Brandhero Design’s Post

Are you going to Las Vegas Market? Look for me. I'll be handing out $1,000 dollar bills, raising awareness and funds for The Design Fund - An accelerator and venture fund for the interior design industry. I'm asking manufacturers, brands, influencers and design celebrities to commit funds for design tech and innovation. And I'm asking them to join the 20% Challenge, by putting 20% of their committed amount towards education through our accelerator program. Design innovation should come from within the design community. And the startups that seek to "disrupt" the design industry, should get to know the design industry first. Never again will the design community need to stand by and watch as the next Wayfair or Houzz makes the industry bend toward their will. Now, the design community has a vehicle to be a part of the early stage funding, and truly influence tech, products and innovation within the home goods space. Welcome to The Design Fund! https://lnkd.in/g6P_U_dZ

It's great to see fundraising for marketplaces warming up (just as the weather isn't!) - here's three UK-based fundings that caught my eye recently: Zen Educate raised Series B from Round2 Capital Partners. Zen is a marketplace for teacher recruitment. I think vertical-specialist recruitment marketplaces are a great space to be in - it's part of the general trend that the first generation of winning marketplaces tend to be horizontal and the second generation tend to be vertical Nivoda raised Series B from Avenir - they're a diamonds marketplace bringing transparency (always a good thing when it comes to diamonds) and range to their jeweller customers - what a great space to run a marketplace in. Vinterior, the marketplace for vintage furniture and home furnishings, secured an investment from Channel 4 Ventures. I love Vinterior - I have this vintage vase on my desk from there. But please don't tell the seller that I'm using it for lego flowers 😂

🚀 November is here, and we’re gearing up for another big month! 🚀 With last month’s success, our team is laser-focused on closing our funding round of $1.25M - $2.5M (already raised $487,500 🎉). Here's what we're excited to achieve with these funds: 🔹 Boosting User Growth – Through organic social, earned media, ticket giveaways, paid ads, in-stadium advertising, strategic partnerships, & more! 🔹 Expanding our White-Label Solution – Bringing on more team/university partners to build custom app experiences for their fans! 🎟️ 🔹 Enhancing UX & Hiring Engineering Talent – To bring our feature-rich roadmap to life! _________________________________________________________________________________ 🔗 Know someone in your network who’d be interested in investing? Tag them here or reach out to Michael Testa or Blake Patterson for intros. #InvestmentOpportunity #FundingRound #SportsTech #FanEngagement #StartupGrowth #InvestorNetwork

I speak to loads of founders who don't think they need an MVP because they've raised enough money to build a full product. That’s where so many founders go wrong. An MVP isn’t a shortcut because you can’t afford the “real thing.” It’s simply the smartest way to de-risk your business. Why? Because an MVP gives you an initial basis to access your customers so that THEY can guide the shape of your product. The less assumption you bring into your product ideation, the less risk of building something that nobody wants. The truth: Raising £100k from family and friends doesn’t mean you’re ready to skip steps. It just means you’ve got the resources to test, iterate, and build something truly valuable at a fast pace—with guidance from real users. Don't let the money fog your vision. It will run out quicker than you think and you'll want something to show when it does!

Attn: Designers, Researchers, Creatives, Team Leaders, Humans: Do you want more curiosity, creativity, and wonder? More joy? More connection? Do you want to give a gift that inspires creativity in others? I’ve got something for you! A book…actually, it’s not really a book - it’s a guide, a road map, a step-by-step manual. You can’t just read this, you need to let it lead you. ✨✨ ‘The Questers Guide For Exploring Your World.’ ✨✨Now on Kickstarter. (Link below.) For about $20, you can have one of the most impactful creative tools I’ve ever experienced. Creative Quests is a program that provides the framework and tools to inspire curiosity and a richer way of seeing the world. It brings joy, connection, and presence. It’s playful and fun. Based on a framework 10 years in the making with endless contributors from all over the world. The book is themed around magic but not about magic, as you might expect. It explores themes like the magic of: ⏳ancestry 🌳 more than human ecosystems 🪞personal objects with sacred powers 👀 noticing & wonder 🌀 engineering serendipity 🤖 AI imagination 🖼️ making art And much much more. 70+ activities, missions and stories throughout the book & card deck Get yourself a copy by 3rd Dec. A great gift for a friend, relative, or team. ==== What’s this all about? It’s about expanding your world, saying yes, digging deeper, and seeing things differently. (Magic is just the general theme of this edition. Once this kickstarter is successful, more themes are on the way.) By supporting this book, you’re creating a world with more curiosity, creativity and inspiration. Creative Quests and this book are deeply important to me and I'll be sharing more before the campaign is over. I believe a better world is one that’s more curious, creative, and life-giving.  Joining Creative Quests has been like a portal into all that goodness for me, and I’d love for you to experience it too. 😘 Beyond the book, there are other rewards through Kickstarter, including early bird pricing for next year’s Creative Quest programs (for solo questers) and bespoke workshops (if you are on a team or have a group of friends -- this would be an unforgettable way to spend time together.) http://kck.st/3C5vosL

A few weeks ago, I talked about the "100-day dash" - the final push before the year winds down. Well, we're deep in the thick of it now! The past week or so has seen a flurry of new business inquiries: architects, charities, professional services, SAAS products, and even one so secretive I'm not allowed to know what it is 🤔 Potting Shed has also kicked off a few awesome new #BrandStrategy & #BrandIdentity projects: a global investments firm, a property development venture, a startup in the interior design space, and a fintech innovation. Plus, our existing clients are keeping us on our toes with a wave of new activity. As if that wasn’t enough, my diary is filling up with events. Seems like everyone is eager to squeeze in their shindigs before the Christmas party season takes over 🎅 Holidays are forgotten, the kids are back at school, and everyone is charged up and focused on 'getting 💩 done'. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to master that classic trick where you keep a cool exterior, all while paddling furiously beneath the surface to keep up. Here’s to staying afloat and steering through the sprint! #BusinessBusyness #EndOfYearRush

I find this article frustrating. As a design industry, do we need to be writing articles about how bad the state of design is without any data to back it up, I don't get what this article set out to achieve apart from scaremongering. I speak to executives all the time who value design. They are everywhere. We need to fight back against the pushback, not constantly discussing the problems without any solutions. There's so much great design work being done in charities, development programmes, large organisations through to small start-ups. Just having a focus on large companies cutting CDOs because shareholders want to see quick returns now and don't see the value of design is not a good indicator of where the industry is going.

🚀 Private Equity Firm Permira Acquires Squarespace for $7.2 Billion 🚀 Permira has completed the acquisition of Squarespace for $7.2 billion, purchasing all available common stock and taking the website builder private again. Squarespace, a popular platform for photographers and creatives, saw its market cap fluctuate dramatically after going public in 2021. The acquisition was finalized with major financial and legal backing, and Squarespace's founder, Anthony Casalena, will remain CEO while retaining a significant stake in the company. 💡 Want more updates on private equity? Follow us! #PrivateEquity #Permira #MergersAndAcquisitions #Squarespace #InvestmentNews #TechAcquisitions #BusinessStrategy #PrivateMarkets #FollowUs

Our pivot story We started as a platform that was a way to make pitch decks for founders looking to raise funds, we wanted to make pitch decks for people and launched in January, we tested out the model for 2 months, we got lots of feedback around product scope, lots of people jumped on a call with me, The channels we used to get our users include, -- daily posting on X to share the process -- Posting on Reddit to show expertise We got a lot of feedback around this, what really stood out to us was that most clients told us that we were too expensive, our price point was ($800, $1200, $1800), especially for a small founder just starting out, I made pitch decks for clients in the past but never done it as a whole business, someone evaluated our product scope and said we should have tiers pricing which I feel made a lot of sense for the category of people We later did that and that’s why we currently have 4 pricing options which include Starter — $99 Budget-friendly — $229 Standard — $429 Pro — $729 The starter plan was just for a test of 1-2 pages showing the workings of what we could do as a team we also got another feedback that told us that we should not only position as someone who makes decks but as a place where founders could do other things, that was one of the best feedbacks we ever got in the early days of pivot We were focused on making a deck so PPT designer was more of a better option, now we had to rethink how we could make finding a deck memorable, something that people won’t forget at all, that was what led us to look for names, we had various options but what stood out to us was we wanted a mix of having what we were offered in as part of the names pitchdeck.com was the most suitable but it was taken, the same as pitch. After thinking and iterating, we invested around $200 to get www.pitchdeck.design I’ll say it’s one of the best decisions I have made as an indie hacker building stuff in the early stages That domain now has an authority of 11, and we are on the top of the search keyword when you search for pitchdeck design beating the likes of current players likes pitch and pitchdeck.io in those keywords Here are some key takeaways lessons I have learned from this ⭐️ Pivot very fast ⭐️ listen to feedback from customers ⭐️ Purchase a good memorable domain name ⭐️ Apply SEO from the start ⭐️ Show working always Are you looking to make a Pitch deck design, Let's help you make one We are still www.pitchdeck.design Follow me On X - @olayanjuidris On Linkedin - Olayanju Idris #buildinpublic #design #SEO #startups #indiehacker #website #landingpage #pitchdecks #investors #venturecapital #pitch #website #design #landingpage #product #investing #money #venturefund

Whenever I come up with a new business idea, I build a slide deck. In the past, this used to take days or weeks to finish so most of my ideas would lose momentum. Last year, one of my friends was raising money for his startup and sent me his slide deck. It was beautiful! And it covered everything so seamlessly. But it also looked like it had been built by a very talented engineer so I figured I wouldn’t be able to have a deck that nice. He told me he had used an app called Gamma Last week, I had yet another idea for an app I want to build. I wrote the prompt directly in Gamma and within 8 minutes, my deck was ready. All I had to do was spend some time editing the details and picking the theme. Genuinely love these AI tools for how much time they save. Try out Gamma here: https://gamma.app/