Meet our 2025 All-Star Mentors! 🌟 These mentors have shown up time and again with generosity, care, and a meaningful commitment of time and energy to the companies they support. They bring diverse experience and perspectives, and serve as trusted partners as founders work through complex challenges. Thank you for being the backbone of our accelerator programs! 💚 Get to know them on the blog: tsta.rs/YO8b50Y4Yyt

Too many designers are looking for clients in the exact same places. Dribbble. Upwork. Contra. Fiverr. Here’s the problem: → Too many supply, not enough demand. Dribbble has over 12 million designers showcasing their work. Upwork has 18 million freelancers competing for roughly 800,000 active clients. That’s not a market. That’s a knife fight. If you want clients, stop going where everyone else goes. Start thinking in terms of supply and demand tension. From the book Blue Ocean Strategy: “Competing in overcrowded industries is no way to sustain high performance. The real opportunity is to create blue oceans of uncontested market space.” Translation for independent designers: Go where there’s demand for design, but fewer designers fighting for it. That could mean: • Niching down into a specific industry • Partnering with local companies who don’t have in-house design • Embedding yourself in communities where your ideal clients hang out The goal isn’t to be seen by everyone. It’s to be found by the right few. Where’s your blue ocean right now?

💥New work for @Superhuman (@Grammarly & @coda_hq)💥 It’s a cursor, it’s a cape, it’s an incredibly complex identity system! So your company acquires another company and now you're changing your name to the smaller company. Let's dig in. Full case study smith-diction.medium.com/bra…