I&#39;ve been causing existential crises in almost everyone I&#39;ve talked to about AI. Especially fellow designers. Mainly because I&#39;m afraid most of us will be replaced by AI. That is IF we stick to the way we work today. In the roles we have today. Creative work is about to take a big shift. Execution is no longer the name of the game. Directing is. Learning the skills of a producer and directing your way through the process will help you evolve your role into what will be the next step in your career. In a world where Ai and Humans work together to design the future.And by skills I don&#39;t mean learning how to prompt. I mean developing a high-level of taste. Some might say it&#39;s a born-with talent. But I believe it&#39;s a self-taught skill. And it starts with understanding why you feel what you feel towards the things you like or don&#39;t like. How? By observing. Mainly by putting words on your internal language. Your emotions. Start by taking things you like or don&#39;t like apart to see which elements you feel positively towards them or resistant. That&#39;s the beginning of learning any creative skill. By understanding why you feel what you feel.Name the art. Music. Movie. Architecture. Industrial design. Digital. Brand. Fashion. You name it. You can now be good at it. Without knowing how to play the instruments. Without speaking the language. Without knowing how to execute it. You can talk your way through designing your favourite house. Your dream car. Even directing your movie. With the actresses you like. (The AI version of them). Or producing the songs you hear in your head, with the whomever as the voice. You can become the executive producing director of your full potential creative.Your goal should now be to develop the skills necessary to articulate what you feel in simple words so others, regardless of age or experience, know how to execute it. And know our time is ticking. This will be the mother tongue of the younger generation. So you and I need to invest our time, to learn that language now. With this being said, we are running a new experiment at OP. You can now use our <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/trial" rel="nofollow">Trial</a> to get a glimpse of what future holds for your business with AI. During our 2-week sprint, we will explore radical and realistic concepts for how AI could impact and empower your business. And we&#39;ve lowered our <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/shop" rel="nofollow">brand packages</a> from $10K to $3K. Learn why <a href="https://twitter.com/blankresident/status/1646449857366986752?s=20" rel="nofollow">here</a>. Exciting times. Embrace the shift. Survive the AI takeover. By becoming the director of your ideas. Until next, <a href="https://twitter.com/blankresident" rel="nofollow">Blank</a><a href="https://twitter.com/blankresident" rel="nofollow"></a>✌︎☺︎<a href="https://twitter.com/blankresident" rel="nofollow"></a>

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Develop your taste

So why did I decide to sell my previous ventures as Brand Packages in the new <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/shop" rel="nofollow">OP® Shop</a>?<img src="https://mailple-cdn.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/prd/wayward/inline/images/20230412022243-0fdaed74-ec9f-4358-b30d-c208c5654591"/>Well, it’s a lesson that took me a while to learn but I finally learned it. To evolve, you need to let go. Let go of past ideas, dreams and visions to make room for what is.Over the past few years, as you might have seen on <a href="https://www.wayward.group/" rel="nofollow">Wayward Group</a>, I dedicated most of my time, energy and money to start new ventures/experiments. I figured I had to step out of my comfort zone to scale my learnings. I wanted to see what else life had in store for me besides running a design agency and a SaaS startup before my time runs out. Maybe there&#39;s more within me that could be unlocked with new challenges.For the ventures, I picked four areas where I felt most excited about: Incubator/Accelerator Program/Fund, Fashion, Self-Care products, and exploring a new multi-purpose retail/event space.For each, I hired a small team of 1-3 members, sat clear time constraints for each phase of the process and begun the work. For reviews and decisions, I created a simple 3-step process to keep all members in sync with each others plan and accountable to their progress. No decisions were made in the silos by team leads. All decisions had to be made in the open channels by majority votes, and everyone had to participate. This way the learning and responsibilities for our next steps were shared among the members. In other words, less &#34;founder&#34; stress for me.Fast forward to two years later, at the end of 2022, we launched three ventures and paused one. We launched a high-end <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/case/marviaca" rel="nofollow">fashion brand</a>, released our first <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/case/renklar" rel="nofollow">self-care product</a>, and built a new <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/case/compliment-building" rel="nofollow">retail/event space</a> and formed an <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/case/inen" rel="nofollow">accelerator program</a>, pitched a conglomerate for funding and paused before we begun (too many dependencies, more on this later).But at the end, I decided to shut down almost all of them.It was hard. Going from 0 → 1 on ventures you haven&#39;t worked on before is especially difficult. Because most of the time, you experience growth pain. Every step of the progress, comes with friction. In the form of uncertainty. Just this background noise that gets louder the more you spend on a venture that you might be on the wrong path. Because you don&#39;t know what the right path looks like.But, we learned the way. We paved the steps. We created the process. And we applied them to <a href="https://www.ofc.software/" rel="nofollow">OFC</a>.<img src="https://mailple-cdn.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/prd/wayward/inline/images/20230412022216-4655ed95-9ad1-44f5-b35e-f520bb6f484a"/>And for all of our physical product exploration, and experimentations, we brought them all to BR. Our new brand. <a href="https://www.blankresidents.com/" rel="nofollow">Blank Residents</a>.<img src="https://mailple-cdn.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/prd/wayward/inline/images/20230412022231-071dc3d7-1463-4fc8-b1fc-62fafdf1bc70"/>TLDR; It took me a long time but at the end, I learned the only way to truly grow outside of your own way, you need to let go of your old self. Your old ideas, visions, fantasies. To create new ones. Adapted to your present self with your present mind to stay present.In my journal, I wrapped these two years under the first two phase of our creative process: Explore and Experiment. Now, we are entering our third: Execution. In the next post, I will share more of OFC and BR.Until then,Have a look at our new <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/shop" rel="nofollow">Brand Shop</a>.You might find the Brand for your next venture there. ;)<a href="https://twitter.com/blankresident" rel="nofollow">Blank</a>✌︎☺︎

-Ahr736Rd

Let go to evolve

Earlier this year, we rolled out <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/trial" rel="nofollow">OpenPurpose</a>®<a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/trial" rel="nofollow"> Design Trial</a>. A two-week sprint for founders to explore, experiment and execute [B] Brand / [P] Product design ideas with our team for $14K. <img src="https://mailple-cdn.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/prd/blank/inline/images/20230406184907-725a736f-ad65-452d-a1ca-fa88e1913527"/>This experiment was designed to simplify the initial phase of a project exploration. To replace the time consuming process of putting together the perfect brief, weeks of doing calls and talking about what ifs with action. After all, we would rather show you than talk about it. So it worked out perfectly for us and for our clients.Founders like Tariq from Qatalog, Jürgen (founder of Things) from Semantical, Eli from Multi, Dennis from Amie and many others reached out to book a trial with us. You&#39;ve probably have seen bits of the work we did for them on our Twitter. Most booked both Brand and Product trials. Mainly to see our take on their designs or our perspective on their next step. So we made some updates to our Trial page and opened two new slots to see what April has in store for us. To book a trial, visit <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/trial" rel="nofollow">openpurpose.com/trial</a>. Now to our new experiment: <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/shop" rel="nofollow">OpenPurpose® Brand Shop</a>. <img src="https://mailple-cdn.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/prd/blank/inline/images/20230406184923-da4f2a50-5c31-4066-8add-a6661112f3cb"/>Over the past few years, I invested most of my time, energy and money into starting new ventures. From researching incubators and accelerators worldwide to create the perfect program/fund for creatives by partnering with enterprises to launching streetwear fashion brands, organic self-care products and even a new marketing agency. I learned a ton. In fact, these past 2 years, felt more like 10 years. I surely 10xed my grey hair. And I learned a ton. And I think the most important lesson was: To evolve you need to let go. To let go of your past ideas, dreams and vision to make room for what is. I will tell you what that is in my next post. For now, check out <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com/shop" rel="nofollow">openpurpose.com/shop</a>Our new experiment is productizing Brands. Ready-to-launch brands for entrepreneurs looking for a new name + domain + logo + website for their next venture. For $10K, you can own one of our OP® designed Brands (transferred to you within 3 days) to kickstart your new journey.Until next one,<a href="https://twitter.com/blankresident" rel="nofollow">Blank</a>✌︎☺︎

-Ahr736Rb

Introducing OpenPurpose® Brand Shop

While everyone seem to be creating noise and demanding attention, we are finding ourselves asking for more stillness and honesty. Clickbait design has taken over. Everywhere I look, I find myself distracted by flashy visuals, upbeat music, rollercoaster motions, and bold claims. Where attention is sought, purpose is lost. It takes some awareness to look past these distractions to find the real value these companies are offering. And it takes a bit more, to understand the difference between this and what came before. So how do we stand in out in a place, where the ask is to impress in less than 10 seconds? By slowing down. <img src="https://mailple-cdn.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/prd/blank/inline/images/20230302154917-44f5efeb-80d5-4b71-b3ef-c9a6eee8eb7f"/>No vibrant background colors. No flashy visuals. No upbeat music. No distractions. No tricks. Just our work, products and brands we&#39;ve designed for our clients, displayed plainly. With honest copy. This is the thought process behind the new OpenPurpose®. Watch the reel. Read our case studies. Get to know our aspiration on our About page. And for the first time, we are sharing our prices. Our minimums for each project type. Hope you like it. Took us a couple of months. ✌︎☺︎

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OpenPurpose® New Reel

You may fear it, but I welcome it. I get inspired by it. I feel free. Free to explore. Free to create. Free to become. It&#39;s a place of freedom. It&#39;s a place where nothing can go wrong. It&#39;s a safe place. Nothing to lose. You are here to only gain. And you get as many chances as you wish. To create something, different from past. With your new learnings, with your new perspective. It&#39;s a place to reborn. Every once in a while, we reach ground zero. Sometimes willingly, to get on a different path. And sometimes we get directed here, because of a turn of an event. But everytime we find ourselves at Ground Zero, we take this moment to reflect. To observe. To study. It&#39;s a place to learn. With <a href="https://www.ofc.software" rel="nofollow">OFC</a>, we&#39;ve reached Ground Zero. With the experiments we ran over the past 6 months, we learned what we are not. Which brought us closer to cherish who we are. Confidently. We thought building in this space, required us to be on Discord, because that was the norm. And yet again, we learned the cost of following the norm. Anxiety. While Discord may work for others, we learned it doesn&#39;t work for us. One of the strongest indicators for us was the need/anxiety to be always present. To be always active. And if not, there needs to be something to be discussed just for the sake of staying active. That&#39;s what social media is capitalising on and that&#39;s not how we would like to grow OFC. Discord, for us, was the type of noise we were trying to stay away from. So remaining true to our &#34;The antidote to hypergrowth culture&#34;, we believe Discord is part of that and we&#39;ve decided to step aside. We do so to remain focused on building <a href="https://www.ofc.software" rel="nofollow">OFC OS</a> and will start the funding through NFTs when the right time comes by. We&#39;ve been on this journey for the past 6 years. We are committed to our long term vision and following our plan. OFC OS is a place where our peers and their teams will align on work and evolve with the help of the shared knowledge from all OFC members. To all of our Inner Circle members, thank you for your participation in this process. Your involvement helped us to define a better next step, that we couldn&#39;t have reached without you. And to all of you following our updates, I hope you learn from our experiments. I hope you learn to prioritise (ruthlessly) by saying No (respectfully) to what&#39;s not aligned with your long-term goal. I hope you learn to believe in yourself (unconditionally) and grow confidence in your work (stubbornly). Learn to lead from within by following your intuition. You are more.Ground Zero is a place where you shed your self-doubts. It&#39;s a place of growth. Embrace it.Blank.

-Ahr736N4

Welcome to Ground Zero.

I started 3drops over a decade ago in a refugee camp in Sweden. At the time, I had no ID. Nor any work permit. Without it, it&#39;s impossible to go to university or apply for any job.Starting my own was the only option. I worked every waking hour to turn that hope of freedom to reality. It took me a few years to get my first client project. And a couple more to hire our first member.Due to the lack of permanent residency, I had to build a remote company. Remote clients, remote teams. It wasn’t easy but nothing worthwhile ever is.3drops became the key to my freedom. Even though I still don’t have a permanent residency (hint on the new name <a href="https://twitter.com/blankresident" rel="nofollow">Blank Resident</a>, more on this later) I am living comfortably, collaborating with people I admire, working on projects that inspire me.3drops has fulfilled its purpose for me. It’s time to open it for others to find theirs. Welcome to <a href="https://www.openpurpose.com" rel="nofollow">Open Purpose®</a>.The next chapter in design services.We are currently working on formalising the new structure. Until then, you can follow our recent work on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/openpurpose/" rel="nofollow">Instagram</a>. I’m excited for what&#39;s next. I hope you are too.✌︎☺︎

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Why Open Purpose®

Let&#39;s talk about what motivates you. Because that&#39;s what aligns you, controls you, makes you and breaks you. Over the past few months, I&#39;ve been questioning a lot of my recent decisions. I mean, when I wake up, I&#39;m all charged and ready to take on the challenges head-on, then later at night, when I&#39;m tired, I question every bit of it. I mean, I doubt every bit of it. Wondering whether I really should start these new companies or should I just focus on what I already have. After all, I know how much it takes to get something off-ground but I&#39;ve invested most of my past 6 months into these new projects. So do I really want to dedicate the next couple of years to bring these ideas to life? Do I even have what it takes to pull it off? Most nights, like tonight, I&#39;m re-thinking every decision I&#39;ve made lately. And by rethinking, I mean overthinking. Probably. But you be the judge of that. Let me paint that picture for you so you can see what it&#39;s like to meditate with this mind of mine. I run a design agency called <a href="https://www.3dro.ps" rel="nofollow">3drops</a> since 2010. You already know this. We work with enterprises and governments to create or improve their digital products. Big deal right? Portion of the profits from 3drops goes to <a href="https://ofc.software" rel="nofollow">OFC</a>, our self-funded startup studio, where we ship next-gen SaaS solutions for smaller companies. So far, we have 3 products in 3 different categories, but all directed towards the same customer base → early-stage startups. We do productivity, marketing and analytics. Roadmap, Sincere and Slim. Experimenting with new ideas, in this space, in this format, is a dream come true. Now, to the new companies. I&#39;ve been living in Bangkok, Thailand for a couple of years now. And the longer I live here, the more I think about the potential of this country. And the more I think about it, the more obsess I become with this thought and slowly ideas are beginning to form. Especially in the past year. Thailand is a country where resources are very affordable, the weather is amazing, the food is delicious and the people are kind, which makes Thailand the perfect place to start your new company. But why isn&#39;t anything happening here? It lacks something. It has almost all of the key components needed to become the next tech hub but it lacks that beautiful interface to communicate them. It needs design. Thailand needs world-class design. So I&#39;m starting two new companies to help with that. Each is directed towards different markets but both are needed to design this city from the inside out. One is in tech while the other is in commerce. One is an incubator/accelerator backed by enterprises while the other is a branding and manufacturing studio with in-house influencers. One is designed to build innovative tech companies leveraging the resources available here, while the other is formed to build world-class brands, products and services here in Thailand. Basically, in a couple of years, most startups here will look like startups in Silicon Valley, and most shops will look like Swedish brands. Doable? 100%. Can I do it? I believe so. I hope so. I think so. I do believe this is why I&#39;m here. I believe this is the place where I can be most helpful. And if I do it right, it will hopefully put me in touch with the right people to make this possible. So what drives me? The freedom to experiment with new ideas in different spaces and scale to meet interesting people and evolve. What&#39;s my end goal? Reform how governments operate from within, to bring speed and transparency through tech, to ensure justice we all need to live our lives right. This motherboard we are all operating in, needs a major redesign. And I hope through the experiences and relationships I build along the way, one day, I can get the opportunity to add to the conversation of a new government/system. These words, these mental fragmented images is what I see when I&#39;m up or down. This is what excites me and overwhelms me. But this is what grounds me. This is what motivates me. What&#39;s yours?

-8MMHQUM

What motivates you, defines you. 

If you ask anyone who knows me about what describes me the best, they will most likely answer with: &#34;Farzad likes to make his life difficult. He could live a much easier life if only he wanted to.&#34;And they are right. I tend to, at times, turn my life into hell for a few months/years, when I see, in my mind, that it might help me reach my goals sooner. I believe it&#39;s necessary. I believe if I don&#39;t, I might never get there on time. After all, we are all running on a limited time. Something that most of us overestimate. And things usually take a while until they fall into their place. It took me a decade to turn <a href="https://www.3dro.ps" rel="nofollow">3drops</a> from a one-man design shop into a world-class design agency, working with governments, institutions and enterprises to rethink the future. It took me almost 5 really difficult years to turn Roadmap into a self-funded, software studio that we now call <a href="https://ofc.software" rel="nofollow">OFC</a>. And last, to make the full-circle, it took a good couple of years to get over myself and hire better CEOs for each. Which today enables me to take on my next journey: To turn Thailand into South East Asia&#39;s new tech hub through the work we do at <a href="https://www.inen.co" rel="nofollow">Inen</a>.Throughout all these years, I&#39;ve had countless nights where I wanted to call it all off. The thought of doing the wrong things, making the wrong decisions, hiring the wrong people, or simply not doing enough was just too overwhelming at times. But all these hard learned lessons aside, one thing made the most impact. And that was to grow our business, we need to evolve our business model instead of growing our operations. Let me explain what I mean.Every year, as we learn more about our work and others in the business, we brainstorm new ways to stand out by doing less. Every year, instead of growing our team size, taking on more challenges, offering more services, we remain small, charge more and do less. Which goes against our instincts as founders. Specially when things start to show return. More clients knocking on your door asking for more services, more customers want your product to offer more features and more people want to join your team. And sure, who am I kidding, we did try to grow our operation at first. We added more services to our agency, hired more members to our team and took on more projects. We implemented more features to our products and tried to do more things for more people. And sure, we maybe saw some peaks in our revenue but it never lasted long enough to justify the new set of challenges that came with that growth. The type growth that you need to constantly grow your headcounts, offer more services and implement more features just to keep it moving upwards. And at the end, more capabilities, more features, more services, means more people, and more people mean less flexibility, less freedom and less fun. So we learned in order to create exponential businesses we need to become notorious constraint creators. Which may create pain in the short term as you figure out what your secret ingredients are but once you&#39;ve found the right balance, you can build remarkable businesses, with small teams and budget. This means if you apply the right constraints in the right areas of your processes/products, you can deliver much better results compared to your competitors which allows you to charge more without adding more services/features/people. I have limited availability in May. But if you are running a company and feeling stuck, I would be happy to help. I might not have the right answers, but I can guarantee that together, we can figure out what you can try next that might just help move the needle. To start, hit reply and tell me a bit about yourself and your company.

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The chase of becoming incomparable

We recently had a client project that got cancelled at the very last minute. A day before our kick-off. After weeks of discussions, the founder realised, at the very last minute, that he couldn&#39;t let go of his control over the product. He was too afraid to find out what needed to be done in order to get his business on track. Which in most cases is a matter of a re-organising and re-prioritising the features in their products. But in some cases, it&#39;s also about taking away some of those features to make it easier for the rest to be understood. Something that is only obvious to a fresh pair of eyes with experience but unimaginable to a founder that&#39;s been staring at it for too long.It&#39;s more common among bootstrapped founders because of their 100% control over their business. A freedom that can become a curse. I&#39;ve had it. I remember feeling stuck with Roadmap so I asked my friends who run insanely profitable bootstrapped companies for advice. The result? I panicked. I didn&#39;t like anything they said. Their advice: I had to remove at least half a year worth of work to get it on a better track and then pause the development and focus on Marketing. Too much of my ego was wrapped up in these things to make such a drastic decision. So I didn&#39;t. I carried on as we had planned only to realise, two years later, that it was the best move so I did it then. Your ego becomes your work and your work becomes part of your identity and then everything becomes personal. This is why founders look for a clone to delegate this type of work to. But there are better ways to make those decisions easier for yourself: Explore fearlessly. Don&#39;t waste time discussing ideas. Don&#39;t reject ideas too early either. Just because you explored something similar in the past doesn&#39;t mean the result would be the same. It&#39;s all about the execution. Explore fearlessly and prototype rapidly. That&#39;s what we do during our test weeks. We explore all potential directions, then we put the best pieces together and prototype the end result. At last, we send the prototype to a few existing/potential customers to get our proof. That&#39;s how we launch outstanding products for our clients in a fraction of the time it would take for an in-house team to achieve. That&#39;s how we do our test weeks. We are now available for one b2b SaaS client project. If we match, we can start a test week soon.

-Ahr72hvP

The antidote for founders that can't let go.

When I was growing up, I was told the more responsibilities one takes on, the greater he/she becomes. A simple phrase that went on to shape my world view. It became the filter I saw the world through. That&#39;s how I ranked people around me and that&#39;s what I was striving for to leave behind. In my head, more equaled to progress. So I spent my entire 20s looking for more things to take care of. More responsibilities. More people. More money. And as I was going up this ladder, I slowly lost sight of the ground. Where I started from. Who I was. What I wanted. So you can guess what happened next. After a couple of breakdowns, I stopped. Now I&#39;m in my 30s believing the opposite. The fewer things you are responsible for, the greater you can become. I thought I was doing a good job on all of those things when I was younger. But it turned out, I wasn&#39;t. You would be surprised how similar it is in our work. As a founder, growing a company sometimes feels like raising a kid. So if you teach this kid that the more things you are able to do, the greater you become, you know now where that leads. Most startups start simple but after a couple of years of taking on more requests, more responsibilities, they lose sight on what they were actually good at. Now they are just another all-in-one tool that are not really doing a good at any. Resist the urge to do more. Progress by doing less.

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Resist the urge to build more.

Yet, most of us, waste so much time and money trying to prove people/ourselves wrong. Our ego gets in the way. The designer in us, the introvert, takes over and starts polishing every little detail from within. As if that&#39;s going to help us make more money. And we all know what happens when we go down that rabbit hole. Days, months, and sometimes years go by and we are still making changes. And the longer we spent in this hole, the more insecure we get about our product, our vision, our whole being. But what if we let the entrepreneur in us lead the way. The extrovert. What if, instead of looking for validation from our peers, we looked for potential customers. What if we just took a break from making and instead, started spending all of our time on learning how to sell what we already have. It&#39;s Marketing, isn&#39;t it? That&#39;s what stops us. I think marketing got a bad rep among creatives. Most people think marketing is just ads. It&#39;s distasteful. Nobody wants to become that one person on twitter that always talks about her/his product. It&#39;s annoying. But that&#39;s not Marketing. Marketing is about sharing. It&#39;s about inviting others to see how you do what you do. Marketing is about sharing your story. It&#39;s about showing people why you do what you do. Marketing is not selfish. Marketing helps you to understand people you care about more. It teaches you what they like and what they don&#39;t like. Marketing makes you a better conversationist. It makes you interesting. I believe all designers and developers are great marketers. I believe we all have it in us. We just need to get comfortable with sharing more. And the way we do that is by documenting our progress as we do it, instead of focusing on creating content for the sake of creating content. Just take a screenshot of what you are currently working on and share it twitter. Record your screen for a few seconds and show people what you are doing now. Unlike product design/development, quality doesn&#39;t matter as much as quantity does. How often you share matters more than what you share. Then once you&#39;ve got the habit of sharing, the quality will follow. Start it today. Create less. Share more.

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Repeat after me, a great product alone doesn't sell. 

It was a different world last time I sent you an email. I&#39;m still in Thailand and here, the city has been in lockdown for over a month and it&#39;s estimated to continue until the end of this month. Who knew that this virus that started in Wuhan reach your city that fast. While most experts saw it coming, only a few governments prepared for it. South-East Asia seems to be the safest place now because of their experience with SARS back in 2012. US seems out of control, Europe is under pressure and Sweden is acting like there&#39;s no virus. But wherever you are, I hope you and your loved ones are at home and safe. I hope you are taking this time to improve your health by exercising a bit at home and eating a bit healthier food. And I hope you are picking up a few books to read or maybe even a few new hobbies. As a team, we are experimenting with some too. But despite the apocalypse, Q1 was good to us. We completed two SaaS client projects. We collaborated with Pentagram to launch a UK-based startup called <a href="https://www.sonantic.io" rel="nofollow">Sonantic</a>, backed by EQT Ventures. We designed their product and Pentagram designed their branding and website. It was a smooth collaboration. The other project is a German-based enterprise SaaS solution called <a href="https://www.impower.de" rel="nofollow">Impower</a>. We also quietly put up a new page for our next product called <a href="https://www.slim.app" rel="nofollow">Slim</a>.More to come soon.

-Ahr72hvK

3drops + Pentagram

I&#39;m obsessed with Products. For me, discovering a cool new product gets me as excited as if someone would just hand me the keys to the new Cybertruck. But part of me always saw this as a weakness. Something I had to overcome to focus more on the things that grew our business. Like expanding our offerings or headcount to take on more projects. The same path that most agencies take when more clients show up in their inbox. To become a one-stop-shop for their clients. So we did the same thing.We scaled our remote team to over 20+ members across 4 continents. We expanded our services to branding, marketing, product design and development. At some point, we even had a small motion studio/team within 3drops to produce product videos for startups. On paper, 3drops was quickly growing to become a successful full-service agency. But internally, it didn&#39;t feel as exciting as we thought growth should feel like. We felt like we were failing to reach out potential. Something was missing. So in 2018, we decided to take a break from client work and do a little soul searching for our company. It was the first time in almost a decade we had the luxury of time so we knew we would regret it if we didn&#39;t take it. With a bank account that could last a small team a few years, we changed our direction and set a new destination. To build a sustainable business without relying on client work. We figured the best way to do this is by building SaaS solutions aimed at teams like us by scratching our own itch. At that time, we had already launched Roadmap Beta to Product Hunt which was very well received. It was awarded as one of the most popular product launches in that year. So we decided to invest our time to bootstrap Roadmap into a healthy and profitable startup with a team of its own.Roadmap was the first of its kind. A simple solution for remote teams to get aligned on priorities, and track their progress visually so nothing goes unnoticed. With no products alike, our numbers were growing beyond our imagination. But that sweet rainbow didn&#39;t last long. Half a year into our work, almost all leading team project management tools like Asana, Jira and even Dropbox had already caught up with our unique features. So naturally, at first, we reacted by responding in the same way. Implementing more features to our product to keep up in this competitive market. But half a year down that path, we noticed we were moving in the opposite direction of what we aimed for. We were losing momentum playing this feature war and our MRR growth was suffering. So we turned to the people who know us best. We asked our customers to guide us in the right direction. We asked them why they chose us over alternatives and they came back with two features that they valued the most in our solution: Simplicity and Visual Overview. With our Northstar on sight, we started improving our key features and got rid of everything else. Fast forward to now, Roadmap is a healthy startup growing at ~10-20% in MRR per month since then. Sure it was a risky decision to stop our main source of income for 2 years. Sure it wasn&#39;t easy turning down great projects from companies like IKEA or Redbull during that time. Sure I can admit I was up until sunrise most nights worrying about whether I had made the right decision or not. But in the end, it turned out to be one of the best decision I made in 3drops history. Those two years reminded us what we can accomplish when we focus on what we do best. So in 2020, I&#39;m excited to say that 3drops is now accepting client work with only one focus: Strategic Product Design to grow B2B SaaS businesses.So we recommend, if you are looking for a design firm to work on your company&#39;s branding, contact Pentagram. If you are looking for an agency to rework your marketing website, reach out to Ueno. But if you are looking for a team to take your SaaS Product to the next level, 3drops is the right team for you.

-Ahr72hvI

The bold move of specialising.

Only a day left from Christmas, a few days left to my 30th birthday and a week to a brand new decade. What a countdown. As I&#39;m reflecting on the past decade and preparing myself to get back to work in 2020, after a 2 years long break, I can&#39;t help but feel nostalgic. I started working as a freelance product designer right after high school in 2010 and spent my entire 20s growing it to become one of the few go-to product design agencies in the world, among governments, fortune 50 companies, and leading startups. All this while traveling between countries, building a super talented remote team and chasing a dream in Sweden. The dream of being able to call Sweden my home so I can be close to my family and continue growing 3drops in Stockholm, but it turned into a nightmare that cost me half of my life. Thanks to their injustice, inhumane migration policy, I felt like I lost half of my life and part of my identity during that process. 2 years of blowing up money, traveling alone between countries, meeting inspiring people and getting high on adventures I previously was too scared of beginning, led me to find a new self within me. 2020 is a new beginning, a new opportunity, and a new chance to evolve. It&#39;s time to get back to work. A new 3drops is coming soon.

-Ahr72hvH

Time to get back to work.

This is an attempt to break the bubble and start living a more transparent life where others outside of my close friends and family get to see into my life and hopefully learn from the outcome of my choices and decisions.I don’t believe in right or wrong. I believe in experiences. I believe there’s no right path in life, there are just simply different experiences. The fork in the road metaphor, that we were taught in school at a young age is just too extreme and not the reality we live today. Do you remember the picture? The left path takes you into this dark and what it seems to be a horrifying jungle where pain and horror await and the right one takes you to this beautiful land where all your dreams come true.But to tell you the truth, between these two paths, if I had to pick, the left one has always been more appealing to me than the right one. Why? I think it’s because I just don’t believe there are any shortcuts to your dreams in life. In fact, whenever I’ve been shown or offered a shortcut, I’ve always turned around and ran the other way. From getting job offers with fancy titles at industry leading companies to acquisitions offers for my company from the big league and investment opportunities from the rich gangs in our own ventures.To me, these are all distractions. My goal has always been the same. To own my own time by doing what I love. To me, that means turning my passion into a business and run it until it can run itself.I don’t believe working for a big company would teach you anything about running your own company, so I’ve always declined the job offers, no matter how good the titles were. I also don’t believe selling your company is such a good happy ending as most people think, regardless of how much money you are offered. I would rather have a recurring income doing what I love than a fixed big sum in my bank account. And lastly, I don’t believe you can learn how to make money by spending someone else’s money. I believe you need the financial constraints to keep your team’s focus in check. Otherwise, it’s effortless to jump between things and develop this shiny object syndrome most founders seem to struggle with and as a result, lose sight of what really matters.That’s why I believe walking in that dark jungle, is necessary, regardless of how many bruises you get when you come out. Those are just signs of the lessons you had to learn in order to find your own way out.I’ve been using the same framework, the same core principles that I apply to make decisions in my professional life, in my personal life as well. That means I tend to take the path with the highest risk and endure the pain in the short term to get to my long-lasting reward. Sometimes I get the reward I aimed for, and sometimes I benefit from the lessons I learned, later in life which always turn out to be much more valuable than the reward I was aiming for in the first place. But unlike my professional life, I’ve spent the last 14 years of my life trying to find a way out of this jungle with no luck as of yet.Let me explain.I currently have no country I can stay in more than 90 days. That means I don’t have any permanent citizenship or even a temporary one, in any country at this moment. Not even the country I was born in. Nor the country that I grew up in. Yes, there are two different countries. And no, this is not my first time. I believe most things that “happen” to us in life are just the result of our own choices and actions which means these could’ve easily been avoided if I took the right path, the shortcut but somewhere deep inside me, still believes that beautiful land is just a facade. The real destination lays after this dark, scary jungle.Let’s take a walk.I was 14 years old when I moved to Sweden with my family and applied for asylum. Roughly 6 years later, thanks to my mother’s job, my parents got the citizenship. Me? I got deported because I was 19, adult in the eyes of the law, no longer depended on my family to survive. With no country to return to, I had no choice other than picking a random country I had never been in nor did I know anyone there, outside of Europe which would grant me a 90 days tourist visa just so I had a bit of time to figure out a plan to get a temporarily 1 year visa. I chose Malaysia (one of the two countries with more than 30 days tourist visa), booked my own ticket, and left Sweden within the 4 weeks timeframe to avoid getting deported by the police. That was the first time I got deported.After almost 3 years of living in Malaysia and a few other neighbor countries and airports in South East Asia, I came back to Sweden with a work permit. Fast forward to today, 5 years later I’m getting deported wrongfully, again, at the age of 28, because of an insurance we missed from the beginning. It’s a matter of a few thousand kronor (a few hundred dollars). For some reason, the Swedish Migration Agency never bothered to let us know we were missing the insurance 5 years ago when I applied for my work permit or 3 years ago when I extended it. They simply waited until I applied for my permanent citizenship to tell me I never actually met all the requirements, to begin with, and therefore need to be deported. Again.I’m going to skip the part when the Swedish Migration Agency lost my case for over a year with no effort whatsoever from their side to get things back on track. For the record, let me just say that it’s the waiting that takes the most toll on you, not the final answer.That’s 14 years of my life spent in uncertainty. That’s half of my life, not knowing where I belong. Even though my entire family is Swedish citizens now, I don’t seem to belong here. I mean this is my second time I got deported from this country.Let me put things in perspective for you. I started my company in Sweden when I was 20. A few months before my first deportation, I signed the ownership of my company over to my family so I could keep it alive. For the past 8 years, I took it from absolutely nothing to a world-class agency working remotely with Fortune 500 and governments as clients. In fact, if you’ve applied for a visa lately, the chances are you went through the system we designed together with governments in over 60 countries to make the process simple, transparent and more efficient for you and the staff.The success of my first company gave me the opportunity to reinvest some of our profit into our own ventures that gave birth to our second profitable business. I like to think that these are the results of the constraints I’ve lived in for so long. But I also sometimes think that I might have jeopardized my own comfort in my personal life to keep myself in check and focus on what matters the most. To tell you the truth, I’ve never felt comfortable in my comfort zone so I’ve always done whatever I can to make sure I never end up there. Or maybe I’ve never really been that comfortable to see what it’s like. I just know there were shortcuts I could’ve taken to get my visa like marrying someone as most people do in this situation. But both times I got the option I turned around and walked the other way. Mainly because I believe I shouldn’t have to marry someone just to get what is rightfully mine. I mean I grew up here, my entire family is here, I went to school here and when I wasn’t allowed to continue my studies in University because of the lack of permit, I instead started a business while I was in the refugee camp and grew it into the successful business it is today from absolutely nothing and created jobs in Sweden and paid millions in tax in the process, just in the past few years.This is why how I get this visa is so important to me. I invested too much of my time and energy here just to take a shortcut now. This is why the How is more important to me than the What, and it has become a core principle, both in my personal and professional life.The system in the Swedish Migration Agency is unbelievably broken, and I have my life to prove it.As I’m preparing to leave Sweden again, within the next two weeks with no destination where I can stay longer than 90 days, I can’t help but feel resentful. But I’ve been here once before so this time around I’m more mindful about how I can use this energy to my benefit. I’m more aware of what kind of opportunity I have on my hands too. There’s a rare luxury in having everything taken away from you. There’s a certain freedom to it that I now come to desire. You get the chance to start over, from scratch with nothing in your luggage. I see it as a plain canvas with endless opportunities. Do you realize this is what most people are afraid of? Here’s what I’ve learned in the past 14 years of living in uncertainty:Realise there are no right or wrong path in life, just different experiences. Believe in yourself and trust your own intuition. Somehow, deep down, unconsciously, we all know where we need to go.Realise you are where you chose to be. Nobody took those steps for you. Take responsibility for everything you are and everything you are not.You are always in control of your life.Realise you are more than what you own and what you don’t own. You are not your house, your car or in my case, where you are from. Never let these stuff become a reason to stop you from taking risks necessary to persuade your dreams.Realise all you have in life is what you choose to do with your limited time. We are all going to die. Sooner than we would like to. People put their money in the bank to buy the things they don’t need and continue to sell their time until it runs out. Do the opposite. Protect your time and ruthlessly prioritize what you invest it in, and spend your money on things that buy you more time.Last but not least, realize the power of spoken words. Always speak your truth or don’t speak at all. We tend to listen to our own words more than we listen to our own thoughts. It’s like a magic spell. What we say, we feel, what we say often, we believe, and what we say the most, we become. That’s how our mind is wired, and that’s how we can reprogram the picture from within. To reach our true potential, we must carefully select the words we speak because it will change the way we think which leads to desired behaviors and that becomes the force to change our lives.<img src="https://mailple-cdn.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/prd/wayward/inline/images/20210630153509-a7a8c5a9-8b99-479e-96d0-5d67722cc0c7"/>