Mikael Cho on psychology and design, and how side projects saved his startup

Welcome to the first episode of DN FM! Look forward to a new show every couple weeks. Through interviews, news and Office Hours community segments, DN FM aims to spark a meaningful conversation on design.

We're joined by Mikael Cho to hear about his unique career path, the intersection of psychology and design, and chasing perfection; he also shares how side projects became his biggest success story.

Mikael is the founder of Crew, a site that connects freelance designers and developers to projects, and Unsplash, a do-whatever-you-want photo sharing site boasting 6 million+ photo downloads per month.

Sponsor

Our first show is proudly supported by Invision. InVision is a design platform to prototype and collaborate with your team - we use it internally and it makes things effortless. If you’re not familiar with them, go to invisionapp.com and check it out.

Episode Highlights

###Interview

How Mikael used a psychology background to fuel his design career (1:40)

The philosophy behind Crew (4:00)

Why losing faith in himself pushed Mikael to develop his company (9:20)

“Is there a market for this? Is this a business? How do we make it sustainable?”- the first steps to building a business from an idea (11:10)

How and why Crew.co is unique from other freelance websites (12:30)

Crew’s utility-approach to marketing, and the best money Mikael ever spent (19:30)

'Quantity gets you to quality' and the the benefit of juggling multiple projects (25:00)

Letting go of perfection and changing perspective (27:20)

Mikael’s unique writing habits (30:00)

Job postings (34:30)

Top Stories (35:00)

Community Announcements

Our Job Board now supports development positions. We've also revamped the browsing experience with location, listing typeand job type toggles.

###Jobs

Slack is looking for a Product Design Manager in San Francisco

Intercom is hiring a Design Lead in Dublin

ThoughtSpot is looking for a Brand Designer and a Product Designer in Palo Alto

###Top Stories:

New Sketch Licensing Model: Sketch is moving to a new licensing model and will now charge for updates. If you purchased Sketch more than a year ago, you will receive six months of updates. If you purchased Sketch less than a year ago, you will receive one year of updates from the date of your purchase.

Dropbox - New Productivity Features: Dropbox has a few new productivity features. Designers will appreciate the ability to scan in documents by taking a picture and uploading it. Dropbox also now has MS Office co-authoring.

Ask DN: What side projects are you working on? Sam's favourite Projects: Devjojo by Tony Lea, PunBot by Pablo Stanley and Graphical Cooking by Johannes Ippen

Bookmarks are dead: Zeh Fernandes rethinks bookmarking by suggesting we use natural-language search to find what we're looking for.

Feedback

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