Andrea Wenburg interviews Johnathan Grzybowski of Penji about setting aside ego and exponential growth. They also talk about getting good graphic design at affordable prices.
Johnathan Grzybowski is the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of Penji, an on-demand graphic design service that is fast, simple, and affordable. Penji was named “Top Start-Up to Watch” by Philadelphia Magazine and has been mentioned in major publications like Success Magazine, Huffington Post, Forbes, and INC. Prior to Penji, Johnathan founded multiple marketing-related start-ups and worked for Apple. He is also the host of the Blind Entrepreneurship podcast. In this episode, Johnathan discusses why he started a graphic design service he says he’s the “least qualified” person to do graphic design work, what he believes helped Penji take off so quickly, what it’s been like to grow his company to nearly 50 team members in such a short period of time, how he helps his team members adopt the company culture, how he came to realize he needed to keep his ego in check, the two questions he always asks during the hiring process, and more!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Penji – Use coupon code “podcast15” for a discount off your first month
- The Blind Entrepreneurship Podcast
- Hopeworks
Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
The Penji Process
As mentioned by Johnathan, Penji is an on-demand graphic design service. It offers unlimited graphic design, which means you can submit as many requests for design as you can. They also provide unlimited revisions to ensure that you get the exact design that you need.
And all that for a flat, monthly rate. You don’t have to pay for each project you need. Their plans are inclusive of the designs and revisions. Their design team consists of professional web designers, illustrators, app designers, and many others ready to take on a design job you may need.
They have made their design process straightforward. In just four easy steps, you can get your design anytime between 24 to 48 hours. Here are the steps:
● Create
When you sign up for any of Penji’s affordable plans, you’ll get access to their platform. This is where you’ll submit your design requests and communicate with the designers. You’ll be asked to write a brief description of your project. You can attach references to let the designer know what you have in mind.
Your request will then be automatically assigned to the best designer for the job. What this means is that your project will be given to the designer most capable of creating that specific design.
After the turnaround time, you’ll get your first draft. You’ll be sent email notifications about the progress of your project.
● Review
You’re then asked to review the draft and send them for revisions if you’re not entirely happy with it. Penji has a unique point-and-click revision tool that allows you to tell your designer exactly what to change. They have made their system simple so that you don’t have to go through a lot of back and forth emailing with your designer.
Wait for 12 to 24 hours for the designer to make the revisions.
● Download
Once satisfied with the design, you can download it directly from the dashboard. You don’t have to wait for emails to come with your design. In addition, you get full ownership of the designs and use them whenever and however you want.
Who is Penji For?
Johnathan tells us that Penji is ideal for agencies and marketing companies. But they also cater to individuals and businesses of all shapes and sizes. Here are a few examples of who Penji is perfect for:
Agencies
A majority of Penji’s clients are agencies that are focused on creating strategies. They’d rather give the small tasks to Penji to give them more room and energy to do just that. When they have an overflow of work, agencies will benefit from Penji as they no longer have to hire additional staff. When the workload is manageable, they won’t have to let go of people.
Marketers
People in the marketing industry will understand how important graphic design is to get ahead. For marketers that need a constant supply of design, Penji is perfect for you. You don’t have to pay for every design that you’ll need, Penji can create them for you. From social media graphics to promotional print materials, you can send requests for it.
Bloggers
Almost everyone you know today has a blog. What used to be a hobby has now become a full-time endeavor. And to stand out from the crowd, stock images won’t do anymore. What every blogger needs are eye-catching images to emphasize their content and make them more relevant.
But as we commonly know, graphic design can be expensive. For bloggers, Penji is a dream come true. You can have amazing graphics for each blog post—all for a fixed monthly rate.
Startups
For startups that need effective branding identity as well as design assets, Penji is a smart choice. Hiring an in-house designer can put a strain on its limited resources. With Penji, they can get all their branding visuals without breaking the bank. They won’t have to rely on websites that create templated designs that look similar to everyone else’s.
Penji Pricing
Penji has three available plans. These are:
Pro Plan
For individuals such as bloggers or independent marketers, the Penji Pro plan is a solid choice. For $399, you’ll be getting unlimited graphic design and revisions. You and another team member can use it and have a daily turnaround. If you pay the subscription rate per quarter, you’ll only be charged $359 per month. A yearly payment will get you a 15% discount, which means you’re getting the service at only $339 per month.
Team Plan
For medium-sized companies and organizations, this is the plan for you. Penji’s Team plan includes all of what the Pro can offer and more. You can send requests for web and app designs, as well as custom illustrations and infographics. You can add four additional users for a total of five. The Team plan is $499 per month, but if you pay quarterly, it will be down to $449, and $424 if paid yearly.
Agency Plan
As the name suggests, Penji’s Agency plan is created specifically for agencies. It is ideal for businesses that require no less than 10 hours or more of design work per month. For $899 per month, you’ll get all that the Team plan offers and more. You will have two designers assigned to you, plus ten users and prioritized support. This gets you double the output, which is excellent for crunch times. You’ll also get discounts if you pay quarterly or yearly. You pay only $809 per quarter or $764 per year.
Penji Services
Penji covers a wide area of design categories. Take a pic from the list below:
- Digital and print ads
- Web and app design
- Logos
- Magazines, books/eBooks, newsletters
- Social media content
- Business cards
- Brochures
- Billboards and other outdoor advertising
- T-shirts
- Catalogs
- Custom illustrations
- Postcards
- Restaurant menus
- Banners
- Landing pages
- Stickers
- Leaflets and flyers
If what you need isn’t on this list, don’t worry. They can custom create them for you. That’s how versatile their graphic designers are.
Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have Jonathan Grzybowski with me and I’m so excited. We just have been chatting a little bit beforehand; you’re going to really enjoy him. He’s the Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Penji and on demand graphic design service that is fast, simple, and affordable. Penji has been named as “top startup to watch” according to Philadelphia Magazine and has been mentioned in major publications like Success Magazine, Huffington Post, Forbes, and Inc. Prior to Penji, Jonathan founded multiple marketing related startups and worked for Apple. Jonathan is also the host of Blind Entrepreneurship podcast.
Andrea: So Jonathan, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Excited to share as much value as I humanly possibly can.
Andrea: Oh my goodness. Ok, well, we better get started. So why don’t you tell us first of all, a little bit more about Penji? What is it? How did it get started?
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah. Well, to get started thing has been like a freak accident to be perfectly honest with you. Penji is an on-demand graphic design service. Businesses hire us to do all the graphic designs that they need. Some companies hire us because they need some type of ancillary design team. Maybe they have designers in house, but they just have so much work that they just don’t want to do it themselves anymore, or maybe they have some of the projects that are a little bit above them, so they give us kind of the dirty work so to speak.
It’s expensive to hire a graphic designer, and it’s really hard to hire a good one. It also takes a lot of time. So, what we want Penji to be and what Penji is, is we want people to go on our website, feel, I guess enough trust that we’re able to do the work, and then we need to be reliable enough to complete it.
So, you sign up for Penji, you get access to our team of designers that are all in-house. We don’t freelance or outsource. They’re all in-house graphic designers, and you can submit a design project and receive it in under 48 hours. And you could do that as many times as you like throughout the course of the month.
And when it comes to actually finding it, we were an agency for several years and we had our ups and downs, lost clients, gain clients. But every time we lost a client, they always said, “Hey, you’re not able to deliver results, but your design is kickass, and it’s really good, and it’s something that we really regret that we’re not able to work with you because the marketing side of your business sucks.” Or “the development side of your business isn’t good.”
So, we explored that a little bit, and then we started testing it out and saying, “OK, this person said it and that person said, and more people said it, what’s the problem here?”
So then we started interviewing our closest friends, interviewed close to about 200 people, and we asked them the same question. We said, “Hey, what is the biggest problem that you’re having in your business today?”
“OK, well, it’s graphic design.”
“Alright, well, let’s figure that out. If we built this type of service, would you buy it?” And there’s a bunch of other questions that we asked too, but that was kind of like the main ones. “What is the problem that you have and if we built this, would you buy it?” And the problem overwhelming, believe it or not, the people that we talked to, they all had a problem with graphic design or some form of variation of marketing.
And then they said, “Well, if we build it, would you buy it?” And again, that answer was yes and then we use that as like the basis of our initial customers.
Andrea: Wow! OK, so were you a graphic designer in the first place?
Jonathan Grzybowski: If you asked me to design something, it would be the worst possible graphic design you will ever experience on the planet. The answer is no, I’m not a graphic designer. However, I was an agency owner that did all the graphic designs, even know he knew that he was awful at them and I did it for years. And it wasn’t up until we started to grow when we really found some really good graphic design talent.
But for the most part, I did the graphic designs, all of the graphic designs for our business for years, and I’m the least qualified person to do so. So feeling that internal struggle that I had and being able to translate that to like an actual business alongside my co-founders, it just was the perfect marriage and the exact business that we were meant to build.
Andrea: So what was the agency before that? I mean, what were an agency for what?
Jonathan Grzybowski: We did SEO. We did social media marketing, advertising management, web design and development, and app design and development.
Andrea: Yeah, stuff like that. OK, gotcha. Alright, cool, so what you realized was that this was the big, big huge need and you’re just going to fill it however you had to fill it.
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Andrea: Wow! Yeah, interviewing 200 people is a lot too.
Jonathan Grzybowski: I think you have to if you really want to like there’s so many startups out there that are just like have this idea, and I need a $100,000 to do so. And then my first question is how many people did you talk to in order to make sure that this is a valid idea?
“Oh, I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.”
OK, well, I don’t even want to talk to you until you start putting any effort because if you get discouraged at like let’s just say 50 people and they all say that your idea is crap then how are you going to be able to see this idea to fruition?
Andrea: So true. Alright, so you guys got started with Penji then and from what I understand it took off pretty quickly. How and why?
Jonathan Grzybowski: I think, to be perfectly honest, I think luck is definitely on our side for sure. I definitely think it has a lot to do with our skill as well of course. But I think it was solving the problem.
We’ve created something that had a huge need in the marketplace, and we are at the right place at the right time. We started, as I mentioned before, our initial customer base was the people that our friends, like the people that we interviewed. And a lot of them said, yes, that they need it, and then we kind of just grew from there.
We said, “OK, well,” and this was before we even had software, by the way. So this is like two years ago, two and a half years ago. We had no software. We just knew that like this is something that we thought we could do. So we had like 10 customers. We’ve got those 10 customers pretty quickly and they’re paying us like I think it was $2.99 at the time. And so we’re like “All right, we got ourselves some stuff here and the service is not what it was.”
So, it was like a diet Coke version of what it is now. And then we got our initial customer base, and then we asked for referrals that we built this awesome platform that now allows us to communicate and scale our business. And then fast forward, we used variations of like cold outreach.
We were heavily connected. I know you’re in Nebraska, heavily connected toward geographic region, which is right outside Philadelphia, so like a 30 mile radius of Philadelphia. I can confidently say that there’s a large majority of people that are in our tri-state region that know what we do and know who we are, and we’re completely OK with them just knowing it, even though we have customers all over the world.
But we’re trying to dominate our local sector first and then figuring out how to do it and then being able to scale it in other cities later on and in advertisements in SEO. To some people that are maybe listening and think that SEO is dead, they couldn’t be more wrong. A large majority of our traffic is generated and conversion is generated through SEO, which is higher ranks on Google.
Andrea: Sure. OK, so when you’re growing that fast and you’re having to put together a team, how many people are on your team at this point?
Jonathan Grzybowski: I’d say like around a little under 50.
Andrea: Wow! OK, 50 people really quickly.
Jonathan Grzybowski: We’re hiring more people, so it’s like 45-50.
Andrea: Yeah, yeah. And you continue to have to hire I’m sure as you grow. So what’s been one of the biggest challenges in the short period of time in recruiting and then also just getting everybody on board with your whole process, your company DNA and that sort of thing?
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah, it’s a great question. When it comes to hiring, I don’t think we necessarily had an issue when it comes to that. We’ve partnered up with a lot of great organizations that are in our area, one of them, particularly, is Hopeworks. We’re in a technically an underserved community, which is a Camden, New Jersey. And they help kids, youth, students, and residents kind of teach them job-related skills in the world of tech. And so, we’re able to work with that organization in order to help these students and residents obtain jobs and we hired them. So that’s definitely one area.
Andrea: Really cool.
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah. We’re really proud of it. We are definitely a community conscious organization, and we consistently believe in our community, and we believe in our people.
But when it comes to our scaling, I think we’re a cash flow positive business. We’ve never received an ounce of funding. We don’t need funding. We don’t want funding at this moment. When the timing is right, maybe we’ll think about it, but we don’t need it. So why go after it? With that in mind, when you’re growing this by yourself, you have all these systems and processes in place that work really well for yourself because you’re the only one that’s doing it, you’re the only one that’s looking at it.
And then when you actually have to hire people to do the job, you really have to think about it like, “OK, if somebody has no idea even what the English language is and they’re learning it for the first time, would they be able to understand what it is that I’m trying to say to them?” And being able to cookie cutter it for that individual that is for that job that was probably one of the hardest things to do just because you have so many processes and systems in place that work really well for you. Now you have to be able to amplify that times a million. That’s definitely one of them.
And then the last thing would be leadership. I think it’s incredibly difficult to lead a team without having to ever really led a team before. This is like my first “I’ve only had really one another job outside of this.” So you really have to rely on reading, interviewing, talking to people and then just trial by fire. There’s a lot of mistakes that we made, but I’m really proud of where we came from.
Andrea: Wow! OK, so, yeah, leadership. Leadership is huge. I know that you’re not the only leader at your company. What is the leadership structure?
Jonathan Grzybowski: So, I’m the CMO. I do a lot of the sales and lead generation for our business, and I get the message out there as much as I possibly can. We have my co-founder, which is a CEO, and he does the day-to-day operations in order to make sure that everything runs smoothly and is cohesive, but it’s safe to say that my job, in particular, is the lead generation and sales.
Andrea: Gotcha. So when it comes to making decisions together, and I know you co-founded it, when you’re working like this and you’re working so fast on something that’s growing so fast, and you’re with somebody else, you’re bound to come up against things that you disagree with each other about. I mean, is that safe to say?
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah, all the time.
Andrea: OK, so how do you handle those things so that you can move through it and come to decisions? How do you actually decide?
Jonathan Grzybowski: You really have to just completely check your ego at the door, and that is like so freaking difficult because you’re an entrepreneur because you feel like you have some form of ego that you could do it better than somebody else, right? That’s always like the stature why you start a business or at least like, long story short, it’s ego, right? You have to be able to check your ego at the door. You have to be able to understand that, you know what, this person has put in this place for this particular reason. And even though you may not agree, write down the thing that you said that you want to push forward, and it may not be right now, but make sure that you at least remember the decision that maybe like your co-founder made and be able to reach back out to them and say, “Hey, you know, I see here that the thing that you tried to push a couple of weeks ago just isn’t working correctly. Do you mind if we give this thing a try instead?”
I think that has worked really well, but there are tons of disputes that we have even on like a, not so much anymore because we just have more dialogue and conversations, but at the very beginning, it’s just like, “I want my idea to go through.” And he’s like, “I want my idea to go through.” And now we’re butting heads.
But I think at the end of the day you also have to understand that each of the ideas that are being presented are coming from a good place. But I think where a lot of things butt heads with partnerships is that reluctant attitude of, like, always being right. You constantly want to be the right, and you want to be like, I guess the star that comes up with the silver bullet so to speak. And I think, personally, it’s like giving him full reins of “This is the company that you’re leading, and you need to be able to do that. And as a co-founder, yes, I do have a say but this is why you’re in this position. You focus on your job, which is leading the company. I’ll focus on getting a crap ton of sales and growing the company through sales.” And having, too, clear defined roles, I think is also very challenging to maybe do at first. But you really just have to understand, like, what your strengths and weaknesses are. He can’t do some of the things that I can do, and I can’t do some of the things that he can do, and I’m OK with that.
Andrea: Was it pretty obvious to you when you started who was going to do which role?
Jonathan Grzybowski: I would say, yeah. I’d like to say that, like, I’m a millennial, so if you couldn’t tell. And I would say that I’m, like, to give a millennial reference, I am like a level 19 Charmeleon that is on the path to becoming a Charizard. To put it in layman’s terms, I’m just not there yet when it comes to my intellect and my ability to lead. And I think that he is incredibly intelligent in particular, and I think that he’s just the better suit. So I’ve come to terms with that. I’m OK with that. And there’s going to be a time where, you know, maybe he takes to X degree, and I’d be able to come in, and I’d be able to help with the latter half. So again, it’s just that open conversation and that transparency you need to have with your team.
Andrea: Yeah, I love that. I mean, it’s a hard conversation. It’s a hard thing to figure out when you first getting started, there’s so many big bumps in the road. Was there like a certain point in your life when you just really realize that, “Oh my gosh, my ego is getting in the way. I’m done with this.”
Jonathan Grzybowski: Oh yeah.
Andrea: What was that for you?
Jonathan Grzybowski: It’s not done with it because, like, you still have to have it, you need to have some type of backbone. But, you know, I just think of like self-reflection is really important, like why do you constantly get into these silly arguments and you really have to like think about like what started it, right? And then once you’re able to determine and have that conversation with yourself and look at yourself in the mirror and you’re like, “You’re the reason this argument started because your damn ego.” It takes a really long time to understand that and you really have to be OK with it and I think that’s why a lot of relationships fail. Beyond this business is just relationships in general. They fail because you’re not able to look at yourself in the mirror in the right light and then you end up just destroying whatever the good things that you have because you just want to be right all the time. I’m OK with that. I’m OK with not being right.
Andrea: Yeah. That was a hard thing for me too. I think that is something that you kind of figure out sometime in your 20s probably.
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah.
Andrea: It’s just not the end of the world to not be right.
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah. And then is it right to like if you think about that, like at the end of the day, say you’re right. Like “OK, what are you gonna get out of it? Do you feel better about yourself?” Maybe for a little bit, but I don’t know, I started asking myself really serious questions, like, “What is the point of this? You know, what is the point of this argument? Where does the point of this conversation? What is the end result going to be?” Large majority of the times these conversations are just there to destroy the relationship and if you see that going down that path, you need to be able to have the foresight and to say like, “Hey, like this isn’t going the right way that I wanted to, like I need to stop.”
Andrea: OK, that’s great. I like that. I’m still kind of in awe of startups and how you have to grow in scale so quickly. I’m particularly interested in how the people that are working, you know, for the company, how they’re dealing with customers, how you are making sure when they are dealing with customers that they’re using, you know, the voice of your brand and that sort of thing? Is that something that has been a challenge that you’ve found a certain sort of solution for in your company?
Jonathan Grzybowski: So the question was more so along the lines of how are you able to have a consistent brand image throughout the entire organization?
Andrea: Yeah, especially when it comes to, you know, the frontline people working with customers.
Jonathan Grzybowski: I’ll be honest, I don’t think we had that much of an issue with it and this could be _____, I’m not sure. But at Penji, we’re a really tight-knit family, and we don’t call our team members employees, we call them team members, as I’m saying. We don’t necessarily say that I’m the boss. We discourage them from calling us bosses even though they do it as a joking matter. But we just are a very well-oiled machine. We don’t let our ego get in the way when it comes to leading. And that, I think, has transpired in the way that we’re able to communicate with our customers, with our members. We have guidelines that we give our team, and it’s up to them to figure out like what their voice is. And I’ll give you, like, an example. We have a call every time somebody becomes a customer of ours. We call them up and we say, “Hey, you know, welcome to Penji, welcome to the family.” And like my swagger in doing that is going to be completely different than somebody else. And so you kind of have to just say like, “Hey, this is the goal that we want to obtain from this particular conversation. It’s up to you to make it your own.”
Andrea: I love that. I really do. I love that. We do a lot of work with customer service in helping customer service teams own their voice and that sort of thing. And it’s so great when you come up, and you find a company that is so willing to let their people have a voice and own their own voice. There’s something really significant about that.
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah, I mean, the reason why you hire people to take over a particular job is because you believe that that particular individual is better than you or they could at least do just as good, if not a better job than you can. And so, like, who are we to just shun that particular individual from being able to accomplish that? It’s as simple as that. We had a conversation about this.
In Philadelphia right now, there’s a thing called Philly Tech Week. And my business partner and myself, we’ve had opportunities to speak. We didn’t even realize it until like a couple of days ago, like the core message that we’re talking about is like we’re treating humans like humans. It sounds so silly to say that out loud because you’re like, “Oh yeah, duh,” but it’s really difficult. People don’t do that. People don’t treat other humans like human beings. They treat them as employees. They treat them as sales.
Every time that we interact with people, we treat them as they want to be treated. Do you want to receive a cold email? Hell no. Do you want to receive an email that says, “Hey, I really noticed that you love to Philadelphia 76ers, and they just won yesterday, amazing! That’s awesome!” You’d probably want to have that conversation versus like a sales call, and then maybe you can open up a conversation about sales or maybe you don’t. It’s completely up to you.
But I think that at the core what we do, and I think that what makes us successful and separates us from faster, I guess, startups that are able to succeed than others is that we’re really understanding of, like, who the people are that we’re working with and what their strengths are and what they bring to the table and letting them run.
And I just want to throw one more thing out there that I think could be really good to the audience is every time we hire somebody, there are times where we aren’t a good fit for this particular individual. And there’s a time where they’re not a good fit for us. And what we do is every time we bring on a new and new team member, we asked them two questions, what is your dream and how can we help you get there? And there are times where we just can’t help that individual, simple as that. There are times were like “This is the perfect fit, and this is exactly who we’re looking for.” And those two questions, in particular, give us a great understanding of what motivates that individual. Do they want to make a $500,000 a year? OK, well, you know, maybe that might be a little bit unrealistic, but let’s see what we could do. And then maybe they just want to be able to provide a better life for their family, then that’s great. We could definitely help with that, but at least we have an understanding of what motivates that individual from the beginning.
Andrea: Yeah, those are really great questions, and I can imagine that it gives you a sense of who they are, what they care about, also to make sure that it’s in line with what you care about.
Jonathan Grzybowski: Exactly.
Andrea: So what does the company care about? I mean you said being human and treating people as humans, do you have a mission? Have you actually outlined these things for your…
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah, we have. I would say that like if I were to give like a mission/vision statement, so to speak, it would be helping those who help others. We have a lot of initiatives that help our community and that helps those who help others. I just think that that is, like, the core philosophy at the end of the day, it’s just helping those who help others.
Andrea: That’s very cool. So then you probably get a sense from the beginning then on if your team members or potential team members would be able to resonate with that, if they care about that, and if they’re in line with that?
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah, absolutely. And we ask questions specifically around that too. If they don’t care about their community, then there’s a strong chance that we may not be a good fit for them. And that’s OK, like, they can go and be successful at another company. It’s just they may not be successful with ours.
Andrea: So, who are some of the big influencers that have really spoken into your life, whether that be, you know, people that you’ve read or YouTube videos or whatever, like, who are some people that you’ve followed that have really influenced you, and your style, and, yeah, your voice of influence?
Jonathan Grzybowski: I have been asked this question quite a bit, and I have never figured out a good enough answer for this question. My family, my mom, and my dad are very blue collar individuals. My mom is a lunch lady. My Dad is a truck driver, and so you can probably put the two together that I didn’t come from money. I grew up in a relatively poor neighborhood in Philadelphia. And so, I don’t necessarily can look at those particular individuals as like inspiration because, you know, they worked really hard, but they’re not where I want to be.
And so, like, a lot of the things that inspire me, believe it or not, is kind of just like a self-motivated underlying tone of just having a better life for the people around me and having a better life for my future family, if that even comes up. That’s kind of like the thing that motivates me.
There are books that have inspired me, but I really try my best to kind of have my own voice and my own style. I definitely think early on in my career, there are people that I watched and listened to that I kind of just took everything from them, and I became like a carbon copy of those particular individuals. But now, a little bit older, I’m realizing that, you know, I need to be my own self, and people need to either like it or love it or hate it. That’s fine. But at least I’m me at the end of the day.
Andrea: Hmm, cool. So Jonathan, is there anything in particular that you would want to encourage Voice of Influence listeners with? Any kind of parting words of wisdom that you believe are really important when it comes to somebody wanting to build their voice of influence?
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah, I would say, you can be an influencer, you can have a voice of influence, it could be to those people that are very specific and near and dear to your heart, which is right around you. Or if you want to be more, so like a voice of influence to a general audience, you really have to look at yourself in the mirror and have a good understanding of what are your goals, and what is the plan that you want to take in order to become whatever it is.
In the very beginning for me, I thought to myself like, I want it to be the center of influence. I wanted to be this like thought leader when it comes to millions of followers and all this and all that. And I realized that like, you know what, if that comes, so be it. If it doesn’t, I’m totally OK with it. I don’t need that.
What I do need is to be the voice of influence to the people that are trusting me with their lives, which is being a team member of a startup. Startups are risky to work with. I definitely think that we’ve broken that path of riskiness now, but you know, there is a point in time where it was risky to work for us. And I think that if you’re able to just have a conversation with yourself and have a better understanding of what you want to accomplish once you’re on your deathbed and be able to, you know, not to be morbid, but be able to look back at your life and be like, “You know what, it was all worth it. All those risks were worth it.” I think that’s how you could be the center of influence.
Andrea: Awesome! If I remember right, you have a deal, or what should I call it?
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah. Deal is fine with me.
Andrea: Sure, OK. You’ve got a deal for the listeners.
Jonathan Grzybowski: At the end of the day, anytime you’re able to share your story, you have to be able to ask for a sale, and I think that’s the most important thing. And so, this is our ask for a sale, if you like, whatever it is that I said, if you need any form of graphic design support, we want to be your go-to solution for graphic design. So if you could head over to penji.co, enter the coupon code podcast15 and you’ll get 15 percent your first month of Penji.
Andrea: Awesome! Thank you so much for being here with us, Jonathan. This is a really delightful conversation.
Jonathan Grzybowski: Yeah. Thank you so much!