Building a Collaborative Branding Platform and Serving Unicorn Startup Brands

I'm a 31-year old European digital nomad, cherry ice cream lover, failed garage rock band guitarist, and CEO & Co-founder at Corebook. It’s a startup in the branding industry with a mission to ensure that by 2025, fixed-format PDF brand guidelines will have become a thing of the past.

• I recently sold the majority of my stuff, downsized 4x to a modest studio flat on
• a Mediterranean island Mallorca to lead my team fully remotely, and spend more time outdoors on my way to co-working spaces.
  

"In 2004, I discovered computer software, artsy-type peers on the internet, heavy metal music, grunge fashion, and boys' ability to grow long hair (the start of my rebel going against everything teenage phase).\n\nIn 2008, I spent one month in the hospital because of deep pain in the chest every time I breathed.

Doctors never really figured out the diagnosis but assumed it was caused by anxiety in a school system where I felt I didn't fit in. I spent most of that time looking out of the hospital window at a lonely tree and wondering about life and stuff.\n\nA year later, I dropped out of art school, and I learned what my condition \"autodidact\" means. Then, I started teaching myself design.

I founded my first business (graphic design studio) by helping out friends who played in rock bands by designing gig posters, album artworks, band logos, and Myspace layouts. In parallel, I tried to co-found another marketing agency startup. I failed fast because of a lack of money while bootstrapping.\n\nIn 2014, I began traveling around Europe with nothing but a backpack, rollerskates, and freelance design gigs. My most extended stay was in Venice, Italy, where I lived with local art academy students. Two years later, I returned to Riga, Latvia, and co-founded a time management product startup. I failed fast because of personality conflicts between co-founders.\n\nIn 2017, I accepted a creative director job offer at an advertising agency, and a year later, I quit the job because of shitty products I had to advertise, and my inner urge to still make f’n amazing sh!t happen through entrepreneurship. Soon, almost like from a scene of The Matrix movie, I met two bright gentlemen who later played a crucial role in my life as my business partners. We started working on a small startup idea called Corebook to disrupt how the industry creates and uses brand guidelines because it bothered us throughout our previous professional lives.\n\nIn 2020, together with the other two co-founders, we managed to launch the public Beta of Corebook, officially registering the company as a legal entity and raising our first investment capital with a $1.2M valuation. Last year, I set up my second home in Spain’s Mediterranean island Mallorca and got a matching tattoo with a random stranger. Corebook is now used in 30 countries by the most influential brand studios and world-renowned brands."

"Without a doubt, it's a universal law that great ideas must be materialized by the right makers, right timing, and the right approach. Our idea was fortunate in meeting co-founders with the matching competence and experience, favorable context in our personal lives, and strong friendship.\n\nIt took two years of building a product from scratch till public beta launch and two years after that, until this moment when we are confident about what we're building, how to bring value to our clients, and finally, become interesting for VC investors.\n\nAfter we committed to the idea, we gathered building resources — a real challenge started with endless creative possibilities on how to be sure what to build and what not to. I created an internal methodology called Core Truth as a solution for the team. It's a collaborative cloud document, a dedicated place to figure out Product-Market fit and be in tune with the reality of our audience. The document consists of guiding principles for customer interviews, industry insights, user persona archetypes, customer feedback archive, and product-market fit validation methods."

My main lessons have been:

• Be open to advise from mentors. Nevertheless, if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out.
• Create your own rules.
• Tomorrow you will be paid for what you do today.
• Your product will never be finished (deal with it).
• Integrate failures as a fun activity for team building.