Today we’d like to introduce you to Sofya Polyakov.
Sofya, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Noun Project was founded in 2011 with a mission of “creating, sharing and celebrating the world’s visual language”.
We launched the company on Kickstarter during the recession, and it resonated with a huge community of designers which built our initial user base. We didn’t know anything about tech or starting a company at the time, it was a big learning curve.
We bootstrapped the company for the first four years while I still worked full time. It was a grueling experience but one that taught me to be creative in problem-solving and uber-efficient with my time – “necessity is the mother of invention”, as Plato said. We raised venture capital from some really great investors after that, and take pride in being a profitable and self-sustaining company.
Has it been a smooth road?
A couple of years ago we launched a completely new product called Lingo. Lingo is a design library used by teams to establish a shared design language so they can automate consistency and increase efficiency. Even though launching it within an established company was easier than starting a business from scratch, it’s been a learning experience all over again in terms of getting to know our customers and their needs.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Noun Project story. Tell us more about the business.
Noun Project is the world’s best-known collection of nearly 2 million icons built by creatives from around the world. It is used by designers, educators, business professionals putting together presentations, and anyone needing to visually communicate information.
What role has luck (good luck or bad luck) played in your life and business?
Combined with a lot of grit and perseverance, I think luck was on our side and contributed to our success. There are many extremely smart, ambitious, and hardworking people who start businesses every day, that unfortunately do not succeed.
We didn’t have the deep industry knowledge starting out, all we had was an idea and a will to fight hard battles to get things off the ground. We were lucky enough to make enough good decisions along the way to get to where we are now. I believe that luck favors the prepared, and we worked extremely hard to be as prepared in our decision making as possible.
Contact Info:
- Website: thenounproject.com
- Instagram: @nounproject
- Facebook: @thenounproject
- Twitter: @nounproject
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