A most humble year: 2021 in review

It’s almost the end of the year, so it’s time we told you what we’ve been up to since the last time we told you what we were up to. (As you read it, we humbly suggest that you listen to this song by Kanye West, a very humble man.)

Let’s start in-house:

• We worked 46,000 hours on projects for our wonderful clients!
• We created around 100,000 artboards in Figma, and they’re all amazing!
• We mentored 50+ startups, almost all in Seed or Round A, with great teams and fun business and design problems to solve.
• We spoke at six conferences. And we were on a number of podcasts too.
• Our heroic HR team went through 1,000 applications, interviewed people for over 300 hours, and ended up hiring 20 really excellent people.
• We designed a mentorship program for accelerators and incubators, and spread our knowledge at Techstars, Seedcamp, the IBM Accelerator Program, Village Capital, StartupYard, and the Startup Wise Guys.
• We continued to recklessly give away all our product design & startup secrets on our newsletter and blog, doubling our audience in the past year.
• We built a branding team that doesn’t do business cards! Instead they specialize in the needs of startups and their products, doing only what’s necessary for a successful launch, working fast, creating animation, copy, 3D and everything else, and going straight into production.
• We continue to work with a bunch of innovation consulting agencies from Sweden to Italy! Among the things we did this year was help launch an awesome car/phone concept for Renault, and a big internal coaching system at McKinsey.
• Our fintech design team launched a big research push, with 11 primary user journeys studied across over 20 market players!
• We created our very own skill-boosting educational program for young designers! As we’re writing this, our team is checking the homework assignments of over 1,500 students, and giving everyone feedback.
• We’re working on our own podcast about the world's most mind-blowing startups that will launch in 2021. Don’t tell anyone!
• Last but not least, we used a lot of exclamation marks!

What did we do for our clients? Let’s see.

We designed the interface for Audigent’s new advertising platform, coming soon to a demographic near you. We helped the asset management platform Collective visualize their product.

We worked on a couple of big projects for Crave, a platform for small restaurant chains in the US, and we completely redesigned Dripos’s app for restaurants and coffee shops. We started working with Healthtap on a bunch of very healthy stuff that we unfortunately can’t talk about yet.

For Logitech we worked on a Counter-Strike training project. We helped our arty friends at Marcel with lots of things, including launching an NFT platform for artists. We continued our cooperation with Musi, making various great improvements to the world’s most popular free music streaming service.

We also continued working with Piñata, scaling up their app for landlords and tenants, and helping with marketing. We’re helping new Pakistani neobank Sadapay add features, improve services and target new market segments.

For the non-profit organization SafeSite we created an application to help protect victims of sex trafficking. And we continued working with our friends at the subscription-based perfume service Sanctuary, who always smell good. We helped our new pals at Stilt go from idea to sales in two weeks, and we’re working on a huge acquisition campaign that will cover San Francisco in the new year.

But that’s not all! We also did a lot of other things for a lot of other clients but we would get in trouble with our lawyers if we told you about it, so you’ll just have to take our word for it.

You’re busy, we’re busy, so let’s wrap this up by saying thanks to all of you for following what we do. Especially the three people who’ve read this far! And if you’re one of our clients, you get extra special thanks. We literally wouldn’t be here without you.

That’s it for now — happy holidays, and see you all next year!

— Your friends at Humbleteam

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