Ep. 239 - Johnathan Grzybowski, Co-Founder of Penji on Graphic Design Service On-Demand & Growing a Startup

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Johnathan Grzybowski, co-founder of Penji and on-demand graphic design service. Johnathan and I talk about the changing face of graphic design and the new trends making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Johnathan Grzybowski, Co-Founder of Penji

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Johnathan Grzybowski. He is the Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Penji, an on-demand graphic design service. Welcome Johnathan.

Johnathan Grzybowski: Brian, thank you so much for having me appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on board. I wanted to have you on as a founder to talk about what it's like to build a startup outside the Valley, but I also want to talk about some of the new tools and trends that we're seeing that's making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. Penji's one of those. And so, what is Penji and what do you do for them? 

Johnathan Grzybowski: Penji is an on demand graphic design service, where our customers can essentially sign up for the service, get immediate access to the top 2% of graphic designers in the world, and be able to receive a completed project in under 48 hours. That's essentially the nuts and bolts of it.

We want to make graphic design more easily accessible and not necessarily this commodity where you have to spend thousands and hundreds and thousands of dollars in order to receive something really good and custom and unique to you. So, we're really trying to just challenge that mindset, that old school mindset of graphic design.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the genesis of Penji. How did it start and how did it grow? 

Johnathan Grzybowski: We were a digital marketing agency that necessarily wasn't the best at a lot of things. However, a lot of people kept mentioning about how good our graphic designers were. So, we started interviewing people and we talked to them and we said, well, what are some problems that you have, or it comes to the marketing space.

And we started to see trends and people say that they had an issue with finding reliable talent. And then we realized that that talent translated to somebody who could execute the graphic design. So that's one aspect of it, but more so we also thought about the big picture of who we wanted to be as a company.

We are a digital marketing agency. We only helped, you know, maybe 10, 15 customers a year, new customers a year. People cancel people, come and go and et cetera. And I remember the time when I sat inside of a meeting at Rutgers with like a chancellor of some kind. And they wanted like a website. And I just remember sitting there, and this person's like talking to me and sharing to me about like what they want to do and how they want to promote to get more people.

And I realized that the thing that we were creating was only benefiting like the higher ups. It wasn't necessarily benefiting the actual students or, or anything like that in which we really wanted to change the philosophy and say, who do we want to be when we grow up? And we thought to ourselves, well, we want to make an impact.

Well, how do we make an impact? And then we kind of put the two, all of the pieces of the puzzle together. To basically say we want to make graphic design more easily accessible. So, you know, your company can actually come in and get some really cool graphic design work done. Or what about like Jimmy who decides they have this amazing idea, but they can't necessarily hire somebody full time in order to complete their idea, their app, their whatever it may be.

And then what about the person who is. A marketing manager in a really big corporation. They have all these brilliant ideas. They don't have the time or the technical skill to actually do graphic design themselves, but they don't necessarily have the ability to hire somebody else for their right hand. All of those scenarios are really essential as to why we created Penji. 

Brian Ardinger: It's interesting you mentioned impact. We talk a lot about on the show, we're kind of entering this age of impact, where, you know, access to new tools and new talent has never been easier. You know, quite frankly, if you think about starting a company, you know, 20 years ago, especially a tech company, what you had, they go through and now everything's in your pocket or available in the cloud or other places.

So, talk a little bit about that trend of democratization of tools and things for builders. How are you seeing that affecting your business and what do you see for the future of this trend? 

Johnathan Grzybowski: There's always going to be people out there. They want to do a DIY. There's always going to be people that want to create their own website that do the graphic designs themselves. But I think you have to look at it as like, how much is your time worth? Yeah. 

You can get something to what it is and you could probably get it to be somewhat manageable, but there's always going to come a point in time where it has to go above that. And so that ultimately depends on what you want you to do with your business.

For us in particular, we want to talk to the people who have that need. There's always going to be that sector of people that want to DIY. There's always going to be people that want to be able to, that just need that additional help. And those are the people that we really want to talk to. 

Brian Ardinger: And so that kind of brings to the question, like there are all sorts of new tools for, I guess, that you wouldn't typically think in the past, you'd have to go to creative agency to do it. So now you've got tools like Canva, for example, or even like Photoshop and that are technically getting a little bit easier for the person to hack together things or see templates and utilize that in such a way that makes it more graphically sound or more visually appealing than ever before. What's the difference between something like that hacked together versus going to like a Penji or...

Johnathan Grzybowski: So, I think when it comes to the DIY aspect of this, the company that you mentioned, there are skill sets of graphic designers. Let's just say you want to create a website, that's a technical skill. You might be able to put pieces of a puzzle together to do like a social media meme. Right. You could do that, but can you create a website and then when you create the website, and you send it to a developer, can they actually code what you do?

And the short answer is probably not. So, the benefit of Penji is essentially that you have a pool of hundreds of graphic designers that specialize in very specific things. So, if you could do like the big things, like, let's just say you are a web designer, but you can't ...