Six Types of Creators And Builders Who Will Thrive in The New World

Trends like open-source, no-code tools and new professional networks and communities are paving the way for a new breed of creators and builders.

Brianne Kimmel identified six new builder types that will be able to thrive in this new environment:

1. The Designers who Code
2. The Career Jumpers
3. The Ambitious Advisors
4. The Creative Hackers
5. The Industry Academics
6. The Community Builders

I'll discuss 1, 2, 3 and 6 here, if you want to read them all follow over to Brianne's full post.

The Designers who Code

There are a couple of examples here that I have named over and over here in the newsletter.

• Notion is exclusively hiring designers who can code (and their software shows).
• Figma is the first design tool that’s both technically and creatively well above the competition and they too have designers who code as co-founders.
• Then there is Rahul Vohra, a former game designer turned entrepreneur who brought his skills and creative thinking to Superhuman and made it the first email client that has a game-like feeling to it.

From Brianne:

Technical designers bring aesthetics to computing and create products that draw people in and keep them engaged in a thoughtful and inherently more intuitive way.

Career Jumpers

I'll be writing about the generalists taking over the world (from the specialists) in a future newsletter. But suffice to say, in todays world if you've learned to solve problems across different roles and industries you have a leg up. If you've been around you can cross-pollinate your skills and expertise from different fields into new insights. A swath of former journalists are now venture capitalists (Kim-Mai Cutler, Alexia Bonatsos, Katherine Boyle), lawyers becoming VP of fitness at Peloton.

Or another example I love:

What Brianne has to say:

It’s easy to confuse the career jumpers next move with starting from scratch. In reality, they’re simply plotting a continuation, treating their careers as a jungle gym rather than a ladder. They blend together the expertise and skills they garner along the way to craft innovative products and businesses.

The Ambitious Advisors

This includes freelancers, agencies and advisors. Since I am in this group as well, I can attest to one thing that is really unique here. Technology and the markets move fast and because we are constantly talking to people and seeing the insides of companies, we develop a good intuition for the problems companies face and how to solve them.

Brianne hits the nail on the head:

What’s different from the ambitious advisors from career consultants at major firms is their operating experience inside tech companies and their ability to smoothly transition between full time roles + advising on evenings and weekends to full-time advising, and in some building a venture scale software company using services to bootstrap their way to product market fit.

Also, we see a large percentage of founders come from an agency background where building web projects for clients leads to a unique insight on ways to improve the software development process for others.

The Community Builders

The ones that build and own the platforms for communities and businesses to sprout from are the ones who cash in big in the current economy. Examples are: Shopify (over 1M online storefronts), Teachable (online course platform), Mighty Networks (community platform), Substack (Newsletter platform), Ghost (blogging platform) and so many more.

Community builders are natural company builders. They value thoughtful curation and quality; they eschew the attitude of growth at all costs. As founders, they’re natural evangelists who invest in user education and steadily increase revenue.

Again to read the full article head over to Brianne Kimmels article to read more examples and the other two jobs in detail.