Member and Community-Builder, Luke Chandler, sat down with Justin Kropp, the founder and brain behind his namesake design firm Kropp and chatted about how freelance design functions within the startup atmosphere.
Luke: So what do you do and how long have you been at SoW?
Justin: My name is Justin Kropp and I’m an independent consultant so the company is just my last name, Kropp, at the moment. I’ve been at Society of Work since February of 2018 although when I first moved back to Chattanooga in 2013, I was a member for about a year back then and that was when SoW was in a different building.
L: So you’ve been around since its infancy?
J: Yeah I think when I joined, Kelly had just gotten off the ground a few months prior.
L: Talk to me about your background and the path that you took to get where you are now:
J: I’m a Chattanooga native — I grew up here and graduated from UTC. Both of my degrees are in traditional graphic design but as soon as I graduated I went into doing web work and worked in a couple of agencies doing that type of work, and somewhere along in there I became more interested in product. So I went to grad school in Baltimore and once I graduated I joined a startup in Berlin, Germany and worked there for a while, then moved to Portland, OR and worked for another startup there. Then in 2013 I didn’t quite know what my next move was going to be so I just moved back to Chattanooga because it was familiar and cheaper and was going to allow me to figure out what that next move was going to be. At that point I had been away for a decade, and in that span the city had changed a ton. So when I came back there was a fledgling startup scene, there was venture capital here, the tech scene was exploding, so I just thought, “Okay, I can stay here and see where this goes,” and that was it. Five years later I’m still here.
L: What interested you in SoW to begin with?
J: The company I was working for was a startup out of San Francisco and we had a pretty large workforce — at that time there were 140 employees — but we were all remote. So I was working from home and had been for a couple of years at that point and loneliness had just become a factor in my day-to-day sanity. I just needed to be around people. I didn’t know that Chattanooga had a coworking space at the time but then I found out about Kelly and what she was doing with SoW and decided I had to join.
L: Besides having that interaction with people, what else made you stick around?
J: I’d say proximity to other colleagues who are doing similar work. If I need to get a set of outside eyes to look at something or just ping somebody and say, “Hey can we talk through this? I’m having trouble thinking through it clearly,” and I can just walk down the hall and talk to any number of people just to get some feedback and that was just nice to have that convenience and proximity to other people.
L: Tell me more about Kropp and what you do on a day to day basis:
J: On paper, my title would be Digital Product Designer. And Kropp, as a consultancy, what we do is digital product, primarily working with early-mid stage startups to help them refine their product set and bring their product to launch.
L: Talk to me about how you personally approach that process:
J: Well, it’s not really prescriptive. For launching these things there are any number of frameworks that you can use, but I find that every startup has a different set of problems that they’re facing. So process definitely varies from one to another. But one thing that doesn’t change across the board for any new client is just the initial conversation. It’s pretty informal — at that stage they have more than likely done their fair share of market research and they may already have a working prototype or product. But where I come in is just to help them refine that and identify if the feature-set that they’ve come up with is targeting the wrong audience. And if so how to mitigate that gap.
L: So that discrepancy from job to job; I assume the nature of that kind of work makes it extra helpful to surround yourself with people that have faced similar things and can help you work through those various situations. Do you feel like SoW helps you to do that?
J: Yeah, I mean here where we are in the Innovation District and in The Edney Building, there’s a handful of other startups that operate in and out of the building and I’m able to learn from what they’re doing. They may be engaging in something that I haven’t thought about or maybe have tried differently in the past and didn’t quite figure out as well as I wanted to.
L: Can you give me a real example of how being at SoW has benefitted your consultancy?
J: I think in general SoW just helps with visibility. Just this week I had a brief conversation with someone kind of explaining what I do and am trying to do with Kropp, and they emailed me asking if they could introduce me to someone else in town who’s looking to build a company. So within 10 minutes of him asking if he could make this introduction, I had a lunch date lined up to meet this new person to hear about what they’re trying to build and how I could help out. And I think that just wouldn’t have happened were I not in this physical space and already made some connections with other people who were working in this space as well. That only happened because of SoW.
L: What kind of space do you think motivates or fosters your best creative work?
J: Well I think SoW helps do that because there’s just a sort of buzz here — I think it’s just optimism. Everyone in SoW seems like they’re trying to do something and they’re optimistic and they’re humble and that’s pretty energizing — even when you don’t engage with it directly you can kind of just feel it around in this space.
Society of Work is a membership based shared office space that’s creating a culture for you to get things done. Want to join us? Set up a tour.
