ARTICLE / THE MAKING OF... SERIES
The making of...
New Vacancy.
With the constant drone of opinions, shorts, reels et al across the socials and the lofty positionings of the more traditional publishers, it’s hard enough getting legit, unbiased updates on what’s going on in the tech world, let alone find inspiration. Until now. We caught up with Cat Sietkiewicz, founder of New Vacancy - the new lifestyle publication for everything that’s going on in tech. With an eye on helping people stay ahead of innovation in their everyday settings - where they shop, play, travel, work and live, this is The making of… New Vacancy.
Series
The making of... Series
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#newvacancy #techinnovation #culturaltrends #popculturebranding #digitaltransformation #creativetechnology #newvacancytrends #startupstories #startup #growthstrategy #entrepreneurlife
Hey Cat, lovely to catch up and talk New Vacancy. It’s been our new favourite source of inspiration for a couple of months now. We’re loving the freshness and local vibe. Where or how did you land on the idea? What’s the story?
Hey Hunter. How are you doing? Ok, some back story to New Vacancy. Originally from New Zealand, over the past fifteen incredible years, I’ve been putting my communication and marketing degree to good use, wearing many hats from professional musician to writer, marketer, and founder with some of Australia's most innovative start-ups, award-winning agencies, and large-scale incumbents across arts, education, property, design, retail and energy.
During that time, I’ve fallen head-over-heels in love with innovation, storytelling, and growing an idea into a tangible product. Working across sectors as a content specialist, I noticed businesses struggling when it came to creating seamless customer experiences across their physical and digital presences. It could be something as simple as a website not reflecting the look and feel of a bricks and mortar store, or the information someone gets from a call centre being at odds with what's in a digital application. This friction confuses people and they can end up missing out on the value to be had from a business's products and services. In turn, businesses can then miss their growth and retention targets.
I wanted to explore how businesses around the world are navigating the intersection of digital technology and the physical world. I wanted to see what great looks like. What interesting looks like. What nascent and unproven looks like.
New Vacancy was born as a vehicle to discover that - and share the insights in a meaningful, light and engaging way - so that people can better understand our place in a world that is increasingly digital and physical at all times - and businesses can better capitalise on the opportunities a digital-physical landscape presents.
Cat Sietkiewicz, Founder of New Vacancy
The tone is bang-on compared to… say, the stuffiness of GIZMODO. It also sounds like you were well on the road in terms of research. What else did you do to test your product-market fit?
I saw the problem first-hand. I was constantly trying to solve digital-physical friction through content, but I knew I needed to look globally and end-to-end to discover and understand best practices. I researched various publications covering technology, lifestyle, fashion, and arts before positioning and testing New Vacancy as a platform at the intersection of them all.
So what were the first runs like? How did the launch issue go?
Similar to how it looks today! New Vacancy is a young brand and product. It's exceeded my expectations in terms of growth, reach and impact - but there's so much more iteration and experimentation to go. I'm a year in but feel like I'm just getting started.
Funding? How have you been funding things so far?
New Vacancy is bootstrapped through a combination of self-funding, and sweat equity from 5 pm - 9 pm most evenings and weekends.
Sweat equity is some of the purest! Right, branding. We’ve actually collaborated with you on some projects in the past so we know a bit about how you work. But for our readers, how did you go about developing your initial brand or MVB? How did you develop what you’ve got today?
I've worked in brand and marketing for years, and all too often I've seen the desire for a brand-perfection get in the way of a good idea and create inertia. Naturally, a great logo, font or colour palette contributes to a brand's artefacts - but really, a brand is a perception people have of your product.
Knowing I can't control my audience’s perception, but can influence it through certain cues, I gave myself six weeks to build the MVB. That included website creation, content production, social media setup and brand development. These constraints meant I didn't have time to get stuck in the weeds.
Here's how I went about the branding:
- Naming: I wrote a list of names. They needed to be ambiguous and spark curiosity. Pragmatically speaking, the name also needed to be available as URLs and social media handles. Fun fact: I bought the domain name whilst riding on the free tourist shuttle bus to Chadstone Shopping Centre.
- Colour palette: I had never seen a pink tech publication before, but I loved the subtle irreverence it brought to the all-too-often-all-too-serious world of Big Tech which is often codified in blues and purples.
- Vibe: New Vacancy has to feel like a cool friendly person at a party. New Vacancy takes complex and interesting ideas and makes them easy to understand without talking down to its audience. That's a cool and friendly thing to do!
New Vacancy’s approachability is something that will resonate with a wide range of people, likewise, showcasing what is bubbling away in popular culture and the wider business world. Exposure-wise, how are you getting the word out there? How are you scaling the brand?
Community-led social media (follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads and TikTok! We're cool and friendly!), our newsletter, and our website newvacancy.co.
Nice plug. Actually, let's do that again. New Vacancy - follow them on Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads and TikTok, their newsletter and newvacancy.co. Ok, future challenges - what’s on the horizon?
Lots. I'm trying to do something new, so there are bound to be challenges with monetisation, scale and more. The biggest challenge will be one I haven't thought of yet - which will probably be directly proportional to the biggest opportunity for New Vacancy. Regardless of what it is, when it arises I hope I can face it with tenacity, creativity, and determination. That's what all the businesses and brands New Vacancy covers do - so I'm lucky to be a student of them.
Ok, Cat, before we wrap up with our final question, thank you for taking the time to share what’s going on in New Vacancy’s world. Now, here’s that final question. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give another founder setting out on their own startup journey?
Start. Start now. Start today. Start cringey. Start pixelated. Start in your track pants. Start lacking confidence. Start tired. Start unsure. Start optimistic. Start with delusions of grandeur (and continue when they land in reality). Start on the free tourist shuttle bus to Chadstone Shopping Centre. Start with the five spare minutes you have between switching off the TV and brushing your teeth before bed.
Don't rob yourself of the opportunity to start by getting caught up in shipping a perfect MVP. Just ship it to prod. Let the experiment be the user testing. Get the value out the door as soon as you can. Then look for signals from your customers.
Keep doing it. Your goalposts will shift, your audience or consumer base will grow, and before you know it - you'll have taken something that was a dream, and brought it into reality so that others can share in it.
But you have to start. Just start.
