Sustain

Episode 33: Getting Money for Awesome Icons with Dave Gandy

Apr 24 '20

Panelists

Justin Dorfman | Eric Berry | Richard Littauer

Guest

Dave Gandy
Font Awesome Founder | CEO Fonticons, Inc.

Show Notes

If you’ve never heard of Font Awesome, or even if you have, this episode is worth taking a listen to. Our special guest today is Dave Gandy, who is one of the main people behind Font Awesome. He has some super inspiring advice that we all could use right now with everything going on in the world. On a funny note, which way is the best way to hang toilet paper? There is a fascinating conversation on TP that you don’t want to miss. 😂

02:33 Dave talks about what Font Awesome released to help out with COVID-19 awareness and they are ALL Open Sourced.

04:55 It’s been eight years since Font Awesome has been around, and Dave talks about the story behind it and how it gets money for icons.

08:31 Dave explains the process and the response from transitioning to being free to now asking for money. It all came down to what kind of company they wanted to build.

11:30 Richard wonders how Dave pitches all his ideas to investors and he has some great stories to tell.

016:38 Justin wonders how Font Awesome pays their Angel Investors back and is there an exit they are looking for or has he already paid them back?

21:17 Dave talks about how Kickstarter raised 1.076 million dollars which is still a record of most raised and backed by a software Kickstarter. The guys were all backers to it.

24:53 Expectations for the Kickstarter for Font Awesome is discussed and Dave goes into how the video is made.

33:41 Is Font Awesome one of those Cinderella stories or one of those unicorn projects that are likely to be reproduced? Can somebody else be the next Font Awesome? Dave has some great advice and so much inspiration to share that we could all use.

Spotlight

37:04 Richard’s spotlight is a book called, “War of Art,” by Steven Pressfield.
37:25 Eric’s spotlight is a project website called, helpwithcovid.com.
38:18 Justin’s spotlight is to Google, “Font Awesome 5 Kickstarter Video.”
39:34 Dave’s spotlight is a book series, “Mistborn Trilogy,” by Brandon Sanderson.

Quotes

22:39 “It turns out all of that failure was actually not failure, because all of those things we had done leading up to it, ended up being tremendous assets when it came time for Kickstarter.”

23:36 “No matter how good your intuition is on the first version of a product, the only way to get better is to talk to customers.”

34:02 “Everything is impossible until it’s done and then it was always inevitable.”

34:13 “When you believe before you start something that you can’t do it, you will always be right. No matter what, you’ll always be right!”

34:35 “If we don’t have faith in something that doesn’t exist, it can’t come into existence, until you believe that something could become real that doesn’t exist yet, it can’t.”