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Sometimes fitting in feels like the smartest move. It’s certainly the safest. Nobody ever got fired for playing it safe, for following the pattern, for blending in. Humans are drawn to safety. Risk makes people uncomfortable. That’s part of why so much of tech startups today looks the same: sleek dark mode UIs, moody lighting, and a limited color range, usually some flavor of blue, purple, and all black.
But with brand, the irony is this: the real risk is in avoiding risk altogether. The danger isn’t in standing out; it’s in disappearing into the background. In trying to fit in, you almost guarantee that you won’t be remembered. A blip, at best.
Brand, if it’s working, refuses to hide.
For those who don’t know, Blacksmith was founded in 2024. Our focus is on building a high-performance CI cloud for GitHub Actions. That’s what we do. And for some, that’s where the interest stops, and conversation ends. Nowadays, when you talk about CI, people think you mispronounced AI. CI has become, or maybe it always was, one of those unsexy, unglamorous things that every software company has, but no one wants to think about. It’s plumbing. It’s carpentry. It’s the infrastructure everyone relies on, but no one wants to talk about.
And that was my vision: To make CI sexy, for once.
As determined as I was, I couldn’t do it alone. I needed a creative mind. A true partner in crime. And like so many modern meet-cutes, I found mine online — on LinkedIn. The moment I saw their work, I knew: this was a designer in tech that didn’t want to blend in. I had to find out who was behind it. More importantly, I had to find out how we could poach them!
Luckily for Edera, You Little Beauty (YLB) was a brand-new brand agency. So working with both of us was an option. Better still, I found out that the founding partners, Trav and Jim, came from fashion, not tech. They weren’t weighted down by the status quo. They saw things differently. They were exactly what we needed.
Now, I wish I could say I nailed the pitch from the start, that I walked into the meeting with Blacksmith’s founders, laid out the vision, the price tag, and had them grinning ear to ear. I wish I could say yellow, as the primary color, landed without debate. But let’s be real: most tech startups don’t spend much time thinking about brand — especially not infrastructure startups. So I get it. I really do. Who was this wild kid from Florida, barely in the door, talking about a rebrand of all things?
Still, I was lucky. JP, Maru, and Aayush trusted me enough to take a swing at it. So with their blessing, for the past two months, I’ve been biting my tongue, working in the shadows, waiting to show the world what we’ve been designing.
Blacksmith 2.0 is here.
"The first thing investors, talent, and consumers see isn't your product — it's your brand."
