In today’s America of hard line partisanship, one democrat seems to be doing the impossible: Andrew Yang (D) has increasingly been winning over Trump voters to his 2020 presidential campaign.

How, you ask? For one thing, Yang is no ordinary candidate, nor is he a politician. An entrepreneur and philanthropist, Yang is standing out by running on a platform of solutions, not problems. The core of his campaign revolves around mitigating the effects of widespread job loss that’s happening due to increased automation in America. …

Although picking good colors is an art, there are a few tricks you can use to make picking pretty colors easy. This article comes in two parts: I’ll first go over what makes a good color palette, and second, I’ll outline a formula that you can use to arrive at a good looking palette.

Disclaimer: This is far and away from the only way to choose good colors, and is more so a set of heuristics that I’ve come to adopt myself. My hope is that this can help you pick the right colors for your website/app/game/what-have-you.

Color Palettes and Contrast

First off, we need to recognize that colors don’t exist in isolation. A pretty color isn’t one that is light or dark, saturated or desaturated. When we think about picking colors, we should not be thinking about individual colors so much as think about picking sets of colors, or color palettes. …

A challenge we faced while building SpriteBox Coding, a learn to code game for kids ages 5+, was that the educational component primarily centred around puzzles. However, as we learned with our previous title LightBot, for some kids, puzzles simply aren’t exciting on their own. There were often players who needed a reason for why they would want to solve puzzles in the first place.

Luckily, years of video game history have taught us about all kinds of things when it comes to what makes games fun. We analyzed games across multiple genres to find some of the more universally popular ideas. …

We ran into a big blocker when designing SpriteBox Coding, a learn-to-code game for kids ages 5+. For some kids, code was simply unapproachable.

With our previous game LightBot, we’d already proven that kids ages 5+ were capable of writing complex programs with icons. The goal for our next title was to get kids engaged and familiar with ‘real’ text programming so that they could advance to real programming languages.

Problem is, many newcomers, kids and adults alike, believe that code is inherently complex simply because it looks complex. Our first challenge became ‘How do we make code look friendly?’

We guessed that the likely culprits were the unusual symbols you see. We thought we’d succeed if we got rid of anything atypical, adopted simple vocabulary and used an interface that didn’t allow for syntax errors. We’d soon find out that this wasn’t the case. …

You never know when you may have to present your elevator pitch. But no matter how well put your one sentence intro to your startup is, your audience will likely imagine something totally different from what you mean.

Your elevator pitch is essentially a high-level description of what you do. Without a visual , your audience must piece together their own ideas on what that description means. Most likely, they’ll cobble up an image comprised of things they’ve already seen: similar existing products and services. It’s why often times your audience may give suggestions or ask questions that are completely at odds or inapplicable to what you actually do. Then you get into the predicament of explaining “Yeah, it’s like that, but not exactly”. …

Knowing when you’ve found product-market-fit should be simple. Product-market-fit is said to be achieved when your product truly resonates with your target demographic; when users don’t just like, but love what you’ve made.

All too often however I see products being launched that have not achieved product-market-fit, even those that have gone through several Alphas, Betas and Pilot periods beforehand. I attribute these false-positives of a product-market-fit on a combination of overly kind feedback from testers and confirmation bias from entrepreneurs.

One thing I’ve found to be fairly effective in gauging the existence of product-market-fit is using what I’ve coined as the “Smile Moment”. It’s hard to fake a genuine smile, and when people use a product they really enjoy, they form a literal smile on their face. …

After you’ve included all the elements from the Startup Pitch Formula, there are a few more pitch strategies you can adopt to take your pitch from good to great.

Tell a Story

Quite some thought should be put towards how you piece each element of the formula together. A great pitch flows from section to section instead of feeling like you’re simply checking off each bullet point.

At the beginning of your pitch during your problem step, try to find the story that can best resonate with your audience. This may include a personal experience, a particular customer’s experience, or a common experience for your target demographic. Make the audience feel for the people facing your problem to capture their interest from the get-go. …

Delivering a captivating 3 Minute Startup Pitch is challenging.

It really forces you to hone in on all of the important aspects of your business while doing away with anything that’s less relevant.

There are hundreds of things that you as a founder can touch upon in a pitch, however, in most great 3 minute pitches, you’ll see a pattern emerge of things to talk about. That’s because the core aspects for most businesses, those that an entrepreneur definitely wants to cover in their 3 minutes, are generally the same.

The Formula

Problem. Solution. Competition. Market. Traction. Team. Future.

Once you’ve seen your fair share of 3 minute pitches, you’ll start to recognize these as the archetypal parts of a startup pitch. Making sure your pitch touches each of the elements in the formula should be your starting point. Beyond that, the way you dive into each part is up to you.* …