HeyJaredThe State Of Mind
The State of Mind is a not-so-serious, unfiltered, very real newsletter about building a design agency, jamming with Gen Zs, designing for SaaS, and Tech.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 14
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Jul 30, 2026
Latest issues
How to Get Ghosted by Your Client (opens the original)
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There is a surprisingly reliable way to get a client to disappear.Spend three weeks understanding their business. Take the brief seriously. Talk to five stakeholders. Build the strategy. Make the deck. Show the concepts. Revise them twice. Send the proposal.Then wait.This has become such a familiar part of creative work that most designers don’t even question it anymore. Studios spend enormous amounts of time getting a potential project to the point where a client can make a decision, only to di
The Invisible Junior Designer (opens the original)
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For decades, design careers followed a fairly predictable path. You started by doing the work nobody senior wanted to do. Clean up the files. Build the components. Adapt the screens. Make the variations. Sit in on meetings where decisions happened above your head. Get things wrong. Have someone more experienced explain why. Slowly, over months and years, you developed judgment.The boring work was the training. Nobody called it that at the time, but it was.AI is now getting very good at doing exa
1000 Subscribers Later (opens the original)
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I want to be honest about something. I’ve been watching the number.Not obsessively. But enough to know exactly when it crossed a thousand. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tracking it. Writers track it. Everyone tracks it. Sometimes the number doesn’t move at all so you think about the work and whether anyone is actually out there reading any of this.When I wrote the first issue of this newsletter, September 2025, twenty-eight subscribers, most of them people who already knew me, described what I
The SaaS Dashboard Is Dead (opens the original)
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A head of sales I spoke with last week opened her analytics tool during a call. The screen had twenty-four widgets. Six line charts. Four donut graphs. Eight metric cards. Two scrollable tables. She stared at all of it for about thirty seconds, clicked the export button, and opened the CSV in a spreadsheet to find the answer to one question: are we going to hit our numbers this month?The question remains.For fifteen years, designing B2B software meant designing places for information to live. Th
Design Studios Are Now Product Studios (opens the original)
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In 1999, a small web design consultancy in Chicago called 37signals was drowning in the same problem every studio has. Client projects piling up, communication scattered across email and instant messenger, deadlines slipping because nobody could see the full picture. So they built an internal tool to manage the chaos. They didn’t plan to sell it. They just needed something that worked.Within a year of showing it to clients, that tool was making more money than the entire design business. They sh
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