In this series, WeWork’s director of digital community selects a WeWork member to get to know better, sharing her fun findings with the rest of the community.
For a few years now, I’ve known ZeShan Malik for his creative agency work. With his new venture, Brandathon, one of its most recent winners is a WeWork Dumbo Heights member: Savethatname’s CEO Anthony Placet, a musician and artist turned entrepreneur. I got the chance to chat with both of them, learning all about the contest, their collaboration, and opportunities around saving brand names online.
Tell us a little bit about Brandathon and Savethatname.
Malik: Brandathon is a weekend-long branding hackathon where I bring four early-stage companies I love that need branding help together with 12 of the most creative and talented people I know—all while being mentored by really inspiring and smart angel investors, CMOs, and founders of iconic companies. Early-stage companies have bright ideas and amazing products, but in a crowded marketplace, great branding makes all the difference in helping a startup stand out. Brandathon exists to solve that problem—by offering top-level creative services to select early-stage companies at a price they can afford to pay.
Placet: We call Savethatname the first branding automation platform. You can search, activate, and protect your name across every digital channel online. The first part is the search engine—we have the most advanced search engine for social on the web. You can also research a taken name to see who has it, how active are they, if you can approach them, and if you think it’s worth acquiring, you can go back to those channels with more effective information to get it. In addition, we also keep you first in line for the next platforms to emerge. Our slogan is “getting name-jacked sucks.”
How did you two meet and start to collaborate?
Placet: I heard about Brandathon thanks to the WeWork Labs Slack channels. I thought it seemed amazing and cool, and I thought I’d reach out to see how it went.
Malik: From my end, we receive creative and startup applications through our website—the creative applications get fed to my inbox, and I go through the portfolios of individuals. On the day I encountered Anthony, I saw a brilliant mind who had an enterprising background with Savethatname. I also saw he had done a lot of branding and marketing in his past. So after interviewing him, it seemed that he really got the vibe of what we were looking for—at Brandathon, we’re looking for talented people with great personalities who like collaboration. He really has that mindset. Our interview was only supposed to be 15 minutes, but we spoke for an hour!
What is it that you hope people take away from attending Brandathon? Where can people learn more about the events?
Malik: Great question. I hope our participants have made some valuable connections that stay with them the rest of their lives. It sounds like Anthony has kept in touch with the people he met on the first day of Brandathon—the creatives stay in touch. And if they did a great job, they’re encouraged to keep in touch with the startup they worked with.
For the startups, I hope they get creative deliverables they can keep working with, and make connections with our incredible mentors going forward. One of our startups, SpokenLayer, has landed serious investment from a few of the mentors and judges we had on-site, which is amazing. It’s about bringing great people together who can change each other’s lives. And Anthony should be proud because he was a big part of SpokenLayer’s life changing.
Placet: We gave them an entire new identity, a new story to tell, in a matter of three days.
The overarching theme is creating community around it, so that we all do keep in touch—whether it’s hosting fun events, or happy hours, not just Brandathons but at other moments, so we can keep growing the club.
Photos: Brandathon