Female Founders: Saskia Ketz of Mojomox on the Five Things You Need to Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
You have to let go of perfectionism. As a designer, I love tinkering until something is exactly right, but that’s the wrong way to go about building a business. You want to launch quickly so you can learn from what you put out in the world rather than letting perfectionism hold you back from ever getting started. This ties back to the product I’m creating, too: I think it’s better for startups to create “good enough” brands on their own rather than wait until they can pay for an expensive designer before launching.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders,” I had the pleasure of interviewing Saskia Ketz, the founder of Mojomox, an online logo builder that allows startups and creators on tight budgets to create dynamic, professional looking brand identities. No stranger to starting companies, Saskia also runs MMarch NY, a branding agency that’s worked with world-class brands like Netflix, Ikea, and Timberland. She’s also the founder and editor-in-chief of A Women’s Thing, a publication reshaping what society’s views of “women’s things” are, and is passionate about helping women see new possibilities for themselves.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I’ve always been passionate about design — it taps into my love for strategy and creativity. After getting my MA in design and visual communications, I took a traditional job at an agency and quickly found that wasn’t the path for me. I wanted to work on my own things and control my own schedule. That’s what led me to become a founder.
At first, that meant starting my own agency. I loved choosing my clients and have worked on some amazing projects over the past eight years for everyone from big brands like Netflix to startups with really interesting missions. The work was inspiring, but I felt like something was missing.
For one, I felt drawn to the idea of building a product. I’ve always been analytical, and the thought of creating something technical from the ground up was appealing. I was also tiring of the high-touch nature of agency work and hoping to create something that would provide passive income in the long run.
At the same time, I started offering free “office hours” calls, and a lot of startups would use this opportunity to pick my brain. The work these founders were doing was inspiring, and I always felt pulled to help them, but I didn’t want to cut my agency prices to meet their startup budgets. Moreover, I didn’t think they should be spending a lot on design work. Good branding design is rooted in strategy, and early-stage companies still have a lot of experimenting and pivoting to do before they understand their strategy.
That’s when I saw the opportunity: to build a product that solved this problem for early-stage founders. I wanted to equip them with my design knowledge in an empowering way and give them tools to easily create design assets to get them off the ground until they have the strategy (and budgets) to hire someone.
And Mojomox was born. We currently offer DIY tools for creating logos, color palettes, font systems, and basic marketing assets — with more on the way!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
I’ve been so pleasantly surprised with how generous early users are with feedback. Founders have tight budgets and even tighter schedules, and I always assumed if they didn’t like something about my product, they would simply find an alternative.
But I’ve experienced the opposite: Early users see the potential in my product and want to help me better help them. The first time this happened, I opened my inbox to an entire essay from one of my users sharing their story, their needs, and what I could improve about the product. I was so shocked and grateful, and even more so when this continued happening with other users.
It’s helped me feel more open to asking users for feedback, which has become the most interesting part of the founder journey. When you step out of the room where you’re building something by yourself and see how other people react to the work, you learn about their actual problems — and when you solve their actual problems, they’re more likely to pay for your product and recommend it to others.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I started building Mojomox, I wanted to create something different than existing DIY logo apps, which often integrate icons for a brand’s industry that a professional designer would never use. Instead, I focused our tool on creating wordmarks: a simple logo made with a brand name in a clean typeface without any imagery.
Quickly, the feedback started rolling in: My users liked the wordmarks, but they also wanted some kind of logo to go alongside it. After fighting it and fighting it, I finally caved and decided to add a logo feature (though one that focuses on simple, graphic shapes rather than illustrative icons).
I had to laugh at how quickly I built what I said I wouldn’t, but I’m starting to understand that’s such a big part of the founder journey. You like to think you’re the expert and that you always have the right ideas, but really your users are the experts in what they need and want. It goes back to receiving that feedback openly and making real business decisions from it.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I would not be here without the support of my husband, Darshan Somashekar (and not for the reasons you might expect). He’s founded two companies — EasyBib, which he sold to Chegg, and now gaming company Solitaired — in addition to advising many more, so he’s very familiar with this world and has become a de facto business partner.
We have a daily routine where we sit outside with coffee and talk for an hour. While we’re chatting about personal stuff, too, he almost always gives me a new perspective on a challenge I’m facing in my business. All in all, he probably spends a few hours of his spare time every week helping me build my company, and I’m so grateful for it.
Whether it’s a formal business partner, a mentor, or just someone you’re close to who’s gone down this path before, I hope every founder can find someone this supportive to help on their journey.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience, what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
This is such a big question with a lot of complex answers, but two things really stand out to me. One, on an individual level, is just that women generally still struggle with confidence compared to men. So many women I talk to feel like they need more expertise and experience to start a company than men do. I’ve had to work on showing confidence in my ideas and decisions. A few things that have helped are finding other female founders to share experiences with and getting good people in my corner to support me.
On a societal level, the lack of equity in childcare and other caregiving is still a huge barrier. I see so many female founders who either have to step back from their company once they have kids or aren’t able to grow at the rate they’d like because of the time and energy spent tending to their families. Worse are the women who never even try starting companies because they can’t imagine having children without paid maternity leave, healthcare, and other benefits employers offer. This isn’t a new conversation, but there’s still a lot of work to be done in solving it.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
It would be great if the government would step in with things like universal parental leave, healthcare, and affordable childcare to help women feel like they don’t have to choose between building a family and building a company.
Until then, it comes down to having tough conversations on an individual level, particularly if you’re having a child with a male partner. Before you have kids, sit down, address the amount of work it’s going to add and get tactical about how you’ll divvy that up: The baby wakes up X times a night — who’s going to get up? Each feeding takes an hour — who’s going to do that?
Most men don’t realize how much work raising a child takes because they don’t talk about it. It’s important to have this conversation from a place of valuing both of your time and work equally so that you don’t end up with the bulk of the responsibility. I could have done without having kids, but my husband wanted them, meaning we had to negotiate what that would look like so I wouldn’t have to sacrifice my career.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
People who start companies do it to solve the problems they see in the world, to make a dent in the universe. There are so many issues that will just never get tackled by men because they don’t have these same problems: women’s health, childcare, and other duties women bear the brunt of, like education and senior care. Even for problems that male founders are tackling, women will undoubtedly bring creative solutions to the table since they see the issues from a different perspective.
This doesn’t just relate to needing more female founders, but to needing more BIPOC founders, more LGBTQIA+ founders, and so on. If we want a diversity of solutions to the diversity of challenges in the world, we need a diversity of founders to do it.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
It’s not glamorous! So many female founders share their highlight reels online: going to snazzy events, speaking at major conferences, getting featured in big publications. What they don’t often show is working all hours of the day, muddling through dull operational things, and all the other really tough things about being a founder.
You do have more control over your time than when you’re working for a traditional employer, but you’re giving so much of your time to your business that it doesn’t always feel that way. Still, it’s worth it if you have a passion for your mission and are excited to build something from the ground up.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
The short answer to this is that anyone can be a founder if you really want to do it and are ready for the work it will entail.
The longer answer is that it depends on your work preferences. If you want to get really good at doing just one thing — for example, if I wanted to spend all my time creating brand identities — I think it’s better to work a traditional job. Obviously, your responsibilities will shift throughout your career, but generally you’ll be highly focused on one area of expertise.
As a founder, though, you have to do all the things, even if you don’t know how to do them or don’t like doing them. For instance, I’m more excited about the product side of things, but building a successful business is 80% marketing. While I’d rather be working on the product roadmap, I often have to spend a full day doing media outreach or SEO content creation. If you don’t think you can push through tasks you don’t want to do in order to achieve your vision, being a founder probably isn’t the path for you.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
- You have to let go of perfectionism. As a designer, I love tinkering until something is exactly right, but that’s the wrong way to go about building a business. You want to launch quickly so you can learn from what you put out in the world rather than letting perfectionism hold you back from ever getting started. This ties back to the product I’m creating, too: I think it’s better for startups to create “good enough” brands on their own rather than wait until they can pay for an expensive designer before launching.
- Everything will be different than what you think. You can never truly prepare to be a founder because everything will play out differently than you anticipated, from what your users actually want to how long it takes you to complete tasks (hint: always longer than you think). Don’t waste your time planning too much — instead, as we Germans like to say, you just have to jump into cold water and figure it out as you go.
- You really can’t do it all. I hate to say it, but it’s true. This relates both to how you balance your business with your personal life, but also to how you balance other projects and ideas you have while growing your business. I love having my hand in multiple projects at once, but I’ve had to step back from my work at A Women’s Thing and start saying no to agency clients so I can put as much energy as possible into my business.
- You have to be the face of your company. You don’t just get to build your vision — you have to share it with the world, too. Depending on your personality, you may love this, but it’s not my favorite thing and I have to push through it regularly to write about my work or do interviews like this. There’s no getting around having to put yourself out there to put your company out there.
- There are so many business basics to learn. I wish someone could have just dumped the knowledge about accounting, financing, organizational strategy, and the like into my brain. There’s so much to learn, and it’s not the most fun part of building a business (at least for me), but until you can hire someone to help you with it, you will have to spend time figuring it out.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Design and branding may seem frivolous to some, but it’s critical for business success — especially in today’s online world. Hiring a professional designer can be cost-prohibitive for early-stage companies, so Mojomox is all about making good branding more accessible. I hope the work I’m doing will help remove this as a barrier for other founders — particularly women. I love getting to use my design knowledge to help others succeed.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I would love for there to be more support for alternative ways of working and living. Wouldn’t it be cool if our education systems made it easy to travel at a young age so that we all could learn more about other people in the world? Wouldn’t it be great if our healthcare wasn’t tied to our employers, so people could choose to work how they like? Wouldn’t it be inspiring if societal norms didn’t push one way of starting a family, but modeled all kinds of ways to build community and live a fulfilling home life?
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Honestly, nobody comes to mind because I’ve always been very bold about just reaching out to people I want to meet. Even your heroes are more normal than you think — if you want to meet someone, just ask, and don’t be afraid to be a little persistent. It all goes back to having confidence.
A while ago, I really wanted to chat with Seth Godin, so I reached out to him a few times and even went so far as sending him a handwritten letter. He ended up inviting me to a private event he was hosting on the future of publishing, which was really cool.
At this point, the people who inspire me most are historical women who lived impactful lives despite the societal oppression they faced. For instance, it would be amazing to go back to Medieval times and talk to Hildegard of Bingen, who was a philosopher, writer, composer, and visionary of her time. I would love to find out what inspired her to do so many great things in one lifespan.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Female Founders: Saskia Ketz of Mojomox on the Five Things You Need to Thrive and Succeed as a… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.