We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jana Devan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jana , thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

For years I watched smart, scrappy small businesses hemorrhage money on marketing that looked fine and did nothing. They’d have a designer who didn’t talk to the strategist, a strategist who didn’t talk to the writer, and a social media person operating on vibes and a content calendar. Everyone was executing. Nobody was connected.

I was working inside that world, close enough to see exactly where the cracks were, and the frustration was real. Not at the businesses, but at a service model that was essentially handing them pieces of a puzzle and charging them full price for the privilege of figuring out where they fit.

What I knew from both the creative and the strategic side of my brain, which had been arguing with each other my whole career, was that how something looks and sounds is the strategy. It’s not decoration applied after the thinking is done. For a small business especially, every touchpoint either builds trust or erodes it. There’s no neutral.

So I built Zettist in 2016 around that belief: one integrated brain, working across brand, content, and creative, with real accountability for the whole picture. Was anyone else doing it? Some. But not for the businesses that needed it most—the ones too small for a big agency and too complex for a freelancer. That gap felt both obvious and wide open. That’s a rare combination. I couldn’t not go after it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I came up in the business world through the creative side, visual art, design, the making-things end of the spectrum, and somewhere along the way, I realized I was also wired for strategy. Not the spreadsheet kind (though I’ve made peace with spreadsheets). The “why does this exist and who is it actually for” kind.

That combination turned out to be useful in ways I didn’t fully anticipate. I founded Zettist in San Diego about ten years ago because I kept seeing the same problem: small and mid-size businesses being handed fragmented marketing ( you know, a designer here, a strategist there, a social media person operating on instinct) with nobody accountable for how it all added up. The brand would look fine. The messaging would be technically correct. And it still wouldn’t work, because nothing was connected.

Zettist exists to fix that. I work as a fractional CMO and brand strategist, which means I embed with businesses and nonprofits as a senior marketing mind, without the overhead of a full-time hire. My clients get someone who can move between the visual and the verbal, the tactical and the strategic, without losing the thread. We handle brand development, content strategy, social media, web, and creative direction, but the real product is clarity: knowing what you’re saying, why it matters, and how to say it in a way that actually sounds like you.

What sets us apart is harder to put in a services list. It’s the integration. It’s the fact that I’ve been a maker my whole life—I paint, I draw, I write, I design—and that part of my brain never clocks out when I’m doing strategy work. It means I catch things. A brand that’s saying one thing visually and another thing in copy. A client who’s been handed a beautiful website that doesn’t convert because nobody asked what the visitor actually needed to feel. Those gaps are where I live.

I’m most proud of the clients who come back, not because they need a deliverable, but because something shifted in how they see their own brand. When a business owner stops second-guessing every piece of content because they finally understand why the decisions get made, that’s the work. That’s what I’m here for.

If you’re a founder, a nonprofit leader, or a small business at a real inflection point, and you’re tired of marketing that looks busy but doesn’t build anything, I’d love to talk. We say it like you mean it. That’s not just a tagline. It’s the whole job.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In early 2023, I was about six months pregnant, running a boutique marketing agency, and trying to hold onto clients who were starting to wonder whether they needed me at all. AI was arriving fast and loud, and the industry I’d built my business inside was shifting underneath my feet in real time. On top of that, I was attending high-risk monitoring appointments twice a week (the kind where you sit and wait for your baby to move enough times before they let you leave) and I was scheduling my entire business around them without telling a single client why.

I had been a Zoom-native business before Zoom was normal, so a well-placed camera angle and a rotation of high-neck black shirts were doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Steve Jobs built a uniform around minimalism. Mine was built around something closer to necessity.

On one of my final prospect calls, the kind where you find out if you got the job, the person across the screen brought up their last web developer. Pregnant, they said. Got halfway through the project, had the baby, disappeared. Left them with an unfinished mess. They said it like a warning, like something to be avoided. I nodded along, six months pregnant, and told myself what I already knew: I was not going to disappear. Not because I’m exceptional, but because I genuinely didn’t have the option.

A few weeks later, I revealed my pregnancy to another client mid-engagement. Within two weeks they discovered sudden budget constraints that ended our work together right before I gave birth. I saw clearly what it meant to be a woman and a mother running a business. I filed it away and kept moving.

My daughter was born on a Sunday. She was in the NICU through Wednesday, and I was working by Thursday. I don’t share that as a badge of honor. I share it because I want other women to understand what the math actually looked like—that stepping away wasn’t a mindset problem or a boundaries problem. It was a keeping-the-lights-on problem. And we deserve a world that stops making us choose between our babies and our businesses.

When I finally told my clients, they were wonderful. Genuinely, warmly wonderful. And my daughter, who is now the best thing that has ever happened to me, has given me more clarity and more fire than I ever knew I needed.

If you’re a pregnant founder sitting across from a client right now, hiding what you’re carrying: you don’t owe anyone that information. Protect yourself first. The work will speak for itself. It always does.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2023, the business I had spent years building started to come apart. AI disruption hit the content marketing world fast and hard, and clients who had relied on agencies like mine began to wonder if they needed us at all. I won’t sugarcoat it: I almost lost everything. What followed was a slow, unglamorous rebuild, brick by brick, decision by decision.

The pivot didn’t come with a dramatic moment. It came from a journal entry.

I had spent years running Zettist as a collaborative, community-forward agency. San Diego has an incredible network of marketers, designers, and creatives, and I had always operated inside that ecosystem with intention. I passed work to partners, made room for others, and built something that felt generous and collective. I still believe in that model. But somewhere in the honesty of an early morning journaling session, I had to admit something uncomfortable: I had also been shrinking myself to make room. Skills I had in podcast production, in design, in creative direction, I was quietly handing off jobs. Not because I couldn’t do them, but because I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes.

That stopped last year. Not with fanfare, not with a rebrand announcement, just with a decision to stop editing myself before anyone even asked me to. I started saying yes to the full scope of what I actually know how to do. I let my own name become the front of the business instead of the back story. It felt uncomfortable at first, the way most honest things do.

What I found on the other side wasn’t competition with my community. It was a fuller version of myself showing up to that community. Turns out nobody needed me to be smaller. I had just convinced myself they did.

The rebuild is still happening. But it’s being built on something more solid than before: the actual sum of what I bring, not the edited-down version I thought was safer to offer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.zettist.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettist
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janadevan/