We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Zachariah Lux. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Zachariah below.

Zachariah, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

The context is that I’m a self-taught-university-dropout engineer. I’m naturally curious, empathetic, eager to help, and generally combine a designer’s approach with a systems perspective. I’ve both freelanced and led teams at a variety of tech companies.

With that in mind, the idea for NDSTRY came mainly from observing how my partner operates in her role(s) in the fashion industry. Rebecca is a freelance wardrobe stylist with additional experience modeling and creative directing. She taught me what it takes to survive in that world. Over time I built an understanding of the various patterns to her work-life both on and off project.

I learned that chaos and scrambling are the most predictable elements to a project. We’re talking organization at best is a consortium of email threads, slides, sheets, instagram, Dropbox, Pinterest, sms, and literal paper documents. Folks are recruited and “onboarded” (sent a pdf) less than 2 weeks before shooting starts, and have to coordinate, source, and otherwise creatively prepare – sometimes with explicit client approval – within that timeframe. Regardless of why that’s the case, the result is that managing logistics is consistently frustrating and exhausting. Top it off with a paycheck that includes reimbursement for your prep costs (if you’re lucky), but that won’t come for another 30 to 90 days. Between projects it’s all about networking. That’s instagram for most, so good luck staying focused and organized on a social media app designed to take your attention and money.

This is just the price of admission to be a creative in a lot of industries. I view this rather dramatically as the suffering of creatives for the sake of their livelihoods and crafts. I also view this as unacceptable and a waste of collective genius. We can do better, creatives deserve better.

So this passion project began. Unglamorously, it started with months of brainstorming as I inched from thought to action. It wasn’t until some heavy introspection that I felt the courage and resolution to just commit. I didn’t know the final shape of what I was building, but I knew that as long as I let the problem define the solution without imposing “should”s on it, I’d end up with something useful. Plus I had Rebecca to validate ideas, saving me days of user research time.

Speaking of research, once I had a general sense of what the final product could be, we (I brought on a friend and former colleague Zejian Shen to join the effort) conducted market research in the form of surveys and live follow-up interviews. This was ultimately hyper-validating of our understanding of the collaborative creative process, the problem space, and the worthiness of the effort.

The data we collected indicated that purpose-built tools for creatives were rare and insufficient. Despite analysis by companies like Adobe that shows the creative economy is growing quickly and will continue to do so for many years, nobody seemed to be trying to tackle the full scope of problems that creatives are facing. Even Adobe just focuses on a narrow slice of the creative process. So I feel a certain responsibility to see this through – nobody else is helping.

Which means nobody else is building a single place for creatives to network, find opportunities, build teams, collaborate on projects, share inspiration and get paid. The scope of the opportunity is exciting sure, but I draw more motivation from the prospect of materially improving creatives’ lives and their ability to produce perspective-changing art together. Imagine how much larger, more impactful, and more diverse art could be if artists could collaborate across disciplines effortlessly. That’s the world I’m set out to create.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Sure, starting from the top, I came from a supportive, white, lower-middle-class household in suburban Arizona with two older brothers. Both nature and nurture gifted me with an orientation towards curiosity, independent thought, collaboration, empathy, helping others, and doing what you can with what you have. My dad was into science and tech, and that clearly rubbed off on me.

I went to Arizona State’s honors college pursuing Electrical Engineering at first, but switched majors a few times and landed on Computer Science, with a minor in (visual) Design. I took several classes for small business and entrepreneurship as well, driven by a notion I’d head down that path someday.

Well at some point I previewed the curriculum for all my remaining required engineering classes and cross-referenced with content I could learn for free on the internet. As it happens, most all of it could be learned online without the institution and tuition. So I decided to bet on the increasingly degree-agnostic hiring trend tech was going through. I left years before graduating, took on the learning myself, did some freelancing, and landed my first tech job as a contractor 6 months later after dropping out. And since then I’ve only continued to learn, especially through valuable experiences at places like IBM, Tumblr, and Dutchie.

My introduction to the creative industry, however, only happened once I met my partner. She opened my eyes to the bittersweet struggle of succeeding as an artist. Though her art is her passion, the mechanics of actually collaborating, coordinating, networking, and getting paid nearly always result in frustration. Various parts of my personality kicked in here, driving me to dedicate my attention and thought towards how I could help. That’s how NDSTRY was conceptualized: a means to make creative life easier.

Through further research it became clear that the issues above were widespread across creative disciplines. There was real dread at the thought of needing to use instagram to manage their professional network. The chaos of opaque, disorganized projects were causing lost sleep and anxiety. Not knowing when invoices were getting paid was leading to all sorts of effects, like overdue bills, strained relationships, and the inability to take an extended break. Talented artists are burning out despite still having passion towards their crafts.

Knowing this, NDSTRY couldn’t stay a hypothetical – something had to be done to try to alleviate the burden. A few hours a day for over a year, I worked with the skills I had to offer.

The result is a web platform (apps coming soon) designed to support the needs of creatives and modeled from the lifecycle of creative ideas. Starting from inspiration, ideas then grow into projects, projects produce works of art, and that art again becomes inspiration for new ideas. It’s a cyclical, self-sustaining process, and NDSTRY provides the ecosystem for that to take place.

Specifically, NDSTRY provides portfolio, networking, messaging, and job board features, for connecting creatives to each other and to new ideas. It also enables those people to coordinate and collaborate on developing that idea from project to artwork with realtime project management features that include a shared dashboard with a timeline, tasks, decks, links, and slack-like discussion threads (with instant payment in the works). And to close the loop, when the resulting assets are added to a portfolio and linked to the project, it shows up on the inspo feed with the team credited automatically – serving as the basis for new connections, ideas, and opportunities.

There isn’t anything else that combines these systems into a single product, and certainly nothing like this designed specifically for creatives. That intentionality shows up in a number of ways. From the sleek and minimal ui to enabling up to 3 portfolios for those with multiple talents – it’s embedded into the design of both the product and company. I mean literally, the legal name for the company is For Creatives Inc..

While we’re talking the business side, it’s important to note that because NDSTRY is still in its infancy, everything is free. There will always be a free tier, but I do intend for NDSTRY to become financially sustainable and that will require membership fees.

Also in the vein of sustainability, each monthly subscription will plant a tree every month, and our carbon footprint will be matched or exceeded with carbon offsets. To give back to the community, a percentage of profits will be allocated to a scholarship fund for underrepresented artists, and a percentage will be allocated to funding artists’ new ideas on the platform. The goal is positive impact in everything we do – a non-negotiable ‘everyone wins’ mentality.

So all of that, that’s NDSTRY.

As I said, it’s still early stages and there’s endless improvement to be had. I love where things are going and the supportive feedback I’ve been getting so far. It bodes well for the grand vision I have for NDSTRY, which includes physical collaboration spaces, community events, ultimately even a decentralized production studio. I believe we’ll get there, one day at a time, as long as we put the needs and desires of our fellow creatives first.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I’d say that my resilience along this journey can be seen by my daily dedication to building NDSTRY despite chronic pain and mental illness.

In my second semester of college I was in two car accidents two months (to the day) apart, neither were my fault. The result was chronic whiplash, nervous system damage, and some other injuries, all of which I still have to this day. Additionally, my mental health got significantly worse both as a direct result of the pain and from the toll the whole situation was having on my academic and social life. I quickly became suicidal.

At rock bottom, instead of ultimately giving up on life, I made an all-out commitment to live life by my terms. One of those terms is that I leave a positive impact. After improving my mental health with medication and psychedelic therapy, I’ve been dedicated to doing just that.

It’s all a work in progress, but despite how hard it is oftentimes with daily pain and anxiety, I’ve stayed resolute. Everyday I wake up at 5:30am in pursuit of achieving the vision of NDSTRY, usually with a headache. I’ve learned to coexist with these ‘negative’ factors, and now those relationships have only made me stronger.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

For context my day job is as an engineering manager, where I’ve had experience managing high performing, high morale teams in tech. Based on experience, it’s about trust, support, and perspective.

The more interpersonal trust a team has, the more genuine and nonjudgmental interactions become. People feel they can show up without the political/corporate facade and embody more of their honest selves. That trust is built from the choices you make, but is made especially obvious in how much independence you enable your team to have. Trust them to do their work and to come to you when they need help. Empower their creativity and give them authority over their domain as much as possible. It all contributes to shared investment in the effort and a sense of autonomous freedom, both leading to better outcomes and higher morale.

And when they do come to you for help, with feedback, or to complain: listen. It’s the foundation for effective, morale-boosting support. Respect and honor the person by giving your full attention to hearing both what they’re saying and where they’re coming from. Validate their perspective, because it is valid. Clarify your understanding with questions and/or summarization. Putting in all this effort shows that you recognize what your team is saying has value, and as a result, people feel heard. Folks knowing that their voice matters leads to both higher engagement and increased sense of psychological safety. But remember, there’s no substitute for the real thing. If you don’t genuinely care to listen, people will pick up on that and be less likely to speak up – and now you’ve lost the power of diversity.

Diversity matters in part because diverse perspectives lead to novel, inclusive solutions. Each perspective sees the problem from a different “angle”, and in combining each perspective we end up with a more complete understanding. This fuller picture informs a better fitting solution that’s more likely to succeed.

Your perspective as the leader is also important for everything from defining team culture to analyzing team dynamics. The way you frame obstacles, mistakes, and celebration influences how your team frames them as well. Stay patient, light-hearted, and focused in times of stress and your team will follow suit. The lower the stress of the team, the more creative the solutions, and the higher the morale.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ndstry.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ndstry.co/
• Other: Google Forms survey for understanding how creatives work: https://forms.gle/yedgGwke4AEGABy58