I founded Eyesight almost two years ago as a creative agency. Our brand was bright, exciting, and "sketchy" (in a good way). This worked really well, for about eighteen months. 

Then, in August, I shifted gears. After hiring over 15 college students to work at the agency and finding that 90% of them lacked business professional skills, I focused my efforts on providing training for these students so that they, too, could thrive in their early careers. Not just our clients. I hired four students to test out the Eyesight Accelerator Program, where they worked with real clients and attended twenty soft-skill workshops with our new mentors. By the end of the summer, it changed their lives - they all landed their dream jobs. I decided to abandon the agency and focus on this new, altruistic model.

I was met with a lot of confusion. On a regular basis, I was asked, "so, wait, what does your company do now?" I had a lot of fun perfecting my new elevator pitch at The Downer every Friday and Saturday night.

In October, Nathan (my new co-founder) and I launched a video series with entrepreneurs and CEO's to communicate these soft-skills in an inspiring and exciting manner. Students LOVED them - we were onto something. We decided to explore this video idea to figure out how to productize and package it to actually help students grow while tracking success. We spoke to a few hundred students in the past 60 days and figured out exactly what needed to be built.

We are launching a series of online courses, driven by video lessons, led by industry leaders helping students land a job in their dream industry or start their own company. The biggest insight that we learned from our validation was that our online courses needed to communicate the end goal up-front. Students had no interest in learning skills like networking, interviewing, or overcoming failure if they could not clearly understand why.

It felt like the right time to abandon the original branding. The other night, my girlfriend referred to our old logo as being "whimsical". She couldn't have been more accurate. Our new style is elegant, sleek, and futuristic. We, as millennials, want to bring back the feeling that we got as kids when we would stay up late, hunched over under our covers, flashlight in hand, reading a chapter book late into the night.

Our first online course, "Starting Your Own Company" will be launched in May. We pulled together dozens of successful entrepreneurs to help design a curriculum of ten key lessons and steps to take when starting a company, regardless of the industry. The course will consist of ten videos, broken up by chapter, with a printable workbook to follow along, forcing the student away from the computer screen and out into the real world, where they will be encouraged to interact with real people and track their own growth.

The next two courses, to be launched in the Summer and Fall, respectively, are Landing a Job in the Creative Industry and Landing a Job in the Music Industry.

To learn more about the upcoming courses, take a deeper look at our rebrand, and pre-order a course for exclusive early access and 50% off, visit us at EyesightCollective.com.

Cheers,

Jake Hurwitz