This is an extraordinary time to be a creative person. To survive as an artist in the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance, you needed to have a sponsor, a patron – perhaps a pope, a Medici, or a Holy Roman Emperor. Today, photographers hawk their compositions on any number of stock photography websites; writers can create their own blogs for a fistful of dollars, augmenting their income with freelance posts; and digital designers can create clever website designs as independent contractors. A creative type can effectively create his or her own marketplace.

Yet the strain to satisfy the insatiable beasts that are content marketing and competitive creativity can sometimes be overwhelming. The Information Age is just that: an age that is exploding with information. At times the glut of information bombarding one’s senses either drives the creative person into an entirely catatonic state or catapults him or her into a state of utter pandemonium – numb or crazed – take your pick. Either way, creative output is essentially paralyzed.

All of us sometimes become trapped in creative morass, so we thought we would share some of our favorite ways to break free and get into the creative zone.

We’d love to hear what yours are too.

Chris Mohler – Creative Director

• Taking a long drive
• Blasting music
• Taking a walk on the beach

Andra Gheorghe – Designer

• Anticipating an upcoming vacation frees my creative spirit + a Nespresso coffee with milk and sugar

Paul Gergely – Product Designer

• I’m inspired when I’m around people who are great at their craft (doesn’t have to be designers or people in tech – just people who are great at what they do)
• Early mornings at the office or my local coffee place – just getting some place where there are few distractions – where I can “get lost in my head”

Dolfin Leung-Melville – Marketing Director

• Browsing through photos/designs/layouts/from print or online materials for inspiration
• Searching with keywords online
• Riffling through a stack of magazines to see what jumps out at me
• Clearing my head with long walks with my dogs

Madalin Slaniceanu – Designer

• Listening to music and chilling out

V:shal Kanwar – Creative Director

• Ambient sound drives my creative energy – the right music can help emote the right visuals for a particular project, and the wrong background humming (static sounds, buzzing, people having annoying conversations) can really throw off my chances for finding that moment of design epiphany.

Julie Farrell – Head of Marketing

• Nature first and foremost – long walks in the sticks or long bike rides through wine country where I live
• Reading, learning, traveling – sounds corny, but learning or experiencing something that’s tangential to what I’m doing at work often shines a new perspective on a creative topic/problem

Me – Lisa Peacock – Managing and Executive Creative Director

• Doing anything away from my computer: showering, gardening, motorcycle riding, cleaning house, working out, decorating the house
• Riffing about a specific creative goal itself with other smart people
• Sitting quietly alone with something that has moved past a blank canvas

How about you? What gets your creative juices flowing? Tell us!

Early stage tech startups are primarily driven by engineers who believe in one or several of the following statements:

• We are making the world a better place
• We are disrupting a stagnant industry
• We have a solution to a prevalent problem

When you are deep in the weeds of developing a new tech product it may be hard to objectively evaluate the chances of your innovation to succeed in the marketplace. I’ve spent the past four years soaking up the San Francisco startup culture. Several of my friends, classmates from Stanford GSB and former colleagues have joined or funded startups. The million dollar question: “What’s the next hot tech company?” comes up at virtually every happy hour and every dinner. Being a geek at heart and marketer by passion, I’m spending my time at the intersection of technology and business thinking about how to turn an innovative product into commercial success story. Although a universal formula for creating the next game changing company like Uber, Dropbox or Netflix does not exist, the most successful tech companies have one thing in common. They are investing as strongly in product marketing as they are in the product development.

Innovation cannot happen in the vacuum, especially not in the highly competitive markets of today. The key to surviving and thriving as a tech leader is to constantly re-win your customers’ business by delivering real value. And how do you know that your product is set up for success in the marketplace? In order to answer this question I’ve looked at a number of hottest tech startups as well as well established companies to distill the critical elements of their marketing strategies. I synthesized the results of my analysis into a sixteen steps’ marketing plan checklist. Each step is explained threefold:

• Definition of the business term that is the theme of the discussed step
• Example of how a successful company implemented the step
• Insights from my work as business consultant and product marketer

“Marketing Plan Template for Tech Companies” is a framework for you to:

• Get to know your customers and your competitors
• Learn how to quantify your product’s value and how to communicate it
• Define realistic business objectives and strategies to achieve them

My marketing plan template features lessons learned from  some of today’s hottest Silicon Valley companies. Let these great brands inspire your own success:
Tesla, Netflix, Dropbox, Google, Theranos, DocuSign, Marketo, Breather, Suse, Walgreens, Lyft, Riverbed, Nokia, Uber, Cisco, Trunk Club and Salesforce.

I hope you’ll find my marketing plan useful. I look forward to your comments and suggestions!

Justyna Bak is a marketing strategist and an engineer so naturally her passion is to help fantastic tech products succeed in the marketplace. Her marketing experience ranges from mobile networks and devices at Nokia, data center and cloud at Cisco, to user experience monitoring and optimization at Riverbed Technology. Connect with Justyna on LinkedIn and check out her TechSurprises blog.