Interview With ReadyMag CEO, Diana Kasay

Tell us a bit more about the business you represent.

I co-founded Readymag, a tool loved and appreciated by designers worldwide. It helps create websites and all kinds of web publications and stands out from competitors with its powerful layout, aesthetics, and creative-friendly interface. As a business, Readymag is a SaaS with subscriptions as our monetization model. After ten years of experience, it grew into a sustainable business that works well without third-party funding and brings joy to every team member.

Our clients are large-scale enterprises, mid-level businesses—like advertising and design agencies—and solo designers, who create portfolios or work on projects for clients. We are trusted by design teams, and that’s what shapes our audience. Our customers include Amazon, Airbnb, Complex, United Colors of Benetton, UNDP, Condé Nast College, Postmates, and Sleeper.

Being the founder and CEO, what do your day-to-day responsibilities look like?

Since the pandemic hit, my duties have transformed into non-stop calls. My direct responsibility is, of course, ideation, strategy, and communication with people. To my great pleasure, that’s what I love doing the most. I take on strategic planning, and crisis management, and provide support where it matters most: the personal growth of team members. My aim is to bring wonderful people together into one living organism and create miracles together.

How have you evolved as a founder and leader over time, and what have been some of the biggest lessons you've learned along the way?

I’ve evolved in leaps and bounds. As soon as I took on the CEO position, my mindset became very people-oriented. For me, it was that very moment when I had to redesign myself as a company leader. I’ve even experienced self-doubt and identity crises because I thought I differed so greatly from other executives and leaders in my circle. They were all hard-edged with a focus on capitalisation and numbers. I took an entirely different way and focused on people – our users and the Readymag team. At first, I, of course, thought I needed to seriously refashion myself. But the main lesson I took in this process was a realization: I am the one the company needs, not the functions I perform or the roles I can play. I don’t strive to appear as someone else, and this state of being feels very natural. It’s way harder to deal with a personality, not a role because a personality has different states. In this sense, I’m so grateful to my team for their willingness to treat each other, first of all, as persons, not functions.

What is your company's approach to innovation, and how do you foster a culture of creativity and experimentation among your team?

I encourage a culture of creativity and experimentation with my loyalty to mistakes. We don’t have punishments for failing. I believe that failures are inseparable from knowledge and experience—if a person doesn’t make mistakes, it means they don’t go anywhere, doesn’t gain competencies and new attainments, and doesn't move forward. I see a lack of failures as a bad sign.

How does your technical organization work with the other components of the company?

Readymag is still not a big team. There are less than 50 of us. That’s why weekly team calls help us share updates across departments and make everyone visible. We manage to give the floor to every person and create space where they can profile themselves. Depending on what task our team is working on—be that marketing, growth, or a product puzzle—we follow our own particular inner protocols. But what makes those frameworks special is that they were introduced by the team, not handed down from executives.

What are some of the biggest trends and challenges you see in your industry right now, and how is your company adapting to stay ahead of the curve?

Our company doesn’t simply adapt itself to the market but follows a continuously evolving vision. For the time that Readymag has existed, and that’s already ten years, many changes have swept across the market. Many of them didn’t have a long-lasting effect, so we’ve become somewhat immune to such outbreaks. They can be a good direction, but not to the extent we rush to take up the call. I find it interesting to watch AI blossoming and reflect on how far the idea of AI-generated content might lead. Now I muse over integrating it into the company, using it as an accelerator, a magic pill that speeds up work or offers new insights.

What can we hope to see from your business in the future?

I want every designer in the world to know about Readymag. I believe we do have an exceptional product. We don’t just do business, but also build and maintain an enormous asset for our clients. I’m not eager to ‘lead the company to Unicorn status’ or IPO. For me, such a goal would be lifeless. I want to see the project influential and beaming with joy from the inside: with the joy of the people who work on it, with pride in what they do and with the senses they develop.

We will definitely progress toward greater automation, without depriving our users of the ability to impact their unique final results. Automation is more about helping users develop new ideas and expand their vision with less effort and time loss. We want Readymag to become the continuation of their thoughts and fingers to help them embody their ideas.

Can you tell us what book you are reading currently?

I am reading “The Lessons of History” by Will and Ariel Durant. It’s about the history of civilizations and tells readers how cyclical history is, how empires emerge and fade into nothingness and how various forms of societies come and go. Those stories lower the scale of anxiety about current life events—you come to understand how limited our resources are for impacting most things happening in the world.

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