What if I told you that a teenager who spends weekends staring at Velazquez and building LEGO sets can teach SaaS founders a lot about positioning, UX, and content strategy?
That is basically what is happening with Lily Konkoly. She studies art history, writes about gender inequality in both art and business, curates online spaces for teen artists, and runs a long-standing blog about female entrepreneurs. The short answer to how she turns art history into impact is simple: she treats every artwork, every story, and every user as data, then builds experiences and narratives around them that drive behavior. The tools look “soft” on the surface, but the process is very close to what good product, SEO, and UX people already do every day.
So if you work in SaaS, SEO, or web development and feel like art history is something far away from your dashboard, I think her path shows the opposite. She turns visual analysis into user research, curating into product thinking, and storytelling into conversion-focused content.
From Canvas To Customer Behavior
When you look at a painting like Las Meninas for ten weeks straight, you start to see the world differently. That is what happened when Lily joined the Scholar Launch Research Program and spent a summer studying Velazquez.
She was not just memorizing dates and brush types. She was asking things that sound a lot like product questions.
Who is this painting for?
Where does the viewer stand in this scene?
What power dynamics is the artist trying to point our gaze toward?
Those questions might sound far from SEO or SaaS at first, but they overlap with questions you probably ask already: Who is my main user? What context are they in when they land on this page? Where do I want their eye to go first?
Art history, when taken seriously, is one long exercise in understanding what people see, what they ignore, and why they behave the way they do in front of an image.
For Lily, that habit of reading images and stories turned into three clear types of impact that translate very cleanly into tech:
- Designing digital spaces that respect real people instead of abstract “users”
- Creating content that exposes bias and unequal opportunity
- Building communities around underrepresented creators
If you rebuild those in SaaS language, you get UX, content strategy, and community building. The raw material is different. The logic is almost the same.
Art History As UX Training
Seeing like a curator, thinking like a product manager
Lily worked on a mock exhibit with a professor from RISD about beauty standards and how women are portrayed across cultures and time. That project sounds academic at first glance, but look at the structure.
To build that exhibit, she needed to:
- Choose which artworks to include (feature selection)
- Decide the order (user journey)
- Write wall texts that people can understand without a degree (UX writing)
- Predict how people will move through the room (user flows)
That list is not far from what a product or UX team does when they ship a new feature. They choose screens, flows, copy, and then guess how people will move through the product.
In both cases, the question is not “What do I want to show?” but “What will people understand, in what order, and how will they feel at each step?”
This is where art history quietly trains a skill that product people often struggle with: perspective shifting.
Lily grew up moving from London to Singapore to Los Angeles, speaking Hungarian at home, doing Mandarin practice on camera, and spending most summers in Europe. That “third culture” background probably made it easier for her to ask: How does someone unlike me see this?
Good UX is basically empathy with structure. Art history is empathy with images, plus history. The bridge between them is not that wide.
When Lily designed the teen art market, that mindset showed up in small but clear ways. It was not just “let us post some art.” She saw how intimidating galleries feel to young artists and tried to lower the barrier with a digital space that did a few practical things:
- Gave teens a simple way to upload and present their work
- Made pricing visible instead of mysterious
- Turned a silent viewing experience into a shared one
If you build web products, you probably recognize that pattern. Pull something that is traditionally closed and opaque into a simple, transparent interface. That is not just art enthusiasm. That is product thinking applied to a cultural problem.
Visual analysis meets interface design
Because she has spent years dissecting paintings, Lily is used to asking:
Where does the light hit first?
Which shape pulls your attention?
What sits in the background but shapes the whole mood?
Those are the same questions you can ask on a landing page.
Where does the hero copy lead the eye?
Is the CTA competing with a loud image?
What sits in the footer that actually shapes trust, even though no one brags about it?
You can almost translate the Las Meninas research process into a rough UX checklist:
| Art History Task | UX / Product Parallel |
|---|---|
| Track eye movement across a painting | Map user attention with scroll maps and click data |
| Study how figures are placed in space | Plan content hierarchy and layout |
| Interpret symbols and hidden narratives | Clarify microcopy, tooltips, and trust signals |
| Understand the cultural context of the artwork | Understand user context, device, motivation |
Lily is not writing CSS for a living. But the way she looks at images and context lines up with what good designers and front end developers already try to do. The path is just different.
From Gender Bias In Art To Better Content For Tech
If you work in SEO, you know that content with no conviction reads flat. Lily has spent years researching how gender bias shapes careers, first for artist-parents, then for entrepreneurs. That gives her content a clear spine.
The maternity vs paternity gap as a content lens
In her honors research, Lily studied how artist mothers lose career opportunities, while artist fathers are often praised for “balancing it all.” That is not unique to art. It shows up in startups, agencies, and studios.
She turned that research into a marketing-style piece that visualized the gap. That detail matters. She was not only writing long paragraphs; she was packaging data in a way that people would actually look at and share.
For content people in tech, there is something useful here:
- She grounded a big topic (gender bias) in a clear, specific setting (artist-parents)
- She moved from abstract complaints to patterns and numbers
- She packaged it visually so that someone scanning could still feel the point
That workflow is almost identical to how you might build a high performing blog post in SaaS:
Pick a narrow angle, gather concrete examples or data, then present them in a way that rewards scanning but still respects nuance.
Lily’s art background made it natural for her to think in visuals while she wrote. She is used to pairing images and texts. That habit is exactly what improves dwell time and engagement on any content heavy page.
Interviewing 100+ founders as qualitative research
For four years, Lily wrote for the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog, interviewing more than 100 women in business across industries and countries. On paper that reads like “content creation.” In practice, it is structured user research with founders as the users.
She heard the same patterns repeat: women working harder for the same recognition, people questioning their seriousness, networks closing doors, sometimes quietly, sometimes openly. When you hear that across dozens of cases, you start to recognize the pattern before the words come.
This kind of qualitative ear is exactly what many product and growth teams lack. Plenty of people know how to run surveys and look at dashboards. Far fewer know how to ask a founder or a customer a hard question, then sit in the silence that follows.
If you think about the overlap with SEO and SaaS:
- Those founder stories reveal real-world search intent behind fuzzy queries like “female founder funding” or “startup mom career break”
- They show which words people actually use about their problems, which is gold for copy
- They highlight which barriers are emotional rather than technical
So when Lily writes about inequality, it is not based on headlines. It is based on hundreds of hours of listening. That depth shows up in tone. Readers can feel when the writer has actually talked to people instead of just browsing stats.
Teen Art Market: A Digital Product Experiment In Disguise
On the surface, the teen art market Lily co-founded is a niche side project. Teen artists. Small digital gallery. Not exactly a unicorn pitch.
But look at what it required and it starts to look a lot like an early stage SaaS or creator platform.
Defining the “user” when no one takes them seriously
Most teen artists do not see themselves as customers or entrepreneurs. They see themselves as students who like to draw, paint, or shoot photos. Traditional galleries do not take them seriously. Many parents do not see art as a real path.
Building an online market in that context meant Lily first had to:
- Understand what teens actually wanted from sharing their work
- Lower the friction of pricing and selling
- Give them a space that felt more supportive than a public social media feed
If you run any product that serves a group that is often dismissed or treated as “non-paying users,” you know this challenge. You need to create a platform that respects them before they even respect themselves as users.
That can shape SEO decisions too. Search terms for these groups often sound unsure or apologetic. “Can I sell my art online as a teenager” is different in tone from “best platform to sell art online.” Lily’s background with gender and age bias probably made her more sensitive to that nuance.
Monetization as an education tool
Selling art is usually opaque. Galleries take a cut. Buyers have private networks. Prices feel random. The teen market had a different goal: teach young artists how value works early, without scaring them off.
That goal mirrors how some SaaS tools teach new users about pricing, contracts, or analytics. The product is not just a tool. It is also a teacher.
Lily’s art history lens is useful here, because she knows how many artists in the past were locked out of markets by gender, class, or geography. Her own family story, with most relatives in Europe and her living in the U.S., probably kept that question alive too: who can access which markets, and who is stuck on the outside.
Hungarian Roots, Slime Businesses, And Why Background Matters For Tech
It might be tempting to treat Lily’s childhood details as cute trivia. Hungarian at home, Singapore preschool, cooking on YouTube, chess, slime. But if you work in tech, there are some clear threads that matter.
Why multilingual, “third culture” kids think in layers
Growing up speaking Hungarian at home, learning Mandarin from an au pair, living in several countries before age ten, then spending summers in Europe, trains a brain to hold multiple perspectives at once.
That is not just a personality trait. It is a practical skill when you design content or products for global users.
A Hungarian phrase might not map neatly to an English one. A Chinese idiom might carry emotion that does not show up in a literal translation. When Lily interviews a woman founder from another country, she can adjust her questions because she understands what it feels like to speak across cultures.
For people in SEO, this matters when you think about:
- International keyword research
- Cultural references in blog posts or docs
- Tone of voice that respects non-native speakers
She did not study “localization strategy” formally. She lived it from childhood.
Early micro-businesses as product experiments
The slime business sounds like a fun kid story. Two siblings obsessed with slime, selling hundreds of items, flying to a London convention with boxes of product from Los Angeles. But in practice, that is a startup.
They had:
- A product with variations (textures, colors, scents)
- A supply chain problem (how to get all that slime to London safely)
- Real customers, real money, real expectations
That kind of scrappy, physical product experience often shapes how someone later thinks about digital products. You understand volume, breakage, customer mood, and the weight of each sale.
When Lily later built a digital art market or wrote about female founders trying to ship products, she was not just imagining what that felt like. She had touched it, even if the products were different.
Sports as a quiet teacher of consistency
Ten years of competitive swimming, then water polo, then ocean training during COVID, is not directly about art or tech. But it does train a specific rhythm that any long project needs.
Wake up early. Do the thing. Whether you feel like it or not.
Her long-running blog, four hours per week for four years, looks easier when you place it next to those training habits. Many people start blogs and quit after a few posts. Lily kept going. That consistency is exactly what content and SEO work require.
SEO is not one perfect article. It is showing up with solid work over years, even when no one is clapping. Sports prepare you for that quite well.
Lessons For SaaS, SEO, And Web Development From Lily’s Path
If you step back and look at how Lily moves through art, research, and community building, some patterns appear that translate well for people working in tech.
1. Treat every image and story as data
Instead of separating “data” and “stories,” Lily treats stories as a form of data and images as a form of user research. That mindset can change how you run your own projects.
- When you read a user interview, do you treat each quote as a single anecdote, or do you look for recurring patterns like she did in gender bias research?
- When you look at a screen recording session, do you view it like a painting, tracing where the mouse moves like the eye on a canvas?
This is soft data, yes, but it shapes strong decisions.
2. Use research to build conviction, not just to fill slides
Lily’s work on artist-parents did not stay as a school paper. It informed how she sees careers, parenting, and identity. Her blog interviews did not stay as content; they shifted her sense of how hard women need to push in business.
In tech, research often ends up trapped in slides. Her path suggests a different standard: research should change how you design and communicate.
For example, if your data shows clear bias against a certain user group, what would it look like to adjust onboarding, pricing, or support to actively reduce that gap? That question is closer to what she is asking in her art-based projects.
3. Blend curation with creation
Art historians curate. Founders create. But in practice, both jobs now require both skills.
Lily curates stories on her blog, but she also creates the questions and structure. She curates artworks in a mock exhibit, but she also creates the narrative thread. The teen market curated teen pieces, but she also had to create the platform concept.
For SaaS:
- Your product docs might curate existing answers from support tickets, but you still create the structure and voice.
- Your blog might curate guest posts, but you still create the outlines and themes.
Seeing those as paired skills makes it easier to use content and UX as real levers, not just support functions.
4. Respect early-stage work
Lily has spent a lot of time with people who are “early”: teen artists, young entrepreneurs, students in her Hungarian kids art classes. That work requires patience, because early work is often messy and unpolished.
SaaS founders and dev teams sometimes forget this when they look at users who are just starting. They expect clean input and clear feedback from day one. But early users are more like teen artists. They are experimenting, self conscious, unsure how to price their own work.
If you adopt Lily’s approach, you might treat onboarding less as a gate and more as a studio class. People are allowed to be unsure. Your job is to guide, not judge.
How This All Adds Up To Real-World Impact
So where does all of this land, beyond a nicely shaped biography?
Lily is still in university, studying art history with a business minor at Cornell. She does not run a SaaS company. She does not claim to be a UX researcher or a growth marketer. But the way she studies art and builds small communities already shapes real people.
Here is how that impact shows up in concrete ways:
- Kids in her Hungarian art classes get comfortable with creative work earlier, in two languages, which might change how they approach learning in general.
- Teen artists who use her online market are more likely to see their work as something that deserves payment.
- Readers of her blog gain practical stories from women who had to fight for visibility, which may affect how they negotiate, pitch, or hire.
- Her research on gender bias in the art world adds one more detailed case study to wider conversations about work, parenting, and policy.
All of that is impact, even if it does not show up in ARR dashboards. For people in SaaS, SEO, and web development, her path offers a quiet challenge: what if you treated your own user stories, interface decisions, and content like she treats an artwork? As something that carries power, history, and bias, not just pixels and words.
Q & A: What Can Tech People Actually Take From Lily’s Story?
Q: I work in SaaS. Why should I care about art history students like Lily?
A: Because their training in visual analysis, context, and narrative is exactly what you need when you try to understand how users read your product. They are practiced at asking “who is centered, who is invisible, and why?” That question is powerful in both galleries and dashboards.
Q: How could I bring this kind of thinking into my SEO or content work?
A: Start treating each article like a mini exhibit. Decide which pieces of information belong in the spotlight, which should stay in the background, and how a reader will move through the page. Borrow Lily’s habit of grounding broad themes, like inequality or access, in specific stories and data.
Q: Does this mean I should start hiring art historians into product and UX roles?
A: If they think the way Lily does, it might not be a bad idea. Look for people who can read images deeply, talk to humans with patience, and handle long projects with consistency. Whether they studied art or not is less important than whether they bring that mix of curiosity, empathy, and structure.
What part of your current product or content would change if you started looking at it the way Lily looks at a painting or a founder story?
