As we are a dispersed team I write a weekly newsletter to all employees to keep everybody up to date with whats happening. I thought maybe this weeks newsletter might be interesting to someone outside the comp. Both because of the content and as an example of how you could write a newsletter to keept your team up to date. And to be honest, maybe its just because I´m so happy about the post myself or because it´s much of a summary of my own year as an entrepreneur with my beloved business SkrivaPå that I feel like sharing it here at my own entrepreneurship blog.
This one is of cause special as its a 2010 summary, I cut the more boring pieces about backlog technique and detailed team progressions in the end. Voila...
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“Rule 1: Always find a good excuse to write a lot”
Some thoughts of the past year and the year to come
Dear SkrivaPå dream team. At the late sprint meeting today (due to Gracian’s flu last week) me and Gracjan did some summing up of the SkrivaPå experience of ´2010. We looked back at the year and discussed what we have done great and what we could have done better…
What a great team we have!
Time to be emotional… We love you. It is so great to have you all on board and compared to just being me and Gracjan fighting all the small and large issues, its so much more fun and energizing to be a real team with so much diversity of knowledge’s and ideas. We are truly thankful (I’m convinced I can also speak on the behalf of Gracjan) for your full-hearted contributions and how you inspire us and push us and the business forward. I’m actually honestly surprised and amazed: how could we possibly get such a passionate and talented team so smoothly? How did this happen? Is it the idea? Is it us? Have we had a very long series of luck or are we just very good at good decisions and getting the right people attracted? I guess it might be a little bit of all. Anyway, big props to you all for being so awesome.
We are surprised by how well the dispersed team model has worked
Of cause you have heard it before: ”it is possible to work in dispersed teams, just look at 37Signals, they’re alive and rocking it” Of cause we hoped it would work, but we never thought is would work so well and that it would be possible to get such a tight organization with such efficiency as we actually have. The stand-ups were a spontaneous invention when we were trying to figure out our workflows back in early autumn. They immediately showed to be super valuable and have shown to be really essential in gathering the team and making us into a real organization. Also they have shown to be a real good whirlpool for either increasing engagement or pushing unserious interestees away, thus making the core tighter. I’m convinced Eric and Emily who also have experienced SkrivaPå without the stand-ups would agree with much of the above (or what do you think?).
We never expected the business to be so complex but now it seems like the bulldozer is starting to gain some speed
When I first got the idea (back at the bed of my friends apartment talking with him about his difficulties in finding a smooth way to sign with a label in Canada that wanted to release his song) it seemed like the most obvious and simple idea. When I told Gracjan about it just a few weeks later he was also fired up by the simplicity of the idea:
“let people sign documents electronically”
As it has shown during the year those 5 words have really shown to be everything but simple to put into reality. First we discovered the complexity of customer feature needs, then we discovered the depth of customer security needs, then we realized the complexity of the legal issues and just now the strong need of strong branding and forceful marketing is appearing at the horizon. We have had lots of ups and downs, moments of desperation (”Are we moving fast enough?”, ”Will we ever be able to convince those slow customers?”) and moments of great positive surprises (mostly helpful people giving us an extra push, including you guys here). And much of the time it has really been about just to remind oneself that its all just phases and to be more stubborn and just remember how obvious the idea is, that it is the obvious future and if we just work hard enough, stay on top of developments and stay creative and opportunistic we really stand a good chance in becoming the top player. From the start I have said (you may remember scattered pieces of this Gracjan, no?):
”I believe the wave is coming. Its quite far away but I think I can see it and it moves fast and it will be big. If we don’t move fast enough we wont catch it. I want to catch it. I want to run fast as hell and I want to surf that wave and be on top of it. To do a really successful business has been my dream for almost a decade now. I have had hundreds of business ideas since I started dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur and I believe I have never had any idea even remotely as good as this one. No project I have ever done have I ever believed in so much as this one. There is no chance in the world that I would let anything stop me from making this happen.”
From the start, doing this business was like being a human dragging a horse load to just make it move one meter or two. Today I said to Gracjan I’m starting to feel the carriage roll on its own and I’m starting to run ahead not to get squashed. I really feel something is starting to happen. The ups and downs are almost gone. Every day its just more and more up. More and more pure fun, its more and more to do but I just feel more and more energy to do it. And the strange thing is… I’m happier, more relaxed and more rested than ever. Can you figure out the equation? Maybe it’s the fact that more and more of the hardest nuts to crack have been cracked. More and more of the first deep research and tough decisions have been made. We know so much more and don’t have to start all over at every question. Or as Gracjan expressed it:
“This year was the year of decisions and learning, next year I feel will be the year of execution, the year to really put everything into practice.”
We have gotten more structured but we are still too sloppy
As you might know (and as Mariusz is so good to make fun about) neither me nor Gracjan are the most rigidly and well structured guys. All the structures and admin created so far have been the result of necessity. After enough pain and annoyance and realizing that the issue is a potential hindrance to achieving the goal of our dreams we have put our brains to solve the issue and implemented the structural change, but we kind of suck at nagging and being very consequential about it (as you might know with schedules for example). We agreed that this is really one of our weaker sides as consequence is good for structure and structure is good for efficiency. Thus we aspire to get better at this during 2011. We promise to nag a little bit more to push people to be more structured. Also now Viktor is entering full hearted into the organization with the first main task of developing our processes, structuring the company better and pushing everyone else to help out. We hope he will also help us get more structured and we encourage you all to nag us when necessary.
Well that’s all for this years summary. Of cause there is a lot more to write about. But I guess it has to be enough of all this business poetry. So to sum up:
Look forward to work with you this year of 2011!
Happy new year!
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