Series 1 - pilot.
Let’s be honest, a newsletter is just a fancy term for an email.
Notes as a tool for communicating, not for press releasing. Or maybe a bit of both.
We (that’s Anna Goss and Eliot Fineberg) did a project together in the summer and it went well. We decided we created more value together than we do on our own. And we have a nicer time. So we’ll do some more.
The past two or three weeks have been spent in productive boredom, trying to get a couple of projects over the line, and beginning to converge on some shared vocabulary, tools, and cashflow spreadsheets. We still run two different businesses, but we’ve started to ask each other the kinds of questions you might ask your business partner (“Am I ok to spend £600 on a screen and a keyboard and a mouse?”). Maybe at some point in the future we’ll run the same business. There are enough shared principles - for another day, not for now - and overlaps in the Venn that it seems like it would make sense.
Productive boredom is almost over. Next is actually starting to plan the work - we’re signing the statement of work for St Giles tomorrow, and St James’ in the next week or two. We’re trying to figure out how to bring some other people along for the work we have locked in for the next couple of months so that we can continue with our other commitments and the strand we’ve named ‘cultivate’, aka new business, alongside delivering St Giles and St James’. Bringing other people along doesn’t necessarily just mean ‘this is the day rate’, because we’d like to believe there’s more to it than that, there’s a value to the hanging out and making something new, but there’s also a risk too if you commit too high and too long and the pipeline doesn’t manifest itself into invoices.
So. We are finding the way through risk, value, enjoyment, and trying to do something that feels fair to all involved. No one here is (knowingly) building anything to sell, so we can try some different approaches to running a business. The strategy is to create more value than we cost for clients, or users, or whoever is paying for. To use whatever insider knowledge we have from our combined 25 odd years of working on the internet - that’s the coded way of saying we’re both in our 30s - to pay our mortgages. And to try and leave things better than we found them for whoever might be implicated by our work.
Both onwards and upwards. Let’s try that. 🙌
AG and EF