In the past two and a half years, we’ve built and launched many websites and web-applications for our clients, all of which we’re quite proud of. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot about project management, scheduling, client relationships, and all of that fun stuff. We worked diligently and put in a lot of long days and nights to meet deadlines and keep our clients happy.

All the while we’ve been consulting, Dusty and myself have poured countless hours into our products: Tripleseat.com and SiliconPrairieNews.com. We’ve been splitting our time and focus between consulting and our products, which has been nothing short of difficult, stressful, and time consuming. (If we focus on the consulting side of our business, the product side suffers and vice versa.) Nonetheless, both SPN and Tripleseat have gained considerable traction and momentum over the last year, and, as founders, the need for us to dedicate ourselves fully to these endeavors has become paramount. As a result, we’ve decided that we will be halting consulting work and focusing 100% of our efforts on our products. It’s something that we’ve always wanted to do and there’s no better time to act on it than now.

Note to all of our current clients: We will honor all outstanding projects to which we’ve committed. Additionally, we will continue to support and maintain all projects we’ve built.

However, we will want to transition ourselves out of any and all support and maintenance roles as quickly and realistically as possible. We will be touching base with all of our current clients over the next week to determine the best plan of action moving forward.

Lastly, suffice to say, we will not be accepting any new projects going forward.

Ideally, our transition from a consulting shop to a product shop would be seamless, and we’d be able to find a home for all current employees in our reorganized company. Unfortunately, in the short term, sans consulting revenue, we would not be able to financially support either of the Erins so we’ve had to let them go. It’s one of the hardest business decisions we’ve faced; they’re two of the best employees one could hope for. So, any of you out there who are looking for a talented developer or designer, let us know and we’ll be happy to get you in contact with them.. or you can simply email Erin Hawkins or Erin Standley directly (click on their names for their email addresses) or find them on twitter: @erinhawkins, @tinyxl.

What Lies Ahead

We’re very excited for what lays ahead for both Tripleseat.com and SiliconPrairieNews.com. We’re aiming to grow these companies to the point where they are wildly successful. Both of these products will almost certainly grow to the point where we will need to hire on people, need more or additional space, take on funding, etc. For the time being, both SPN and Tripleseat will continue to operate out of our current office in mid-town Omaha. We’ll be bunking down, working hard, and knocking these products out of the park.

More to follow in the specifics of each of our software / company endeavors. For now, thanks to everyone who has been a supporter, client, friend and follower of BrightMix over the past two and a half years. It has been a fantastic run up to this point, and we’re more excited than ever for what’s in store.

BrightMix Founders,
Dusty & Kevin

Question: Did you go through the traditional route and send in a PR announcement to get the coverage? (If so, can you share with me to share with the students)

Or, did it come by being at the Pitch session on Thursday and networking with the OWH reporter?

Or, a different way?

I always like to know the story behind the story so I can tell the students, “How did they do that”? It helps to answer the “WIFM” question that keeps the students more interested in how education (at least my way of education) is real-life training on what you need to do to get noticed.

As for the press, we definitely did NOT go the traditional PR route. In fact, our approach to marketing in general is very non-traditional.

The short story is, we met Stefanie (the reporter) through our involvement with entrepreneurship here in Omaha. I’m involved with a number of initiatives, each centered around this idea of putting Omaha on the map as a place where entrepreneurship and startups can not only happen.. but flourish. This started with my involvement with the Chamber’s entrepreneurship organization “Cornstalks,” which I have been involved with from its inception. Additionally, I helped organize Omaha’s first Barcamp event, and I am working with Jeff on Silicon Prairie News.

Its not “networking” in the traditional sense, its more genuine than that. Its building and being a part of a community at a very grass roots level.

It’s through these involvements that we were able to tell our story, establish ourselves as a company of innovators and leaders, and meet people like Stefanie. At that point, getting into the paper was almost as easy as making a phone call and saying, “I think it’s time to be in the paper.”

Like I said, our marketing efforts are non-traditional, at best, and are less focused on “selling widgets” or “signing contracts,” and more focused on “building community.” Through channels like our blog, Twitter, and now UStream, we’re wanting to build a following of people who truly care about our company, believe in our story, and want us to be successful.

Our advice is to point your students in the direction of people and super-successful businesses like Gary Vaynerchuk or 37Signals. These companies are leveraging community and buzz to generate “real” press and media coverage.. and that’s what matters.

Update: Stefanie gives some insight into how to get some press coverage..

I’ll pick up pretty much where we left off, with the interns just arriving at BrightMix ..

Step 6: Provide Lunch and Proper Equipment

When we talk about the internship program to people, one of the things that turn the most heads, is the fact that we provided free lunches to the interns every day. These weren’t shoddy lunches either; we went out of our way to bring in a wide variety of foodstuffs, ranging from delicious Mama’s Pizza to make your own sandwich day! (Actually, the whole company got free lunches, not just the interns.)

Why Provide Lunches?

First, it’s a great differentiator. I would venture to say that out of all the internships available to the students at these colleges, NONE of them offered free catered lunches. ZERO. The monetary value of free lunches is fairly menial, but it has a great impact.

Second, it opens the doors for some fantastic team bonding time. Having everyone in the office talk to each other and get along is incredibly important. As it turns out, eating lunch together (mostly) every day is a great way to make this happen. Our full-time employees got time to interact and make fun of the interns and vice-versa!

Lastly, talented individuals love getting things done. Catering lunches helps paves the way for that to happen by removing the need to leave the office every day for lunch. Not to say we didn’t let them leave – in fact, we had an entire week where we all worked from home!

Equipment Matters

We also made sure that everyone had top of the line equipment. This meant brand new MacBookPro’s all around! Oh, and 24inch monitors to plug into them.

Step 7: Provide Guidance and Get Out of Interns Way (mostly).

Another very common question is “How did you structure the software development lifecycle?”

We’re not big believers in Big Design Up Front, on this project especially. A major reason for this is that we wanted the interns to play a large role in defining the functionality of the application, in addition to actually coding it. If we had just handed the them a big fat requirements document at the beginning of the summer, they would’ve just been code monkeys. Not fun for anyone. Especially considering somebody, namely, ME, would actually have to WRITE that requirements doc.. yuck!

Instead, we were agile in our approach— a very task-based workflow, with weekly-ish “sprints.” Kevin and I would provide guidance in terms of the tasks and functionality that was expected for the week, and then we would get out of the way. From time to time we had to step in for code reviews and do some question answering.

Step 8: Take a Load Off!

We broke our product release schedule into 3 phases, each roughly a month in length. At the end of each phase, we prepared a formal “demo” of the app. Needless to say, the deadlines got a little hectic. Trying to firm up the functionality and the design of the app in time to demo it to whomever we were demoing it to that day.

But, after crunch time, it was important to get everyone out of the office to blow off a little steam! So, one time we took the afternoon off and went bowling, another time we went and saw the new Indiana Jones movie, and the last time we saw The Dark Knight (on opening day, on IMAX, I should mention – it was killer).

Step 9: Launch Product!

Finally, after three short months of feverishly hacking and designing away, it was time to unveil for the first time publicly, the project which our 3 interns had poured their blood sweat and tears into. It just so happened that BarCamp Omaha coincided with the end of the internship, and thus provided a fantastic forum in which to launch the product—BetterOmaha.com

The End

All in all, it was a wonderfully fulfilling and rewarding experience for Kevin and myself, and I certainly hope (and truly think) it was an equally rewarding experience for the interns.

In the beginning, we set out with the following mission…

We want to have an internship that’s not your ordinary, paper shredding internship. We want to find and hire the best of the best—the Cadillac interns, if you will. We want to feed them free lunches every day, and pay them well, and give them interesting things to work on. We want to value their opinions and inputs on the project. We want them to SHIP SOFTWARE. And, at the end of the summer, we want them to be able to go home and say “hey mom (or hey future employer), look at what I MADE”….

Thats what we set out to do… and by golly, I think we did it. Our interns, Allyn, Robert, and Erin #2: .. the Feisty Piranhas.. you should all be very proud of yourselves! You guys will be forever remembered as Brightmix’s first ever summer interns! (We thought about making Statues of you guys, but we bailed out on the idea

If you’re interested in hearing what the Interns had to say, check out their reviews of their experience here. We didn’t persuade or bribe them in any way, honest!

We’ve received a lot of questions about how we launched and managed our 2008 summer Internship project, codenamed the Feisty Piranha Project, so it’s about high time we address these quandaries.

The recipe we came up was largely based on this Joel article. With that said, I’m going to lay out the steps we went through to pull this whole thing off for those of you interested in trying this out for yourself. (Fair warning: getting everything together for our internship wasn’t easy – it took a lot of time, energy, and diet mountain dew to make it happen.)

Step 1: Concept and Preparation

We started by coming up with an idea for a great internship experience. We felt that locally there weren’t very many places where a young college kid could go work over a summer and have a meaningful, well paying, and fun internship.

We brainstormed for a bit and then drafted up this blog post/manifesto, announcing our internship, what it’s all about, and how it’s going to be better than 99% of other internships out there.

Step 2: Getting the Word Out

One of the most commonly asked questions we get is how did we go about finding our interns. For this, we loosely followed the guidance of, yet again, Joel by reaching out to all of the local colleges.

To our surprise, all of the colleges were extremely helpful; many went out of their way to get the word out to students about our internship. Dusty’s alma matter, Iowa State, for instance, forwarded our email and flier to every computer science student on campus!

In the end, I figure we sent out emails to 10 or 12 schools in the region. From the larger schools such as UNL and Iowa State, to the smaller schools like UNO and UNI.

Additionally, I should note, we also posted the position on CareerLink and CraigsList. Though, in the end, I think direct access to students via college job centers proved to be the most effective means of recruiting applicants.

Step 3: Sift through Incoming Resumés and Phone Interview

Once the word was out, in came the resumés. We gathered resumés for a few weeks until we had a good number (something like 150).

When the time came to go through our stack of resumés, we started by sorting them into two piles: applicants we wanted to hear more from via a phone interview and applicants we weren’t interested in (we sent them nice “thanks for applying” emails).

We phone interviewed close to 35 individuals over the course of about two months. By the end, we were pretty dang good at getting a feel for candidates over a 15-30 min phone interview, and we had our BrightMix internship elevator speech ingrained into the backs of our skulls. The point of every phone interview was to get a sense for the applicant’s passion, personality, and raw intelligence.

Interns can be Hard to Interview

Very few of our applicants had much of any work history to talk about and even fewer had formed strong opinions on software development (something we really like!). So, we had to focus on things like “is this person genuinely interested in their field of study.” We asked a lot of questions about their favorite classes, what they did in their spare time, and ideal jobs.

Dusty’s favorite question—“What do you want to be when you grow up?“

FYI, the best candidates loved their classes, wanted to write code when they “grew up,” and hacked away on cool projects in their spare time.

Step 4: Interview Top Few Candidates in Person – Hire the Best

Of all of our phone interviewees, we whittled the potential hire list down to about 10 who we brought in to our office for an interview or, in a few cases, traveled elsewhere to interview them. (Note: we ponied up gas money to the few interns who drove in from outside Omaha for their interviews.)

The in-person interview was an extension of the phone interview; it allowed us to further gauge each applicant’s personality and ability. Would they fit into the BrightMix culture? Would we be able to interact and work with this person? Did they tell jokes? Did their jokes suck?

We stuck to fairly broad topics. The goal of these interviews was to, again, find opinionated, creative people. Our interns would be running the show (so to speak) for their project, so it was important that we find the right mix of individuals who could operate on their own if necessary. E.g., dream up functionality instead of being a mere code monkey.

After all of our in-person interviews, we narrowed our search down to 3 individuals—2 developers and a designer; the brightest, funniest, most creative, and awesomest peeps.

Step 5: Prep the Interns for Arrival

Our summer project’s programming platform was Ruby on Rails. While Ruby on Rails can be quick to pick up, neither of our programmers knew the language. So, in an effort to prepare them as much as possible, we sent each of them a few books on Ruby on Rails and programming. These books doubled as great references once the summer came.

The three books we mailed each of the developers were..

• Agile Web Development with Rails
• The Ruby Programming Language
• The Pragmatic Programmer

More to come!

That about wraps up the “finding and filtering” section of the internship story. In Part 2, we will cover some more details of what life was like after the interns actually arrived. From them showing up day one, all the way through launching a real honest-to-goodness web application…. Stay tuned!

Update!

Check out part 2 here

Adios Outlook Calendar!

I adore my freedom from the Outlook Calendar, and Outlook in general. That’s not to say that we don’t schedule anything at BrightMix, because we certainly schedule the important things, like dinner for Cinco de BrightMix or meetings with clients. We simply don’t schedule everything (10:37: Bathroom Break – I think not). If we need to discuss something, we generally do it when the issue comes up, not next week or next month.

No More PowerPoint!

In my experience in Corporate America, Power Point ruled the day. Nearly every meeting of any significance required a set of Power Point slides, with gold stars going to people who printed copies for all attendies. It’s as if they believed that Microsoft has found a way to inject pretty bullet-point lists of information into our memories. The truth of the matter is that most slide decks suck – their only purpose is to provide the presenter with his or her own talking points.

Here at BrightMix, white boards rule. If we need a more permanent record, Kevin takes a picture with his iPhone and we paste it into Campfire. High Five!

More Hats

One of the interesting things about working for a small business is the array of hats each of us wears. We don’t have people, let alone entire departments, dedicated to Payroll, HR, Benefits, Marketing, PR, or PC Support. Everyone just pitches in. I, for example, am not only a developer. I am also the acting social chair, sous chef, and the BrightMix union rep. I’ve even been known to do the dishes, make the coffee, and occasionally clean the toilets (Yuck!).

Flexibility

I have a lot more flexibility working for BrightMix than I ever did working for XYZ Corp. It’s really refreshing to be able to say “I have a dentist appointment on Tuesday” or “I’m meeting some former co-workers for lunch—I might be gone for an hour and a half” with out being made to feel like a slacker. I occasionally work from home for no other reason than I like it.

I do have a little bit of a trade off for this flexibility, in that I am also more flexible. My hours are far less rigid than they ever were at XYZ Corp. I generally leave for the day between 5:00 and 5:30, but if something needs to be done, it needs to be done.

More Fun

Our regular readers are well aware of our “organized fun”, in the form of scheduled company outtings (here’s a shameless plug for the upcoming bowling trip). We also enjoy regular foosball games (although we’re on a brief hiatus for the summer), and have been known to gather around monitors for entertainment provided by YouTube. I highly recommend the Peep Wars.

Better Policies

The greatest thing about the BrightMix policy document is its length. There can’t be more than 15 items, at least 4 of which deal with opening and closing the office. We have all of the basic stuff – vacation and sick days, rough hours of operation, etc. That’s about it. What we don’t have includes a policy for answering the phone, dress code (although there is an unwritten rule that you should wear clothing), or a document dictating what can and cannot be left on our desks.

It’s policy document written for adults, which is exactly what we are (well, some of the time anyway). Hooray!

Stronger Voice

I’ve never been shy about sharing my ideas and opinions, ask anyone who knows me. The great thing about working for BrightMix is that my ideas are actually heard. Well, most of them. No one seems to have heard my idea for company BMWs. Then again, maybe they have, but they want it to be a surprise.

A Shorter Ladder

Until we fired up the BrightMix Summer Internship, I owned the corporate ladder. I could literally go no higher or lower. The great thing about owning the ladder is that you don’t have to coordinate with or cut through layers of management to get things done. Executive decisions occur precisely one floor above me. Elevator going up?

No Office Politics

This is one aspect of corporate life that I don’t think I will ever miss. Enough said.

Recognition

I understand that I am paid a salary to provide the company with my time and effort, but I still love positive feedback and an occasional high five for going the extra mile. I was lucky enough in my corporate experience to have supervisors that made sure I received proper recognition when going above and beyond. A lot of my colleagues did not – their supervisors took all the credit, or didn’t say anything at all (Boo!).

At BrightMix, Dusty and Kevin are all about Thank Yous and High Fives, even when we’re just doing the job they pay us for.

Since our last post, at three’ish months of official business, a whole lot has happened.

We Hired an Awesome Developer!

Shortly before Xmas, we posted a listing to hire an ASP.NET developer, two months and a series of interviews later, we welcomed aboard Erin.

Erin just had her one month anniversary, and she seems to be enjoying her new position at BrightMix. She’s helped Dusty and myself adopt a new pattern for our ASP.NET development called Presenter First, a rendition of the ol’ Model View Presenter pattern. Presenter First has helped us write code that is inherently more automatically testable, something that is challenging to do in ASP.NET.

Erin also just recently launched her own blog, ErinHawkins.com. Good things will come from her blog, so add it to the feed reader nearest to you!

BrightMix’s First Company Outing (Many More to Come)

In line with our goal of providing an awesome place for developers to work, we had our first company-paid outing a few weeks ago. Since there’s only 3 of us working at BrightMix, we invited along some ringers

Why have frequent company outings? Well, because we like our employee(s), we want them to continue working with us, and we want them to feel appreciated.

If everyone is kicking booty at their work, it makes all the sense in the world to start the weekend early by taking Friday afternoon off for a fun-filled bowling excursion. Oh, and participate in the taking of some sweet jump shots!

Continuing Client Work

In early December, we began work with a company here in Omaha called Sojern. We can’t disclose any of the details about their company or product. But, rest assured, it’ll be a pretty big deal once it has launched, which should be happening shortly.

Similarly, we’re on the verge of launching another big website for our other major client. Details for that are also soon to come…

Ack! Apple Converts!

For the longest time, Dusty and I were big Apple haters. This was mostly due to our being forced to use the inferior Macintosh computers back in our younger years (Middleschool and Highschool). Recently, though, Apple has taken a drastic turn for the better, with its new PC hardware-based machines and unix-based operating system. We use MacBookPro’s exclusively for our Ruby on Rails development work now.

I also just recently jumped on the iPhone bandwagon. Oh iPhone, you’re oh-so glossy and lovable…

A Business Trip to Boston

In early January, Dusty and myself flew out to Boston to meet up with a potential client.

The result of it all? A new partnership and product under development, TripleSeat. TripleSeat will be a web-based application to help restaurants manage the booking and sales of their private dining rooms.

We expect to launch version 1.0 of TripleSeat this May, which is coming up shortly, so keep your peepers peeled.

Impending Summer Internship Program

Mostly recently, a lot of our focus been getting ready for our Summer Internship Program. The goal of our internship program is to create and launch a product of our own, as well as find some of the best up-and-coming developer/design talent around the area and hopefully teach them a whole lot about the creation and launch of a brand new Web 2.0 product.

We’ve had a ton of people send in applications – more than we ever expected. We’re currently in the process of conducting in-person interviews with our top candidates, and within two weeks, we’ll be making offers to three of them.

Party Pizzas and Foosball Anyone?

It’s the little things around the office that help differentiate our company from XYZ corp. A few weeks ago, while chatting with Erin, we (possibly just myself) determined that the office needed a toaster oven so we could actually bake stuff like party pizzas, pizza rolls, and chicken nuggs.

Additionally, at some point, it was determined that we needed a Foosball table for the front room of our office. Erin was extremely helpful in facilitating the attainment of the table; in fact, she pretty much found the thing and got it to our office – we just footed the bill. High five, Erin!

The Official BrightMix Open House Party

Since we started the biz, Dusty and I have touted how we’re going to have this glamourous, earth-shakingly awesome open house party. At first, we were going to host it at my house (since we used to work from there), but then we moved to a real office. Then, it got drearily cold for a few months…

Without further ado: the official BrightMix Open House Party will be on Friday, April 25th, starting at 4:30pm and ending… well, whenever it ends. We’ll be providing drinks (of both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic variety), delicious snack foods (quesadillas, chips, etc.), and entertainment. We’ll be sending out more formal invites to our giant list of contacts.

Well, that wraps up our last few months of busy, busy business – stay tuned for more happenings!

We were talking the other day about how fast time has started flying for us since we opened up shop. But, on that same note, we’ve managed to accomplish a great deal in a short amount of time. Back when we were employees at corporations, time stood seemingly still and things happened at such a slow pace.

What have we accomplished, you ask? Here’s a run-down of the latest happenings since our 1-month anniversary posting.

New Office!

In case you missed it, we moved into a real office about a month ago. Apparently the ceiling leaks, which is kind of a downer, but our landlord should have that fixed soon. Other than that, we’re really enjoying the office.

The move was great for me because I can get out of my house and go someplace else to do work, and it’s great for Dusty because it’s closer to his place of residence.

We were initially wanting to have an open house party shortly after moving in, but we decided it wouldn’t be all that exciting because we don’t have much furniture yet. Plus, it’s crappy and cold out. So, we’re aiming to have an open house party sometime in the spring of 2008.

New Website + Logo + Hosting!

In early November we migrated BrightMix.com to Slicehost.com. Read more about our positive experience with Slicehost here.

Along the same vein, after being stuck in the logo design process for a few months, we worked with the Granger Group to finalize our logo. While we were at it, we re-branded BrightMix.com.

New Client!!

New business is always good business. In late November, we started working with a new, top-secret client here in Omaha. We can’t give out any details, as we’re under an NDA, but the idea is exciting and it’s being built using Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

New Hardware!

We attained another Dell 24” LCD monitor, which has taken up residence on my desk as my secondary monitor. (I was briefly in violation of our own credo regarding dual monitors).

Also, Dusty managed to score us a rad printer from a family member. This new printer is replacing our older, also donated printer. It can print at a whooping 17 pages per minute, while our old one could only do a lowly 6. That’s approximately a 300% increase! Woohoo!

Full-time Hiring Positions

We’ve yet to announce this officially, but we’ll almost certainly be looking to hire 1-2 full-time developers to help us out. At a glance, we’ll be looking for individuals who are savvy with ASP.NET, SQL, Javascript, and CSS. More details on the positions and how to apply will become available very shortly.

BrightMix Summer of 2008 Internship Program

Additionally, we’re looking at hiring a small team of interns to help us out this upcoming summer. We believe we can provide an awesome, interesting, and, above all, meaningful internship experience, similar to the type of internship program you’d find at FogCreek or JacksonFish.

The fact of the matter is that many companies out there hire interns because they need a cheap, temporary employee to perform some lowly and boring task (paper shredding or coffee fetching, anyone?). While this is great for company XYZ, the intern isn’t going to learn and benefit from much of anything. Our aim is to have our interns develop a brand-spanking-new web 2.0 application, from start to launch.

We’re still hammering out the details of the program, but we’ll probably be making an announcement within the next month or two. We’ll likely be looking for 2 computer science students and 1 graphic design student. Stay tuned for more details.

Omaha Developer / IT Job Site

After perusing Omaha’s various big job search sites, we’ve come to the conclusion that there is no good resource for finding good local developer and IT staffing positions. We’re looking to solve this problem by creating a job site geared towards this particular market. More details on this are soon to come.

Where We’re Headed

Obviously, as indicated by our move into an office space and our plans to hire on developer help, we’re looking to grow BrightMix. Over the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of planning on Dusty’s and my behalf to get this stuff all figured out. At the same time, we’ll be focusing hard on doing exceptional work for our clients. Busy times, indeed!

That about sums it up – we’ll post again as soon as time allows.

Thurs – Saturday… Cleaning!

All things considered, the place wasn’t actually in that bad of shape, but we wanted to make sure that we started off all nice and shiny. So, Kevin and I spent the better part of Thursday and Friday making trips to Walmart to buy cleaning supplies, and doing the important cleaning. (ie, I cleaned the fridge, so we could get Diet Mt. Dew & Beer in there right away!)

I want to extend a special thanks to my family (Marlina, Jane, Dee Dee, Sara & Joey) for all of their incredibly hard work and help getting things cleaned. They spent pretty much all day last Saturday scrubbing walls and toilets and windows and floors. We couldn’t have done it without their help! Thanks everyone!

Last week… Settling in…

Last week, as a two person company, we had to get back to business as usual. That meant we had to get everything up as quickly as possible. Luckily, we are a young company with simple needs. We essentially moved our computers, did some configuring, and we were up and running! Gotta love being able to do that!

And furniture? Ah, who needs it We actually lucked out quite a bit on this… The guys that were there before us sold us some things, and left some more things. All said, the desks, tables, refrigerator, chairs & pool table were all left there. This naturally added to our ability to get things up and running quickly, as there was no “moving” to be done, per se. This also helped us to not have to outlay a bunch of cash. As a bootstrapped company, every dollar really matters in the early stages, and we’re excited now to be able to slowly and deliberately purchase the things that we need.

Picture Time!

I’ll leave you with a bit of a photo tour of the place… For all of our photos, be sure to check out the BrightMix photos page over at Flickr.

On Thursday, Nov 1st 2007, we officially move into our new digs at 5018 Leavenworth street here in Omaha!

Here’s an arial shot of our new place:

Interestingly, over the course of about 48 hours, the opportunity to lease this new office space arose, we deliberated and discussed it, and, after realizing that timing can never really be perfect, we coolly and decisively decided to go for it.

Some Questions We Asked Ourselves

Do we even need an office space?

This was an important one. We’ve preached about the benefits of “bootstrapping” our company by running lean and mean. And, to be perfectly honest, we’re completely content and comfortable where we’re at now. However, we’re in this for the long haul, and we have to move out of Kevin’s living room at some point, especially if we take on more people. So, we figure, why the heck not now!

How will we benefit from this office space?

One of the hardest things I’ve found that we deal with as a freelancer-turned- small-business business, is handling the stigma of the individual. That is, conveying ourselves as a “company”, and not simply some dudes who write software in their spare time… and happen to make money in the process.

While we believe whole-heartedly in the value of staying small, there’s definitely a fine line. In my opinion, nothing legitimizes ones business more than having an office. However spartan, however small, if you have an office, you’re the real deal, and you can avoid unfortunate scenarios like:

Potential Client: You guys sound like the rockstar developers we need! So where do you guys work from?

Us: Uh, err, um, from Kevin’s basement.

Potential Client: Ah.. yea.. hey, gotta run.. to do.. other thing.

Is this the right space for us?

We’re very particular about the types of offices that we like and that we don’t like. This space, with its “lofty” feel, and more importantly its “non-office” feel, fell nicely into the first category. There were other appealing traits, too. First, it’s only a 1 year lease. No long term commitments for us; it’s just to early to know what kind of growth we’ll experience. Second, we don’t have to do much “build out.” The previous tenants, the rad guys of the Divvy Collective, did an incredible amount of renovating and remodeling to the place. As a result, it’s in move-in condition and then some. Oh, and thirdly, did I mention it comes with a pool table? I think that pretty much speaks for itself.

Stay tuned for more pictures and stories from the move-in, as well as the date and time of our Open House!

P.S. Here’s a sneak peek at how the office currently looks (prior to us moving in)… This is the entrance / waiting room.

Boo, cubicles!

Simply put, we hate cubicles.

Cubicles suck for jobs that require personal concentration (engineering, accounting, most computer-based jobs, etc.).

As previous software programmers for both large and small companies, we’ve spent plenty of time in the proverbial dilbert‘esque office environment. They exist everywhere, and it gets old… really, really fast. Of course, the reasons why cubicles suck have been repeated and enumerated many times over.

No door leads to mass interruptions and noise pollution

Many experienced cubicle inhabitants will tell you they get the most stuff done in the hours outside of 8-5–when no one else is at the office. It’s really terrible in some office layouts where the programmers are right next to a whole raft of customer service reps whom are on the phone all day.

The private office as a badge

Typically, private offices are relegated to employees of importance or seniority. This is just bogus and unfortunate. Not only does this stink for the lowly employees, but it also reinforces the fact that your organization is built around rank and status. Boo and hiss!

Who likes dull colors and fluorescent lighting, anyway?

There are only so many cubes that can border a window (these cubes are also usually treated as badges). The rest of the cubes are stuck in the middle of the office space, sans sunlight. Couple this with the drab, unexciting color of the cube walls, and you have more of a dungeon than a work space. Nothing says workplace efficiency like a dungeon!

Alternatives to cubicles?

If you’re not in a position to alter your current work environment, there is likely little you can do, aside from bitching and wearing headphones. Joel has some suggestions:

“Look for ways to get out of this environment. Take a laptop to the company cafeteria, where there are lots of tables that are empty most of the day (and nobody can find you). Book a conference room for the whole day… The next time there’s a crunch on and your manager asks you what you need to Get This Done By Tomorrow, you know what to say. They’ll find you an office for the day. And pretty soon they’ll start wondering what they can do to keep that productive thing going year round.

Come into work late and leave late. Those hours after the rest of the company goes home can be the most productive.”

However, if you are in a position of power, we suggest you create as many offices with doors as possible and steal some of the solutions that other successful companies have come up with.

Pixar, for instance, has replaced the lowly cubicle with small sheds/huts, which have a door, are insulated from outside noise, and have a high customization factor. How rad is that?!

What’s the best set up?

There’s no one best set up for all businesses. If you want boring, dull, and lifeless employees, put them in a boring, dull, and lifeless environment (not recommended). However, if you want creative, kick-ass employees, then put them in a creative, kick-ass environment.