Notes for week #237

Matt Webb of BERG (formerly Schulze & Webb) has been documenting the weekly life of their studio and ever since they got started, I’ve been meaning to do it myself. We’re starting these weekly notes hoping it will bring clarity to the way we work and think at WBS. At the very least, it is a good way to have ourselves reflect on the things we’re doing. We start at week 237, only two weeks left in 2009^[1].

This has clearly been lecture week. Both me and Tiago have given presentations in different days. Similar subjects, however. We both talked about the experience of running a studio/company to students (and hopefully soon to be entrepreneurs). It was the fourth time I gave this particular “Lessons Learned” talk – and, I believe, also the last (not for any particular reason, I just think I’m putting the subject aside for a while to mull it over for another year). It was – as it always is – a gratifying experience, however. I’m sure I’ll cover most these lessons in greater detail in upcoming weekly notes, however.

We’ve been talking about which conferences to attend next year – we’ve always believed conferences were the perfect environment to generate new ideas, establish new relationships with equal-minded companies/individuals, and possibly above all, a good time away from the day to day work (in our case, of building apps). We’re definitely heading out to UxLx (which stands for User Experience Lisbon), and are considering Lift and Reboot (at the least). Having spoken at Reboot, I’ve always considered it one of my favorite conferences today – I can’t wait for its time to finally come again this year.

Google Portugal organized a dinner/get together for developers in Lisbon so we made our way down. Turns out they were talking iGoogle while our minds (and those of others attending) were set on other topics. It’s always good to take a breather and share pizza with other startups, however.

Work-wise, we’re very much focused on Goplan. We’re seeing usage momentum and things are steady, so we’re starting to implement things that have long been in our users’ wishlists. We’ll talk more extensively about what these things are post holidays, but we’re collectively excited about what’s coming. Growing a community pays off, particularly when you get emails thanking you for what you do, and we’ve been getting a few.

This is it for now – we all wish you happy holidays. Expect another weekly update soon (we’re hoping to start publishing these on Fridays – no promises).

^[1]: It is quite a huge coincidence that we seem to be on the exact same week that BERG is on. The week of June 1st 2005 (when we first got together to start WBS) was most definitely a great week for science.