Goplan has been growing steadily, which is definitely exciting. Having companies like Boxee or Mozilla – both of whom we’re big fans of – using the product means we’re doing at least something right. Tiago has been working with our new credit card payment gateway to finally bring credit card processing into the application and dump Paypal, which will make it easier for us to change our pricing, give accounts away or offer discounts. Meanwhile, I’ve been tightening pixels inside the application, improving things one page at a time (no app is ever truly “done”).

We’ve been thinking a lot about the iPhone and the iPad. We have ideas we want to try out on both platforms and we can’t wait to finally begin in a week or two when the bulk of the stuff we’re working on gets done. It’s weird that we’ve been on the development program since day 1 and haven’t been able to dedicate much time to it.

Conference season is right around the corner. We’ll be at Ux-Lx, Shift and Switch in the next couple of months – hopefully others later in the year ^[1]. My new talk on entrepreneurship – a follow-up to the Lessons Learned talk I did way too many times last year – is on the light table and I’m quite excited about it. If you’re in or around Lisbon in a few weeks, you may catch it at Shift. Thanks to a partnership we just did with Adaptive Path, we’re probably heading out to UXWeek in San Francisco in August as well ^[2].

Speaking of conferences, we’re organizing a startup contest at Switch Conference this year and all the details on it are coming this monday. We’re excited to see what people around us have been working on – that should be pretty good.

Have a great weekend!

Footnotes

^[1] It’s a shame that there will be no Reboot in 2010, but I’m sure Thomas needs a rest. Reboot is a delightful conference that everyone should experience at least once. I hope someone else steps up to organize a conference to fill its shoes this year.

^[2] If you’ve read our notes for week #241 you know we’re thinking of moving out to the bay for a couple of months – for the change of air, mostly -, so it may end up being that we head out to UXWeek and just stick around.

Decisions, guts

Monday’s highlight, however, was not the smell of clean floor tiles, the renovated color of our carpets, or the pixelated video-game-inspired posters that were hung on the walls. On Monday, right before dinner, we hit an odd milestone – one I briefly mentioned on twitter: We said no to a candidate that hit the mark on 99% of our hiring criteria.

As you might have guessed if you’ve been reading our weekly notes, we’ve been rethinking the way we work for ourselves and our clients (we’ve recently decided to only take 4 consulting jobs in 2010 to make sure we’re completely passionate about everything we do – more here). So we’re not hiring until we have everything figured out. It was tough saying no to someone when our gut said yes but we believe it was for the best. If you’re hiring and looking for someone who’s revealed to be extremely passionate, a great PR person and an inspiring individual, get in touch and we’ll connect you.

Preparing for a stint in the valley

Anyway, we’re making big plans for the future and it seems like we (the whole team) may be spending a few months in Silicon Valley soon. Me, I can’t wait to go back, and the rest of the guys can’t wait to see how things are like over the pond. The whole idea is still in its embryonic stage – and there’s quite a few things, namely with immigration, to figure out -, but we’re all very excited about the prospect.

If you have ideas on how to solve the problem of hosting 6 or 7 people in or around San Francisco for about 4 months, please let us know. Housing is our number one concern at this point. But honestly, we see this as a good problem to have. We can’t wait, really.

We’re bringing the whole team to Lisbon for three days packed with great talks and what we hope awesome inspiring conversations. And we’re not only bringing everyone down, we’re also – through our project management and online collaboration app, Goplan – sponsoring the event. We’re giving everyone attending the conference 6 months free of Goplan’s professional plan – which we believe will make a few people quite happy. It’s a great way to give back to a community we love, and to hopefully get feedback from likeminded individuals.

We do hope to see you at the conference, and if you’re not attending, we hope you’ll keep an eye on our blog as we’re planning on some really exciting ways to cover what’s being said on the event. Cheers!

This was a slow but important week. 2009 is done – it’s funny how time flies. The office stood still as we gathered with families, friends to celebrate the new year. Ourselves, we’re concentrating on 2010 – it’s going to be an important, career (and company) defining year.

Important decisions were made. As I briefly mentioned last week, we have always struggled with the question of whether to focus on our products (which we love) or to help other people with their own through consulting (which we also love to do). We’ve reached a conclusion, we’re happy with our decision and we’re sticking with it.

The decision is to do both, but with a twist: we’re taking a very limited number of consulting projects each year from now on – we’re thinking of about 4. This is the best of both worlds. When we’re consulting, we’re inspiring and getting inspired by other people. When we’re working for ourselves, we’re reinventing our ideas and hopefully building special products that you can use.

I wonder (and the others do too) how clients will receive the idea of us only doing a limited number of projects. We want to make the best out of the time we dedicate to other people. We want to be completely passionate about it, so four projects seems like the sweet spot. We’ll see how it goes.

If we have one new year resolution, it is to bring passion back to our business. If you want to work with us (or to have us work for you) in 2010, get in touch – we’ll try to help. Thank you, and happy new year!

The question of whether we should keep building products and providing consulting services or just focusing on our apps keeps coming back (it did again when we went out to the Google dinner last week), and we often debate where we should go. We love building products and we love talking to other people about their ideas – and making those a reality whenever possible. If I may be allowed the exercise of predicting 2010, I’d say we’re going to try and balance the two (consulting and products) again. Still, the whole team is excited about Goplan’s growing numbers, so there’s at least a tendency to expand in that area – we have a few things lined up.

I’ve been dividing my time between designing the experience for Goplan’s mobile app and writing a series of articles that I hope to be able to talk about and publish soon. Finding more time to read (a list of what I’ve been reading is on my blog) and write has been a blessing. Inspiration is on a local high (it seems like the all time high is hard to beat) and ideas are popping up all the time. Exciting, no doubt.

We’ve had a friend over working with Tiago from the office for a few days which is always great. Being fans and advocates of co-working, we encourage our friends to show up at any time. There’s extra chairs and desks (heck, even monitors), so feel free to join us if nearby. We’re usually in the office until late hours (or early, depending on what 7am is in your bio-clock), so showing up at night is quite acceptable – bring pizza, we have the beverages.

You’ll hear more from our weekly updates in 2010. Have fun on the 31st – it’s the last day of the decade, and we don’t get a lot of those.

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.

I’ve recently given a talk to future entrepreneurs about the 10 most important lessons we learned at Webreakstuff in the last few years. I often say these are the lessons I’d tell my younger self were time traveling a possibility. I thought I’d share these lessons here so that others, not just the people who’ve heard me speak, can discuss and hopefully learn from our conclusions and mistakes.

I’ve decided to split the lessons across three posts to facilitate discussion and to avoid one huge block of text that would be harder to follow. This post goes through the first three things we learned, and two others with the rest of the “lessons” are coming soon.

An introduction

I have to start with a little introduction on what we are. Webreakstuff is a design and development company – we do web applications for us, for others, and we help other companies improve the user experience and code of their existing products. We’re not a typical studio, however. We work weird hours – office lights are often on all night -, say no to lots of clients and projects, work mostly with clients over a distance and prefer passion to money (even though we do like money too).

We feel we do great work and have a great team, though, and time has led me/us to conclude that a big part of it was a consequence of the way we, individually and as a team, think and act. These “lessons” may not apply directly to you or your work environment, but I personally believe they’re at least worth thinking about.

Lesson 1: Trust your gut

I would have to say that I believe an always-on often-right gut feeling is the number one trait of the entrepreneur. There were lots times in our past as a company – right from the very beginning, really, when we decided to work together -, where trusting our instincts saved our work – and ourselves – from failure. There were times when dropping a client sounded like the wrong move but somehow felt like the right move. Or times when something told us we’d better be prepared for spending extra hours in the office preparing for a launch. Our gut feeling was often not only right, but spot on.

Whenever I talk about gut feeling, I’m reminded of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford (watch the video here). He tells the story of looking in the mirror every morning and asking himself whether he’d do whatever he was about to do were that day his last. If the answer had been no several days in a row, he’d know something had to change. Pay attention to your own gut feeling – it might save your work and career.

Lesson 2: Ownership & Motivation

One of the earliest decisions we ever made at WBS was that we’d never be a company where there would be a boss (in our case, 4 partners) and a bunch of employees. There were (are, really) many reasons for this, but the most important one was that we’d likely be hiring people much like ourselves (which ended up happening), and if there was something we were certain of was that we weren’t exactly fond of working for other people. So what we did was create a loose hierarchy, with no real bosses – just people with specific responsibilities.

If someone feels something as their own, they’ll take better care of it. And that is the case with a start-up company too. If people believe their opinions are heard and have an impact and value, they’ll feel empowered. You see where I’m going, I’m sure. Make sure you give people the most, so you can get the best out of them and their work. I recently heard a pretty good edition of the Harvard Business Ideacast (number 162) on “Leading Clever People” – go hear it if you’re interested on this subject. It resonated with us, and it very well might resonate with you too.

Lesson 3: Environment is everything

It should come as no surprise that people do better work in an environment where they feel right. I’m one of those guys who loves a clean minimalistic desk with nothing but the tools I’m going to use (mostly because my work involves what’s on the screen, not around it). Other people take a more expressive approach to workspace management. Regardless of your preference, creating the right environment on which people can work is a great exercise in social design and often a complex task. Work flows better when everyone’s comfortable, however, so it definitely pays off.

Whenever I think about the right office environment, I think of places like IDEO, Pixar or Google. There’s a ton of office inspiration out there on the web – this post provides some good examples. Be creative and smart about balancing things for everyone on your team and reap the rewards – we did.

A few concluding thoughts

Coming soon are two more posts with the rest of our lessons learned. I hope you enjoyed these, and be sure to leave a comment if you have questions or something to say. I would definitely appreciate your thoughts – thank you, and hopefully, see you back here soon for the two other parts in this post series!

The fact that there was a deal on Yahoo’s table grabbed Y!’s attention for too long. That made them stop focusing on search innovation, while Google and Microsoft clearly kept moving forward. Truth is on any product, if you’re halted for a few months, you’re dying. We’ve seen this happen to ourselves with our project management solution, Goplan. Now that we’re back on the helm, with a focus on innovation, our numbers are up, our clients are happier, and we are too.

It is really easy to lose focus in this business. And sometimes, more often than not, the price is steep. Yahoo literally abandoned the second spot in the search market for a deal that may end up cannibalizing the rest of their company. One would hope not, as Yahoo has always been an inspiration for entrepreneurs and smaller companies – but things are not looking good.

All this to end on Jason’s note, that you can never stop innovating. Ask the folks at Yahoo – they’ll know.

The post goes into the thought process behind the logo, the stages it went through, and hints at ways to brainstorm brand identities, particularly for web applications. Make sure you don’t miss the post. Click here to read it.

Back in 2006 we weren’t too happy about the existing project management and collaboration solutions out there, and we desperately needed one to manage our relationship and work with a growing customer base. We started the first version back in May 2006 and launched officially (after a long public beta stage) in March of 07. It’s been growing steadily since and with the new version, we’re aiming pretty high.

About the new version

Goplan 2 is a complete rewrite, both in terms of code as well as vision. It is now fully company centric (even though it fits single users just as well), and while we removed some things that we figured didn’t make sense for the majority of our users (public blog, real-time chat, fine-grained permissions), we added a few things that make it a compelling product.

The new calendar is insanely good, the status updates and per-user activity stream make sense in a team environment, and the new company dashboard makes everything come together. We’re biased, but we’re really happy about how the product has evolved. Here’s a quick glimpse over how it looks:

We’re always excited about a product launch, and this one is special because it’s one of our own products. We really hope you try it out and send us your feedback if you have any. For more information about what’s new on Goplan, check the official blog.

PS: Now that Goplan 2 is out, we’ll get back to posting on this blog more often. Thanks for being a loyal reader, even when posts are lacking.