It being christmas, the office has been a little slow. Planning the future seems to be on everyone’s mind these days – future being the year of 2010, now desperately close. Time doesn’t necessarily slow down (it just bends slightly).

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.

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.

This is cross-posted with my personal blog, which is why it is often written in the first person. Given how readers of this blog might benefit from these thoughts as well, we decided it’d be a good fit to post it up here for you to read. Enjoy!

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!

Everyone is talking about the Microsoft + Yahoo search deal – it’s all over the news. There’s something lying beneath the economics of the whole thing that bothers me in particular, however. Something Jason Calacanis highlighted in his latest newsletter/post – how Yahoo lost the fight when they stopped innovating.

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.