Last Friday we sat down with Noam from Mint Digital — a long time subscriber of DeskBeers — to find out a bit more about Mint and how DeskBeers fits into their lives. Noam is a Director at Mint, responsible for heading up the Agency side of the business. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
- Name: Noam Sohachevsky
- Company: Mint Digital
- Size: around 20 people (NY & LDN)
- Customer since: late 2013
- Subscription: 12 beers every week (+ extra on special occasions)
Please could you tell us a bit about Mint?
Mint is a hybrid agency and incubator of digital products. We turn ideas and insights into products people love. Mint has a bit of a niche in building products that straddle the physical and digital worlds where the customer is buying a physical thing, but it’s got an intrinsic digital or personalised element to it. Things like Stickygram and Boomf, Foldable Me, Projecteo etc. I feel like most the digital world markets stuff and drives people to stuff rather than make things people actually want to have and hold. Mint is product focused — things we want people to buy.
It’s really about taking the seeds of ideas and turning them into something real, and ultimately things that people love and want to use. It’s all about trying to to it in a way that’s de-risked and builds confidence in ideas. It has a lot of Lean elements to it in terms of being iterative and validating assumptions — building up to that final product that people love rather than assuming what people want.
How does DeskBeers work at Mint?
It tries to encourage people to stop work around five on a Friday and just relax and have more casual conversations. We put it in the calendar as an event so that we didn’t miss it. We just found that we were getting too busy. Half the office would be too busy to stop. Inviting everyone to an event has helped.
There’s a serendipity to it — sometimes everyone stops and it’s a bit of a craic, sometimes not so much. Sometimes it leads on to a couple more beers at the pub. It leads to conversations that you might not have ordinarily had. One thing we’ve done, which is quite nice, is invite potential partners along — somewhere between a meeting and a social thing. It’s been a nice thing to say “Hey, do you fancy joining us for DeskBeers on Friday?” It’s quite casual, they get to meet more Mints… it’s worked quite nicely.
You can follow Mint on Twitter @mintdigital, and Noam is @noamso
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