Weekly Recap #11: “Singing, Schnapps & Schrippen!”
Hey everyone, this is Harry from diesdas.digital and you’re reading our 11th recap. I’ll spare you the inevitable Spinal Tap reference and get started right away. Here we go!
Welcome Max!
This week Max finally joined us full-time and in the office. As stated earlier he had been part of this adventure all along — from the very first plans made in 2014. Now, roughly 1.5 years later, we’re finally sitting around one desk, working on our own projects with our own company. Some paperwork is still left to be done to make him an equal partner, but in the meantime we couldn’t be more excited.
It’s remarkable how much easier it is to handle the workload with four people compared to three, especially when it comes to meetings, project management and distribution of work. With three people everyone had to be involved in everything and I’m glad these days are finally over. It’s been great so far, but now it’s gonna get even better. 👏
And even though we’re all happy and excited … having more people also means more costs, so the pressure is definitely increasing now. Sure, theoretically we can sell more work as well, but that’s assuming the best case scenario with equal amounts of work for everyone at all times, projects progressing smoothly, clients paying immediately … reality sadly doesn’t work like that and you end up chasing lots of loose ends before you see any money.
When running your own company and bearing all the financial risk yourself, you definitely start thinking differently about efficiency. In my case that means more specific goals for each day, getting more stuff done and a lot of thoughts along these lines:
“How can we be more efficient?”
“Is this the best use of my time right now?”
“What are the goals for today? This week? What can we wrap up?”
“Is there a simpler, more pragmatic solution to this problem?”
“Let’s timebox this task, make a decision and then move on!”
It’s a totally different mindset, compared to being employed. More pragmatic, more efficient, less explorative and also less patient. This week I sometimes forgot that we’re also here to have fun and might have put too much pressure on myself and others. Oh well … learning new stuff every day.
And while we’re talking about money …
Last week we decided on a software to do most of the book keeping ourselves — it’s called Lexoffice. Not too fancy, your standard bootstrap web app basically. However, it does what it’s supposed to do and is reasonably fast and easy to use. We do have a tax accountant as well, but we felt uncomfortable not having a comprehensive grasp of our finances and so Lars spent most of the week transferring data from Google Sheets and Harvest into Lexoffice.
His week went like this:
😗 Monday
😐 Tuesday
😑 Wednesday
😔 Thursday
😖 Friday
As always new software isn’t just a positive thing, but rather solves two problems and then creates four new ones in the process. So Lars spent most of the time on the phone, talking to the Lexoffice support and our bank, making it all work. Now most data is in the system and it works well, hopefully saving us time, money and worries going forward.
Even Lorenz’s mood was affected, stating “I dreamed of book keeping and endless rows of numbers”.
Social Media
Last week I set a goal for myself to be more active with our social media channels, with at least one tweet, instagram and snap per day. In case you didn’t realize, that’s a SMART objective which does help with actually achieving it (instead of a vague goal like “we should be more active on social media”).
Especially Snapchat has been great fun, with Fabu and Vinni sending us absurd snaps every day. Keep it coming, guys!
In case you’re not following us yet and you wanna get stuff like the above picture delivered to your screens daily: Here’s our Twitter account (mostly spreading links we find interesting), our Instagram with lots of impressions from our everyday work and Snapchat for the raw, direct, unabridged stuff.
Singing, Schnapps and Schrippen!
Last, but not least: Lorenz and Lars joined the Berliner Liedertafel and went to their gathering on Thursday. They ended up being by far the youngest, with 80+ year olds around as well. There was singing, Schrippen and schnapps — apparently they had a fantastic time and were very much welcome.
Lorenz got a little sentimental afterwards, stating that there’s so much to learn from people outside of our tech bubble, that we need to get out of it more often and how self-obsessed most people working in this industry are.
Nothing to add there. Take care and see you next week! 🤖
