Weekly Recap #18: Tough decisions.

“Remove Qty hack and instead use line item order options with negative discount adjuster to raise prices.” Wait what? 😐

Once again, I am Harry, we are diesdas.digital and you’re reading our 18th weekly recap. If the intro sentence left you rather confused, not to worry … Lars knows how you’re feeling:

Actually it was me feeling like that for most of the week, Lars was doing fine. But this photo just fit too damn well. Sorry, mate!

As you might have noticed this week we were rather quiet on social media … no snaps, few grams, almost no tweets. The reason being that we had to make some tough decisions and there was heaps of stuff to work through. Which in return meant I didn’t have much spare time to produce inspiring social media content for you to engage with (🙄). Next week will be better, promise!

Make it so!

This week we made the tough decision to entirely switch out the technical foundation on one project, moving to a new framework and pretty much abandoning the work that was done in the past weeks. Specifically, we’re building an online shop for digital products and we hit a dead-end with the shop software we chose initially. Meanwhile we started a new project with Craft Commerce and within a few hours it became very clear that it’s a much more flexible system compared to what we started the other project with. Obviously every solution has their pros and cons, but in this case we are dealing with a rather intricate licensing model and that made things quite complex.

Look, a squirrel! 🐿

Making the decision to basically start over was a little demotivating at first, but after getting over that emotional hurdle everything became crazy productive and within days we built what we made in weeks before, with a solid technical foundation that we can confidently build upon. Hard, but necessary learning: invest time to properly evaluate different technical solutions when starting complex projects. 😁

Those two.

In other news we looked at office space and considered our options to grow our team, but in both cases we ultimately decided that we’re quite happy with the current situation, renting just a few desks, keeping costs low and dealing with the workload ourselves. Sure, we’ve worked with freelancers on specific projects before and we will obviously continue to do that … we might also open up a slot for an internship or bring somebody in for a few days per week … but full-time employment is not on the table right now. A bit sad, but we gotta be realistic about the required commitment from our side and we feel it’s a tad early to go down that route.

Lorenz ipsum.

In general the workload we’re dealing with is pretty optimal right now, working on three bigger projects, two smaller ones and doing a bit of maintenance. The pipeline for the rest of the year is not super full, but I guess that’s okay … most previous and current projects just unexpectedly popped up in our inboxes one day, so fingers crossed that trend continues.

In terms of finances we’re building up a bit of a buffer, paying ourselves reasonable salaries and it’s still kinda nuts we’re doing this and it seems to be working. At least once per week we have to reassure ourselves that all this is actually happening.

KETTENFETT is liquorice liqueur, in case you didn’t know.

We’ve got a few more bits and pieces, so let’s do bullets:

• TYPO Berlin (Europe’s biggest design conference) starts on Thursday and at least Lars and I will be around. Say hi in case you spot us!
• Our lawyer Jan Kuhlen is the best, for an endless list of reasons. If you ever need legal advice, look no further!
• Creative Morning Berlin was on this Friday, with Kathrin Passig, talking about the ups and downs of crowd funding. Solid talk, friendly faces all around and free coffee by electric espresso. What’s not to love? Check out Norman’s photos and Robert’s time lapse!
• Last but not least: I’m going to try a new format for next week’s recap, starting to write it Monday morning and adding paragraphs just as stuff happens, being more in the moment. Kinda like an all-week live ticker that you can only read when everything has already happened. Sounds good? We shall see.

And that’s it already for recap #18. Short one for a short week (although half the team chose to work Thu/Fri). Thanks for following along and see you next week on ALL THE CHANNELS!

Have a nice weekend and don’t forget to catch some sun outside! 🌤 🤖