Week 30: A wild project appears!

We fly to Switzerland, work furiously on current projects and find ourselves in legal drama. This week really had it all. 😅

Welcome to our 30th recap! I am Harry, writing on behalf of diesdas.digital, a new digital studio I founded seven months ago, with my partners in crime Lars, Max and Lorenz. Nicolás recently joined us and from September on we’re gonna be six people working on digital projects: from branding, through interaction design and development, to project maintenance and service design.

Each week we write a new blog post to recap what happened to us, what we’ve been struggling with and how we approached challenges. That, and to post silly photos and make up for the fact that we don’t have a proper website. 🙃

But enough with the opening speech, let’s get this show on the road, shall we? 🏋

“So, we know this operation produces four right triangles around the base image, of which two triangles are just duplicates. We know the length of their hypothenuses, so we can easily calculate the other edges to find the point where their corners touch, right?” throwbackto9thgrade #mathletes

Okay, cool, where to start? How about some legal drama?

Yeah, that sounds exciting: This week we got a phone call out of the blue from a guy claiming to work at another agency, who wanted to get a proposal for our involvement in a project. They had calculated the project for “a fashion brand” to require at least 800h of development + design + UX + copywriting. Uh, what? That’d easily end up in the range of 150k and would therefore be by far the biggest budget we had on any project so far. Sounds too good to be true? Well, that’s because it was. 😅

The guy proceeded to send over an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) before telling us any details about the project, which is pretty standard procedure … I’ve signed those even for tiny freelance jobs. The only problem being that the “NDA” wasn’t an NDA, but a full-fledged project contract containing oppressive clauses regarding the working relationship and the rights to our intellectual property we would retain (pretty much none). Now these clauses aren’t unheard of or particularly uncommon … when negotiating contracts each party naturally tries to get the best deal. However, all that seemed completely over the top at this point in time, because we hadn’t even agreed to work together yet. He assured us that this was standard practice and that we could always renegotiate in case we actually ended up working together later. Umm, yeah. Kinda like signing a marriage contract on your first date, only to renegotiate it all later in case you end up marrying each other. It doesn’t really make sense.

Lars intently reading those emails. So serious.

We consulted with our lawyer and he confirmed our suspicion, recommending not to sign anything of that sort and instead sent us a mutual NDA that both parties could sign to be able to talk about project details. This was meant to be a gesture of good will from our side, to make the process easier, but was angrily refused by the guy, saying he doesn’t understand why we wouldn’t sign his contract and that our NDA was utterly useless, implying that we had simply googled it. All this had been an email thread between me and him so far, but from then on he started cc’ing the others, presumably because he thought I was the troublemaker and he wanted to expose that (much to the amusement of us all). We tried to end the flood of emails with this message at some point, but it kept going and going.

Obviously this didn’t help the situation, but we couldn’t resist.

Anyhow … in the end we didn’t really know what to make of all this. Was he serious about the project offer and just didn’t know better? Was he trying to lure us into signing a contract to gain some kind of advantage? We will probably never know, but it feels damn good to talk to a lawyer who has your back in these kinds of situations; to stop guessing and start knowing. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation or you need legal advice with your company, you better call Jan Kuhlen. By now we consider him to be an integral part of our team, as he helped us tremendously in making difficult decisions and negotiating contracts … after all these situations aren’t all fun and games and can have massive financial repercussions. We often find it important to pause and think about the potential consequences, getting help from Jan when we feel we need guidance. He manages to bring utmost clarity to these muddy situations and we can’t recommend him highly enough! 👏

Goes without saying that we never found out what the project was about.

Change of scenery: somewhere en route to Zürich.

Time for project news!

1. We’re making good progress on our collaboration with TypeMates … the last couple of weeks we had to dedicate some more resources to a more urgent project that spiraled a bit out of control. But now I’m back spending all my time on the TypeMates website and it’s a ton of fun to build a product of that complexity. Side note: Craft CMS is bloody awesome. 👹
2. We finally started work on a joint project with haebmau for one of their clients, which I’m very happy about. After all we’ve been sitting in an office together for the past seven months, so it only makes sense to join forces and take on bigger projects together. So far it’s been going really well, making rapid progress.
3. Shout-out to Jule from imgegenteil, who visited us on Thursday and brought cake, taking this lovely picture afterwards.
4. On Wednesday Lorenz and I flew to Switzerland to visit our client AZ Medien to get to know a few more people from their side, shake hands and discuss a more complex new feature. We’re working in bi-weekly iterations with them, so progress review and a bit of planning was also rolled into that day. It’s always nice to get out of the office and go on a trip, even if it means waking up unusually early and enduring a loooong work day. We had some time to spare, so we spent two hours sitting by the lake in Zürich. Could’ve been worse. 😊

#bliss

New business

Apart from the email train wreck described earlier in this post, we have two more serious new project leads as of this week: one for a bigger company in London and one for a startup here in Berlin. These first-contact situations are always tricky because without knowing each other and only having a rough idea of the project it’s nearly impossible to give a reasonable estimate for timeframe and price. We usually don’t do that and instead push for a workshop or a a few days of working together, to get a better grasp on the challenges and opportunities. Some potential clients shy away from that because a) it means work for them and b) we don’t work for free, so these pre-project preparations are paid.

In both cases though, the respective people totally understood that our intention wasn’t to make a few quick bucks, but rather that it’s an investment to get a more reasonable and accurate understanding of context + scope + costs and on top get to know each other personally. After all, you have to work together for months afterwards, so you better don’t pick a partner based solely on a few emails.

The workshop with one of the companies happened already and we have a good feeling about it, being excited to start working together … we shall see if the feeling is mutual and how they decide. In the other case we will start a few days of working together, culminating in a meeting in London, apparently. Very much looking forward to that as well! 🤘

I can’t even.

And that’s it for this week … as you can probably tell, we’re quite happy with how everything is going; the progress on current projects, as well as the outlook for the rest of the year. We hope you could take something away from this post and obviously we welcome any feedback or questions you might have. If you want to stay in touch, you can add us on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or simply subscribe to this publication. We’d appreciate it! 🤗

Now have a great weekend, take care and get some rest! We sure will! 🐢

Until next week, when we will hopefully have re-assembled all our body parts.