Weekly Recap #6: “Turning it to the Max!”
Yo, this is Harry from diesdas.digital … welcome to our sixth weekly recap! Thanks go out to everyone giving us feedback and thinking of us when a project comes across. You’re the best and make all this worthwhile (and possible)!
Today we’re gonna start with significant news for our little company:
We’re four people now! Max Mussehl is finally joining us full-time! 🎉
I couldn’t be happier to finally reveal that Max has been part of this company all along the way. Ever since we first started making plans in August 2014, then abandoning the idea for about a year, just to pick things up in summer 2015, Max has been an integral part of all this and I couldn’t imagine the company without him. We used to work together at Edenspiekermann and ever since I left, I missed working with this guy. When we started diesdas.digital we decided to kickstart things in January with just three people, to minimize risk and keep the costs lower … but now that we’re pretty busy working on projects and there’s a full pipeline, he’s joining us full-time somewhen in March.
Everyday office life
When Max finally climbs aboard, he won’t be sitting around twiddling his thumbs, that’s for sure. New projects keep rolling in, we’re wrapping up earlier things and overall we’re moving at a good pace, getting stuff done. We’re thinking about renting an office, maybe getting an intern and are quite busy overall, without working long hours. Things are great!
Except when they aren’t.
What I was describing above is how I feel 75% of the time. Most nights I go to bed, looking forward to the next day because things are progressing well. But then there are other days as well, when you look at the bank account and realize that clients take looooong to pay and that it becomes increasingly unlikely that we’ll have any kind of salary for January. When the paperwork is overwhelming, and everything moves so damn slow. When meetings fill the days and we’re behind schedule with the actual work. When I feel like it’s impossible to get into the zone to write code. When little things like buying a printer eat up so much precious time. When you start thinking about efficiency and that these little projects would need to be finished much more quickly to make sense financially. Then you feel the pressure. Oh well.
I guess these feelings are normal. We’re in a situation we’ve never been in before, running a company that is supposed to pay the bills for several people and that’s scary sometimes. Most days are fun, doing stuff we like and getting paid for that. It’s definitely looking bright and especially with Max joining we’ll be able to tackle much more at once. So things could hardly be better … but sometimes you zoom in on some negative aspects too much and it gets to you. We’re all human after all. 👽
So, if you consider starting a company, here’s a quick list with some early insights from us:
- Everything is twice as expensive as you think
- Everything takes thrice as long as you think
- The paperwork is magnitudes more annoying compared to your personal adventures
- Make a business plan, even if it’s super rough, see if the numbers check out
- Activate and grow your network early; every single one of our projects came in by recommendation
- It takes time until you’re up and running, so prepare to not have money flowing in for a while (this obviously depends on your type of business)
- The type of company you choose has major implications on everything that follows (e.g. GbR, UG, GmbH, GmbH & Co. KG, e.V., … in Germany)
- Don’t try to save money on a lawyer or tax accountant, make sure you understand every step of the way (especially your company contract)
- You gotta fight for “zone time”, as meetings and management issues tend to fill the majority of your day
- It’s all completely worth it! 🤓
We might expand this list into a blog post or talk of its own at some point, providing more context for each point, but for now enough with the sobbing! Topic change!
Recap statistics
Below you see Medium’s statistics for all our posts combined over the past 28 days (we started posting them to Medium about a month ago). Overall we’re super happy with the feedback we’re getting and quite a few people from our peer group seem to be reading what we’re writing. So as long as that’s the case, we’ll keep making them. 👍
And finally, a book recommendation:
Thomas Levenson: The Hunt for Vulcan: How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe
This week gravitational waves were detected for the very first time and that’s a big deal.
Coincidentally I got this book for Christmas, not quite sure what to expect. But it turned out to be a fascinating, exciting journey through the centuries, following major scientific discoveries.
Levenson starts with Newton publishing his groundbreaking “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”, which is a set of theories explaining the world around us, especially almost perfectly capturing all kinds of movements big and small, from falling Apples, to the arc of a thrown object, and the planets revolving around the sun. However, there was one exception: the orbit of Mercury showed weird ripples that couldn’t be explained by Newton’s calculations. This prompted scientists to look for the cause and explain the anomaly within the framework of Newton’s concepts, ultimately drawing the conclusion that there had to be another planet between Mercury and the sun, influencing Mercury’s path: Vulcan 🖖. After all, Neptune had just been found the same way, so the thought wasn’t too crazy. So astronomers looked for Vulcan for decades, pointing their telescopes to the sun, even resulting in phantom sightings, but ultimately Vulcan’s existence could never be proven and Mercury’s orbit remained a mystery. The book chronicles the search, zooms in on Newton, Le Verrier, LaPlace and finally Einstein presenting his concept of space time and general relativity, shattering the need for Vulcan to explain Mercury’s orbit and presenting a whole new way of looking at gravity. It’s an utterly fascinating read, showing how scientific progress actually happens, how theories evolve, gain a following and vanish when new concepts pop up. Levenson also manages to explain Einstein’s concepts in simple, clear words, so you can actually understand the core ideas. Highly recommended, as gripping as any work of fiction! I couldn’t put it down! 👌
And that’s it for today, have a nice weekend everyone! I’m gonna play Firewatch now! 🤖
