A Year of Ways We Work and How It All Started
Originally published on March 17th, 2015
A year ago today the first interview was published on Ways We Work. When I first had the idea for the site a year ago I couldn’t have imagined everything that would follow. As I continue to ponder what’s next for this little project I can’t help but reflect on the last year and look at how it all started.
Where it all started
About a year ago the idea for Ways We Work popped into my mind. Like any other idea I’d had in the past this one kind of hung out for a bit and I’d think about it every now and then. I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this. Ideas float in an out and usually come and go. This particular idea wasn’t going away and for me, that was a new feeling. Everyday I’d come across something that would remind me of it and think “I gotta do this”, and “I could actually do this”.
The idea came from a somewhat selfish desire to learn for myself how others in my industry were doing things. There was no clear path to the idea, I picture it more like the spokes of a wheel with the idea in the middle. I was working as a community manager and developer fresh out of University where my role didn’t exist in the company before. This was exciting of course but I also didn’t know anyone (at the time) doing the kind of job I was doing. I was a newly graduated student playing the role of an expert.
There is tons of great information online on what tools to use, strategies, templates the list goes on, and on, and on. Where I struggled was deciding which ones were worth trying? With a small team and tight timelines you need to make your efforts count. All I wanted was to talk to someone in a similar role and find out what tools they’d tried. Why they found certain ones didn’t work, different strategies they’d tried etc. That was the first spoke of the wheel. From there I thought it’d also be interesting to know what methods and tools people outside my industry were using too.
While discussing these thoughts out loud with my partner he showed me The Setup. A wicked site where a new person each week outlines the hardware, software and other tools they use in their work. I loved this, but I wanted more. I wanted to know HOW these people landed on using these tools, why not other ones? Where did they struggle in their work? What was their process for discovering new tools, strategies, and methods? This was another spoke of the wheel — a big one. This site inspired the first version of Ways We Work, it showed me that this could be done in a simple and straightforward way. A set of questions and a couple of photos.
I can’t explain where my love of process comes from, but I am obsessed with it. I find it so much more compelling than any final product and this was a big, big part of what inspired Ways We Work.
Sharing process and transparency
If you look around it’s clear that I’m not unique in this fascination. Collaboration and sharing process is already huge in the tech community and it’s beginning to be a big part of the design community as well. Transparency within companies is becoming a huge focus and spreading like wildfire. My favourite, most recent example of this is the popular podcast Startup. Alex Blumberg from This American Life decides to venture out on his own to create his own startup — a podcasting company. He podcasts his way through every step. Awkward pitches to investors, the complexities of bringing on a business partner, conversations with his wife and pretty much every failure throughout the journey. It’s fantastic.
Buffer is another one of my favourite examples. They share literally everything about their company on their Buffer Open blog. From new hires, to how they hire team members, to exactly how much they spent on their most recent company retreat and all of their revenue statistics. To add to this they also write Buffer Blog an amazing resource for learning content marketing or just how to market yourself or your business online period.
I’m constantly inspired by other people and projects and these are just a few of the main ones that stick out in my mind.
As this project has evolved it’s become more and more important to me to highlight challenges. Everywhere you look it’s easy to find perfectly polished identities, success stories and achievements. How did they get there? I think we need more of the honest stories, the things that didn’t go right, the challenges, the failures — and then how those were overcome. Success is the goal but the journey is the real story. That’s what people connect to.
So that’s where the idea came from — but how did I get started?
Idea to real-life thing
I’m a planner. I want everything figured out before I even begin but somehow I was able to let go of this for a bit when I started Ways We Work. I did a little research but mostly I just asked myself what I’d want to ask people. I made the decision early on to ask everyone the same questions. One it was easy, but two I loved the idea of being able to compare people’s answers side by side. Across different industries and even similar ones. Once I had the questions I started emailing people about it. I sent out a few tweets about the idea to try and see if people would be interested, and it kind of went from there.
I did have a few interviews ready to go before launching the site. I wanted to make sure I had enough to publish every week for the next little while. I picked a super minimal Wordpress theme that was pretty similar to The Setup and posted the first interview on March 19th, 2014. 84 people visited the site that day. Almost all from Canada with a few from the US (thanks Google Analytics). The next day? 19 people. Nothing crazy.
Early on, talking to people about the project and sharing interviews on Twitter was where the majority of traffic came from. It was modest traffic for awhile. I was focused on getting interviews every week and not so much on promoting the site.
In March 2014, 433 people visited the site. April was 451. May picked up a bit with 910 but for the next few months it hung out around 900 people a month. Which I was cool with, it was a fun side project and I was enjoying it.
Then other people started taking an interest in it. People were really enjoying the interviews and more and more people were asking me where I was going to take it. I couldn’t answer them, I had no idea.
Growing Ways We Work
So finally I decided to double down and give it much more attention. I wanted to re-design the site and give interview content a much more visual focus. I also wanted a place to add other content where I could share the process behind the site and other things. So I did it. I did a bunch of research on editorial website design and started drawing out some layouts. Next I got into Photoshop to get some designs going. I wrote a full post on the process of redesigning and developing the new site if you want to read the whole thing here. I reached out to my friends at HIM and HER because they’d been supportive of Ways We Work and I admired a lot of their design work. I worked with them to design a new logo, which you can read more about here.
On the day of launching the new site there was 345 visitors, the most for any single day so far. I was so excited that people were engaged enough to go and see the new site and that most people loved it and wanted to share it. People are awesome. For the whole month of November there was 1200 visitors. A good 300 more than average. Then it started growing from there. I also wrote a post on how design doubled the traffic to Ways We Work which you can read more about here.
I was proud of the new site so I pushed myself to take it even further. I emailed companies that were mentioned in some of the interviews to share them with their teams and that was really effective. A couple of teams reached out wanting to know how they could tell their stories on the site and that’s happening more and more now.
What were the challenges?
Early on the main challenge was getting people to do the interviews, I leaned on friends and colleagues and for awhile it was fine. There was one week however, where I had no one and I just wouldn’t be able to publish an interview — luckily my good friend Gill wrote a great one and saved the week (you can read hers here). After that I had a few close calls but the site had gained some local interest so it wasn’t too difficult getting people on to do an interview. I’ve found the sweet spot for getting interviews back from people is two weeks, some people take longer, some a lot less but if you give people two weeks it’s generally a safe bet!
For the first version of the site I was using Wordpress. A few months in I decided to try a new theme and wanted to experiment with a new blogging platform Ghost. Something went wrong during the switch and I almost lost everything that I had on the site. Luckily I was able to revert back to Wordpress and export all the interviews and photos. That was a great lesson in always having a back up somewhere (one I definitely knew but was dumb and ignored).
Building traffic was hard in the first six months. I didn’t know much about that other than leveraging social media. The best short term gains were through Twitter and Reddit, a lot of traffic still comes from Twitter naturally. Redesigning the site really, really boosted traffic and I can only assume this is because the design gives the site a great feel and people want to share it more. Submitting it to design award sites was one of the smartest decisions I made, particularly to Awwwards. I was so proud that they chose to feature the site and it received Honourable Mention as well. The best part was that it brought hundreds of people to the Ways We Work site everyday.
Currently my challenges are continuing to get amazing interviews with people other people want to hear from. Getting the word out about the job board is a new challenge and getting teams to see the value of posting on Ways We Work. Mostly though I spend a lot of time thinking about where to grow from here. The project has attracted a lot of interest from companies, teams, and individuals and brought opportunties I never expected. It’s really important to me that I only spend the time and energy on the ones that truly fit and feel right.
So what’s happened in a year of Ways We Work?
There’s been 50 interviews with people from all across Canada and the US. Designers, developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, CEOs, writers, musicians, educators, hospitality professionals and more. I’ve had the chance to connect with some of the people I admire the most and been introduced to some incredible people I might otherwise have never met. I’ve had the opportunity to show an international audience some of the amazing people, companies and ideas that come from Waterloo and highlight people from so many diverse industries.
In February, 6000 people from over 100 countries read the site and that’s blowing my mind a little bit.
So what now?
I’m focused on finding more passionate people from even more diverse industries. I’m so curious about what people in fields so vastly different from mine are doing and the challenges they face in their work. Anyone with an insane amount of passion for their craft is interesting to me.
Job Board
I’ve also built a new job board on Ways We Work. I had a few people suggest it as part of the site and came to realize that it fits naturally with the content of the site. The goal is to have all kinds of companies and cool opportunities on there but I’m working towards building the interviews into the job postings. How great would it be to read an interview from someone who’s already working in the company you’re applying for? I think this is something that can set this job board apart from others and I hope people will find a lot of value in it.
Teams
A lot of great work is done in teams. I’m currently working on a project with my friend Matt Quinn that will showcase some amazing teams and the work they’re doing on Ways We Work. If this is something that interests you — get in touch!
A year ago this was a just a little passion project, so I can’t even express how fulfilling it has been to see it grow into what it is now. Thank you for reading the interviews, for Tweeting them and sharing them with others. Thank you to everyone who has supported me on this project and continues to do so. I can’t wait to take Ways We Work even further.
Thank you,
Amanda
Originally published at wayswework.io.
