#41: Steady

via The Globe and Mail

How’s wuruwuru doing? Slow and steady.

The team works! I feel like everyone gets it now — clear communication, kindness, integrity, transparency, quality etc. We’ve gotten pretty close-knit since March and we have a better relationship with the artists as well.

Ongoing projects are in flow again and we’re back to sharing regular updates on Basecamp. We’re making a new website that better explains what the studio’s up to. We contracted a researcher to clean up our databases and documentation. We even started writing and now have a small backlog of essays to share.

We’ve also built a lot of capacity and can do other things asides from flagship projects. We completed a landing page for Swaptime (a community for exchanging services), helped Smiles Autos (an auto shop) set up a no-code operations dashboard, and we’re currently rounding up a website/forum for The Writers Room. Everyone is also taking one course or the other to improve specific skills.

The last three months have been productive and everything seems to be moving forward again, but I still think we’re slow 😅, and for a few reasons.

First, I don’t spend enough time with the studio. Secondly, we’re fully remote and having only worked together a few months, we still need a lot of practice. Finally, we work with independent artists who control their own schedules and don’t always have the best work ethic.

Given the conditions, we’re doing okay. We’re not stressed out and we spend more time learning than doing, which is important at this stage. There’s also so much life stuff happening across the team that it helps to have some space to breathe.

And we’ll keep getting better anyway.

We’re making a new website that should go live later this month. This version better explains the work we’re doing at the studio and makes it more accessible (esp the databases and creator profiles). Tomi & Nifemi are helping code the website and implement a CMS (Astro) to manage data easily. .

We’ve been helping Nicole set up a website/forum for The Writers Room. It’s been a really interesting learning experience for the team (Design, Wix, SEO, etc) but most importantly, we now have a community of 3000+ people to ask for writing advice.

We started redrawing the background images for Hanky Panky but still have a lot of work to do. We want the animation to be more detailed, gritty and representative of Lagos traffic but the first couple of images are a little off the mark. We’re hiring background artists to move faster. We’ve also been experimenting with film music and we’re due to wrap that up in a few weeks.

After six months, we finally have 10 stories for Feel Good! We originally wanted 12 stories for the anthology, but two of them are unlikely to come in before we’re ready to publish. The plan is to finish editing the stories in June, build the website in July and start publishing the stories in August.