Week 301

In our now regular Monday morning retrospective, we agreed that we’d spread ourselves a bit thin the previous week. Although we’d made incremental progress on a number of fronts, it felt as if we’d lost momentum on the Video project; significantly we didn’t manage to invite some “alpha” users as we’d hoped.

Video Project

To this end, we decided to focus on reaching this milestone in the first half of the week and postpone as much other stuff as possible to later in the week. I’m pleased to say that we succeeded in this aim and sent a batch of invitations out on Wednesday afternoon. Yay!

We began the Video project partly because we had a hunch that it wouldn’t be too hard to build by gluing existing services together, but also just as something technical we could work on together. I feel as if the project has already been a success on both these fronts.

While we have given some thought to commercialising the service, this has never been our focus. When we got to the point of inviting people and we had to write some copy about the service for the first time, I definitely realised that I was a bit confused about what kind of audience we’re aiming at.

That being said, I’m still convinced there is something in what we’re doing and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. Anyway, let us know if you’d like to try it out for yourself.

GFR and Office Admin

We spent rest of the week catching up with other stuff. In particular, Chris waded bravely through the annual accounts which our accountant had sent through. We always feel very conflicted about how much time to spend on this.

We use FreeAgent to do our book-keeping and we pay an accountant to generate the annual accounts based on the figures from there. We could just accept the accounts as they stand, but since as directors we’re legally responsible for the accounts, we always feel we ought to understand all the figures.

Unfortunately it seems as if it’s always really hard to match up the figures in FreeAgent with those in the annual accounts. I’m curious whether this is a problem that other small companies have run into and whether anyone has found a better solution.

Our business development efforts continued this week and it felt as if a few possibilities of client work started to solidify. We’ve also started to think more seriously about what we’re going to do when the office lease expires early next year, but that’s a bit trickier given the crazy prices being charged for office space in Shoreditch.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

– James