October Monthly Gathering

Overview

Maximizing impact

In our last monthly gathering, we took some time to discuss Whitesmith’s purpose: maximizing impact through work!

As a long-term mission, we want to create a positive impact on our team, partners, clients and community.

Regarding our team, we aim to be impacting their quality of life, their happiness and giving them opportunities of fulfilment by providing an environment to build products and spin-offs.

For our partners and clients, we should be able to influence them to build better products and companies. And last but not least, for our community we should be a positive source of change, setting the example and showing that there are different ways to build companies.

Long-term vs short-term

Optimizing too much for the long-term will lead us to a not-that-good present but on the other hand, optimizing too much for short-term will reduce our potential impact. The key question to build this vision is how can we continuously keep a balance of maximizing for long-term impact while also being relatively happy and lead a life of purpose in the present.

We continuously try to keep this in mind to ensure we make wise decisions, aligning both the short-term with the long-term and ensuring our work provides opportunities to follow each other’s individual purpose.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts about this with us, we will write more about the topic for sure.

Consulting<div id="consulting" class="collapse">

In September we achieved 62k€ of 70k€ billables we wanted to achieve, being our cash-burn currently at ~57k€.

Sales wise, we got 5 qualified deals of the goal of 16. We had 2 closed deals estimated bellow 20k€, and 0 above 20k€ (being our goal closing 1 of these).

For October we traced the goals of achieving 80k€ of billables, 12 qualified deals, and 1 new deal closed won.

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Investment Time<div id="investmenttime" class="collapse">

September was a busy month! So...

Product Cycles

With the end of September, the 2nd round of Product Cycles came to an end. As so, the 2 ongoing Product Cycles, Auto-Tune and Digital Bird, presented their results, their conclusions, lessons learned and wins to all the company. In October we’re starting the 3rd round as we try to capitalize on the lessons learned on the past 2 Cycles, both by the teams and by the ones giving external mentorship to the proto-Products.

Pixels Camp

Added to this, September was marked by Pixels Camp in which 27 of us were participating in the Hackathon, having fun building things and learning new stuff (one of the most explored techs was blockchain). Qoop, one of the projects made by Whitesmithians, even reached 4th place, and it is a general consensus that this year was once again a learning experience for everyone involved. On top of all this, one of the ways of earning badges in the event was by playing an AR Game called Game of Sponsors, built by a Whitesmith team.

What an event it was!

Whitesmith-Explained

More news: we have a new thing going on called Whitesmith-Explained, which aims to make our internal dynamics easier to visualize.

Mirror Conf

We also had a team working on the 2017 Mirror Conf Quiz, doing the coding, hardware and testing, and validating if everything was as expected with the organisation team.

All the code will be open source soon!

SoundyBoard

There was more, like our brand new SoundyBoard that puts Soundy in the palm of your hand - currently available on the App Store.
So, you can see it was a great IT month. </div>

Marketing<div id="marketing" class="collapse">

September goals:

• 2/5 inbound contacts
• 5/6 blog posts
• 1/1 Digital meets Physical

Improving Inbound Marketing

We still need to dedicate more time improving our inbound marketing strategy in order to guarantee the contacts we want. During the last month, we had two events that help us increase our brand awareness and later receiving leads contacts, however, that was not enough.

During September a lot of our team members were super busy making difficult to reach our goal for blog posts. We almost reached it and we have a lot of cool blog posts, so don’t forget to pay us a visit there. In October, taking into account that it’s difficult for us (marketing team) guarantee that all the blog posts are written by our team, we decided that we will just start counting the blog posts written by the hustlers’ team.

Organizing Digital Meets Physical and presence at Pixels Camp

During September we organised a Digital meets Physical and we were present at Pixels Camp.

Digital meets Physical @ Porto edition was a success! We had nice talks from Rui Coutinho and Luís Roque and we also had the biggest audience from all our meetups with more than 30 people.

Our next edition will be in November in Lisbon, so stay tuned!

The numbers of Pixels Camp 2017:

• 27 members of Whitesmith participating in the hackathon;
• Our first AR game: Game of Sponsors and Castle Quest;
• 5 projects in the final pitch;
• 4 teams in the quiz show and one in 2nd place :tada:;
• 2 people coding in the dark.

During October our marketing team will be focused on some consulting projects. So our only goal is to guarantee three blog posts. </div>

See you next month

We would love to know your thoughts about our monthly reports. What else would you like us to cover? Or what can we share that would be helpful for you? Feel free to share any thoughts or questions on twitter!

Check out the posts of the past months: September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January part 1 & 2 November part 1 & 2