Adjusting strategy to a changing market
How Deep Work is positioned, how we can adapt, and collaborate more
Hello everyone!
Today I want to share with you my view on our current market environment and provide some more clarity on how we can navigate it.
I will also share progress on internal community projects and opportunities to collaborate with others at Deep Work.
More founders are changing their narrative
Perhaps the most delightful observation I recently made from conversations with founders (who have been in the space for a while) is an increased interest in making an impact instead of seeking short-term financial gains. While the connection between impact measurement and stakeholder- and user research has yet to make it into business strategy, there is more curiosity about what part of a project creates value for users.
I have yet to catch up with macro trends, but the synthesis comes from comparing public narratives and conversations with founders in the last months to my average conversation with prospects last year.
Current prospects are trying to attract funding
Based on my conversations, the startups that fall into the category above are currently reducing their cash burn. Internally by decreasing their team size, and when reaching out for design work, the requests to us are mostly small - i.e. landing pages, pitch decks, and grant proposals.
I assume that Deep Work’s lack of design-focused marketing channels has kept us in a low-funding environment, where strategies for spending money on services are more careful and rely on building trust first.
This deliberate compromise meant that we could build our reputation in the web3 community while staying authentic to our values.
It also helped us validate the hypothesis that it’s possible to build an organization with the individual freedom of an online community and the profitability of a business.
Moving to a bigger market and building rapport
The decision to re-design our website (work-in-progress and conversation here) stems from the assumption that we can leverage online traffic to interface with the broader ecosystem of teams who already have a design budget and are shopping for a service provider. Interacting with investors and their teams to establish a connection as a trusted partner should also reinforce referral channels.
Recently, we also noticed that the small projects I mentioned above could expand into more extensive projects with founders we like. Landing pages, pitch decks, grant proposals, user research, and workshops provide immediate low-cost value to teams, build trust in our brand, and surface the areas where Deep Work can add more value in the future.
I suggest documenting small projects
We have weak evidence that small projects led to more work in the past (DM me for details), but to be certain we should start documenting more of these smaller projects as part of Deep Work if we see them fit. So far we only kept track of bigger projects and everything else was “delegated to freelancers“.
If you work with teams 1:1 on something that can evolve into more collaborative projects with others at Deep Work, please save them in Deep Teams for visibility.
The granularity of detail on the project is up to you, but the information should help us interpret what works in the long run, and also what you are personally interested in.
That way we can analyze what can be improved, document our learnings, and decide what we want to keep building more complex project workflows on. And who among our experts to forward projects to.
Updating the community onboarding process
Lastly, welcome if you recently joined our Discord server, and thank you if you provided feedback on the onboarding experience.
The current process is quite clunky, so I’ll work on reducing friction in making connections with existing community members, increasing collaboration, and minimizing “dead ends“.
I will also try to increase the number of internal design projects. Here are a few open design-related projects:
Website redesign (budget TBD)
MetaCamp Website + Playbook (budget TBD)
And non-design projects:
I’m also in the process of onboarding other founders who work on something interesting, have a large community or audience, and can benefit from design/user research support. This process is a bit slower but I will probably have updates in the next newsletter in two weeks.
I really appreciate your patience, advice, and kindness.
Much love,
Andrej