[Progress Report] July
Clarity over sales pipeline, good feedback on public education efforts, and a new IRL experiment.
Hey friends, today’s call was a brief catch-up after a month of interesting insights. There’s a lot more clarity than last month, you can watch the recording of our meeting here, but checking out the notes below will likely be clearer.
If you’re interested in shorter, more frequent updates, you can join our internal Telegram chat.
I have also started a series of Experience Mapping sessions (more details below), the next one taking place August 5th, 10am CET. If you’re working on a technical project or have an idea you’d like to vibecode, join our jam and co-create a delightful user experience.
And Lastly, I received more positive feedback on the Skill Mapping exercise that helped my friends uncover their unique skills and blindspots. If you decide to do it, please let me know how it works for you, I’m always curious to hear about your experience with it!
Total Treasury Balance: $2,544.21
Our goal for July was to follow up with the conversations after my conference trips, increase clarity in our offering and find more opportunities for workshops. It turned out more interesting than I expected.
Client Pipeline & Business Development
Client Pipeline Built Out: We're currently in the proposal stage with multiple potential collaborations. The biggest insight I have so far is that every conversation beyond the introduction call feels like jamming with friends - good sign.
This is the result of refining our process to make sure we optimise for clients with aligned values, consistently provide value, and set ourselves up for meaningful and enjoyable collaboration. We refined our interview guide for focused questions at initial calls, created a short deck with case studies (WIP), and an alignment session for proposal co-creation.
Alignment Session Success: Thanks to Bence’s and Balint’s comments, the recent alignment session went exceptionally well. The process helped us reveal that the initial request (a website to reflect the current project) had a deeper underlying need that is consistent with my observations across the web3 space - to work on strategic validation of the current direction and articulation of the customer-facing value. In past articles I mentioned that without this validation and focused experimentation, web3 projects will not survive market changes beyond speculation.
The conversation with the team is particularly delightful because the project has a strong track record and we’re excited to help them bring out the best in their project.
Content & Public Education Updates
Experience Mapping Sessions: After writing up a one-pager with a few exericses on user journey mapping and putting technical infrastructure in the context of delightful UX, I facilitated the group session with three project teams. The feedback was very positive, it helped them get a different perspective and test their ideas with other experts in web3.
The next session will be on August 5th, 10am CET and you can join it here or invite someone you know who is interested in a creating a user-facing experience. I will most likely repeat them every 2-4 weeks.
Weekly Writing Sessions: To maintain consistency and accountability, I have scheduled weekly writing sessions. As you can see in the BD diagram above, conferences and newsletters are our strongest channel to interact with our audience, so I will double down on creating value across both, as they are also enjoyable and nudge me to grow personally. Thank you for reading the newsletter, liking, commenting, DMing me feedback and hanging out with me/us IRL!
Sarah, Colin and I will start writing together and see if it helps increase the quality while reducing the time/effort. If you’re interested in joining, let me know.
Innovation & Experimentation
Sanctuary Experiment - Sicily Retreat: Over the last two weeks I hosted a 10-day experiment in Sicily, combining the design sprint process to define a tangible use case for the Bonfires project with a decompressing retreat model. This hybrid approach brought together technical infrastructure development with experience design, prototyping, user testing, and a healthy lifestyle.
Key insights:
Tremendous learning potential from people interacting with new technology in physical spaces
Particularly valuable for Web3 technologies involving relationships, trust, and interpersonal communication
All five participants expressed strong interest in iterating and improving the format
Successfully blended focused online workshops with in-person collaboration
Created cross-functional collaboration between physical user research, technical research, and spatial collaboration
The costs per person were very low while the quality and perceived value was very high for all participants
I am still processing the feedback and will publish a report soon.
Bigger Software Project: Several recent conversations with friends are moving towards larger software project collaboration. We don’t exactly know what it will look like yet, but the involved skills and motivations seem promising. I will schedule a co-creation session to decide on goals/objectives, map out user journeys, identify what components we already have from previous experiments (Deep Skills, Deep Teams), and designing a starting point that could validate a new type of ecosystem or product.
Website Updates
Website Enhancement: I’m adding team member profiles and portfolio links to our website. Please send me your profile picture, 1-2 skills and a link to your website if you would like to appear on our website.
This approach allows potential clients to directly reach out to our team members through their portfolio links, which provides more transparency and removes friction while providing more opportunities for collaboration.
A lot of movements seem to be converging, so now it’s a good time to remember to stay focused on what works and avoid shiny distractions.
Wishing you a great weekend and see you next time!
Andrej