Hi Friends,

Karl here. I’m runnin’ this studio product thing a little differently than you might expect. partly that is because I’m like teetering on the edge of financial disaster but also maybe not? ¯\(ツ)/¯ . The other part is that I want to run, improve, and maintain the studio thingy the same way I do the clients of the studio. Wanna give more transparency to the whole process. Let’s get into it.

The News:

Yesterday, Capsule’s first customer ponied up the dough and bought into our crazy plan. Which is incredibly exciting. I can’t wait to get started. Since launching the studio idea thing last Friday I’ve received an outpouring of love, lots of attention, and a thumbs up or two. Honestly I should have done this sooner. But inevitably there is a feeling of trepidation when embarking on a new venture. A sense of self doubt that you can do it, or whatever. I never felt that with the idea behind Capsule for a number of reasons, but the greatest is that I have confidence in myself that I can do it.

Anyways, as with any new customer-client relationship, the early days are incredibly important. Acclimating to the team, client, and project quickly is important to begin deepening your understanding of their problems, in order to find solutions to them. So, outside the initial meet and greet meeting, I’m organizing a comprehensive checklist (simply a short list) to cover the basics and advanced stuff I gotta know to deliver.

  • Where the code at?
  • What’s the project?
  • Define the strategic goals of this project.
  • What do you hope I can provide?

These seem pretty straightforward to me. But looks can be deceiving. The purpose of these questions is probe into the expectations and intentions of the client. Good communication is absolutely important to achieve a consensus of thoughts, patterns, and ideas. Doing that requires a lot of back and forth, critically thinking about what someone asks for, and what they really want. There is always a gap between the message transmitted by someone, and what is received. We all have our own understanding of the world, and it’s different from everyone else. Reaching that consensus, or at least a good foundation to that consensus, is what the first days of a contract are all about.

The ongoing project is compelling and fits the subscription model very well. But on to some other news.

An open source sponsorship.

The other day a great fellow asked me if It would be alright to sponsor my open source work, I of course said hell yeah! So for the next year I have an open source sponsorship, Payment and some money put behind me to push forward the projects that I’m focused on. Those projects are currently Camping, an MVC micro ruby web framework, and KonaScript, An experiment at replacing javascript on the web. My primary focus will be on Camping though.

This is great news. I’ve long known that financial investment is necessary to move open source projects forward, truly, and that we all ought to be more generous about how we donate to such causes. If ya’ll would like to support some open source work, then please do so. I suggest sponsoring Marco Roth, Joel Drapper, or Ruby Central.

What’s next

I’ll continue to improve the offering at Capsule, deepen connections with folks that are in our industry and looking for work or providing employment, and iterate on the fit, polish, and marketing of the studio. Soon I’ll be writing a case study about the current design ethos of capsule.graphics, and what inspired it’s design. Tell then, Cheers. Have a wonderful day.

-kow