The new site we did for friend, startup founder and writer extraordinaire, Jason Baptiste.

The Radiiate team recently did some awesome work on SocialGo's V2 website. Check it out here.

I recently stumbled onto the Second Startup Syndrome article by Ben Horowitz and whilst reading it I realized that I was going through exactly the same thought processes, emotions & ideas as was described in the article.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on getting my original company - radiiate - out of hibernation, since I didn’t want the brand or the initial TLC that went into the company go to waste. My biggest problem though has been to find the time to devote to what can essentially be called a startup all over again, as WooThemes was still taking up the majority of my time, whilst The Rockstar Foundation was also beginning to demand more and more of my mental energy & ideas.

So during the last 6 months I have taken shortcuts. I didn’t trust the same, bootstrapping advice & strategies that I blog about here and didn’t apply the same thinking as we did when building WooThemes so successfully.

In fact, this only recently changed when I came to the realization that I needed to be less idealistic about what I wanted for the company and almost needed to go back to square one if we wanted it to succeed.

The 6 months also didn’t get wasted, because as a team we learned a hell of a lot during this time and if we only learned one thing, it’s that there are models & ideals that we definitely won’t be exploring in future… :)

If there’s one thing that is for sure in the design & development community, it’s the fact that nothing is ever as it seems and every now and again, there will be controversies & unhappiness going around. As a result, I’ve found myself at the center of one of these recent situations.

So herewith follows, an open letter & apology about the cause of this recent, unfortunate situation: TypeFaces.

First off, as leader of the radiiate team, I need to take full responsibility for the whole project, as the idea was mine and I was in charge of the execution thereof. I have no intention of shying away from the public scrutiny that TypeFaces, radiiate & I are under at the moment and I’m content to take all of the flack & criticism that is being directed to our side at present.

Secondly, I’d like to apologize to all of the designers for never asking their consent prior to launching TypeFaces. The project was conceptualized to honour you and it is unfortunate that my own ignorant assumption in this regard, lead me to believe that consent would not be required. Legalities aside (which I - probably,  ignorantly - know nothing about), we should’ve had your blessing irrespective of our good intentions. Sorry for assuming that you’d be cool with it and believing that everyone would regard this is simply a “fun” project that would have no consequence.

Thirdly, to all of the designers featured that I consider friends: sorry for associating you with a project that is receiving bad press. You deserve only respect & admiration and the bad publicity (as it reflects on you) is unwarranted.

Lastly… For me this is a case of learning how not to do things in future. I’m used to not always being liked and have had my share of the odd online controversy in the past; I would however like to believe that every experience has simply allowed me to learn & grow.

There’s a lot more that I *could* say about the project in terms of what inspired it, what our goals / intentions were etc, but I wouldn’t want that to deflect from the sincere apology above (as those things don’t change the fact that I made an ignorant mistake).

Adii

*If you’d like, feel free to read @cobuse’s - one of the radiiate team members - experiences (as a relative newbie) in addition to my letter above.

Ever since WooThemes established itself to such an extent that I could earn enough money from it to make a living thereof, I (Magnus & Mark made similar decisions with regards to their freelance activities) decided to call it a day for doing client work (which is why more than a year later, radiiate - a boutique web design agency before - is only making a comeback now).

As a result, we have a pretty strict “no custom design or development work” policy at WooThemes, since we choose to rather focus our attention on internal projects / ventures / activities that furthers & growths the business / brand. Yet, we still get a bucketload of e-mails from people (I’d assumed they’re fans of our work) requesting a custom quote for a designing / developing a site with X, Y & Z specifications. The answer is always the same however: “Sorry, but we don’t do custom design & development work.”

Considering the sheer amount of requests we get for client work though, has lead me to at least re-think our approach & more important our mindset in this regard. I mean - are we just ignoring the cash that is being put on the table right in front of us?

So I’ve gone back and forth about how we could potentially handle this situation (which is an obvious contradiction to our decision of not doing client work) and maybe maximize the potential profit or value from the opportunities that are presented. I’ve also decided that I need to take emotion out of it and I can’t thus justify my decision (not to engage client work) on the fact that I don’t like to work with clients, since that is completely subjective and based on bad experiences (neither of which makes for a good basis in making the *right* business decision).

In the end (i.e. after this epic conversation I had in my own head), I decided that this quote by David Heinemeier Hansson (from this video) summed up how I felt:

“If you’re not working on your best idea right now, you’re doing it wrong.”

What I’m saying is WooThemes’ best “idea” at this stage is to ignore the short term benefits (profits) of doing client work, as it is more profitable & sustainable to focus on building great products which would pave the way for the company in the longer term. I’m also 99,9% sure that if I actually did an extended financial analysis of this, it’d show that the ROI that client work would deliver in the short term is far outweighed by the magnitude of continuing to build our products and brand.

So that’s our decision in this regard. I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible to actually make this model work whereby internal projects / products are used for marketing (more on this in a future post) and to thus generate leads for client work. I am however saying that this is not a road that WooThemes are exploring at the moment…