We’ve been incredibly busy these past two months and they’ve flown by like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Time is definitely not slowing up and as a business our constant challenge is to make sure that we’re optimizing every single moment together so that we can collectively build our future.

What we’ve been doing is very simple and it’s compartmentalized into two buckets of effort: Optimization and Growth.

The first has required us to take a serious look at what we’ve been doing and judiciously kill all energy into things that won’t help us reach our core objectives. This has meant that we shed (or sell) parts of our business that are actually profitable – we are making significant changes and there are risks involved but it’s necessary to move these things now before we get bogged down even further.

The second has required us to start looking at our growth patterns and projecting what the future looks like from a financial perspective, considering all options for growth opportunities. This includes conversation about Angel investments and venture capital as well as changing our internal financial modeling so that we can do two things in sequential order: Survive and thrive.

Our stakeholders and customers demand it – and we want to be around for a very long time. We have so much more to give you, our faithful publishers, and we can’t wait to show you some of what’s been going on behind the scenes. Sure, we joked about going IPO but we think the infrastructure and products that we’re building could lead us down that path.

And it’ll be so sweet to reject that particularly opportunity when it comes.

Keep dreaming. Do work.

Every year I try to set the team up with a local talent to get some new team and mug shots so that we can at least look like we know what we’re doing – which isn’t much since that’s somewhat the definition of a “startup,” but we’ll take anything we can get.

(We do know this: We’re insanely passionate about online publishing. Just a FYI. And we’re having a heck of a lot of fun.)

Kevin Geary, a local photographer allowed us to hang out with him a week or so ago and rocked some creative shots in his Dojo-conversion studio – which worked out really well!

Kevin’s the real deal with some sweet talent to boot – if you need some local professional photography done then hit him up and tell him 8BIT sent you. Seriously.

Check out some of these somewhat-randomly chosen images:

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In addition to setting up our Quarterly Release Cycles, we’ve been taking a hard look at how we do work in our day-to-day workflow and the tools that we use.

Oftentimes, I think companies develop products with the best of intentions. That is, they want to satisfy a need in the market – they want to provide a solution for an obvious problem. But I also think that many companies leave their customers’ experience with their product as an afterthought.

As long as it gets the job done, does it matter how it does it?

Think about it: how many products do you use – both online and offline – that work but aren’t exactly fun to use? Now compare that to the product that you love to use. You can tell when a company cares, right?

There’s a flip side to this coin, too.

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We have a number of ways that we track what’s being said about our company, our products, and even individuals on the team and it’s generally very positive in nature, which is great. Occasionally we’ll get some negative feedback and we’re not naive enough to believe that we can satisfy every single customer that comes knocking – it is what it is and it’s the cost of building a great product!

But the best notifications that come across my desk are the ones like Andy’s blog post where he’s providing an incredible service to his readers and our other customers by helping educate them on how to do neat things like embedding a tweet into a blog post.

Not only is it applicable to those that use the love our life but also for people that do not – Andy’s intention is clear: He’s a happy user and he wants to provide value to other happy users.

And that’s something we can get behind time and time again – in fact, we encourage it.

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Do you own a Support License? You do? Well, then you already know that you are the object of our affection!

We luffs you.

And it is because of this deep and double rainbow colored luff that we’ve been on a quest. We searched the Internet far and wide for the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for you.

But what could possibly symbolize the size and scope of our luff? Flowers? Exotic canned meats? A really, really amazing stick?

Nay.

We knew these cliche and mundane trinkets would never do. We wanted to give you something special. Something to set you apart from all the other primates and/or marsupials floating out there in the nether-regions of cyberspace.

We wanted a beautiful gift for a beautiful you.

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Well hello there. We’ve had a busy few weeks and here we are already well into February. The team took an interlude from working Friday for a photo shoot, but then jumped right back into Standard 3. Michael’s been keeping us on the straight and narrow. Jared & Tom have been closing tickets like a boss. Or should I have said Jared and Tom have been closing tickets like respective bosses? Who knows. I’ve never been keen at pluralizing slang.

The time felt right to jump out of my tasks and give y’all some more information. Here is what you may or may not already know about Standard 3.

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve spent a bit of time talking about the state of online publishing and how we’re hoping to improve the process end-to-end. Obviously, we’re crazy passionate about it and we want to stay connected with those that love anything related to digital publishing and the technologies that drive innovation.

To that end, we’re looking to begin putting together several meetups with those of you that dig startups, technology, WordPress, and publishing. Ultimately, we want to share our experience on publishing, product design, web development, and starting a business with others while giving back some of our time to our the community at large.

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We had an incredible time as a team hanging out with tons of bloggers, publishers, designers, developers, and everyone else in between at the 2012 Atlanta Wordcamp!

We even got to meet some of our heroes, like Jane, Mark, and Matt – awesomeness!

We’d like to thank Judi and Russell for doing such a great job organizing and allowing us to hang out, sponsor the event, and even let me speak at one of the breakouts (you can see the slide deck here).

We also made tons of new friends and had a blast at not only the event but the after parties as well! If you weren’t able to come then we missed you big time!

Here are some pics of what the weekend looked like:

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We’re making an improvement to our process and it was born out of a team meeting we had in December. One of our goals for this year is to be more consistent and predictable. It’s almost ironic considering my post on Monday.

From this point forward updates to our products will be on a quarterly release schedule.

To be specific:

• As we patch and fix minor bugs throughout the month, we will not release-as-we-go. Instead, we will batch them into a “versioned release.”
• As we create new features we will include them in these versioned releases.
• Releases will be deployed to the support community’s download area at the beginning of the quarter.

I don’t mean to infer that we will always have a release for every product at the beginning of every quarter, but if we do have releasable fixes or changes, they will happen at predictable intervals.

As usual you can find release information in the release notes for each product. Standard’s notes, for example, can be found at http://standardtheme.com/releases. So you see we’ve been doing versioned releases all along. Now, you’ll be able to predict when it will happen next.

See you in April!

Yesterday John posted about his best idea ever. From this side of the curtain I can tell you… it’s phenomenal. It has become a new lens by which we filter all decisions.

His idea is that good.

As a team we are all excellent in our individual disciplines. Design, development, operations, support, editorial. You name it. And we each have enough overlap in our secondary skills to fill in for (or even challenge) each other’s primary. In fact, if you look hard enough, there are a few places where you might even think we have redundancy within our team. To an outsider looking in, it may seem like we could accomplish the same thing with fewer people.

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