You’ve probably seen organizations where bad decisions are made by people in authority. Either because they don’t know better, or worse, they are ignoring the advice of those who do know better.

This is a cultural warning sign. If you see it, run away as fast as you can!

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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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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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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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