From the notebook
Insights
Short pieces on strategy, language, and the practical work of building something meant to last. Written between projects, usually after we've got something wrong.
We publish when there's something worth saying rather than on a schedule. Most of these started as notes to a client and turned out to be useful to more than one.
Six pieces · updated quarterly
-
The vision document nobody reads
Most strategy documents fail for a boring reason: they're written for the funder, not for the person who has to make a decision on a Tuesday afternoon. Here's the one-page version we use instead, and the four questions it has to answer before it's finished.
-
Naming a platform without flattening it
What we learned naming four community platforms in eighteen months — including the two names we threw away, why the plainest one won, and the test we now run before we let a founder fall in love with anything.
-
Month four is where good ideas go quiet
Launches get the energy and the attention. Month four gets a spreadsheet and a tired volunteer. A short argument for designing the unglamorous quarter first, and what that looks like in practice.
-
Stop explaining, start saying
There's a difference between a sentence that describes your work and a sentence that makes someone feel it. We collect examples of both, and this piece is about how to tell which one you've written.
-
Planning a Ramadan campaign that outlives Ramadan
Seasonal campaigns are the easiest way to build an audience and the easiest way to lose one. Notes on pacing, on what to publish after the season ends, and on resisting the urge to peak on day one.
-
What we ask in the first ten minutes
The three questions we open every discovery call with, why one of them is deliberately uncomfortable, and how the answers tell us within a quarter of an hour whether we're the right studio for the work.
If you can't say what you're for in one sentence, you don't have a messaging problem. You have a decision you haven't made yet. From the studio notebook, March
Want these in your inbox?
We send one piece roughly every six weeks, plus a short note when we open a reduced-rate slot. Nothing else, and no forwarding your address to anyone.