Focus on your mission, not your tech - Another Cup of Coffee (Posts about About Us)

Still Alive: A Micro Agency's 20 Year Journey - Part 2

Anthony Lopez-Vito — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 15:28:15 GMT

In Part 1 of Still Alive: A Micro Agency's 20 Year Journey, I reflected on Another Cup of Coffee's journey from a one-person freelancer operation running from a rented mailbox address, to setting up in a trendy unit Westbourne Studios. Here I recount the initial challenges we faced as an agency and how we survived by transforming the way we worked.

Finding a Balance: Growth and Resources

A few doors down sat what I wanted for our future. It was a large and successful media agency staffed with very confident ex-BBC people. They had loads of sales reps and account managers. I think it was among the first generation of the global web agencies we have today.

The founder was famous in our circles for saying that he didn't bother getting out of bed for less than £30,000. That amount is common for web projects now but saying this in the early 2000s was quite grandiose and flamboyant. Though we were charging a fraction of their rates, I imagined someday reaching their scale.

However, running a small web agency in London is challenging to say the least and scaling was the biggest problem. We were too small for large projects, but small projects wouldn't pay for growth. It was a classic trap.

Sell and Keep Selling?

Looking back, I think the key to growing an agency of any size is to just sell. Sell and keep selling even if you're not sure you can deliver. This is why the large agency had so many sales and account managers. Other agencies I've observed over the years seem to have grown in this way: they are sales-heavy and make lots of nice promises. But I've never been comfortable with making promises unless I'm sure of them so our growth remained stunted.

Meanwhile, our office space wasn't really free. It came with a heavy cost in the form of commitments that took my time away from building the business. The elephant in the room wasn't that big agency but our premature attempt at playing big.

It couldn't be ignored for very long as I struggled to bring in the right projects to ensure everyone was paid. It became clear that the traditional office setup wasn't sustainable and I had to make some difficult choices, quickly.

Transforming Into a Cloud-first Virtual Agency

Goodbye Westbourne Studios

Survival often means letting go of how you imagine things should be. Our biggest advantage was that we were scrappy and nimble so I decided to use it. We didn't actually need a trendy office and everyone was more productive without the daily commute into West London.

Within a couple of weeks of making the decision, we transformed into a cloud-first operation. I also hired more freelancer friends from the Philippines to fill our skills gap. Suddenly, Another Cup of Coffee was a fully remote virtual agency, years before the concept became popular.

Digital Nomad and Prevailing

Being cloud-first and remote meant that I could do the digital nomad thing for a while too, working out of all sorts of unconventional places. This opened up the opportunity to pick up clients globally. Even now, the majority of our projects come from outside the UK.

Karl and Pafsanias moved on to other—almost certainly greener—pastures but by then we'd evolved into a collective of remote colleagues, forming teams as projects demanded. This lean and agile model allowed us to weather storms that have since sunk many of our contemporaries.

I can say with some sense of accomplishment that Another Cup of Coffee has outlasted all three of the ventures who shared our unit, and also that large agency I'd once admired. The key was our ability to try out different ways of working. The founders quite possibly sold the business and exited with large bonuses, but I'm after something different: an establishment that can be handed to another generation. (More about this will follow in another post.)

Moving Towards Specialisation

Our early advantages began to fade as remote work became mainstream and sites like Elance and oDesk gave even small businesses access to global talent. This rise in cross-border competition made it difficult to stand out by only offering general website services, and even our strong relationships with existing clients wouldn't guarantee the cash flow needed to keep the business afloat.

At the same time, Drupal's growing complexity turned maintenance into a huge drain on resources. Again it was time to adapt and the answer came from an unexpected direction.

I'd spotted a need for content migrations, specifically from Drupal to WordPress, and built up an expertise in data-heavy web projects. It was unglamorous and mundane engine-room work so few agencies were interested in training up their talent for such a niche skill.

Version 1 of our custom-built Drupal to WordPress Migration Tool

Leaning Into Your Nature

But it was necessary work that happened to fit my meticulous nature and long experience with databases. Further, businesses were beginning to realise the value of data and content while most of our colleagues were focused on dazzling user experiences. Data was our differentiator.

Another Cup of Coffee shifted to becoming a boutique data migration consultancy with myself as principal consultant supported by a few freelancers. Unexpectedly, I became a pioneer of Drupal to WordPress migration services and was recommended by WP Engine in a whitepaper guide.

This ultra-narrow specialisation gave Another Cup of Coffee a much-needed distinction for almost ten years. Run a web search now and you'll see many solutions and services for content migrations but we were one of the first.

Looking Forward

Since those early days, we've kept evolving alongside shifts in technology and ways of working. I can't claim that any of it was planned but I can say we've always been willing to change, just slightly ahead of our peers. Throughout this journey, I've learned that survival isn't about being the biggest or the most innovative. You survive by keeping customers happy and watching out for dust on the horizon, ready to move before a stampede arrives.

We once embraced virtual offices, the cloud-first paradigm and global remote working before they were common. Now we find ourselves very suddenly confronted by something new. I think it's obvious that AI will be disrupting our lives in ways that will be hard to avoid. It's again time to learn to adapt just as we always have.

This is the first in a series of posts about our journey and how we're adapting to Artificial Intelligence in our lives. I do hope you'll follow along with me as I share what I've learned.

'Still Alive' from the Portal game credits. I never played the game but I've always enjoyed the sound and lyrics.

Footnotes

Featured image photo by Lil Mayer.
Still Alive is by Jonathan Coulton. The official video with Sara Quin and Dorit Chrysler can be found here.

Still Alive: A Micro Agency's 20 Year Journey

Anthony Lopez-Vito — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 15:28:15 GMT

Recently I was handing over tasks to an AI when it struck me how much my work has changed. It's been two years since OpenAI released ChatGPT-3.5 but things were so different when I first started Another Cup of Coffee. One of my biggest problems, almost twenty years ago, was figuring out how I'd hire skilled people with no budget. Now I'm learning to understand how to use something that's been trained on all the world's knowledge, while paying less than the price of lunch.

This change is astounding so I thought to reflect on our journey. I'd like to tell the story of building Another Cup of Coffee from a one-person operation to a survivor of multiple technological revolutions. It's a story about the decisions, both good and bad, that led to where we are now. Most of all, it's about learning to adapt before a shift in paradigm.

I'd like to share this now because I believe the developments in Artificial Intelligence have brought us to another turning point. It's once again time to adjust to new ways of working. Before I get into that, I think it's important to look back on the past to understand how we got here.

Finding Our Path

Another Cup of Coffee has never positioned itself as a trailblazer. It was founded on the principles of reliability, technical expertise and long-term client support. We focus on the behind-the-scenes work so that our clients can shine. And while we don't try to be the first to adopt every new trend, we have found there's value in selecting tools and methods that make our services better.

Over the past two decades, our approach has positioned us to adapt to industry shifts while ensuring that our clients remain happy with the core of what we do for them. This philosophy was a counterpoint to the early days of the web which was an experimental and somewhat chaotic scramble to try new technologies.

The Early Web

The web was very different in the '90s. I remember moving out of the comfortable walled garden of CompuServe into the wild web—and being completely underwhelmed. It was slow, even after upgrading to a blazingly fast 28.8K modem.

Browsing sites on NCSA Mosaic was confusing too but we netizens soon understood the Net to be a place without rules. And if you wanted something, you had to build it, so we did. We hand coded sites in Notepad, Vi, FrontPage or HotDog. (Some of you must remember HotDog, right?) We built and experimented and figured things out as we went along.

HotDog 1.0 web editor released in 1995

After university, I landed jobs working on mobile data synchronisation, building online communities, web databases, and rolling out the first mobile services. These concepts are taken for granted now but they were pioneering back then. People quickly integrated new technologies into their business and personal life, opening up different approaches for accomplishing everyday tasks.

Starting Out as a Freelancer

It was exciting work but I liked doing things my own way and set out as a freelancer in the early 2000s. I wore whichever hat would get work: technology analyst, database developer, systems administrator, network engineer, and of course, 'webmaster' (how quaint). Remote work wasn't a thing yet, so legitimacy meant having a proper business address.

People would blag desks from friends' businesses or pay for expensive serviced office space. I chose the quick and easy route: a rented mailbox address in Gloucester Road, London. Just a block away from the tube station and a short walk from Kensington Palace, it sounded legit and swanky! But no, by necessity I was working from home and operating a virtual office before it was the norm.

Fresh Coffee and Trendy Peers

After a few years as a solo freelancer, I realised that having a team behind me was necessary to take on more ambitious projects. When Another Cup of Coffee was formally established in 2006, it was a natural continuation of those freelancer years but with a more structured agency approach. The aim was to offer fully-functional but reasonably priced websites to small businesses, using a set of ready-built tools and an emphasis on customer service.

Many developers were still rolling their own custom solutions. They retained the do-it-yourself mindset of the early web and didn't realise that open source Content Management Systems had matured enough to offer production-ready web platforms. WordPress was still mostly a blogger tool so I chose Drupal because of its flexible content structure and growing module ecosystem. We offered complete web solutions at a fraction of the cost and development time needed by most other agencies.

Westbourne Studios

I set up in a client's spare meeting room in the trendy Westbourne Studios, near London's famous Portobello Road Market. Westbourne Studios was a space popular with creatives, musicians and media professionals which, after hours, transformed into one of Notting Hill's most popular nightclubs.

In exchange for free office space, I handled project management for the host company. We shared the unit with three other micro agencies in the cool creative media arena so as techs, we were somewhat out of place.

Potato phone photos of Westbourne Studios in the early 2000s

Our initial team was small but promising. My friend Lan handled technical support; Karl, a colleague I befriended from my first job out of university, took care of development; Pafsanias, a brilliant fresh graduate who responded to my Gumtree job ad, created the front-end eye candy; Benjor, another friend who ran a small design studio in the Philippines, was our remote designer. I focused on project and account management while trying to build up the business. Claire (not her real name) was in charge of sales.

Early Mistakes

We all gelled personally but I learned an expensive lesson with Claire. You see, she couldn't actually sell. Claire was a photographer looking for side work, and I thought her outgoing personality would make up for inexperience.

I was wrong. You need the right type of person in sales and she wasn't that person. It was my mistake. Perhaps I was motivated by the need to fit in with the other creatives in the building but in any case, it was a bad hire on my part. I really should have driven sales but I wasn't a salesperson either.

My mistake with sales was one of several that would lead to problems balancing growth and resources. In Part 2, I recount the initial challenges we faced as an agency and how we survived by transforming the way we worked.

This is the first in a series of posts about our journey and how we're adapting to Artificial Intelligence in our lives. I do hope you'll follow along with me as I share what I've learned.

Still Alive: A Micro Agency's 20 Year Journey - Part 2

In Part 2 of Still Alive: A Micro Agency's 20 Year Journey, I recount the initial challenges we faced as an agency and how we survived by transforming the way we worked.

Read Part 2 Now

Footnotes

Featured image photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi.
HotDog 1.0 screenshot from The Web design Museum.

Focus on your mission, not your tech - Another Cup of Coffee (Posts about About Us)

Still Alive: A Micro Agency's 20 Year Journey - Part 2

Finding a Balance: Growth and Resources

Sell and Keep Selling?

Transforming Into a Cloud-first Virtual Agency

Digital Nomad and Prevailing

Moving Towards Specialisation

Leaning Into Your Nature

Looking Forward

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Footnotes

Still Alive: A Micro Agency's 20 Year Journey

Finding Our Path

The Early Web

Starting Out as a Freelancer

Fresh Coffee and Trendy Peers

Westbourne Studios

Early Mistakes

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