Sam

bring back OpenPurpose or continue the plan no matter the obstacles the amount of times i went back and forth on this decision over the past year has been unbelievable but i knew to go from good to great i had sacrifice the name to make room for what’s new after all it wasn’t my first time before op my agency was called 3drops - some of you might still remember it - a product lead studio i started in 2010 in stockholm, working with leading saas startups in us which i grew to a few dozen members in its first few years to skip the startup short-lived cycles and skip the graveyard and i partnered with a few design lead VCs to build better pipelines and continue to grow the studio that partnership eventually lead us working with governments and enterprises which lasted a decade the money was great as the team was small and we only did a dozen of projects a year - the rest of the time we spent building our own products like Roadmap our first which quickly became popular among big companies like google, palantir, microsoft, netflix, you name it but more on the venture side later early 2020 i got an idea to build something great and decided to rebrand the agency to OpenPurpose and decided to dramatically drop our prices to get there faster we went from an average of $400k per project to $80k almost over night - i was convinced it would lead us to create better processes and systems to deliver projects in less time i wanted the timeline to turn an idea into a venture to go from 6 months to 3 months - design and engineering, brand product and campaign, end to end services to end the fragmentation i built the team, designed the system with the right constraints that delivered us the result, within just a few years we were doing 40+ projects in parallel with almost 80 members - all while working only 4 days a week 3drops was founder lead - i was involved in all projects due to their high stakes high pressure nature so naturally they were high tickets but op was different, much lower ticket size, fully process driven i know a lot of agencies, most of the owners are my friends but i never had seen a system working so well - i was so proud of it - it was finally time to turn the agency into a platform where creative projects happened the first step was to onboard designers and founders at scale then later bring angel investors to fund projects to turn them into ventures but as we slowly moved forward with releasing the app in bits, i realised something i did not expect op as a name was bigger than where we wanted to go - regardless of how many times we reposition ourselves as a platform, we were still known as an agency, even though how we operated internally wasn’t like any agencies, we were still being seen as one and we couldnt break that association to move forward, i had to close op to create room for what we wanted to bring to the world introducing s.page where creative projects start last month we rolled out the app to make it simple for founders to hire and collaborate with top talent next week we are rolling out projects where you see ideas come to life in the open - from exploration to execution, all shared transparently while you as participants vote on the directions to shape its next iteration together with s.page slowly getting on its feet it’s finally time to bring back the agency as well - as i really miss working with great founders its called s.engineering - we deliver strategy through execution we work with founders that want to move fast, experiment with ideas at scale to define and execute what works, think of us as your product and brand research and development studio with world-class execution i will also do a short streaming on S7RX.com later today to share a few more surprises for designers wishing to grow their services and products - check the countdown and see you then 🫡