Lab.Coop

Juli's "Path to Cooperation" - First three months at Lab.Coop

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:00:00 -0800

For the previous installment of the series, click here

I started to work for Lab.Coop in September, roughly 5 months ago; ample time to get an overview of the kind of adventure one may have embarked on. And boy, has it been an adventure.

A New Life

I started off by receiving a laptop straight away. I believe I perform better on Mac - a preference which was never questioned. This was quite the contrast to previous experiences wherein every request required rigorous reasoning and provided proofs.

For my first assignment, I proposed to continue working on an unfinished project at my previous job. Everyone at Lab.Coop agreed; the most important thing for everyone was to simply have someone at the company with design knowledge. Future projects were secondary. This made the transition easily, immersing myself at Lab.Coop two days a week while finishing up business at my old company during the other three.

Only a mere two weeks into my employment, a conference, I had been wanting to go to was approaching: the yearly Service Design Conference New York. Previously, I have failed many times to get the industry knowledge I wanted; I had met rejection due to high expenses by a company incomparable in size with Lab.Coop. I wanted to go badly and knew that there was a 2000 EUR yearly budget for individuals to spend on educational opportunities at Lab.Coop, yet I hesitated: I felt unsure bringing this up having spent so little time at the job. On my third week, I gathered up the courage to ask: “Hey guys, how would you feel about sending me to this 1000 USD...Read More

Juli’s “Path to Cooperation” - A brief account of how a talented designer joined Lab.Coop

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 15:00:00 -0800

Around the end of 2014, I was working as a design lead of product development for Magyar Telekom, the Hungarian Branch of Deutsche Telekom; by definition a big, multinational company in the telecommunication sector. I was making the most of it. My role was to facilitate design thinking, but throughout my stay I felt like an outsider. The issue festered and parting ways started seeming like the next logical step so I gave myself 6 months to see where I’d go next.

Fortunately, I was approached by the co-founders of the Lab.Coop in the early months of 2015 with an innocent request to chat about an idea of a new company they were constructing and whether I, as an employee and a potential owner, could articulate what an ideal work environment would look like. The question did not catch me off guard; it was around this time I had been thinking about a change and had collected my ideas of what kind of a place I would want to work for. I pulled out my list and walked them through all items one-by-one. I did not doubt their sincerity in moving forward and their dedication to building something new, but little did I know how quickly it would become a reality.

In the following months, I had a few more meetings with the Lab.Coop guys. I attended several events in which every potential member was invited to meet and to be kept in the loop of the future company’s developments. Through this, I learned they wanted to build a true end-to-end product house and were lacking in-house design competences. I was not yet convinced: I do not consider myself a pixel-fighter, but rather a...Read More

Share More to Have More – Why Lab.Coop is an employee-owned, holacracy-governed company

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 15:00:00 -0800

Founding Circumstances

After pulling the trigger on closing Brickflow, our previous venture with Tamás Kökény, we decided to stick together. "We stood there and knew where we messed up, and there was a team with whom we liked to work. What’s next?" - as I’ve stated in our recent Forbes interview. It was spring of 2015 and we had to reset our professional life.

Since we had just crashed a company, we had no money to be invested and decided not to raise external funding for the kick-off. This meant two things: we needed a business model which could generate cash in a short time (weeks), but moreover we needed to find a venture with a very low barrier to entry. Since the core team of Brickflow was going to stick together, we had all the know-how of an end-to-end digital product agency targeting software startups. This also meant that the first team members would have to take almost the same risk as the founders.

Based on our previous experience, we aimed to bridge the motivation and commitment gap between owners and employees as the sense of ownership and risk-taking wasn’t satisfying before. A desperate need appeared to create an environment which attracts and supports growth mindset, entrepreneurial, and full-stack minded people.

Market Circumstances

We are hiring a CFO: Finance and controlling senior needed

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 15:00:00 -0800

The ideal candidate

Lab.Coop, a Budapest based digital consulting firm is looking for its new CFO! If you have extensive experience in finance, accounting and controlling, moreover you could manage the financial matters of a private corporation (Zrt.), you are the right person! By working with us, you would earn substantial equity and work in a self-managed, flexible and energetic environment. #startuplife

What your job will be

Finance and Controlling:

Invoicing our clients IFRS
Legal knowledge
Invoicing
Tax planning and payment
Establishing financial processes
Actual accounting is outsourced, you have to coordinate with the firm about accounting and payroll matters
Optimizing financial processes and managing financial issues
Tracking cash-flow

Visibl Gives SMBs Access To Premium Video Inventory

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 15:00:00 -0800

Today Visibl announced a huge milestone in their programmatic video-marketing platform's life. They teamed up with video inventory-manager SpotX Video Advertising to offer small and medium sized businesses premium placements with key publishers. In addition, Visibl has announced it is expanding its self-serve programmatic platform (developed by Lab.Coop) to agencies and businesses around the globe.

At Lab.Coop, we're very proud to be part of Visibl's journey all they way from building their MVP to expanding in such a big scale.

The Deal And Impact

Visibl, which launched in the United States last month, aims to democratize programmatic ad buying for the little guy: It gives small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) the same access that megabrands have to target audiences at major sites for as little as $50.

The SpotX deal marks a significant milestone in the democratization of programmatic advertising, enabling Visibl to deliver premium ad placements to clients. Through this custom inventory, SMBs will have access to ad-placement opportunities that have not existed outside the media-agency-buying model.

Programmatic is not as daunting as it may seem to SMBs, according to Mike Shehan, CEO and Co-Founder of SpotX. "Setting up to take advantage of the efficiencies of programmatic poses an initial learning curve, but one that is easily overcome,” Shehan said.

Access to video ad placements across multiple publishers can be provided in automated marketplaces that package inventory around audience or content categories, demographics or even performance-based goals like engagement or viewability. This simplifies the buy for advertisers while giving them transparency into where the ads appear.

Programmatic...Read More

Designing Experiences Not Products - Service Design Conference 2015 Recap

Wed, 14 Oct 2015 15:00:00 -0700

Service design was born on the premises of not just designing apps, but looking at the bigger picture: instead of a product, creating systems users interact with. All this because, what people want is often not the same what we think they need. If service design is about anything, it is putting people at the very centre of the design process and creating experiences people actually need. And users want magic experiences.
Best practices and newest trends of user centered design were discussed at the Service Design Global Conference in the beginning of October at Parsons School of Design in New York City. I heard there what the industry is transforming into, and let me share in this article that we are on to something big. Service design methods now go way beyond products and apps, as they can offer revolutionary solutions even for business models and policy making.
Designing Experiences - Together With Clients
We can already see incredible advancement if we first look at the consumer product and service level. Nick de Leon, Head of Service Design Program at at the Royal College of Art, and many others share the notion that it is key to closely involve clients in the process of user-centered-design and to...Read More

The 20+1 Takeaways I’ve Learned From My Failed Startup

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 15:00:00 -0700

We have just announced in a Forbes interview that Brickflow, our startup, had to be closed down because we could not raise the next round of $1m. We faced the fact that this venture was among the 9 out of 10 that fail. On the other hand building it was the best investment of my life. During these two and a half years I have made friends for life but more importantly went through a pretty steep learning curve. Here are the takeaways.

1. Theory vs. practice
We have read all the important books, watched all the recommended videos and got great mentor feedback. However, it took us a good year to learn how to execute on the theory. Practice is above theory, so try instead of reading.

2. Experience
It is surprising that, as juniors with no relevant experience, we made it so far. This says a lot about the importance of courage.

3. Talent
I do not believe in that anymore. You can learn whatever you want, just do not hesitate to jump into greater and greater challenges all the time. Ideas do not matter, if you do not build them.

4. Team
Read More

We Grabbed a Few Drinks Sometimes - The End of Brickflow

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 15:00:00 -0700

Brickflow was a good story, while it lived (we wrote about them twice already), but it became a really great story in its death. Today the founders share with Forbes what they learned from the failure of their promising startup.
"We told our investors that the project is on life support during the May board meeting. It was shit to prepare for that" say the guys, Peter Langmar, aka. Petak and Tamas Kokeny, aka. Eggdice. We are sitting in an office in downtown Budapest. They moved in recently, the beanbags were delivered a few days ago. The founders of Brickflow did not wait long with their new venture, but in May at the board meeting they asked one last thing from their investors. They want to tell their story and the reasons of failure. Why? "Sharing the take-aways makes the whole thing genuine" says Eggdice.

Risky Industry
Brickflow wanted to go with social media trends by making a storytelling tool (→ Forbes 10/2014). "Content is everywhere in social media, you could build your stories using YouTube videos, tweets, images" says Petak about the goal of the business. "The ideal is to build a user base several million strong and exit. But that is the hardest in this industry."
Social media is a very risky market, products usually can be monetized at a later stage. But if you make it, profit is immense. The road is bumpy, as reaching millions of users is not easy, but retaining them is even harder. (Servers themselves cost a lot.)

Read More

MOMECODE - Why and how you should learn coding

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 15:00:00 -0700

The newest popular belief is that coding will be the next item in everyone’s computer literacy checklist. Designers, UX professionals, and some more interesting politicians are working on their coding skills with various reasonings behind their decisions. But does everyone need to know coding?
Aniko
I’m Code & Community here at Lab.Coop. This means that when I’m not coding, I’m working towards an even better coder community here in lovely Budapest.
I, for example, am a developer. I need to know coding. I also do not need to know much about color theory, usability testing, or personas, but knowing some of those do make me a better developer.

At first, coding seems like a completely different mindset than what most of us is used to. And the thing is, you don’t know if it’s your thing until you try it. Who knows, maybe you will feel what I felt 10 or so years ago wandering into my first programming class and falling in love with that new world of binary things: of things that either work, or not, of the perfection of code compared to the subjectivity of graphic design that I was struggling with back then.

So definitely go try coding, and see if you get the hang of it! A good way to get started is the next MOMECODE class, where you can pick up the basics quickly with the help of Budapest’s...Read More

Lean Marketing: How Brickflow made weekly 10% growth

Sun, 06 Sep 2015 15:00:00 -0700

Developing a great app is only half a success without users. What you also need is an even growing user base, or in other words traction. I joined Brickflow about 1.5 years ago when they had just raised a seed round and had pivoted from storytelling into visual content discovery. So we started to look for traction with Mihaly Borbely, CMO at the time.
In less than half a year we were able to maintain a weekly 10% growth by following lean marketing and data driven decision making principles. Although the service had to be ceased for 150,000 users because of an unsuccessful fundraising round, the learning is invaluable. I will share it now, starting with some basics then showing how we did it at Brickflow.

What is lean marketing?

The idea behind lean startup, like launching MVPs for real user feedback or the build-measure-learn cycle, can be used for marketing efforts as well. This way spending huge budgets in vain can be avoided, which can be essential for a startup with scarce resources.

Doing lean marketing means starting test campaigns from day one with very small consideration of a perfect slogan or superior creatives. This is not the time for perfectionism, what you need is product/market fit and traction as soon as...Read More