Week Notes 3 Feb 2017
Monday
Worked on a proposal for a coaching project with a London based agency before adding some small fixes into togetherwise.co and learning how to use the new Wordpress API that allows you to grab content via JSON and publish elsewhere.
Tuesday
A full day near enough of biz dev. Several phone calls and a face to face meeting plus booking up Friday for another full day of sessions with Brighton startups.
Wednesday
I spent the afternoon at the Learning Technologies expo at Olympia, London which is a strange event you can read about here, suffice to say I am somewhat dismayed that this is even an industry let alone a thing.
What was good about today however, was getting time to catch up with James Tyer, of Togetherwise, talking about or rejection for our first pitch together and what we can learn from it. We then had a coffee with Euan Semple where 10 minutes became 20, 20 an hour and then it was getting dark.
Thursday
I spent the day with home-baker Anna learning how to correctly prepare dough for sourdough bread, an art form I dabbled with for a few months last year before killing my starter.
Results were impressive and within a few hours I had found all the things I’d been doing wrong and yet still managed to make the dough too wet. Turns out measurements actually need to be precise. 5g out either way will ruin everything you’re doing.
Friday
A pretty intense day. I started off meeting one of my favourite startups Unknown Epic. Spending some time with Kim to talk about ways they can tighten up their value proposition and get it into words, images, videos to be able to make the website do more of the work for them.
Next up was a meeting with Brighton University who approached me about facilitating a workshop day with them, Brighton & Hove Council and a number of local community transport providers. This is part of a project they’re doing with funding from Innovate UK to uncover some of the problems with community transport and how we can safeguard their existence so that we don’t create an environment whereby people cannot get out into the community who are housed in out of town locations, amongst other things.
Then it was off to The Skiff, where I have recently become a community member to meet my accountant, Amanda Hancock - who is fantastic and helping me out with a few challenges I am about to face with only having 1 year of accounts and a mortgage up for renewal in June. Amanda is also transitioning away from Accountancy and putting more time into her fashion stores in London and their online outlet Wears London.
The day was capped off with a engrossing chat with Jean Mutton, who I met during the Service Designers Web Summit on Wednesday night. Jean is a Service Design Contractor based in Derby who has been working in higher education for the last 10 years, introducing service design concepts into Universities with great success. We talked about my recent work with Southampton University and some of the challenges facing the ‘student experience’ in 2017.
All in all, a good week!
