The end of MACE is approaching and I have mixed feelings. I feel happy, sad, fearful and intrigued. I feel happy that this phase in my life is almost over to give room to another extraordinary experience, but at the same time it is sad to know that I might never see some of my colleges again nor learn from their experiences. After feeling joy and sadness the fear comes in. The fear of not accomplishing everything I have set myself to do, the fear of not being as good as I want to be, but then again, who has never been scared? I believe that being scared (sometimes) is healthy and makes sure that the confidence is balanced out. Now, the intrigued feeling is the hardest to explain, even to myself. I think that I am intrigued at everything that I have been able to accomplish and at everything that I had to do to accomplish it. MACE has definitely made me grow as a person, a professional and a colleague. But let me tell you how it all began.

It was the winter of 2009 and I was thinking about my life. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do after college. I was only a few months away from graduating and I still was not sure about what I was going to do to my life. Various options aroused in my head: start working, do another degree (in law) or do a Masters. All three options had advantages and disadvantages, so choosing one was not an easy task. Luckily my parents helped me to make this decision and I it started my Master searching. When I found the Master in the Creative Economy I knew it was the one. I have to be honest diary, I had no idea at the time that the master was going to be this good and this complete.

I have always been very ambitious, you know that, so the barriers that I set for myself have always been very high. My Goal in life is to be a successful business woman, either in a high managerial position (Marketing or Creative Director) or co-owning a successful business before I am 30. I know that this is a very ambitious goal, but then again how can I accomplish something without fighting for it? So, yes, I am aware that achieving this is not going to be easy, however I have never liked things to be easy. My goal is to be a successful business woman before I turn 30 and also be married and possibly have a baby by that time. Knowing that things only happen with hard work is why I chose to do a Master after I graduated. I believe that if I had started working after my bachelor´s I might not be closer to my dream, as I am today.

I have to tell you about my first MACE experience. It was about shoes. It sounds trivial, I know, but it is not. This was my first contact with storytelling and empathy without even knowing. My lecturer told the class to write a few questions about shoes and to ask people around the campus. Our main questions had to do with price, colour, shop and model preference, since we had no idea what this experiment meant. It was only when we started asking questions like “how do your shoes make you feel?” or “tell me the story behind this shoe” that we understood that this was the way to engage with people and understand how they really felt about shoes. This was my first lesson and I was amazed. I was really looking forward to learn more about user experience and a lot of other terms that I did not know at the time. Everything else that we learned did not let me down. It made me even more curious to learn more and to understand the creative economy.

Creating a business is the biggest challenge I have ever faced. Initially I thought it would be about profit and about creating something solid (product). But this was just the beginning of my understanding of what a business is and what it entitles. Even before we started the businesses we had to choose the appropriate team to work with us. I was nervous since I was one of the few that did not have a set idea of what type of business I wanted to do; a lot of people knew they wanted to work with art, music, fashion, etc. and I believed at time that that was the right way to go in order to find partners with similar interests. It turns out that not knowing what I wanted to do was even better. I connected with Sam because we both knew what we did not want (a business about fashion nor music) and because he is a product designer, perfect if we ended up creating a product. Getting Joe to join the team was not hard. He was also unsure of what he wanted to do and liked myself and Sam, so he joined. Ben was the last group member to join the team (and the first one to leave).

A lot of the groups jumped right into business ideas – Temptation knew immediately that they wanted to do a magazine – but we had no clue. This fact left me a little bit restless. I was worried to be behind, I did not want to be part of group who had no idea about they wanted. We also learned that we should “Fail early and fail often” (IDEO, 2005), so having this in mind we researched three to four ideas before realizing which one had a real need and which one we could really transform into a business. Firstly we thought about creating mini GPS units that could be put anywhere in order to know where to find them. We thought this was particularly interesting because people keep losing their keys, forget where they parked their car or even get their goods stolen. And although this was an interesting idea and there was a big market for it, we soon realized that the prices were too expensive and that it would not be possible to have it in such a small form like we wanted to. So, following IDEO´s advice we failed soon and went on to the next idea. When we learned about the importance of having a need behind an idea and the relevance of that business success, is when I understood that not having rushed into an idea was actually the best thing that we could have done. We found a need, but we also made sure that we could create a service that would cater for that need, audience and create something unique. I believe that having a need and making sure that there is a target audience who needs what your creating is very important. According to Matt Bross (2008) from the BT Group CTO “The power is sifting to the people”. Consumers (people) are the ones who have the control of buying a product/service or not, and realizing that they have that power will only empower companies, that can start creating products to cater for their consumers. I believe that it is a win-win situation. Companies gain revenue from targeting consumers correctly and creating products that they need/want and consumers get products that suit their desires.

We had our idea firmly conceptualized, researched and tested by a survey by the end of November, beginning of December. During this time I felt that I was one of the leaders of the group, joined by Joe. I would make sure we were thinking about everything but still keeping a steady pace. This is a skill that I believe I have always had, but that I improved in MACE. I have always believed to be a leader. I have a strong personality that some might love while others might hate, however I always remain true to myself. Luckily my team mates liked my personality and also respected my opinions and decisions. Being a leader is something that as always come natural to me; following is a little harder. I have no problem in following someone that is hierarchically above me, like a teacher, parent or colleague; but following an “equal” has been my weak point. I consider this a weakness, since I believe it is as important to know how to lead as to know how to follow. Knowing this was not my strong point I tried to make sure that everyone was in the same page as myself and let anyone make decisions if they felt they wanted to. So diary, one of my first lessons of running a business was to be humble.

Around December is when the Reality sank in, I had no idea of how to run a business. I did not know how difficult it was going to be, I had no idea how much time it would consume, I did not know how to manage people skills but most of all I had no clue on how to create a successful business. One of the first things I learnt to surpass one of my Obstacles – lack of business knowledge – was to “Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world (Rodriguez, 2009). Instead of trying to figure out how people browsed in newsagents or how people felt when they browsed, I observed and experienced it myself. This was a big lesson. It made me realize that I would never know how to run a business without actually running a business. But there were more obstacles to overcome. Amongst the obstacles was lack of financial input in the business, lack of mentorship, lack of business experience and lack of a back up idea if this all went badly.  Once the obstacles were found I had to device options of how to overcome the obstacles, both individually and with my team. The options came at different stages of the project depending on what we felt it was an obstacle at the time. The first obstacle was, without a doubt, running a business without knowing how to, but as I stated before, we overcame this using Rodriguez (2009) suggestion. The second obstacle that we faced was monetization for the business. We believed we could do everything amongst ourselves and very cheaply, but the reality settled in when we had to develop the website and did not know how to. Our options were to either create a very basic (and bad) website or to invest in a good service in which people would be interested in. Fortunately we were runners up at the Bright Ideas contest, which enabled us to pay for the website, but either way we had decided that we would put our own money in order to create a good website. I have always followed my parents’ philosophy “Money is not an obstacle, lack of ideas is.”

The second obstacle that we faced was business experience. We tackled this issue by researching other companies and understanding how other companies were capable of doing things with the same or fewer resources than we had. I analysed Facebook and Google strategies. They both started small and had little or none monetization in the beginning, which was the case of Hold the Front Pages (HTFP). Looking at how these two companies started and how they are positioned in the market gave me the incentive to continue and also made me understand that it takes time for businesses to be come out on top. So, I learnt about business experience by both having the experience myself and by reading about other businesses experiences. The third obstacle that we had to overcome as a team was the lack of a back-up idea in case ours failed. We realized in the beginning of January that the newspapers were not as willing to give us their front pages as we thought. Realizing this made us come up with a back -up plan. It was to either pay the newspapers (not very viable for us), to turn our service into a subscription service – which than would be no problem to get the covers – or to get investors that had business knowledge to back us up. The solution ended up being simpler, we now simply take the front pages from any available website and posted in HTFP. But I think it was important to realize that we needed a plan B. Our last obstacle was lack of mentorship. We managed to surpass this by contacting two business angels (Simon Hulme and Julian Ranger) that showed interested in the business and gave us excellent advices.

Having solved the main obstacles that were impeding the business to move forward, I started thinking about our business model – Free. My team and I were investing in a policy that might not be very lucrative. Ultimately all businesses want to be lucrative, apart from creating a service that serves a need. The answer if free was a good or a bad business policy was given to me by the book “Free” by Chris Anderson. Anderson (2009) explains how today´s economics are shifting to the free. Many examples were given in the book that made me believe that HTFP could be successful using the “Free” strategy. Companies like Ryanair, google and TED all give free content by still survive. Ryanair gets 80% of its revenue from 20% of its clients. Realizing that most companies gain most of the revenue from 20% of its clients was very important and made me think how we could get those 20% of clients to spend money on the business. I immediately remembered about wordpress.com and how anyone can have a basic free blog or a more sophisticated paid one. This seemed appropriate for the business so I suggested it to my colleagues. But, Anderson (2009) made me realize the power of free. It made me understand that if our service was not free, we would never be able to get as much visitors, views, word-of-mouth and it might have not have been viable even. “The power of Free” (Anderson, 2009) was another important lesson that I learned in MACE.

During my time in MACE working in a team I realized my flaws and my strengths. Knowing that I could contribute little to the technological part of the business, I invested my time on contributing marketing and advertising strategies and on making sure that we could all innovate and be creative. Having in mind how much I like to be creative, I also know how difficult it can be. I wanted to make sure that I could provide the right tools so that my group could innovative. Knowing this at Tshaped we followed Sutton´s (2006) third tip for better innovation. This tip reads “Do individual brainstorming before and after group sessions” (Sutton, 2006). I tried to incentivise all the members of the group to come up with ideas before we had a brainstorming session, so that we could all be more comfortable in group brainstorming. Brainstorming in coffee shops and in a restaurant were also techniques used many times by us, as a way of breaking the routine and being more creative. These techniques worked very well, since I feel that we have always managed to be very creative and innovative with all our approaches. We also transported this technique to all group related assignments. The first apprentice challenge was idealized in an Italian restaurant while having our pasta for lunch.

In addition to our creativity techniques we used prototyping as the base of our business experience. We used all kinds of prototyping, normal, quick and slow, following the advice of Murray, Caulier-Gricea and Mulgan (2010:50). These authors suggest that prototyping is a low cost technique that enables quick feedback in very little time. In the beginning I was very confused on how a website could be prototyped, but I quickly realized it could be done and how useful it was. It enabled us to create various mock ups of how the website could look like, what type of functions it should have and where they should be situated in a matter of minutes and costing us virtually nothing. Since doing mock ups in the computer would take much longer and it would be harder to produce them, prototyping was adopted by the team with frequency. We also implemented tip number 134 that stated how important it is to have a web presence (Murray, Caulier-Gricea, Mulgan, 2010:71). We used this has our main marketing strategy and we marketed HTFP in many social media websites including Facebook and Twitter. Something that we were very careful with was design. We treated design as a verb and not as noun (Rodriguez, 2010). Everything we did put design in the centre, which made our business and brand ultimately stronger.

We used all these tools and strategies and I believe that we have managed to create a successful business. I am so very pleased about that. But MACE thought me so much more. It thought me to grow, to know my flaws to be able to correct them, it thought me what type of a team player I am and how I should improve that and amazingly it also thought me a lot about myself. I believe that I fit in the metaphor of the “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato. I have learnt that something’s were shadows instead of the real things, I have definitely become less naive and more mature.

My way forward is to keep believing that I can reach my goals and ultimately be successful in everything that I do. We will continue with HTFP, so I have a new goal which is to make this a successful business. Ultimately, my way forward is to achieve any goals that I set and to overcome any obstacles that run my way. Thank you MACE.

Yours truly,

                                               Ana Mikaela

References

Anderson, C. (2009) Free, The future of a Radical Price, Random House Business Books, London

Bross, M. (2008) TM fórum, found at: http://www.tmforum.org/matbross/5893/home/html

IDEO (2005) Fail early and fail often – IDEO Service design, Management today.com, found at: http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/search/article/548074/fail-early-fail-often-ideo-service-design/

Murray, R.  Caulier-Gricea, J., Mulgan, G. (2010) The open book of social innovation, The Young Foundation, found at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/Social_Innovator_020310.pdf

Plato (427bc – 347bc) Allegory of the Cave, The Republic

Rodridez, D. (2010) Why design matters, Business week, found at: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2010/id20100127_150531.htm

Rodriguez, D. (2009) Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world, metacool, found at: http://metacool.typepad.com/metacool/2009/04/experience-the-world-instead-of-talking-about-experiencing-the-world.html

Sutton, R. (2006) Eight Tips for better brainstorming, Business week, found at: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2006/id20060726_517774.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+++design_innovation+and+design+lead

The best feedback and experience I had was given by Julian Rager a business angel. This monday (26th) I went to Farnhan to present Hold the Front Pages to two business angels, Julian and Simon. I prepared a short powerpoint presentation where it was explained what the service was, I added a visual image of the service (like Corrine always advices us to do), what were the expansion and revenue potentials and why we need investement. They both said they liked the presentation and they understand what Holdthefrontpages.com was and thought it was a very interesting service. They were actually amazed that such service does not yet exist.

They gave us advice on how to make our layout better (less front pages on the main page and bigger icons) and where we could get real money from. They also stated that we can be an investible business if we are able to show them that we can generate revenue. But their main advice was to get a fourth partner (something we had already discussed amongst ourself) in order to overcome our lack of knowlodge in programming and coding.

Lastly they explained to me that we were in stage three of business development. According to them business development has 5 stages: The idea (worth 0), conceptualization of the idea (worth very little), Testing the Idea (our phase, and worth something), Generating Revenue (our next step) and having a real business.

But most of all they gave me hope. They said we should continue the business because it is very interesting and can actually go somewhere.

We have taken into account all their advice and feedback and are we are looking forward to create a better holdthefrontpages to all users.

This afternoon we had a few tips on how to behave on interviews. The big scary talk you have if you want to get hired. So, its a scary talk and you still have to be engaging, funny (if possible), but secure and respecful – it´s a hard thing to do. But we have got to do it. So, these tips were really helpfull. Before today I would having definatly answered the question: “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” with “In ten years I see myself… bla bla”, but now I know better and I will definatly try to avoid repeting the question in my answer (Tip #1). Tip #2 was is given the opportunity ask questions back. I don´t think I would have asked questions back, I would have though that that would have  shown that I wasn´t paying enough attention or something. But now I get that interviewers just want to see people engage with them and with their company. So, what better way to engage with the person and company than ask questions about it and show that you care and want to please them, while still maintaining a confident position of  ” I am the only one that is suited for this job!”.

Tip #3 is take all the words that make you sound insecure out of your sentences. This tip sounds pretty obvious, but how many times do we say “I think I might…” ” I would like to do this” or “possibly…”. So, althogh it may be an obvious tip it is an important one.

A few other tips were given, but these were the ones that stuck with me, probably because these were the places I needed more guidance or where I felt the tips were more directed to me.

The rest of the class was spent on talking about human centered design thinking. We have been talking about this topic the whole year, but the more and more we talk about it, the more I see its significance and importance. Everything should be human centered, since things (products and services) are targeted at people, are made by people, are made for people and ultimatly are bought and used by people. So, any other way of seing design is definatly not the most logical. Since we have started this course I have a booklet where I right ideas I have. Everything I think “Oh, I wish I could…. (blá blá)” I think about how many people would have that same problem and how that could be solved. Before I was creative, but now I have a source of inspiration for my creativity – everyday problems. I will keep getting solutions, maybe some day I will actually utilize a few of the solutions and make them viable!

Implementer: Joe, Sam and myself

Shaper: Mikaela (I do feel that in order to get things done I may be insensitive, but it is definalty unintended, so I will try to work on that!)

Completer/finisher: Mikaela and Joe

Plant: All of us. Depending on the situation.

Monitor Evaluator: All of us. But mostly Sam.

Specialist: All of us

Coordinator: Joe, Mikaela

Team worker: All of us (I do think we care a lot about each other and understand when someone is busier, trying to cover for them, or simply understanding everyone elses needs)

Resource/Investigator: Joe and Sam

Most of my answers are in line with Sam´s. But will Joe have the same perception of our team? =)

I think tip #24 is very interesting: 

“Changing roles.  Innovations may be triggered when professionals and managers change their roles – some doctors spend one day each year in the role of patients, and some local authority chief executives spend time on the reception desk. Prison reform has historically been advanced when members of the elite have undergone spells in prison. Some innovative businesses rotate their directors (and Switzerland has long changed its Prime Minister every year). “

 “Web presence. All social ventures now have to have a website. But their full potential has only begun to be explored. Many ventures are by their nature information intensive – in respect to the quality and tangibility of their work, the stories of those involved in it, and the range of people with whom it interacts. It has therefore become crucial for ventures to have access to the tools – wikis, chat rooms, forums, comment boxes, and blogs. It also needs high quality design to ensure usability and navigability, ways of connecting each web site to others (through links and RSS feeds as well as establishing a presence on other social networking sites like YouTube and Facebook which can act as feeders to the venture’s website. Above all, a venture needs to devote resources to the constant updating and active hosting of their sites. A good example is the site of the cooperative football team Ebbsfleet United (My Football Club), which has a team of six working on their website to involve the members, a model that could be adopted by many consumer co-ops among others. “  

 This tip is also something we are trying to implement in HoldtheFrontPages and all throughout our company values (Tshaped) since we think that the web as immense power and the social media is developing more and more. Having this in mind we are trying to put the service in every possible media including Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, web presence, etc.

The facebook updates are going great to. On the second week we had 238 visits to our facebok page and 77 fans. On the third week  we had 282 visits (more visits than the week before) and 13 fans extra (90 in total). On the fourth week our visits fell to 182 but we had a few more fans (7) join the service. In the last week we have had less people visiting the facebook page, but know with our website we assume that the traffic is going to the website instead. All these statistcs are to show that we are paying attention to how people are interacting with our facebook page and website.

We actually have a very interested investor. A business angel we met in the trade fair. We are arranging a meeting with him and we´re very excited. We are going to plan the meeting in detail. Make sure that we can show them a lot of revenue sources and big potential for our service. Powerpoints, diagrams or simple talking? What is the best option? All this will be discussed in our next business meeting.

Even doubt we have not met the past week, since I am not in London, we all take time to update the website (Joe is doing it now) and “like” the facebook posts or just check that everything is running smoothly. But it is very hard to account the number of hours I spend on this business. Sending e-mails to promote the service and talking to people about ideas takes time but at the same time is very rewarding to see that people are responding to the service and are excited enough to give feedback and ideas. I actually managed to put a link of our service in the official website of the Communication Sciences official website from my Portuguese University, which will be up shortly! And we were also feature as enterpreneurs of the month by the enterpreneurship society, check it out: http://yourhiddenpotential.co.uk/2010/03/29/tshaped-hold-the-front-pages-com/

We have another possible investor in our business. My father. It is lame that its my father because obviously he is biased, but he really thinks there is potential and that we should persue this business much further than MACE. But I think we have already decided that, that our business is so much more than a Master´s project. This can actually make us real enterpreneurs with a real potentially lucrative business. Iupi!

Tshaped did not meet last week, since we are waiting for the website to be finished. Joe is the one who has been dealing with the coder and with making sure that the coder has everything he wants. He has been doing a great job, since the coder asks a lot of questions and definatly needs some guidance. Good job joe!

Since last week we have been updating the front pages of all the major newspapers into the Hold the front pages facebook page. Joe did it all last week, and this week is my turn to wake up early (usually the page is updated before 9:30) and update them. Although it might sound like a simple job, it entailes reuniting all the cover (which includes a few print screens and cutting techniques) and than uploading them. People haven’t had a lot of interactions with them, but some “Likes” have been added. We are using facebook so that people are aware of hold the front pages, more than awaiting interaction from them, and I think we are achieving that.

Tshaped met this week on Sunday evening, for one hour. On the agenda was the state of our website, the traide fair and the ads.

We had to extend the coding deadline, which might be prejudicial if it is not done by the traide fair (which is the new dead line! – stressed about that). For the trade fair we planned a few surprises and decided matching colour coded outfits to look more professional. We will also hand out business cards and hopefully generate awareness for out business.  In regards to the ads, the first one will be slightly changed to suit with the comments we had on class, and will include a screen shot of out website.

once we launch it will be crazy. Updating the website everything will include inserting the images in the code, which will be more time consuming and more complicated than we entitled. But, things will get done!

We are through to the National Varsity Pitch 2010 Semi-FInals. IUPI!!!!!! It is going to be very hard to pass on to the finals, but just reaching this benchmark is great! I am very proud of my myself and my team!

On thursday we filmed our ads, and Joe and Sam edited them, and they are now visible on our tshaped website.

Friday was bright new day. It  was again another interesting day. The Apprentice Challenge 2 was much harder than the first one, in my opinion. On the first challenge I felt in my confort zone, and althought it was good to challenge myself in my area, the STUFF challenge took the challenging to another level. We basically had to construct the brief and market the company, since the brief usually contains important information on the target audience, budget, launch dates, competitors, etc., info we had to come up with, last Friday.

I have to confess, I was a bit scared at first, since I really wanted to do well and wanted our team to do well. But the scary thoughts went away as soon as we started working on the challenge. We managed to come up with a good idea (I think). We made sure to explain how the main idea tied up with everything else we were planning for the company, since I think that is key for the client to understand the value of your idea.

Being filmed on the pod was a peculiar experience. Most of the times I didn´t even remember that the camara was there, but when something out of the ordinary would happen I found myself explaining things to the camara justifying some kind of action. Very strange I would say. But at the same time it also made me evaluate our group dynamics. I think we work well in a group because generally we listen to everyones ideas, explore a few of them and get things done. But, obviously, each of us has its own characteristics.

Joe is the guy who listens to everyone, usually without interrupting, but also has a short attention spam, and starts building towers with markers or simply drawing something. But he is always calm and likes to listen to everyone. Sam is the funny one. He has good ideas but I think sometimes they are hard to understand (and I don´t think that it is because I am a foreigner, lol). e sometimes doens´t really knows what he means, so it is even harder to understand what he is saying, So, after a few questions from myself and Joe, we manage to take Sam´s creative ideas and use them And Sam is hilarious, when were talking about a topic (e.g. competitors) and he comes up with ideas, or simple thoughts on another topic (e.g. target audience). And this does not happen once.. it happens a lot! But it is ok, we note it done, and continue on the topic (when possible.. lol). Now me. I am probably the organizer of the group. During the challenges, I tend to keep us on track of each question we are discussing and try to tie it to the others questions. I am also the one who tries to get Joe, Sam and myself out of the daydreaming zone, lol. I scared that sometimes I may viewed as bossy, or as someone that wants things her way. Hopefully my team mates think I am lovely and not bossy at all (hum.. am I believing that Santa Claus exists??!). I really hope that what I do is simply keep track of time and of our activities, so that we can push forward as fast as we can with things done.

I am excited for our last apprentice challenge. What will it be?? =)