Did you catch Jason DeRusha’s report on WCCO’s The Wire? If not, you can check it out here (sorry we can’t embed it). Watch it and you’ll see The Nerdery and our own Bill Brown talking about this new news portal we helped build.
We’ve built The Nerdery to keep up with our ad agency partners’ crazy deadlines. And, one weekend a year for fun, we stay up all night with many of our agency friends at The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, at which teams of interactive pros volunteer to help nonprofits build free websites in 24 hours.
For our “Interactive on Impossible Deadlines” webinar on Thursday, April 1 at 3:15 p.m. Central, we’ll be joined by the captains of successful Overnight Website Challenge teams to discuss lessons learned – both from our day jobs and under tight deadlines in the wee hours. Join us for a nerd’s-eye view of how we work with agency partners to handle big interactive projects in short order. Our panel will include:
Take a look at some of the topics we’ll cover and RSVP today!
Team Ruby.MN is a solid 3 for 3 at The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge; judges ranked the three-year volunteer vets a close second to Team Placeholder. The latest nonprofit to benefit from Ruby.MN is Homeward Bound, an organization that helps kids and adults with severe and profound disabilities lead more fulfilling lives.
Homeward Bound/Ruby.MN – Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge from The Nerdery on Vimeo.
See Homeward Bound’s new website at http://hbimn.heroku.com/.
(This was an email to Nerdery staff – and perhaps, dear reader, you’ll join us soon and come to expect such communiqués)
All,
You may have noticed that we never held a Q4 2009 wrap-up meeting. If you didn’t notice, it may be because there’s a 24% chance that you didn’t even work here that last time we did one of our quarterly(ish) update meetings. I finally decided that we are so close to the end of Q1 that we’d just wait and do a Q4 & Q1 wrap-up meeting combo. But, there’s lots of stuff going on and I feel compelled to provide some summary updates here.
Sales Summary:
We closed 2009 with sales of $8,609,108, which is about 5% over our adjusted plan of $8,200,000. Ugh. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice the word “adjusted” in that first sentence, but obviously I can’t slip anything past you folks. Our original sales goal for 2009 (which we baked at the end of 2008) was $10,000,000. We decided to adjust (un-bake) this plan in May of 2009 after we finally sat down and watched the news.
We grew our revenue by 35% from 2008 to 2009, which is a more-than-respectable achievement. We should all be proud of being part of an organization that was able to establish a strong growth rates in 2009.
Our sales goal for 2010 is $11,200,000, which is 30% growth over 2009 actual revenue. We haven’t finished the first quarter of this year yet, but we are on track for meeting (and possibly exceeding) our sales goal. By “possibly exceeding”, I mean, “we’re going to pwn our sales goal!” We only need like… umm.. carry the one… $118,000 more in sales this month. Get up, go find a sales rep, give him or her a big hug and say, “I believe in you!” Then, sign an order for $1,180. If we all do this, we WILL reach our goal.
Employment Summary:
In 2009, we had a net increase of 16 employees. We started 2010 with 85 employees, added 18 new people and lost one – leaving us with 102 employees (this number includes full-time contractors, excludes dogs, and includes the two people that are scheduled to start in the next week or so). Of the 18 new people this year, 17 of them are in the development department and they recommend sugarless gum for people that chew gum. Are you trying to figure out who the other one is? It’s our newest sales engineer, Bill Titler. I don’t know why he hates sugarless gum; maybe he moonlights as a dentist.
Space Summary:
We have about 17,000 square feet at The Nerdery. We are adding an additional 7,000 square feet in about two months. The lease is signed, the plans are in place and construction is ready to begin any time. We are taking over the two vacant office suites to the north of our space. The diagonal wall will be removed (Nerdery Science Theater will be preserved), new bathrooms will be added, and we’ll have some new conference rooms and a few new offices. If Mike Derheim makes you nervous whenever he takes a tape measure to your workspace, rest assured that his intentions are good. He’s not trying to figure out how many boxes or additional people will fit in your cube. To be honest, I really don’t know why he does that. Perhaps it’s some sort of tape-measuring neurosis that isn’t even work-related.
The new space comes complete with all new cube furniture. All of our cubicles are going to be replaced with new(er) and super(ior) equipment. Mainly, the new cubes have noise-dampening properties that should result in a quieter working environment. But, more importantly, the new space comes with new large bathrooms AND our existing bathrooms up front are being remodeled. Unfortunately, they need to remodel our existing bathrooms before building our new ones. You got the memo, so you know the deal. We’ve survived worse bathroom conditions than this. I just hope the reduced bathroom capacity doesn’t create chair-dampening properties.
Summery Summary:
About the time that our Nerdery Expansion project is complete, we’ll be starting our geographic expansion initiative in earnest. “Geo-what-phic expansion,” you say? This summer, we’ll be opening our first fully-functional remote office – equipped with sales and development staff. Due to the combination of market opportunity, proximity and the option to bribe our way to business success, we have selected Chicago as the venue. And we can keep a closer eye on Matt Albiniak.
We feel that opening offices in remote markets is key to our long-term success. Due to our local presence, we are so much more effective at penetrating the Twin Cities market than we are any other market. By establishing a real local presence in remote markets, we can repeat the success we have seen in the Twin Cities.
This expansion will create a much greater demand on the organization for leadership skills resulting in greater opportunities for individual career growth. For example, who wants Tom O’Neill’s job when he’s busy bootstrapping a new remote office? Anyone? Hello? Is this thing on (thump thump)? I was afraid of that…
We plan to launch the Chicago office with as many current employees as possible. It’s imperative that we start it off right and foster the kind of culture that we have here in Bloomington. Do any of you developers want to move to Chicago to help launch this new office? If so, talk to Tom. To make the conversation more entertaining, start by following this protocol:
You: “So, I hear Chicago is nice this time of year.”
Tom: “Chicago is going to be much nicer in August because we’ll have a badass office there with badass devs and badass sales reps and a badass refrigerator and badass dogs!”
You: “Hells Yeah!”
Tom: “Hells Yeah!”
Summary Summary:
Sales are good. Our team is awesome. More space and bathrooms are on the way. Chicago is hells yeah.
Thanks,
Luke
Finance & Commerce has a story about the rise in casual gaming (those games you play on Facebook as opposed to say, Call of Duty) and the partnership between The Nerdery and SnowOwl Studio. The story explains more about casual gaming, who is playing these games, and the new partnership. You should go read it, if only to see this awesome quote in context:
“A couple of the company’s nerds did resurrect a vintage Tron, a coin-operated arcade game that was based on the movie Tron released in 1982. But that was purely fun.”
Yeah, we love it anytime our Tron game gets a little press.
First, a blanket thanks to all who made the 2010 Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge our best yet. While this friendly competition has an all-encompassing winners’ circle, top billing goes to the champs, Team Placeholder – whose designated nonprofit, Dakota Wicohan, had no website whatsoever when our last long-lost weekend began. Look at them now, and watch how their team (which included eight people from Larsen, a design, branding, marketing and interactive agency) delivered the goods, literally overnight.
Dakota Wicohan/Team Placeholder at Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge from The Nerdery on Vimeo.
RSVP here for our “Interactive on Impossible Deadlines” webinar next Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Central (we’re back on normal business hours), featuring Team Placeholder captain Reid Durbin (from Larsen) and other Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge vets.
OK, the previous blanket statement of thanks to the many Challenge supporters simply will not do. We’re gonna have to name names.
Competition is good, but judging such a competition could not have been easy – and for making tough choices in a timely yet thoughtful and gracious manner, we thank our judges:
We can’t sufficiently thank sponsors Benchmark Learning, LaBreche and ReliaCloud for supporting our nerdathon and its participants in their own meaningful ways. Benchmark Learning will donate training to nonprofits and give half-price rates to volunteer developers. They also hosted our pre-Challenge mixer, providing space (and beverages) for constructive speed dating. LaBreche, our frequent agency partner, joined us this year as an event sponsor and treated all the nonprofits to a pre-Challenge branding/interactive strategy session. VISI offered each nonprofit complimentary web hosting, including the option for its ReliaCloud service; they also provided each volunteer developer a $100 ReliaCloud credit.
We’d also like to send a shout out to all of our in-kind donors and meal sponsors who helped us to make sure that while participants may have been tired, at least they weren’t running on empty.
These companies also supported The Challenge in their own unique ways:
We (the “royal we” of Mark Hurlburt and I) want to personally thank Nerdery founders Luke Bucklin, Mike Derheim, Mike Schmidt for having the vision to see how much good an event like this can do in our community, and having the faith to let us take time away from our “real” jobs to further our ongoing experiment of mixing the nerdy with the needy. Also, thanks for being there to make the first of many pots of coffee (Luke), making multiple food runs (Mike D) and a midnight run for more coffee creamer (Mike S). And, oh yeah, about 3,800 hours of professional web development services were freely given to 16 nonprofits last weekend because of your willingness to run with an idea (Hurlburt’s) that was (and remains) just mad enough to work.
In addition to having volunteers on five of 16 development teams and the aforementioned extras on-hand, The Nerdery also dispatched a band of volunteers who came (and many stayed) to help keep the event running as smoothly as possible. Thanks to Jessica Mogen, Matt Tonak, Jodi Chromey, David Kam, Annette Johnson, Ginger Sorvari Bucklin, Heidi Schmidt, Kai Esbensen, Kris Szafranski, Dave Bucklin, Theresa Dahlberg, Brendan Beckham, Bruce Peterson, Simon Banks, Sara Tabor, Sonja Peterson, Bill Titler, Scott Spillman, Tony Webster and Merne Williams.
Our hosts at the U of M Continuing Education Conference Center deserve props for again letting us rock-star their fine facility, with particular thanks to Ken Gay, Mike Wybierala, Leslie Berry and Wendy Hanson.
The crescendo from the orchestra pit tells me I’ve rambled long enough, so thanks again, everyone – particularly anyone I’ve fool-heartedly forgotten.
On this blog, we’ll continue to post profiles of the finished sites created at The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, so stay tuned.
First of all, in case you didn’t get a chance to TiVO KSTP Channel 5′s report on the webchallenge, you can watch it here and marvel that Mark Hurlburt sounds so coherent after nearly 30 hours without sleep.
Second of all, now that we’ve had a day to recover, it’s time to show you what some other people have posted the 2010 Overnight Website Challenge.
Happy Go Lucky – Web Challenge 6+ hours left from Nathan Hein on Vimeo.
photo by Tony Webster
Congratulations to Team Placeholder (pictured here in the black) for their victory in The Nerdery’s 2010 Overnight Website Challenge. Team Placeholder built a site (from scratch, they currently have no site) for Dakota Wicohan, a group dedicated to preserving the Dakota language which only has nine remaining original speakers. Pretty awesome all around.
Thank you to everyone who participated — nonprofits and volunteers — you all did something pretty amazing within the last 24 hours. Nice work, we can’t wait to do it all over again next year.
We’ve passed 4 a.m. here in the land of the webchallenge and things have certainly quieted down. We’ve slipped from the giddy giggly stage and into the contemplative energy conservation stage (laughing requires a lot of energy. energy you could be using to stay awake).
Some of our nerds are burrowing in for the long haul, and Matt has made a fort and banned everyone but his new BFF (the Yoda Backpack that’s part of the Empire Strikes Package).
Of course after you have traversed the barren, frigid landscape of Hoth you deserve some fort time. Right?
We capture some nerds taking a spin in the Cash Vault (and in Annette’s case we’ll just call it the Crash Vault):
Money Money Money from The Nerdery on Vimeo.
