a digital product firm

March 5th, 2010

An Update on The 30 Coffees Project

You may or may not know that in February, Fight kicked off its 30 Coffees project. 30 coffees is an idea conjured up by Fight partner, Rob Shields, and at its heart it’s a simple social web exercise. As Rob said at the beginning – “Fight has an awesome community of supporters, so we thought: Who better to turn to to help us make a good thing better? We believe that Fight is a different kind of company from other marketing strategy firms, and we’d like to get some practice talking about ourselves to people in the business, marketing, and agency worlds so that when we talk to potential clients we can really shine.”

I have already met with 16 people since we started, and along the way the concept became elastic enough to include meetings I have had with some of the heads of Portland’s advertising and marketing agencies. It’s been a fascinating discussion, and I stress the word discussion as this was never intended to be an opportunity to pitch people, it is intended to help Fight form its own internal and external narrative. The feedback from the talks has been extremely useful. And more importantly, by the end of the project [it looks like it may run over a bit because of scheduling plus my speaking engagement at SXSW,] I am certain we will have honed our story along with our elevator pitch, and have them nailed down. 14 more to go and then I will be writing up the whole endeavor very soon…

I wish to say thanks to the first set of participants. I’ve included their Twitter accounts where possible, so if you use Twitter I encourage you to follow these good people:

Erik Johnson
David Burn @davidburn
Brandon Schoessler @transport_1
Denny Mcentire @dfatouchi
Dian Crawford @diancrawford
Aaron Day
Jennifer Day-Burget @portlandwater
Jennie Fitzhugh @sasquatcha
Stephen Landau @stlandau
Ed Borasky @znmeb
Bryan Rhoads @bryanrhoads
Jay Cosnett @jaycosnett
Amanda Bernard
Jim Woolfrey @informative
Charlie Quirk @CharlieQuirk
Emanuel Brown @emanuelbrown

And honorable mentions to the following for being involved, somewhat unwittingly!

Ashly Stewart @AshlyStewart
David Ewald @motorcoatdave
Justin Yeun @jyuen
Rebecca Armstrong @rebeccamary
Arve Overland @ArveOverland
Jerry Ketel @JerryKetel
Dennis Hahn

Dave Allen
  • http://uxpillow.blogspot.com/ Tyesha

    Starting a new endeavor by taking the idea out into world to test, refine and improve is such a nice approach. So often we go hide away, afraid to share until it's “perfect” either because we don't want to show weakness or are concerned with someone stealing our ideas. Your approach seems to be part of a growing trend to just put it on the table and utilize the increasing available bank of great minds who are willing to share and support others.

    Looking forward to watching Fight take flight.

    p.s. Portland seems like a particularly great place for this type of business development. People here have, and continue to be nothing if not extremely enthusiastic about contributing to the success of others. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now.

  • http://uxpillow.blogspot.com/ Tyesha

    Starting a new endeavor by taking the idea out into world to test, refine and improve is such a nice approach. So often we go hide away, afraid to share until it's “perfect” either because we don't want to show weakness or are concerned with someone stealing our ideas. Your approach seems to be part of a growing trend to just put it on the table and utilize the increasing available bank of great minds who are willing to share and support others.

    Looking forward to watching Fight take flight.

    p.s. Portland seems like a particularly great place for this type of business development. People here have, and continue to be nothing if not extremely enthusiastic about contributing to the success of others. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now.

blog comments powered by Disqus