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** EDITION — 006

Hey, I’m Jared Henriques. You are receiving this because you signed up for my newsletter. If you didn’t do that, it means someone else signed you up. Sorry about that.

** July 2019

Hey Friends. I know that I have been sporadic with these weekly updates. I am going to be experimenting with a new format. I’m going to be sending this on a monthly basis and providing some high level updates on what I’ve been working on, researching, discovering, etc. I would love to hear feedback from anyone on this. Let me know if there is something you’re more interested in hearing about.

** I got an office this past month.

It was really important for me to keep it close to home. It’s not really meant to be Renga’s head office, but rather a quiet place with fast wifi that I work out of. Some of the team comes through every so often, and it’s a great place for us to have our all hands meetings.

I wrote an article about why I stopped working from home, check it out! (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-reasons-i-stopped-working-from-home-jared-henriques/) https://vimeo.com/344661063

** Renga Brand Reel

We have just released a video with some of the work that our team has done in the last little bit.

At Collision Conference in May, Matt and myself went and spoke with many businesses. It was clear that they liked us and loved our process and approach. Without fail the question was always “can I see more work”. The difficulty here is that our team is new and the work that we’ve created together is limited. We need to get their work to have more work to show.

Our strategy to beat this chicken egg scenario is to create a reel highlighting some of the recent work adding an extra dimension of motion. The breadth of the work can be found in the few case studies that we have up, but it allows us to bring in some smaller projects that don’t have a full case study.

We’re working on a bunch of exciting projects right now, I’m excited to share those case studies when they are completed

** Switching to Notion

Over the years I feel I have tried nearly every project management software. At Renga we have used Basecamp and Asana. Both are good and have their strengths, but the one that has become painfully obvious is that these product companies are building project management software for other product companies.

There really isn’t a way to handle tasks outside of the project format, a lack of understanding that other employees has different types of tasks and the client inbound flow becomes quite difficult.

Because there wasn’t a clear winner in this space I looked to notion. I had always said that if we were building a product I would just use Slack and Notion (https://notion.so) . Notion is this very robust tool that allows users to create nearly anything inside of it. It’s sort of like Airtable meets Evernote.

Adopting notion for us has replaced Asana (project management), Dropbox paper (Share document editing), A Sales CRM, and a tool we didn’t have but like a wiki / resource hub.

Notion advertises itself as “the missing part of slack” and it truly feels that way. I met a kind person on twitter who said that they used Notion for their agency and I had to learn more. He was kind enough to do a video call with me and run me through a demo of how they handle this all. The secret, databases. Understanding that not many people on this list are using notion nor care to use it to run an organization I will spare the details but the important part is that it has now become a tool that the whole team uses and we’ve created dashboards for everyone that is catered to their workflow and the information they need. For example my dashboard has some of the high level views of all our projects and another of our sales pipeline. While Matt’s is almost exclusively meeting notes and sales pipeline, and Landon’s is much more task focused.

It’s been a lot of work to set up but we feel confident that this will be an invaluable resource for us to track all of our documents, resources, tasks, projects, people, leads, etc.

I recommend playing around with notion, if you can set it up in a way that suits your workflow it can become an invaluable tool. A couple weeks ago Alex and I put a ceiling fan in our room and it might be my new favourite thing. It’s very nice after being outside and getting all hot to shower off and just lay on the bed under the ceiling fan. I could spend a lot of time there.

** What I’ve Been Enjoying

** Music

Loyle Carner’s latest album Not Waving, But Drowning (https://open.spotify.com/album/1kokRXXxrJzhxdMo0vsVDV?si=BAue6lAYRPKrO26iB1q3RA)

Raveena’s debut album Lucid (https://open.spotify.com/album/5zM1YPLVNvxe6S8I3MIAbg?si=XaL1V0qLQIyC881bXDBAxQ)

Snoh Aalegra’s latest single Find Someone Like You (https://open.spotify.com/track/5CPwfSTHqEIOOWLkRMx2O7?si=sPwE-xjyRRaKxKq9-c34BA)

Daniel Caesar’s new album Case Study 01 (https://open.spotify.com/album/4mvxoogQn8p84Wz17zTHnJ?si=TWY3tBQVS0unfFcu7tPBLQ)

** YouTube

The Futur - building a brand (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzKJi2GjpkEFsV13D3WPm5s6tZVkvKJ1-)

The Futur is a cool channel from this branding studio in LA called Blind. They created the futur as an education resource for creators, mainly graphic designers to teach them how to business. They recently released a series where they walk through building a brand with a client and it’s been interesting to compare our processes.

Complex - Blueprint (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSa6COaFn0M&list=PLNE967m3_UeTeL5ZPk94f_kP8iFBvib6M&index=17)

I know that I’m late to the game on this one, but lately I’ve been watching some of the Blueprint interviews and I’m so fascinated by hearing entrepreneurs start up stories. The world of streetwear is always something that fascinates me, and frankly I miss making clothing. My favourite episode of Blueprint that I’ve watched so far has been Scooter Braun’s. He is an entertainment mogul and most famously known for discovering and managing Justin Bieber, since then he’s done lots of cool stuff.

I really like his comments around success in this interview and how it has changed since becoming a father. What also becomes so clear in this is that there are no overnight successes. The people on top have worked to be there. It’s definitely a challenge to ensure that my work ethic matches my ambition.

** Podcasts

Selfmade (https://pca.st/podcast/b1068920-6898-0137-f267-1d245fc5f9cf)

Not many people know, but when I was younger I used to play some competitive video games, mainly Call of Duty. During that time one of the best players in the world was named Nadeshot. I have followed Nadeshot over the years as he became more of an Internet personality being the first esport athlete to be sponsored by Red Bull and now he has started his own gaming organization called 100 Thieves, who has received investment from Dan Gilbert, Scooter Braun, Drake and others.

He recently launched a new podcast where he interviews other people that are self made. His first episode is with Hector Rodriguez another business mogul in the gaming space. I’ve follow both of them for a while and am really intrigued by the business opportunity in the gaming industry. It’s an industry I quite enjoy and I’d be surprised if I didn’t try and do something there one day.

The Catchup Call (https://pca.st/podcast/74bd6090-2ee8-0137-f265-1d245fc5f9cf)

Many years ago I stumbled across a company called NeedWant. They were this small group of guys who were building a few different product based businesses that were unrelated. They had emoji masks, smart bedding sheets, a notebook company, iPhone case brand and an online publication. As soon as I saw this, I knew that this was the closest expression of what I’m interested in building.

Two of NeedWant’s founders have focused their efforts on some different projects and every two weeks they have a call discussing what they’ve been working on, interested by and learning. They record that and call it a podcast. I quite enjoy hearing about their process.

** My Home Screen

One thing I’m going to be doing is sharing a screenshot of the iPhone home screen the day I publish these. I personally just find it interesting to track the apps I use over time and it might be a fun way for you to see the apps that I’m using.

Any questions about one of them? Ask me Thanks for reading, you’re neat

Jared

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