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Building your own products is not exactly the most profitable thing you can do as an agency. But we’re not in it for profit. We’re here to build incredible products that push the world forward.
I plan to give a bit more insight into our experience of building products in a future article, but it’s fair to say although we have spent well over a million pounds in developing these products over the years, we’ve never fully committed. To build products you need a lot of ingredients, one of which is the ability and commitment to hustle as if your life depends on it. When you’re running an agency that doesn’t happen, as you always fall back on the agency work and never fully commit.
Today that changes. I’ll be moving to CEO of the group and MD of a new products arm of 3 SIDED CUBE. I’ll be advising the management team and on hand for solution advise, but from January will be fully committed to the products arm.
"Our exciting new product arm will enable us to fulfil our mission of building tech for good." Duncan Cook, CEO, 3 Sided Cube
Rich Strachan will be stepping up from overseeing the output from our production teams for the past 18 months to become Managing Director of the agency. Sophie Hardiman Biles, with her extensive knowledge from four years of working on our client’s projects taking over as Head of Production, and with Puff as Head of Commercial, I’m happy that we have the management team in place to take the agency to even greater heights. For the team, this is pretty much how we’ve been working for the last six months, but now it’s official.
The agency world has learnt a huge amount from the start-up world, taking their techniques such as prototyping, user testing etc. and applying it to help build great solutions for clients. Our journey to date in building products has helped the team grow their understanding and skills around this, doing this for ourselves should push the team to new levels and accelerate our learning which will feedback into our client work.
The product arm will have the same ethos as CUBE and will be building products that will have a social impact on the world, this won’t be some small venture. We will be going big.
Building products is incredibly hard and even some of the best on the planet have a low hit rate, so I’m in no doubt this is a big risk and will take huge investment in, money, time, blood sweat and tears, but life is way too short to not take these kind of risks.
More on what this new product arm will look like and why we are doing it will follow, but I’m seriously excited for the change this will have on everyone involved.
A huge thank you to everyone who has been involved in helping us get to where we are today and wish us luck, pretty sure we’re going to need it!
Published on 27 January 2017, last updated on 30 May 2018