• 👥 Team building is hard
• 🐢 Slow but steady growth
• 🧩 Finding product-market fit?
• 📚 Kicking off the Ritza Handbook and other internal resources

Team building is hard, especially(?) for part time positions

I was just saying that it finall feels like we have a great and stable core team when two writers quit on the same day. Luckily this was not due to negative experiences at Ritza, and they will potentially return fairly soon, but the timing (which came on the same day as a key customer agreed to an extended contract) was definitely stressful. Luckily we are still super agile - we were hiring in any case and had some promising applicants lined up, and got 50 new applicants from a new posting. We have several promising writers working on trial projects and except to finalise offers soon. Our strong network of freelancers is more than ready to jump in to pick up any slack.

So overall, we are in a good place, but the events made me think more about how technical writing should work as a career. I far prefer working with people on a longer-term basis where they can properly experience writing as a team activity, and Ritza will never become “Uber for Writing”, trying to take a cut of other people’s work. That said, I would also prefer not to hire writers on a 40h/week basis - I don’t think it is healthy to write that much, most people don’t want to, and it limits what kind of things you can write about if you’re not working as an engineer as well.

On the limited data we have, the most promising writer candidate seems to be someone who does at least 20h a week for us and has Ritza as their “main” gig - I’ve noticed that it’s common for people to claim that they have 20h/week of free time while working 40h/week already, and this obviously never works out well. On the other hand, people who do only a few hours a week don’t really find flow or integrate as well.

“Hiring is hard thank you for coming to my Ted talk” is probably not that interesting on its own, but I think there are some interesting subtleties in different structures. Part time, globally distributed, fully asynchronous roles are probably the only “place” in tech where there is more ‘supply’ than ‘demand’ in terms of talent, but finding it is also tough, especially on a bootstrapped budget.

I think the part that is hardest to reason about is access to “shower time” - the most valuable time someone can sell to you in anything knowledge related is what they think about in their unstructured “free” time. If you work 40h/week for a single company, you probably spend a decent amount of time outside of those 40h solving problems for them. If you work for < 10h/week for a company, you probably don’t. But you can’t really have “dedicate x% of your subconscious to us”, so if you want this you are almost forced to ask for 40h of conscious time. I think there’s huge potential in an arrangement like “hey, we’re not a factory so come hang out with us part time and spend the rest of your time with your family, on side hustles, whatever you want, but the moment any other single thing starts taking up a majority of your focus, we’ll help you transition to focusing even more on that rather” would be ideal, but also the hardest to define in a concrete way.

Slow but steady growth

We still have not reached long-term agreements with any new customers, but we reached an agreement to expand an existing contract, and we (at the risk of repeating last month’s retro) have some promising deals coming up. Again to be repetitive, I find myself constantly swinging back between ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ - for the first half of February, I was focused almost solely on finding more customers, and then very suddenly did a 180 in the other direction, which definitely slowed some things down and meant we had to drop some smaller once-off projects that we were about to start on. Growth often feels far too slow day-to-day and I wonder if I’m doing something wrong or if I should listen those encouraging me to spend more time on marketing, build a better website, etc. Looking back to July, I’m relatively happy with our growth though, so I think most of the negative feelings are simply from being too “zoomed in”.

Finding product market fit?

Once VC said something along the lines of “please grow quickly - every company I invest in over the next 5 years is going to need Ritza’s services”, which is the most promising feedback I’ve gotten so far. I’ve had about a billion conversations about “product market fit” and it still seems to me to a be a leader in “super vague concepts that people swear by”, but I feel like we have it? At least on the writing side, I have more confidence in the ‘free education’ line. I noticed a lot of people from the marketing world agreeing with it and then wanting to create super fluffy bullshit content, and I wondered if we should position differently. But the same VC mentioned that the reason standard marketing and sales tactics don’t work for many tech companies is that developers can smell bullshit from a mile away. I think Digital Ocean’s recent S-1 filing is also great for us, as we usually use Digital Ocean and Stripe as examples of companies that get educational content right. Both of them had to basically set up an internal publishing team from scratch (Stripe even publishes a magizine as a result of this) and I don’t think it makes sense for every tech company to also have their own private publishing company? Anyway, this has been the line since we started and a lot of people didn’t “get” it (and family and friends are still super confused about what we do), but I feel like that is slowly changing which is encouraging.

Building internal resources and what got published

We started building some internal resources for new joiners and the existing team, and are doing this ‘in public’ as the Ritza Handbook on GitHub. I’m getting into the habit of prefering to write a paragraph on GitHub and send a link to someone when answering a question instead of typing out the answer in Slack or similar, and this is going well so far. I think our new Style Guide will grow to something that would be useful to other companies and writers, and I’m developing the idea of running a ‘Ritza writing course’. Spoilers, it’s mainly ‘do a lot of writing’, but we’ve done an informal version of this for a few writers internally and I’ve had several requests from people for something similar, so I made some bullet point and hopefully we can find someone who wants to learn to write and doesn’t mind being a guineapig to help bootstrap it at some point.

Some highlights of content we published this month include

• Building a 2D platform game with PyGame
• Building a personal API with Flask

See y’all next month. It’s always hard to know what is interesting to focus on in these, so if you’re following along and there are things you want to hear more about, let me know by dropping a note to gareth@ritza.co.