Investor showcase tomorrow
By
Teresa Wojcik
Published on
August 20, 2024
Hi there!
It's been two weeks since I managed to sit down and write a newsletter. It's been a pretty busy time including a COVID scare, performing in Suor Angelica and flying home briefly for a family wedding.
The website frontend is continually moving towards being ready, spreadsheet prep is coming out my ears, and tomorrow is the CBRIN Investor Showcase.
The biggest issue of the last few weeks that has been taking up most of my cpu, is trying to get the first version of the website hosted on Webflow live. We had agreed that the new team would use my existing Amazon Product Catalog Spreadsheet, and the information that the previous team scraped from Petal + Pup to begin with. We will add the other 3 suppliers very shortly afterwards.
I was assured by Harshit from the previous team that the information is very easy to find on AWS, and if my team had read the code, they should be able to have the information within 15 minutes.
I wish.
The new team reported they couldn't find it anywhere. I asked Harshit again to either send me the pathway, or a screen recording of where to find it. I had to remind him it wasn't a competition of whether my new team was 'good enough' or passed some sort of weird tech hazing test to find it. It was about an efficient handover.
Grant and I sat down for a good hour and a half. We tried every angle. Nothing seemed to ping it. The information simply didn't seem to be anywhere on AWS. When Grant says he is completely stumped, you know something isn’t right.
Then Harshit told me he could get me the information, but first on the 25th of March because he was on a 3-week Ramadan holiday without his computer.
Meanwhile, days are dripping by.
All I want is a working website! And everyone keeps assuring me, it shouldn't be hard and won't take long....
takes a deeeeep breath
We're working on it.
Tanja has created a beautiful postcard summing up Your Season for the Investor Showcase tomorrow. I get to give a 30-second pitch (still thinking about it!), and then network for the rest of the event. Because I don't have any THING to demo, we decided the cleanest approach would be to put together a quick overview for investors, with a link to the investor pitch deck, which gives more detail.
I am so in awe of how Tanja can take my verbal ideas and turn them into physical/visual THINGS. I am an artistic, creative person, but have never had the knack for visual arts. It is absolute poetry how she manages to convey all the information without overloading the eyes or relying too heavily on text.
I would tell you all to start working with her....but I'm worried I'd lose my spot as her client!
Wish me luck for the Showcase!
I've been musing a lot about what being in business is like. My partner's Mum just gave us her piano. I got a bunch of books from a fellow music teacher and have been inhaling the pieces. Jazz, classical, contemporary, don't care. It's fun, a bit frustrating, and not at all like business. You practice one piece over and over again, break it into tiny little bits, understand it fully, and then replicate it, often. Business seems to me, to feel more like - you build a really well-meaning, but dodgy plane, skip over a lot of the nitty gritty for speed's sake, throw it as far as you can, see what sticks, research what falls apart, try again. Of course, every rebuild takes time, effort, and money, so you are trying to get it right, but...it just doesn’t seem to work that way.
Actually, on second thoughts, that's quite what learning a piece of music is like. The first play through you are sight-reading and just leaving out what your fingers don't get to, then you go over it in finer detail until you can play it well.
I think, maybe because I'm in the early stages of this business, everything feels like sight-reading right now, and I haven't reached the fluidity, confidence and enjoyment of knowing that the next part is going to work because it's been practiced into muscle memory. Something to look forward to…
Thanks for reading along! If you can think of anyone who would be interested in joining me on this journey, please invite them to subscribe to the newsletter here.
Talk soon!
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