I want to talk about six months of Obra Studio. Time flies while having fun, right?

I started work on the company after my honeymoon in December last year and I feel I didn’t really stop. People who know me personally will know that I have sort of personal deadline coming up in July, so I was driven to make the most out of the first six months.

I built most of the company here from Mexico, but I went to Belgium twice to see clients, to meet my colleagues, and network a bit.

A first highlight was contracting our first collaborator Nele in May. Nele is with us as a freelancer and has many years of experience as a designer.

We also have Emily working with us as a freelancer. Working with Emily again is a happy return after having worked with her for many years at Mono.

We’ve been having a great collaboration with Robert on the business development who is also doing design & analysis on some projects. He uses his startup experience to help us do the right thing in the early stages of our company.

As of last Friday, the about page is up on the Obra website so I guess this is my way to announce that we’re officially a team now.

Overall, you would think this is an outfit of just a few people, but if I would pull back the curtains you would see that there is an involvement of at least nine people.

Not everyone has the same type of full-time commitment, but I’ve got a few people to thank that I can continuously rely on when I need them.

First is is our web developer Bauke, which I would like to thank for listening to all my website needs, and developing our super nice Craft CMS-powered website. Working with this CMS has been great and I am glad I’ve made the investment.

There is our newest temporary member of the team – our marketeer Catalina, which I would like to thank to jump in for a marketing summer drive.

There is our freelance visual designer, Marina, which I would like to thank as well for helping us to reach a next visual design level.

Thank you Gavin for supporting some meta-work on Figma plugins and tools. If you’re from the UK – take a look to work with Gavin!

Thank you, J., for helping out with giving feedback on the business model and representing Obra at an industry conference.

Thanks you Simon for helping me with running our own Tacos y Tech event!

And thank you Willow, for being our trustworthy Svelte developer.

So, you know, it’s teamwork. My wife joked that teamwork makes the dream work – I think that’s how I feel today.

The dream is to have a nice boutique agency where we can do the best work.

At this point, I feel like I have enough assurances that I can breathe now, after working on this agency for many months without a lot of breaks and trying to give it my best every day.

We’ve got two long term clients, we’ve got good prospects, and we’ve strategized a way to sell design in what’s — to be honest — a tough year for design.

I feel like we’ve reached an equilibrium where we have a team, we have a strategy, and we have the long term projects to make sure that the company will last.

And now we just have to continue. If we have enough sales, we can start thinking about a third designer towards September.

I am proud of the work we’re doing, and of the team we’ve built. We’ve got some very nice projects to show soon in our portfolio.

I feel it’s only going to get better from here on now because the base is done, the website is there, the team is there, the base logic of what we sell and why it’s there. And now we go to the next phase. Vámonos!