In the beginning of a company, the talents of the core founders are all important. But as the company matures, the founders need to change their ways, and focus instead on hiring people better than them, and then figuring how to get out of the way.

I'd like to give you two examples.

Alex was our first employee, hired by me because he did a great job 3D printing some objects for me, via an outsource-to-amateurs website I'd found.  Over the years he's been involved in almost everything at Decent, and more and more, a designer in his own right.

I taked Alex with using our new laser etching machine to good effect on the DE1.  He had to try many designs, prototype them, but also deeply understand the manufacturing techology and how it intersects with the artwork, so make it look its best.

In the end, he settled on two very different designs: a thick, filled latte art pattern, with the laser powered to a cream/yellow color.  And an X-Ray drawing of the DE1, with the laser cutting deeply into the chassis to create a 3D effect that changes with the viewing angle.

But.... almost nobody was buying these, and I think it's because  I'd limited the visibility of his work, to these tiny photos, which doesn't make his work look terribly good:

Harris comes with a photography and art school background, and has long mentioned wanting to totally revamp our product photography.  She recently gave me a set of "in real life" photos of our milk jug, and I agreed with her: we should be doing better.

In the spirit of "getting out of the way" I've programmed our website so that she can now insert multiple photos into our product database, and they'll appear as a "more photos" button on the website.

Clicking on that will get you a scrollable, large format set of photos, such as:

https://decentespresso.com/morephotos?sku=DE-XLMAINCOVERBKLATTEART_R3-73748

https://decentespresso.com/morephotos?sku=DE-XLMAINCOVERBKXRAY_R3-73750

Of course, it'll take many months for Harris to take nice photos of our entire product line, but she's now able to do so, and I've told her to set her own priorities.  And this will hopefully motivate more of my staff to push forward, doing better work than the founders did.

-john

#photos #website