Chris and I are off to ETech this week. We are giving a workshop entitled: Community Marketing: Your Customers in Charge

Which is a bit melodramatic for the pretty nuts and bolts workshop we’ve put together.

Stay tuned, because we’ll also post the slides to Slideshare as well as the notes from the session soon!

See you there?

That’s less than the cost of 3 Aeron Chairs ($2697). What did we get for $2672? This is what makes it really awesome:

• 10 desks with ample workspace
• 20 boardroom chairs (stackable)
• 4 movable boardroom tables (small, can come together or pull apart)
• One Coat rack
• 4 File boxes
• 3 perfectly awesome adjustable ergonomic chairs
• 2 bookshelves
• 5 waste baskets
• One beautiful black leather sofa (new)
• One coffee table (to go with the leather sofa)

…and some other stuff, too. Of course, we have to put it all together ourselves now, but isn’t that half of the test of whether a team can work together?

We looked at all sorts of options, even buying used furniture from former startups gone under…loads of Aeron chairs and fancy modular units. All still very expensive (fyi…Aeron chairs second hand don’t lose much value…which I suppose is important).

We even talked about making it all ourselves from scratch, but a trip to home depot to work out the costs proved that Ikea (we don’t know how they do it) is only marginally more expensive – and it all sort of comes together, so no major labor.

We started out four and a half months ago, no savings (not even personal savings), no funding and no clients. Today, we have 10 clients, an office (we are sharing Citizen Space btw), ability to eat and now furniture! We are still fumbling through much of this business stuff and definitely behind in our own promotional materials (like the website, etc. – but we have so many requests for work that we haven’t had time to promote…wait…um…).

We are learning, too. Things haven’t been all sunshine. There are rough moments. Months we couldn’t pay ourselves. Scary moments when you question everything you are doing. Sad moments when a relationship doesn’t work out. Unfortunate moments when someone wishes you ill-will. Most of these moments are when we have to get a little real, put down our ‘embrace the chaos’ banners and think of real ways to move forward (which are still about embracing the chaos, but add a little ‘protective’ layer so that we don’t end up being taken advantage of by the self-centered interests that exist).

But, we are proud of ourselves for working hard and pushing through…and especially that office full of furniture that is being delivered this Friday for under $3k.

[from Flickr]

The other day, someone asked Chris, “So, what’s your business model?” Chris looked at him in disbelief and answered, “It’s this strange fangled new thing called consulting. You see, people hire us to spend time on their marketing and product design and then we bill them and they pay us.”

Crazy. The valley is b0rked.

Yep. CA is legit…and so is Tara…

It’s not a matter of just getting a piece of paper and calling yourself a business. There is work involved in this stuff (beyond the work you have to do to get clients and then make them happy by delivering).

But then, again, we never do it the easy way. Add Canadian immigrant to new business to really really tight timeline to ramping up a totally bootstrapped (let’s call it sandalstrapped) business. No money. No documentation. Not allowed to work. Etc.

We decided to book this trip to Calgary this weekend earlier this month so that I may get a new work visa – then we booked about a gazillion things throughout the month. Fast forward to about a day and a half before we leave and find out we need SO much more than just the incorporation stuff and a few signed contracts…hit the panic button and call our new lawyer (who rocks) to bail us out.

We are convinced that Paul Bertoni is an angel sent from heaven. He is walking us through this painful, confusing process to make it far less painful and/or confusing.

I think we are insane. If we get through this, we’ll tell you the story so you can learn to never ever ever be as crazy as us.

Ben, who until last month worked for the BBC in London, will be working in the position of “Grassroots Architect & CTO” (or as we refer to it, Citizen Technical Officer).

Ben will advise CA’s clients on the execution of developer networks and similar strategies as grassroots channels for innovation, technical development and specialist marketing. He will also offer general product development advice and create technical road-maps and implementation plans.

Additionally, Ben will also be creating the Citizen Agency Developer Network – a vendor-neutral platform that will provide several resources the mash-up community. These include a centralized, community maintained, repository of publicly available APIs, and collaboration tools to facilitate the remote development of projects between community members.

Ben has a track record in this field, having co-founded and ran the award winning and highly regarded backstage.bbc.co.uk developer network for the BBC. He has also advised the BBC on matters ranging from blogging and social software through to RSS/web services and standards compliant web development.

During a total of six years at the BBC, Ben has worked on numerous high-profile websites including the relaunch of the BBC News Website, the BBC News and Sport AV Player and the BBC Blog Network.

Ben will be initially working out of London but transferring to San Francisco by the end of the summer.

First of all, Chris incorporated Citizen Agency. Then we had a crazy couple of weeks, meeting with interested parties and potential clients and people who just wanted to figure out what the heck we were up to.

In the meantime, we volunteered to help throw the Microformats One Year Anniversary, we ran a Mashpit, I moderated a marketing workshop at Supernova, we organized and ran a whole weekend of BarCamping in San Francisco, traveled to Seattle to participate in and present at Gnomedex…amongst a few other gigs here and there.

Oh…and then there was that whole signing on of a couple of clients that we really look forward to working with (tba).

Not to mention finishing our gorgeous new logo and some patterns that we are going to really turn into our ‘marks’. I dunno…I like ‘em. All of these designs came from a collaborative effort from our team and from some awesome help from the brilliant team of Emily and Max at Ideacodes (who are really busy, but gave us some great ideas on direction).
And we have another big announcement…but I want to wait until the other party involved gets over his jetlag and is available to respond.

Today, Chris and I are sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle, working on our website and catching up on life. I look forward to us traveling up to Calgary next weekend to visit my parents, then switch my TN1 over to show me working for Citizen Agency! I’m a little scared, but I think we have all of the paperwork in place.

Citizen Agency’s blog is now self-hosted. Stay tuned for an update on the website and a more clear message, vision and overall picture of who we are and where we are going.

Thanks, everyone, for your support!