Week 967

Matt Kirkland

It's week 967!

I was recently reading some advice about writing in public that encouraged the occasional 'recap' post. There's a reason every plot-driven TV show relies on the 'previously, on...' trick. Even people who are watching something for fun won't remember all the details of a compelling show. Do you think they're going to remember the details about... your company?

This is probably good advice. I'm PERSONALLY very tuned-in to Brand New Box. But I'm probably an outlier. So!

If you're just joining us: Brand New Box is a digital product studio that makes and supports new superpowers for high-performing teams. In 2006, Nate Clark started doing solo development in California, and Matt Kirkland joined in 2007 bringing a design focus. We built up a client roster of fascinating people and projects, building new tools and platforms. We built global tools that serve giant Fortune 100 companies, and we helped startups get to their first launch, and tackled most sizes of projects in between.

(That even included a couple of short-lived but *educational* startups of our own; a CMS for churches and a suite of assessment apps for the health & safety industry.)

Bute couldn't stay away from client work. We love building the next thing. And we love growing those projects, in long-term partnerships with the teams we support.

By 2013 we realized we could do this work from anywhere. Our clients were distributed everywhere, and so we opened our Lawrence, KS office.

We continued our dev & design work, and hired our first of many amazing full-time employees (Will Carey - our incomparable CTO!). We went fully remote in 2020, and we've grown to a steady and reliable team of damn-near-geniuses, who love to jump at a new project and solve a new problem.

In that time we've built huge, powerful new platforms - used by hundreds of thousands of people. And we've also built absolutely bespoke experiences that serve a tiny handful of people, who have unique business needs and huge impacts. We built unexpected domain expertise in asset management tools, and edtech, and music.

But the thing I'm most excited about is still the same: what we're building next.