It’s been a very hard year

Unlike a lot of places in tech, my company, Set Studio/Piccalilli has no outside funding. Bootstrapped is what the LinkedIn people say, I think.

It’s been a hard year this year. A very hard year. I think a naive person would blame it all on the seemingly industry-wide attitude of “AI can just do this for us”. While that certainly hasn’t helped — as I see it — it’s been a hard year because of a combination of limping economies, tariffs, even more political instability and a severe cost of living crisis. It’s been a very similar year to 2020, in my opinion.

Why am I writing this? All of the above has had a really negative effect on us this year. Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that. Our reputation is everything, so being associated with that technology as it increasingly shows us what it really is, would be a terrible move for the long term. I wouldn’t personally be able to sleep knowing I’ve contributed to all of that, too.

What we do really well is produce websites and design systems that actually work for and with people. We also share our knowledge and experience via tonnes of free content on Piccalilli, funded by premium courses to keep the lights on. We don’t pepper our content with annoying adverts for companies you have no interest in.

I’ve spoken about my dream for us to run Piccalilli full time and heck, that may still happen. For that to happen though, we really needed this Black Friday period to do as well, if not better, as it did last year. So far, that’s not happening unfortunately, but there’s still time.

I get it, money is so tight this year and companies are seemingly not investing in staff with training budgets quite like they did. We actually tried to stem that a bit by trialing a community funding model earlier in the year that I outlined in ‌I’m getting fed up of making the rich, richer and we even started publishing some stuff.

It went down incredibly well, but when push came to shove, we fell way short in terms of funding support. Like I say, we’re not swimming in investor money, so without the support on Open Collective, as much as it hurt, we had to pull the plug. It’s a real shame — that would have been incredible — but again, I get it, money is tight.

This isn’t a woe is me post; that’s not how I roll. This is a post to give some context for what I’m going to ask next and how I’m trying to navigate the tough times. I’m asking folks to help us so we can try to help everyone, whether that’s with web projects that actually work for people or continuing to produce extremely high quality education material. Here’s some ways you can do it.

Take advantage of our Black Friday deals

You’ll see messaging like “this is the most important time of year for us” and it’s extremely true. To break the fourth wall slightly, people buying courses at full price is a lot rarer than you might think. So often, discount events are what keeps the lights on.

We’ve launched two courses this year — JavaScript for Everyone and Mindful Design — that sit alongside my course, Complete CSS, which we launched last year. I know you’ve probably been burned by shit courses in the past, but these three courses are far from that. I promise.

I can’t stress enough how much Mat (JavaScript for Everyone) and Scott (Mindful Design) have put in to these courses this year. These two are elite level individuals with incredible reputations and they’ve shared a seemingly impossible amount of extremely high quality knowledge in their courses. I would definitely recommend giving them your time and support because they really will transform you for the better. For bosses reading this, all three courses will pay themselves back ten-fold — especially when you take advantage of bulk discounts — trust me.

Share our courses and our studio with your network

So many of you have purchased courses already and I’m forever thankful for that. I can’t stand the term “social proof” but it works. People might be on the fence about grabbing a course, and seeing one of their peers talk about how good it was can be the difference.

You might think it’s not worth posting about the courses on social media but people do see it, especially on platforms like Bluesky with their custom feeds. We see it too!

Testimonials are always welcome because we can pop those on the course marketing pages, just like on mine.

In terms of sharing the studio, if you think we’re cool, post about it! It’s all about eyes and nice words. We’ll do the rest.

Hire Set Studio for projects

We’re really good at what we do! I know every studio/agency says this, but we’re different. We’re actually different.

We’re not going to charge you through the nose for substandard work — only deploying a fraction of our team, like a lot of agencies do. I set this studio up to be the antithesis of the way these — and I’ll say it out loud — charlatans operate.

Our whole focus is becoming your partners so you can do the — y’know — running of your business/organisation and we take the load off your shoulders. We’re hyper efficient and we fully own projects because they’re way above your normal duties. We get that. In fact, the most efficient way to get the most out of a studio like ours is to do exactly that.

I know “numbers goes up” is really important and yes, numbers definitely go up when we work with you. We do that without exploiting your users and customers too. There’s no deceptive patterns coming from us. We instead put everything into branding, messaging, content architecture and making everything extremely fast and accessible. That’s what makes the numbers go up for you.

We’re incredibly fairly priced too. We’re not in the business of charging ridiculous fees for our work. We’re only a small team, so our overheads are nothing compared to a lot of agencies. We carry your budgets a long way for you and genuinely give you more bang for your buck with an equitable pricing model.

We’ve got availability starting from the new year because starting projects in December is never the ideal way to do things. Getting those projects planned and ready to go is a good idea in December though, so get in touch!

I’m also slowly getting back into CSS and front-end consulting. I’ve helped some of the largest organisations and the smallest organisations, such as Harley-Davidson, the NHS and Google write better code and work better together. Again, starting in the new year I’ll have availability for consulting and engineering support. It might just be a touch more palatable than hiring the whole studio for you. Again, get in touch.

Wrapping up

I’m always transparent — maybe too transparent at times — but it’s really important for me to be honest. Man, we need more honesty.

It’s taken a lot of pride-swallowing to write this but I think it’s more important to be honest than to be unnecessarily proud. I know this will be read by someone else who’s finding the year hard, so if anything, I’m really glad they’ll feel seen at least.

Getting good leads is harder than ever, so I’d really appreciate people sharing this with their network. You’ll never regret recommending Piccalilli courses or Set Studio. In fact, you’ll look really good at what you do when we absolutely smash it out of the park.

Thanks for reading and if you’re also struggling, I’m sending as much strength your way as I can.