We ran for three years because we had huge clients in our first year and a half. We weren't really interested in building something small so when we realized our model was flawed and we couldn't rally from where we were at financially, we wrapped it up. Here's some more context: https://medium.com/@chrshys/hindsight-is-an-asshole-71ab9e118764.

As we saw it, this left us with three options:

1. Scale our company up and down as the work we want comes and goes. Doable, but brutal on culture and it’s hard to attract good talent if you have a reputation for laying people off.

2. Take on other types of work, stuff that isn’t necessarily what we got into this for, in order to keep the lights on between the good stuff. But sustaining a talented team is impossible without the right caliber of work.

3. Or realize what you want to do and what you need to do as a business are two different things, and leave before we’ve poisoned the well.

Thanks Aaron. We're really proud of the work we did (some of it still hasn't launched!). It was a really tough call but appreciate the support.

Thanks Mike, passed it around to the team on our slack.

Thanks Adam.

Thanks Emelyn, appreciate it.

Would love to find all of our team awesome places to land. DM me @n8garvie or msg people listed on the site directly!

We do a lot of in-person moderated user research with out clients and have struggled with the same amount of time getting eaten up be recruiting. scheduling, etc. Typically we have a dedicated researcher handle the back and forth and run the research sessions with designers taking notes.

We've also used google hangouts in the past to broadcast sessions to remote team members.

We've used recruitment agencies (for non-users or specific demographics) before but typically have a pretty long lead time, are expensive and don't get great quality of participants. Getting a short lead time is a huge game changer in our process. Allows us to validate decisions or expose holes in our design really fast.

Side note: We've also been using a tool we built called Koala for recruiting remote and in-person research participants, specifically non-users. Had the same 24 hour turn around on booking sessions as well.

Would love any feedback you have or if it's something you'd be interested in using to recruit people for usability tests or customer interviews with.

I hit up Warm Gun this year in SF and it was a lot of fun ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Pretty good for a big agency.