Note Fifteen

Who I am – Andy Roberts, a digital strategist, system designer, and software developer.

What I do – I help brands build apps, websites, and services for the digital economy. I strive to help define and deliver enduring value. In short, I build what you need to grow your business.

Why Note Fifteen exists – You are busy running and scaling your existing business by serving your current customers every day. This requires a consistent and urgent focus on the tactical.

I can step in and help you take on additional initiatives, allowing a leap forward to meet your strategic goals by defining and delivering the next generation of apps, sites, and services to ensure you become or remain a market leader.

What I won’t do – (queue the Meatloaf anthem!) I don’t enjoy spending time copying or developing slight variations of tech or system that already exist. I prefer to develop things that will change your business in new and dramatic ways.

How we do what we do

Depending on the size of the project, I’ll gather a team of experts to staff the engagement. Here are our principles: 

We use great talent – Every project is led by a principal member. This leader is engaged in the day to day leadership of the team, and even creates deliverables. We employ only the best of the best in strategy, engineering, product and design.

We study customers deeply – We use empathy on our journey to find fundamental insights. This allows us to define solutions to unmet and unarticulated needs of customers.

We thoughtfully architect whole systems then quickly test and iterate – we work backwards from the ideal state for the customer, then we approach the hardest or most unknown parts first, to de-risk the project and deliver value quickly.

We don’t believe lean startup methods were meant to mean blindly “test and learn”. Instead, we think it’s wise to design the whole thing thoughtfully, then pick the hardest/riskiest parts to build first, then test and iterate.

We build things for ourselves – Many agencies just “consult” in a vacuum. We actually build products, services and entire startups for ourselves. We think building real, scaled businesses are important to ensure we maintain deep empathy for our clients and also keep our execution abilities razor sharp.

How we organize – We think collaboration, cooperation, and coordination will allow small independent teams accomplishing new amazing things.

We evaluate ideas using a 3 part formula:

  1. Does it address a real problem or opportunity space? Let’s make things better for our customers & the world.
  2. Is the solution radical enough to provide an enduring advantage? If you just need another landing page, I have someone I can refer you out to.
  3. Does technology exist that is relatively feasible? We like to make magic with household items.

Bottom line, we prefer not to work work on ideas that are frivolous, small-bore, or impossible to execute.