Last January we published five goals under our own name, with dates attached, and said come back and check our work. It's October. We're one year old. Here's the honest scorecard, not the highlight reel.
A promise made in January, due in October
A year ago this month, I signed the papers that made HAUS XXIV real. Nine months after that, in "Setting goals we’ll actually be held to," we put five specific commitments on the Journal, in writing, with a deadline. Grow the collective past the founding circle without leaving Long Beach. Publish the Code of 24 as a real public document. Land three nonprofit partnerships at agency rates and agency craft. Keep the Journal running past launch-week enthusiasm. Take on at least one client outside California.
We said we’d rather be wrong in public than vague in private. This is that bill coming due.
I could write you a version of this post that only mentions the wins. Plenty of one-year anniversary posts read exactly that way, a highlight reel with the rough edges cropped out. That’s not the haus we said we’d build. Conviction over convenience means the harder, more accurate post is the one we owe you, so here’s what actually happened against every line item, including the one we didn’t hit.
What we got right
We grew. Not fast, not the way a venture-backed startup grows, but real. We brought on a web developer in February and a motion designer in June, both fully remote, both adding a discipline the founding circle didn’t have depth in yet. Headquarters never moved from Long Beach. The roster is still small enough that everyone on it can name every project in flight, which was always the point. Growth without losing the center of gravity was the ask. We hit it, slower than the January version of me expected, but we hit it.
The Code of 24 is live. Twelve principles, twelve disciplines, published on hausxxiv.com where anyone can read it before they ever talk to us. Writing it down forced a harder conversation internally than publishing it did externally. Turns out it’s one thing to operate by an instinct and another to defend that instinct in twelve numbered lines a stranger can hold you to. We’re glad we did it. It’s better for having been argued over.
The Journal kept running. This is the piece I was most worried about in January, because I’ve watched a dozen company blogs die quietly after a strong launch month. We didn’t let that happen here. The cadence held, the subjects stayed real, and this post is proof the thing we said we’d keep doing is still getting done in October.
“I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!).”
Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO, Amazon.com, Inc., writing in the company’s 2015 letter to shareholders
What we got wrong
We landed two nonprofit partnerships this year, not three. Both were built at full agency rates and full agency craft, a brand identity project for a youth arts nonprofit and a website rebuild for a community food-access organization, neither one treated as a favor or a discount. That part of the commitment held. The number didn’t. We’re one short, and the honest answer for why is that we said yes to two enterprise engagements that ran longer than we scoped them, and community work got the leftover hours instead of protected ones. That’s a resourcing mistake, not an excuse, and it’s one we’re fixing in how we plan 2024.
The one we missed outright: at least one client engagement outside California. We call ourselves a nationwide haus. As of this post, every client on the roster is still a California company. We had one conversation with a Texas-based brand in the spring that got close, and it didn’t close. That’s the whole story. No spin on it.
“We don’t dictate, we educate, and that has to start with ourselves. If we’re not willing to sit in the gap between what we promised and what we delivered, we have no business asking a client to trust us with theirs.”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
Why the miss matters more than the wins
Here’s the thing about that out-of-state goal. It’s the smallest miss on the list in terms of business impact and the biggest one to admit, because "nationwide haus" is a claim we make in the very first sentence of how we describe ourselves. Missing it doesn’t mean the claim was false. It means the claim was ahead of the proof by a year, and pretending otherwise would have been the actual betrayal, not the miss itself.
Boring is a betrayal of the craft. So is a scorecard with no red on it. We’d rather hand you a real one.
What carries into year two
Three for three on nonprofit partnerships is back on the list for next year, this time with hours protected in advance instead of scheduled around whatever’s left. The out-of-state client goal carries forward too, unchanged, because a miss doesn’t get quietly dropped from the list. It gets tried again. We’ll set the next round of dated, numbered commitments when we publish our 2024 goals, and we’ll open that post the way we should, by pointing back to this one.
