What is going on here folks?

While I can’t answer this com­plex, lay­ered, and loaded ques­tion, my intu­itive mind can replace it with an eas­i­er one: ​“What is Fer­al?” I’m glad you asked. Here is what we are try­ing to accom­plish with this enter­prise. You can tell us whether it has res­onat­ed with you by reach­ing out to us lat­er or, alter­na­tive­ly, nev­er speak­ing of us again, as if you’ve seen a ghost. 

TL;DR

The world is sat­u­rat­ed in bull­shit of every order at every lev­el. It’s forced many of us to live dou­ble lives: a professional/​public life where we col­lec­tive­ly invent inter­est, enthu­si­asm, and com­mit­ment in cor­po­rate and com­mer­cial escapades that are as nour­ish­ing to the soul as a bag of con­crete across the face, and a pri­vate life where we dis­miss it all as a ruse, dis­tract our­selves with what­ev­er, joke with our friends about the apoc­a­lypse, and plan lit­tle escapes to here and there. For Tim­my and I, both these lives have felt equal­ly sat­is­fy­ing and dis­sat­is­fy­ing for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. But more to the point, their oppo­si­tion to one anoth­er have left us, per­haps like it has left you, nev­er ful­ly immersed in the moment, end­less­ly remind­ed by one life of the fraud­u­lence of the oth­er. If you’re like us, the world has become too obvi­ous­ly com­plex in too many ways to be com­plete­ly cer­tain of any path we take, and we all suf­fer for it as we do our best to make our way.

At the meta­phys­i­cal lev­el, Fer­al is a recog­ni­tion of this dual­i­ty we live with, the intractabil­i­ty of it all, and also the only thing we can be cer­tain of: life is a glo­ri­ous and absurd tum­ble through the cos­mos. The joke is on us all. We hope our tip of the cap to the mas­ters above will put us in their favor, but if it works any­thing like life, it will most like­ly do the oppo­site. You may already be on the phone to your local police. 

In all seri­ous­ness, we want Fer­al to free us, and you, from some of the more con­strain­ing ele­ments of these dual lives we lead. When you work with us, you can relax and be your­self to the max. We know how it goes. We are under no illu­sions. We are in this togeth­er. This is the game, dawg! There is a job to do and only half of our being, and maybe less, has any inter­est in doing it. There is no pre­tense here. It could be amaz­ing. It could be awful. It could be awful and then be amaz­ing. It could be the oppo­site. Who cares. Let’s high five and ride.

What we are

Fer­al is a mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary web devel­op­ment stu­dio, and we also han­dle some cre­ative and strat­e­gy work as our clients’ needs dic­tate. We’re designed to take some of the bur­den off of oth­er cre­ative and tech­ni­cal teams, which is most­ly to say, we like work­ing with oth­er peo­ple, help­ing where we are need­ed, and main­tain­ing some flex­i­bil­i­ty our­selves. We’ve seen time and time again, whether it be an agency, a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, or an elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­er, that things come up: work you didn’t expect, projects beyond your capac­i­ty, essen­tial inter­nal tools that lan­guish because nobody has time to build them, client stuff, you name it. We’re here to do this kind of thing, and to devel­op what­ev­er it is you need developed. 

What we do that’s unique

We are web devel­op­ers and one belea­guered design­er and busi­ness man­ag­er (me), so we can devel­op most any­thing you can imag­ine, start to fin­ish. That’s not entire­ly spe­cial though. Our unique abil­i­ties lie in both my part­ner Tim­my and I’s abil­i­ty to com­pre­hend a vision, build and improve upon it, and most impor­tant­ly, imple­ment it in a way that makes fuck­ing sense. 

Giv­en that we approach prob­lems from two rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent angles (art vs. sci­ence), we’re able to quick­ly con­struct a blue­print of a project with lim­it­ed infor­ma­tion that is both thought­ful and struc­tured. We are com­fort­able and expe­ri­enced in work­ing through com­plex and often­times vague or incom­plete require­ments. When you work with us you can be assured that we are on the same page and that you and your team’s desires will be under­stood holis­ti­cal­ly, improved and/​or cri­tiqued when need­ed, and most impor­tant­ly, imple­ment­ed in the fin­ished product. 

While this may seem like a giv­en, we have seen time and time again, both in our own expe­ri­ence and the expe­ri­ences of oth­ers, that hav­ing part­ners that can get inside your head and make deci­sions as you would make them with­out your con­stant involve­ment and man­age­ment is exceed­ing­ly rare. We have found that these abil­i­ties, root­ed in empa­thy and resource­ful­ness, are more essen­tial to the suc­cess of a project than tech­ni­cal skill, edu­ca­tion, or any num­ber of oth­er fac­tors. We bring every­thing to the table when we work for you.

How we dif­fer from freelancers

The obvi­ous answer is that we are a team, and we have some redun­dan­cy in skills and per­son­nel that free­lancers don’t have. 

The more nuanced answer is that with free­lanc­ing comes a mind­set. Free­lancers are rarely of the dis­po­si­tion to take an entire project into account, and to research, plan, and strate­gize accord­ing­ly. They tend to work in the fair­ly nar­row band of exper­tise for which they were hired. There sim­ply isn’t the same lev­el of invest­ment in the mul­ti­tude of inputs that effect the suc­cess of the project. We would know too, we were free­lancers through­out our 20s.

What you can expect work­ing with us:

Jeez, what can I say? We’re a blast! We’ve includ­ed some cur­so­ry infor­ma­tion on the hows and whys in our process page which I’m sure by now you are inti­mate­ly famil­iar with, hav­ing tak­ing the time to mem­o­rize each line. Is it time to cut the bull­shit? How long is it going to take and how much is it going to cost. That’s what the world wants to know, right?

As for cost, that…depends. We are stick­lers about prepar­ing a thor­ough pro­pos­al that takes into account enough aspects of your busi­ness and the project to actu­al­ly approach accu­ra­cy. You can learn more about why we do this in anoth­er post. For a ref­er­ence, a sin­gle land­ing page, some­thing like this, takes us around 30 – 40 hours and costs around 6 – 7K for a week’s worth of work. The ​“land­ing page” is our sim­plest unit of mea­sure­ment and a scope of work for which our time track­ing is the most accu­rate. As a project increas­es in com­plex­i­ty, there are economies of scale that make some things eas­i­er through reuse, but there are non-lin­ear effects that make accu­rate bid­ding dif­fi­cult at a glance, if not impossible. 

Putting it all together

Cost should be just one con­sid­er­a­tion of many, and while it’s an impor­tant mea­sur­ing stick to qual­i­fy poten­tial help, we pre­fer to focus more on val­ue. There is tremen­dous val­ue in beau­ti­ful, use­ful projects sup­port­ed by clean, con­for­mant code that can scale with your needs. Sad as it is, this is the excep­tion in tech, not the rule. You may know this all too well. 

We make stuff we can be proud in, and that pro­vides actu­al val­ue to an orga­ni­za­tion. We also hap­pen to have deep­er ques­tions about the nature of work and life itself, and we’ve done our best to weave these into the per­son­al­i­ty of our com­pa­ny in both real and pure­ly metaphor­i­cal ways. We hope it res­onates with you.