The cabin idea came to me when I felt lonely. We grew from a ten-person team to now 23-people (including our wonderful interns) in a few months.

I joined Wefunder as #7 three years ago and now we were 3x the size! I missed working with every person on the team and being part of a family. So I thought, why not take our smart brains to the woods and build really really cool things we'd been putting off because we were so busy with our daily tasks. 

So off our teams went to the woods! 

My team just got back and we shared what really went down in the woods... 

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Good morning, team!

Not to make y'all jealous but our team (Lydia, Omar, Jacqueline, Wookie, Theresa, Jiwon) had the best two nights in Guerneville last week. If we weren't up till 3 in the morning writing/rewriting copy and pretending to code, we were looking at stars in the hot tub and jumping into the Russian River. 

Our Four Projects: 

Fundraising Playbook: https://wefunder.com/fundraisingplaybook 
Just point founders to this book when they have any questions about preparing for their launch. 

Drip email campaign that goes out one week before the campaign becomes public

Celebration page for founders when the campaign goes public: 
https://wefunder.com/gageandtollner/launch_celebration

Manage page small design tweak so it's clear where the $$$ at: 
https://wefunder.com/oneva/manage

What really went down on Thursday & Friday

Thursday 

2PM We ate four bags of Doritos in the car because we forgot to eat lunch. 

3PM We bought lots of expensive beer (sorry Nick...my bad) from Russian River Brewing (we only finished drinking 4 bottles later). 

3:30PM Grilled a ton of corn, burgers and fake soy sausages 

4PM We talked for an hour about what we wanted to accomplish during our trip. We figured out what people cared about and how much we can get done using everyone's superpowers. 

5PM Short walk to the river where we skipped rocks and tried to push each other into the river

6PM We got to working. We paired up in teams: Omar, Jacqueline and Jiwon on Celebration Page team, Lydia, Wookie, and Theresa on the Fundraising Playbook team. We sat around the big kitchen table and talked to each other when we got stuck. We ended up helping each other finish all the projects at the finishline. 

11PM We ate the Safeway banana cream pie (almost as good as Tartine's at the time) and drank tea while writing more copy, designing, coding, making jokes.

 

12AM Late night hot tub listening to Coldplay's Yellow. 

Friday

We woke up late and got straight to work after eating Omar's French Toast and Jacqueline's Gordon Ramsay eggs. 

The whole day was a frenzy of work until Jacqueline made the most delicious dinner. We also went for a nice swim and learned Lydia was a certified lifeguard and mermaid. We threw moss at each other. It was pretty fun. 

We still had a long ways to go to finish our projects after dinner. We stayed up until 3:30AM to get shit done. At one point, Theresa, Lydia and I were writing code so Omar wouldn't have to do HTML coding. I forgot to close my tags

and sent my version to Theresa and Lydia. Let's just say Omar had to stay up later to fix our (my) mistakes. Energy was high and we pushed through until we passed out close to 4AM. 

What we learned

When you have a small group of talented people in a small cabin, a lot of work can get done. It doesn't matter if you code, write, design, organize. We're all in this together and there's some way you can help the person sitting next to you. All of us sat around in awe at the yellow we chose and wrote and rewrote copy for the fundraising playbook. Oh, and we all made food & did dishes like responsible adults. #dreamteam

Advice for future cabin teams

1. Choose a cabin close by. I thought Yosemite was a good idea but it turned out going 1.5 hours from the city was a much better idea. More time to work on your projects!

2. Sit around one table and work together. Throw around questions and ask for feedback. 

3. Don't shoot down someone's idea. Ideas are fragile and sometimes the craziest ideas are the best. 

4. Encourage each other. My favorite moment was when Omar deployed the playbook, we all giggled and jumped up and down. We're a team. We are all in this together. :yas:

5. Offer help. Jacqueline and Wookie kept asking what more they can do, one project after another. Your best is our best :)