Building Something New While Packing Up the Old

After nearly ten years in Barcelona, I’m getting ready to leave while also trying to build The Mailbox Drop. The timing could probably be better.

There are two very different kinds of boxes taking up a lot of my time at the moment.

One is everything we're working on for The Mailbox Drop. Envelopes, packaging samples, paper weights, dimensions, postage. Things I never imagined I'd spend quite so much time thinking about.

The other is moving boxes.

I've lived in Barcelona for almost ten years, and I'm now starting to wind things down here and work out what comes next.

For some reason, this also seemed like a perfectly reasonable time to start a company.

Ten years is a lot to pack up

I came to Barcelona almost ten years ago, which is long enough that I don't really think of myself as having moved here anymore. I just live here.

You get used to a place without really noticing it happening. You have your usual places, your friends, the streets you walk all the time, the café where you don't need to think very hard about what you're ordering. There are parts of the city I could probably walk through half asleep.

Then you decide you're leaving and suddenly start noticing all of it again.

There's obviously the practical side. What do I sell? What do I ship? What do I give away? What on earth have I accumulated over ten years, and why did I keep half of it?

There's paperwork too, because this is Spain and there is always paperwork.

But the stranger part is trying to sort through ten years of your life and decide what actually comes with you.

And while I'm doing that, there's usually a laptop open somewhere reminding me that I also have a company to build.

Meanwhile, there's The Mailbox Drop

We're still very much figuring The Mailbox Drop out.

The basic idea is there. A lot of the work we've done over the past few months has been taking that idea and dealing with all the things that have to happen before it can become an actual product that someone can buy.

We're looking for artists for our first Drop. We're working on the website. We're testing packaging and figuring out printing, costs, postage and logistics. We're building all the boring systems behind it that nobody will ever see.

There are also a lot of spreadsheets.

More spreadsheets than I expected.

Some days we get a lot done, and it feels as though this thing is really starting to come together.

Then I'll lose several hours because something fairly insignificant on the website isn't working properly.

I've been doing a lot more coding than I expected when we started this.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend combining that with an international move.

The office is about to get a lot quieter

For the past few months, Mackenzie and I have been working together here in Barcelona.

She's been doing the things you'd probably expect from someone who actually went to art school. I've somehow ended up doing things like Shopify development and trying to understand why a piece of code that worked yesterday doesn't work today.

We've been sitting across from each other while doing most of it.

This has also led Mackenzie to discover that I talk to myself when I'm working.

I wasn't particularly aware of this until she pointed it out. We recently made a video about it, so denying it now would be difficult.

In a few days she's heading back to the U.S., where Taylor already is.

I'm staying here for now.

So Mackenzie and Taylor will finally be in the same place, and I'll be the one on the screen in Barcelona.

Mackenzie doesn't seem especially upset about no longer sharing an office with me.

I'm sure that's unrelated.

The headquarters keeps moving

Calling anywhere “headquarters” is becoming increasingly optimistic.

Until now, it's basically been Mackenzie and me in Barcelona with Taylor joining us remotely from the U.S.

Soon it'll be Taylor and Mackenzie together and me calling in from Barcelona.

Later this year, Mackenzie is likely to be in Asia. Depending on how things work out with my move, I could still be here or back in the U.S.

So we may end up with three people trying to build one company from three different places.

It wasn't planned that way. Then again, quite a lot of this wasn't planned the way it's turned out.

There will be some very inconvenient meeting times.

But we'll manage.

In a funny way, it does fit the business we're building. We want The Mailbox Drop to introduce people to artists and creative work they might never otherwise come across, wherever those artists happen to be.

Apparently the people building it are going to be scattered around the world too.

I'm still waiting for things to calm down

I keep catching myself thinking that things will get easier after the next thing is finished.

Once the website is done, I'll have more time.

Once we've chosen the artists, that part is sorted.

Once the packaging is finalized.

Once I've dealt with the move.

I'm starting to suspect this is nonsense.

Every time we finish something, we discover another five things we hadn't thought about.

And there's never going to be a convenient period when the three of us have nothing else going on and can devote ourselves completely to The Mailbox Drop.

So we're building it in the middle of everything else.

Maybe that's just what starting a business actually looks like.

I don't know. This is my first one.

What comes with me?

One unexpected connection between moving and The Mailbox Drop has been all the stuff in my apartment.

Ten years is plenty of time to accumulate things.

Going through them has made me much more ruthless than I expected. There are things I've owned for years that I can look at for about three seconds and think, Nope. Don't need that.

Then I'll find an old photograph or a postcard and immediately put it in the keep pile.

I've got prints I've bought from artists. Books with things written inside them. Notes. Photographs. Small things I've picked up while traveling. Things that aren't particularly valuable and would probably look like junk to somebody else.

Those decisions take longer.

It's interesting because I've spent so much of the past year talking about physical things and why I think they still matter.

The Mailbox Drop is partly a reaction to how much of what we see now disappears almost immediately. You scroll past something, maybe like it, and thirty seconds later you're looking at something else.

A postcard doesn't really work like that.

Neither does a print you put on your wall.

And now, while I'm trying to decide what deserves space in however many boxes eventually leave Barcelona with me, I'm thinking about that in a much less theoretical way.

Which is sort of the point

We don't want The Mailbox Drop to be another box of stuff.

That's something I think about a lot.

If we're going to make a physical product and ask people to bring it into their homes, it should deserve to be there.

I want someone to open a Drop and discover an artist they didn't know before. Maybe they put one of the pieces on the wall. Maybe a postcard ends up on the fridge. Maybe something gets tucked into a book and they find it again two years later.

Or maybe not. We can't control what somebody does with it.

But I want us to make something they at least have to think about before putting it in the recycling.

That's a pretty good standard.

And right now, surrounded by things I'm deciding whether to keep or get rid of, it feels particularly relevant.

So, what happens next?

I'm not entirely sure.

I know Mackenzie is leaving Barcelona in a few days.

I know Taylor and Mackenzie will soon be working together in the U.S.

I know I'll still be here for a while, working on The Mailbox Drop and trying to work out my own move at the same time.

And I know we still have a fairly ridiculous amount of work to do before Drop 001 is ready.

There will be artists to contact, samples to approve, packaging to figure out, things on the website that inexplicably stop working and, yes, more spreadsheets.

We're going to share more of that as we go.

Not because we have some perfectly organized startup story to tell. Quite the opposite.

Right now it's three people trying to build something we believe could be really good, while our lives are changing around it.

After almost ten years, I'm getting ready to say goodbye to Barcelona.

At the same time, The Mailbox Drop is just getting started.

It's a strange combination.

But that's where we are.