X3 Studios Blog

For almost 2 months now I keep trying to write this article. It’s a lot harder than it seems, trust me. From the very beginning I knew I wanted to talked about X3 and the history of this company - which means the last 6 years of my life (being a true workaholic, there wasn’t much else happening during these years).

I tried to be objective and analyze the company based on easy to follow and measure economic criteria. But that didn’t work - not because I couldn’t read some reports, but because that doesn’t say anything about who we really are, who we were or who we want to become. So, I’ll just be honest and down-right subjective, if I may ;).

My name is Stefan Szakal and I was the founder of a company called Counter Cortex Media, which later became X3 Studios. Before X3, I was enrolled at a university from Tampa FL, USA, majoring in advertising / mass-media - I’m still hoping to make time to get back there and finish my last year. While in the States, I started my designer career by taking a job at a small local company. After I returned to Romania, I settled down in Timisoara - my hometown is Satu Mare. And now the story…

2001

The first year of activity meant a home office in a 2 bedroom apartment in the projects you might call it, on the 4^th floor (out of 4) where during wintertime it was freezing (good thing that the 19″ CRT monitor I had was generating enough heat for 3 apartments), and during the summer it was way too hot (had that same monitor during the summer too…). However, it was a very interesting period, with lots of new experiences for me at that point - first unpaid project of about 300 dollars, first satisfied client, first large project of over 1000 dollars (which did mean a lot of money back then).

2002

The following year in September I opened our first official office - a 3 bedroom apartment this time of about 50 sqm. I managed to do so thanks to a bank loan of about 3000 dollars, for which a friend of mine put his apartment as collateral (you don’t want to know how many sleepless night he had because of this). With the other 2000 I had, I was able to buy 3 computers, dress-up the office a bit, pay the rent for a few months in advance and have some money left over for salaries for a couple of months - yes, I hired my first 2 employees!

The first few months of “office life” were quite exciting. I really had no idea what management is, what it means to work with others, or how to communicate with them. Obviously, I made more mistakes than good things - but even so, a miraculous thing happened: in the month of December we totaled 2000 dollars! That was quite the performance, trust me ;).

2003

The year started out good but continued… not so good. On March 31, the two guys quit… Oh well, as I was saying, more mistakes than good things. A couple of days before that I hired a new person, who was due to start work on April 1^st. He said afterwards that he thought it was some sort of April fools day joke when he came to work and was all alone ;).

A month later, two more people joined the team, one of them being Calin (today, he is the head of the development department). Bit by bit, the sky wasn’t so dark anymore, we gained experience, mistakes we made were smaller, a team started to emerge, things were looking up. The total income for that year came close to 35000 dollars - a big step forward, all things considered. But I have to admit, at that time I still believed that this thing I started won’t last longer than maybe 2-3 years.

2004

New year, new office! Right at the beginning of this year, after staying 18 months in the previous space, we moved into a new, bigger, more spacious office - 120 sqm this time, in one of those old, historical buildings (very cool!). And given the visionary I am, I figured since we do have all this extra space, why not hire some people, extend the team. Thus, by the summer of that year, the team meant 12 people, design and development…

Well, things didn’t turn out the way I hoped… We did have lots of projects going, but not even close to cover the expenses of a team of this size. That summer I was able to only partially pay the salaries for about 2 months in a row - and some of that money came from some personal loans I had to make.

That was the time one of my still standing principles came to existence: I shall never fire somebody for lack of money. It is not that person’s fault that I wasn’t able to make things work. Thus, it is not fair that he or she should suffer the consequences. So we worked our asses off and by the end of the year not only did we manage to jump back, with all expenses and loans paid, payroll up to date - we also managed to almost triple our income for the year compared to the previous one.

Looking back to those first few years, I often wonder how we managed to stay afloat - and yes, I know it sounds weird, probably even naïve. I had a general idea of our direction, but the issue of those salaries that were due pretty much every month (duh!) was much more pressing - so I didn’t spend a lot of time doing strategies, business plans, projects and that kind of stuff.

TO BE CONTINUED…