Sandbox

Roadmap 2010

January 1st, 2010 by Sandbox

After an amazing year 2009, it’s time to think about our goals for 2010. You will find more information below about what happened in the last twelve months and what we have planned for next year !

What we have achieved this year

In 12 months, we have incorporated a company, established a small but global, very active and valuable network, started a business, and passed from one to four full time positions, enlarging the team to 9 people. You can find a detailed review here.

What we want to achieve in 2010

We have two main objectives for next year:

1) make Sandbox bigger, more trusted and more valuable for its members

2) make the network financially sustainable

Developing the community

The Sandbox online community is now eight months old. A lot has been done, but a lot still needs to be done until it can run it at full speed. We have several projects that will bring change over the next months:

1) Application process

We want to make the application process more efficient, more transparent, and involve our local communities more. We will exchange our ideas with the community in the next weeks and do a first test in a key hub until April.

2) More hubs, more active

With 18 hubs, we have already created a truly global network. In these 18 places, an Ambassador is in charge, the community meets on a regular basis, and visitors are introduced to local people matching their interests. In some of them, the community is still limited to a couple of members; we want to foster the growth of the existing Sandbox hubs – in quantity and in quality – and create new active hubs in several new cities allover the globe. The next ones will be Delhi and Toronto.

3) Better online community

Our current online platform was great for launching the network. With both our member base and services expanding, we now want to migrate to a customized solution as soon as possible. This will allow a better integration of all community services, as well as easier networking and better possibilities to collaborate on projects.

Earning money

source: Flickr

We realized recently that we have never communicated very clearly how Sandbox earns money. We are aware that this has brought uncertainty for some of you, which goes against Sandbox being the trusted place we aim to create.

So here’s what we did : After having tested different concepts for a while, we have now definitively formalized our business model. We had several small money-earning projects, but we mostly paid our running costs out of the investment we received back in May.

What we want to achieve with a Sandbox business

In the past months, we put a lot of thoughts into what we want to do and what our focus should be. Here is a summary of the key points:

1. Finance the community

Our primary goal is to finance the community, not to make money for ourselves; if our main goal had been money, we would have started a career in banking or consulting.

2. Professional community management

The Sandbox community is so precious that it should be managed professionally, with people paid to take care of it on a full time basis.

3. Do what we are passionate about

We believe in doing what we’re passionate about and doing it well, money will follow.

How we will do it

1. The concept

One thing we are all passionate about is problem solving. We want to enable organizations to benefit from the creative capacity of the Sandbox community. We have been proving the concept with several members on small projects ranging from a major European airport, a car manufacturer, a German city and a global Bank. We now want to take this concept to the next level!

Over the next weeks, we will contact members to participate in one or another project. We might ask them to participate in a workshop or just to brainstorm with us for an hour. For some projects, we will be able to pay members, for some other, we won’t. In any case, members are of course always free to say no: there is no obligation of any kind to participate.

source: Idiagram.com

2. And the values behind it

For every service we deliver, we want Sandboxers to benefit from one or several of the following:
a) Interaction with senior management of global companies
b) Learning about new fields, working on really cool projects
c) Personal exposure, we tell where the idea comes from and in some cases, we let members present the findings themselves
d) Knowledge database: we share the results with our members on the online community
e) Material rewards (if possible)

More than ever, we are very much looking forward to hearing your feedback! Don’t hesitate to contact Julian, Paul or myself if you want to learn more about our services or the Sandbox community.

Wishing you a happy new year and sending very best wishes from the whole team!

Antoine is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Sandbox. He is in Belgium until Monday and had a wonderful New Year’s Eve at the Antwerp Opera House yesterday, where Sandboxer Victoria Pfortmüller worked as director’s assistant for a very colorful version of Candide from Leonard Bernstein.