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The Observatory

Carimus Pursues Personal Projects with Rocketship IT

May 25, 2020

At Carimus, one of our core missions is to work on impactful and interesting projects with the people and companies we admire. We believe that fostering internal interests and ideas is as valuable as fostering our clients’. Because of this, we decided we would commit to recurring two-day sprints that are dedicated to working on internal projects that each business unit feels passionate about. These two days are now known as Rocketship IT. 

In our very first Rocketship IT, our varying business units produced everything from new service offerings to new products and new processes. We’re pretty proud of what we accomplished in our first Rocketship IT – so much so that we all stayed on a meeting until 7:00 pm on a Friday sharing our new ideas. Our team had a lot of fun with this, especially in times of social isolation, and we’d like to brag about a few of the projects that came out of Rocketship IT 1.0. 

Dorkable

“We should turn that into a T-Shirt” is probably the most common phrase in our casual discussion Slack channel. Before now, we didn’t have a way to do so without messing with an overpriced 3rd party service. Tony and Bryan, our CEO and CCO, took this as an opportunity to bring all of our t-shirt dreams to life. Utilizing an existing, unused domain, they (read: Bryan) built a website that allows us to upload our ideas and turn them into T-Shirts or Fanny Packs that anyone can purchase. In just two days they produced a brand, a logo, a website, and custom-designed merchandise that can be purchased by anyone. If that’s not impressive, I don’t know what is. 

B-Corp Planning

B-Corps are for-profit companies certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. From the partners we work with, to the name of our business itself (short for Care-I-Must), social impact is what we work towards every day. Additional members of our leadership team took Rocketship IT as an opportunity to work towards getting Carimus certified as an official B-Corp.

Over the course of two days Sarah, Karen, & Michelle took several assessments to determine where we currently stand and what we need to do to become a certified B-Corp. While this will obviously take time outside of our two-day sprint, it’s something we’re very passionate about as a company, and Rocketship IT helped to kick it off! 

Vaider 

We believe automation is key. If you can automate something, you increase efficiency, you remove room for error, and it gives more time to work on tasks that cannot be automated. As a team, we are always looking for ways to automate internal processes and tasks, like social media posts. We know as a small business, it can often be difficult to find time to create and sustain a social media campaign, but as marketers we know how important this is. 

Members of our development team took this as an opportunity to build a tool that allows businesses to input a blog post, or any URL for that matter, and have a social post generated from that URL. The tool will pull a graphic containing a key quote from the post using artificial intelligence, ready to be shared on social media. This provides an opportunity for simple and efficient content creation for businesses that struggle to create content in-house. Hats off to Nick and Nico for making life a little easier for our marketing team. We’re already dreaming up future builds of this one! 

CARimus 

In the midst of COVID-19, everyone is daydreaming about when and where their next vacation will be. Of course along with dreaming of vacation comes budgeting and determining where you can afford to go. This led a group of our app developers to create CARimus. CARimus is a web application that allows you to input a budget and car mileage and it will give you suggestions for locations to travel to based on your parameters. Brennon and Kristen are already planning for future builds of this to include different forms of travel and we can’t wait to utilize it. 

Blender

Our creative team used RocketShipIt to learn Blender, a 3D rendering engine. We’re always looking for ways to up the bar and Blender adds yet another tool that our creative team can utilize to advance our design services. They took these two days to not only learn the tool but also to create new 3D graphics for internal use and we are thrilled with the results. Check out an example of their work below!

All in all we think our first Rocketship IT was a huge success and we loved taking the opportunity to work on internal projects that we’re passionate about. We found it to be a great way to provide a mental break, build camaraderie amongst team members, and explore some new technology topics and interests that will allow us to be more effective as a business.

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