Reflections on a mammoth year at 448 Studio
Holiday Time - 2021 in review
As I start to pack up and finish off my final checklist for the year I feel the best way to wrap up - what has easily been the busiest time for our company - is to start at the beginning and try to piece together a timeline of key events that shaped our direction. To put things into perspective we went from a team of 2 at the end of 2020, to a team of 20+ based in 4 countries in 12 months.
Let’s start at the beginning
January
Straight into it with negotiations to acquire event platform Forumm
February
448 Studio officially brings Forumm into the fold. 448 expands from 2 to 7 with Murray, Junaid, Alex, Cameron and Eric coming on board
March
Forumm founder Eric Kim named as 448 Studio COO
Plans begin with Junaid to build an in-house team of developers located in Pakistan
April
First truly international online conference takes place on Forumm, Association Montessori Internationale AGM with individuals from over 50 countries attending
We expand the team again to support UCAS on their social media plan for Clearing
We appoint six board of advisor members
Work begins on our SMART innovation grant application to develop a hybrid lecturing tool
May
Dr Hilary Young joins the team in a consultant capacity to support the Academic Social Media programme with University of Leeds.
June
All Day All Night (our 24 hour live conference) hosted on our very own Forumm platform
July
After multiple false starts due to Covid restrictions Junaid finally heads to Pakistan to build our 448 Technology Team
We make the decision to close down our social media advertising service
August
448 Studio announced as official Bantshire University partner
Dr Hilary Young joins our team full time and begins work on LSE blog strategy project
We say goodbye to Laura our first 448 team member who is offered an amazing social media job working for Scottish Television
September
448 Technology team fully operational under the guidance of Junaid with office space and 8 full time developers based in Islamabad
Outbound sales process begins
October
GCC hosts their second Virtual Graduation on Forumm
Dave Cowan joins the team as our Head of Marketing and Brand
November
Packed with hybrid style events like Net Native’s Think Student Live, and Pickle Jar’s ContentEd
December
Social media intern Ellie joins the team to work with Hilary
Digital Development Loan final submission which ties into plans for our 448 Cloud servers to power further growth and expansion in 2022
What 448 Studio looks like right now
In order to keep everything organised and workflows as efficient as possible (especially working in different locations) we’ve had to segment 448 four service areas plus a product. This doesn't mean team members don't work together, far from it, it just helps us structurally know what each team member is doing on a day-to-day basis.
448 Studio
Sales for both services and products
Marketing, branding and website
Vision and people
All Day All Night social media conference