About

You’ve been pitched by the senior people, then handed to a junior the day after you signed.

2013

2

0

Common People is a two-person studio, founded in 2013. Matt Hall does content strategy and technical implementation. Mika Hall does information architecture, content models and delivery. There’s nobody else, which means there’s no account manager between you and the person doing the work, and no handoff to a junior after the pitch.

That combination is the thing worth explaining. Most content strategists can’t build the thing they specified. Most developers can build anything and have no view on whether it should exist. The work we get called for sits exactly in that gap: the site is technically fine and nobody can publish anything, or the strategy is sound and the CMS can’t express it.

We’ve done that work inside Intermountain Healthcare, the FDA and HHS, Kajabi, Auction.com and Santa Clara University School of Law, sometimes directly and sometimes subcontracted through an agency.

Where it costs you.

  • No account layer. The person in the kickoff is the person doing the work. You aren’t sold by a senior team and delivered by a junior one, because there is no junior one.
  • No handoff. Nothing gets explained twice, and nothing gets lost between the person who understood it and the person building it.
  • The tradeoff, stated plainly: you can’t buy forty hours a week from us. If what you need is volume, a larger shop is genuinely the better answer, and we’ll say so on the call rather than after the contract. We’re the right answer when the problem is hard rather than large.

The positions we hold, even when they cost us.

Every tech problem is a people problem wearing a software costume.
Which means discovery asks who decides, who publishes and who gets blamed, before it asks what the stack is. It also means we sometimes recommend a conversation rather than a build.
We build your team’s capacity, not your dependency on us.
Which means we document as we go and train your people even when that shortens the engagement. A client who needs us forever is a client we failed.
Technology serves people, not the other way around.
Which means we sometimes recommend fewer tools than you came in expecting, and occasionally none.

Solo founders through the Fortune 500.

Intermountain HealthcareAdobeCommonSpirit HealthPepsiCoWells FargoBlue Cross Blue ShieldCiscoWestern DigitalAmtrakKajabiAuction.comFeeding San Diego
Hugo and CatStagwellHugeTRAFFIK

The fastest way to find out if we fit is to describe the problem.

No form-filling ritual, no discovery call before you know whether we’re in your budget.

Reply in about 4 business hours.