Mulling On Spreedly
I just started reading Derek Siver’s book Anything You Want. In it, he lists his utopian dream-come-true distribution deal from his musician’s point of view. He’s basically listing the reasons he’d want to be a customer of his own business.
This got me thinking about why I’d like to be a customer of Spreedly. So here it is - a customer perspective.
Store the credit cards for me. I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to have security people on staff to ensure our servers are always locked down and secure. I don’t want to become an expert at storing sensitive information in a secure way.
I can’t stand the hassle of PCI. I want to fill out the simplest form I need since I hate busywork. I’m not in the PCI business and I don’t want to be. I know that PCI compliance could cost a truckload of money if I do it myself. I also know that a security breach could mean the end of my business.
If I want the card numbers, give them to me. They’re my customers, not yours.
Let me switch gateways whenever I’d like. Many of the gateways can be pretty difficult if not hostile to work with. Give me the freedom to avoid the annoyance of lock-in. As the gateway market becomes more competitive both in terms of rates and levels of service, I want to be agile and ready to adjust.
Give me a ridiculously simple, easy-to-understand API. If I’m not successfully talking to your service in the first hour, there’s something wrong. If your docs mention the word SOAP, I think I’ll vomit.
Don’t go down. I need a reliable service that’s up all of the time.
I have some pretty straightforward subscription plans. I’m even willing to adjust them some to fit into your framework because there’s a ton of logic there I don’t want to deal with. And I want the freedom to change my plans and prices whenever I’d like. And please handle the grandfathering. And pro-rating. And renewing at the right time.
I’d like to occasionally add some fees to a customer’s bill knowing they’ll get added to their invoice when they get renewed.
I’d like my customers to not even know that you exist. I don’t want them to see your pages when they checkout and I don’t want them getting emails from you. When I’m first starting a business, I’m happy for my customers to see your pages and your emails because I don’t want to spend the time making them. But eventually, I want the ability to hide you completely. Once again, they’re my customers, not yours.
A Nomadic Adventure
Here are the details of an adventure I’d like to embark on:
- Sell most of our stuff.
- Sell our house.
- Rent a UHaul trailer and hook it up to the back of our 12 passenger van.
- Rent a furnished house in the mountains of West Virginia for 3 or 4 months.
- Work from there. Homeschool from there. Live there.
- Then rent a furnished house in another state for 3 or 4 months.
- Repeat for about 2 or 3 years.
- Proposed places: Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, the U.P, Colorado, the Great Woods of New Hampshire, Oregon, California, Maine, and Florida.
- Come back home.
Why do it?
- It’s a family adventure.
- Choose experiences over ‘stuff’.
- We live during a time that allows us to work from most anywhere with an internet connection. Why wait until we’re 65 to travel?
Open Questions:
- How will it affect our relationships? Don’t think we’ll know the answer to this one until we do the experiment.
- Health insurance concerns?
Full Stack iPhone
I’m pretty excited to see if http://fullstackiphone.com succeeds in connecting those creating iPhone/iPad businesses with those who can help them with the tech side.
The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Wow. What a book. Who would have thought that a book about how to convert a factory from a money loser to a profitable enterprise could be so entertaining and engaging? Who would have thought that you could teach business principles using a novel? It’s really a brilliant book.
I can’t stop thinking about how to apply the principles to Spreedly and No Kahuna.
This book makes me want to someday own a factory and make “real” stuff. I wonder if there’s a business owner out there who can actually put this book down.
The Well-Grounded Rubyist
This past Tuesday, we had a pretty enjoyable book exchange at the Raleigh Area Ruby Brigade meetup. Before the gathering, I had some food with Matt Bass. He mentioned that he was bringing a book he was hopeful would help someone who hadn’t been using Ruby for very long. It turns out that I ended up pulling the book Matt brought (The Well-Grounded Rubyist). My first thought was, oh well, I’ve been using Ruby for years, this probably isn’t a book I’d be into reading. I even tried to convince folks to exchange for it.
When I got home that night, I started looking at it a bit and it seemed interesting. The next morning, I read a bit more and I was hooked. I declared yesterday to be an axe sharpening day. I didn’t code a bit. I spent the entire day reading the book. And about half of today doing the same. I’ve got about 3 chapters left to read. It’s one of the best technical books I’ve read in a long time. David A. Black is an amazing author. The book is filled with crystal clear explanations and I’ve been quite surprised how many aspects of Ruby I didn’t truly undertand.
Ever been confused by some of the code that _why’s written? Ever been unsure how some of the code in the guts of Rails really works? Ever read someone else’s code and had the thought, “why don’t they write simpler code that doesn’t utilize such wacky aspects of the Ruby language?” Ever thought some code was too magical? I know I have. No more. This book has been quite motivational in terms of increasing my desire to reach a new level of Ruby mastery. If there’s some code I don’t understand, it’s on me to understand it. Time to take more responsibility.
I’ve noticed that the folks on the Rails core team and other advanced Rubyists like Nathaniel Talbott regularly take advantage of parts of the Ruby language I haven’t been an expert in. They know what self is, they know that a class method is a singleton method on the class object, they truly understand the more dynamic aspects of Ruby and how and when to customize an object. In short, they own Ruby.
The book has given me even more of an appreciation for how beautiful and powerful the Ruby language is. Thanks for the book Matt!
One person makes a difference
We’ve all had experiences as a customer when we’ve heard things like “I don’t have the authority to do that” or “Sorry, we have this policy…”.
It can be pretty frustrating and it seems to happen more when dealing with big companies than small companies.
Recently, I became a customer of a big company named Sprint. You’ve probably heard of them. :) I wouldn’t expect excellent customer service. In this case though, there’s one person named Dennis who works in the store in Garner, NC who seems to consistently attempt to delight customers. He’s one person working for a large corporation whose actions affect customers on a daily basis and cause them to start yapping about how great their experience was as a customer of Sprint.
Example 1: I was having trouble getting my new 4G card activated because it doesn’t handle Macs well yet. Dennis tried a bunch of things and then offered to let me follow him home so he could activate the card on his home computer since there were no available PC’s in the store. A crazy offer. Not something most folks would offer. One I accepted. One that helped me get up and running with the card.
He’s also going to get a PC running at the store for new Mac customers because he knows this solution won’t work long term.
Example 2: Here’s part of an email I just received from Dennis:
This is Dennis at the Garner Sprint store. I was nosing around our 4G rate plans and found a better 4G plan for you. Unlimited 3G+4G for… $10 less than you’re paying now! It will take effect on the start of your next bill cycle, 12/07/2009. Let me know if you have any questions.
This is amazing to me. It’s a remarkable thing when we’re delighted as customers. Perhaps because so few people consider unconventional solutions. Perhaps because there’s often little incentive to delight the customers you interact with when you’re working for a conglomerate. When it happens though, customers remember it and talk about it.
