I’m back from a bit of a blogging break while I moved my possessions out to the west coast to my new home office for the next two years. As we get closer to our internal launch date for the new mystery project, the competitive edge gained by keeping it a secret starts to dull and we’re now forming plans to get the word out and create a bit of the much-needed buzz to generate some attention.

How do we plan to do it? Well, we’re hoping to get some traction from bloggers in the technology and web app realm, but I think the best marketing approach will be to get this on the lips of the musicians themselves that will use this service. While usually web-savvy enough to update their MySpace page, most bands aren’t really what you’d consider “connected” to the big blog machine. Getting the word out to our target audience will require reaching out to them in a much more direct manner… including — gasp — phone calls! Hopefully planting a few small seeds now will create some hefty momentum leading up to the launch date.

A big contributor to that momentum will be a teaser site we’re launching in the next day or two that should help us introduce and educate potential customers to the service, as well as gather a list of interested folks that will want to sign up for the service when it launches later this year. Once that goes live, the whole idea of keeping this hush-hush in our blog posts will be out the window and we’ll be (finally) able to talk freely about it — something I’m really keen to do!

I’m hardly an expert on getting the word out — getting dugg, or engadgeted, or lifehacked… or even techcrunched — but I think between the roster of respected bloggers in the office and the quality of our work we should be able to generate at least a little hype. If that doesn’t pan out we can always busk for trackbacks out on Sparks Street.

Stay tuned for an announcement here when the teaser site launches (complete with one-on-one videos starring the vibe master himself, John Sobol).

steve got the ball rolling with a couple of beauty posts documenting our new project at 76labs
it’s temporarily top secret
but our development process
is inspiring a whole lot of blogworthy thoughts…

it’s no secret that ours is a music project
so i’d like to talk about musicians
and what kind of lousy dough they make
because they make painully little
playing in cafes, bars, clubs, theatres, festivals
50 bucks sometimes
a hundred bucks a lot of the time
and for every quality gig that pays 2 or 3 hundred
another couple that pay nothing at all
which is why one of the main objectives of our new project is to increase the amount of money working musicians make!

and while it’s true that the legends are rich
there are very few of them
compared to the countless fabulous musicians
lifelong musicians
who live poor
and die
more or less penniless

and if you know how the music industry works
you’ll know that even selling a million records
or having a number one hit
is no guarantee of significant financial rewards
because there are so many predators, so many ways to get screwed
that time and again musicians get famous and go broke all at once

and so the project we’re working on is in large measure for them
real musicians who spend their lives making people feel good
we’re building an economic engine
unlike any other
based on an understanding of the real lives of musicians
and their fans
and designed for them and no one else
and when it’s ready to test (soon)
we hope you’ll give it a whirl
and let us know what you think
js

This week I’m on vacation in Vancouver but 76labs is still forging ahead on our secret project. My task this week is to evaluate and compare options for handling payments.

But first, before I jump in, I have a small confession to make. In my delirious excitement last week, I may have claimed that this new product we’re developing is “going to turn the music industry upside down”. While I did acknowledge in that same post — in the next sentence, in fact — that this was a tall claim, I feel a bit like John Lennon after his “bigger than Jesus” remark… minus the backlash, of course. Some colleagues of mine provided me with some sage advice following that hyperrific outburst so all future posts about this product will probably make slightly more modest claims about which industries it may or may not turn upside down.

Alright, got that off my back. Let’s return to our regularly scheduled posting…

At the core of our new project is a subscription model where our customers collect recurring fees from their customers. It’s akin to a consignment shop in some ways. He/she who wields the credit card is buying something from one of our customers. However, the payment is made to us and then we reimburse our customer with their share of the transaction money. Perhaps that sounds complicated, but it’s really not that important at the moment. The bottom line is that we need to accept payments online with credit cards.

In the interest of getting a beta version finished as quickly as possible we’ve decided to steer clear of setting up our own merchant account to process the cards ourselves. Why? Well, on top of not wanting to re-invent the wheel when we don’t have to, it makes sense when we’re starting from a stationary position. Setting up a merchant account is an expensive process and if we can start out using something that’s essentially free, then it probably makes better business sense to focus on squeezing a few more features into the product than building a custom solution for accepting payments.

Once we’d arrived at that conclusion we had a few options to look at:

1. Amazon’s Flexible Payment Service - came out in beta last week and, like Amazon’s other web services, is geared heavily towards developers. This means that it doesn’t work “out of the box” so to speak and would require a lot of work to integrate it into an existing product. Unfortunately for us, it doesn’t really matter because it’s not available to non-U.S. merchants yet anyways.
2. Google Checkout - it’s been out for a year and is free (as in, no transaction fees) for the remainder of 2007. It’s rather basic, which makes setup easy but the lack of customization makes it a bit of a drag. Once again, it’s not important because it’s only available to U.S. and U.K. merchants. Score: unusable options 2, Canada 0.
3. PayPal Standard - the vanilla fudge option. It’s lean but it certainly does the trick: simple to integrate, a trusted brand in the payment industry, and customers don’t need PayPal accounts anymore. What’s the catch? Well, during the checkout process customers get bounced to PayPal’s site to enter their credit card info and then back to your site when they’re done. While it is possible to “skin” the PayPal page to match your own site, it’s still obviously a PayPal page and probably a little jarring to your users’ experience as they navigate through the checkout process. But hey, it’s a free service so it’s hard to complain. If only PayPal offered a paid service that allowed you to really skin their page so that the payment process was completely seamless…
4. PayPal Pro answers the call. For $20/month you get a turnkey solution that allows customers to stay on your site from start to finish for a totally seamless experience. PayPal Pro basically fixes everything wrong with PayPal standard, and then some. Seem too good to be true? It is, if you’re in Canada. This service is only available to U.S. and U.K. merchants for now.

Until PayPal pro makes its way to Canada, the clear winner for us is PayPal standard. Well, technically it’s the winner because it’s the only option. As Homer once said, “the two sweetest words in the English language: ‘de fault’”. It’s not perfect, but it’s the quickest and easiest way for us to process credit cards.

I didn’t really get into the nitty gritty of comparing per-transaction fees. They’re all pretty competitive in that respect - ranging from roughly 2 to 3% per transaction depending on who you go with and what kind of volume you’re doing.

That’s a real quick and dirty analysis of what’s available (for free or nearly free) to Canadian merchants. Something I didn’t mention above but did weigh heavily on our decision (well, before we recognized how geographically handicapped we were) was scalability. At some point it’s going to become more economical for us to migrate to a merchant account and process the cards ourselves. With bigger volume also comes the need for more infrastructure to handle the volume. Adding in an order-management tool or developing something ourselves would be a lot easier with a merchant account.

When we get to that point we want to make the transition minimum muss’n'fuss. Apart from Amazon, pretty much every option would adapt well to the merchant account model (we’d basically just be filling in the gap in the process occupied by PayPal or Google). Unfortunately Amazon’s solution would require us to do a lot of custom work (well, a lot more than zero which is basically what it would be with PayPal or Google) to communicate with their APIs to integrate it into the purchasing process. That’d be work that we’d pretty much have to toss in the trash if we transitioned to a merchant account.

What’s next? Next week we take the development team’s user-flow diagrams, architecture and wireframes and start on designing the interface for the front end (and back end). Pressure’s on the design team ;)

Yes, I’ve been a negligent blogger… but let’s forget about that for now. I’m writing again and damn I’m excited.

A wee while back (in November to be precise) I talked about an initiative at 76design called 76labs. Since then it’s remained largely cloaked in mystery. I wish I could say it’s because we were secretly toiling away, building the web’s next big thing, but alas it’s been quiet because we had our busiest Spring ever and when you’re busy with client work that leaves little time for experimentation.

Well, that was then and this is now. It’s Summer time and while we’re still abnormally busy, 76labs has gained some new focus and a whack of momentum thanks to the efforts of a few motivated and bright individuals (the brightest of which is undoubtedly John Sobol) who are determined to bring some of our ideas to market.

I’m excitedly writing this entry because we’ve begun development on a new product which we plan to launch in the Fall, on a beta level at least. I wish I could go into more detail but at this point I’ve got to keep it under my hat. The thing is, it’s an incredibly simple solution to a really complex problem… and so I can’t exactly tell you what it is or else you’d go out and make the product and collect our millions. I’m kidding. We’re fully aware that as social media advocates we’re being a bit hypocritical in the anti-transparentness of our development, but really - if you knew how surprisingly simple this idea is you’d understand why we can’t share it quite yet.

All I can say is that it’s going to turn the music industry upside down. Big words, I know… I don’t expect you to believe me just because I typed that. Just be patient and we’ll show you what we mean.

Even though it’s strictly on the DL I do plan to blog the process as we go. After all, product development is new territory for us and comes with a whole new set of rules. While it is ultimately web-based and obviously requires a lot of the core skills we use on a daily basis, the move from service-for-hire to R&D is pretty substantial. I hope to offer a few observations and insights as we go. Without further ado…

We’re already midway through week 2 and just entering the architecture and wire-framing stage. So far, the process has been much like a typical web site project for us. However, the one difference I’ve found is the difficulty in nailing down the scope. By its nature, the sky’s the limit with this thing. Unfortunately, we can only invest a finite number of hours and in the Web2.0 spirit of development we really want to get a foundation built and release a basic version of the product done and in the hands of real users. That feedback will be invaluable and we hope that it will ultimately shape the development as we move forward.

Alright… gotta get back to looking for available domain names for this thing. As it goes in the online world, we’ll name it once we know the .com is available! Why do you think this company’s called 76design, anyways? 71 through 75design.com were taken, duh.

A few months ago we quietly launched a something called “76labs”. What is it? Well, it’s a sandbox of sorts.

After attending SXSW in Austin in the spring, Brett and I came back with a bit of an itch to try new things. We saw companies like 37signals and SkinnyCorp tell us how they’d gone from being service-based firms to product-based ones after something they’d tinkered with evenings and weekends just took off - Basecamp and Threadless, respectively. Totally unexpected in both cases. It literally turned their companies upside down.

When we came up with the idea for 76labs we wanted a place where we could experiment with ideas. A place where we could screw up and it was no big deal. A place where we could try stuff without worrying if it even worked or not. But hey, that’s not a very lofty goal so we came up with a short list of objectives for work we do within “the lab” so that we can get something out of the time we put into it. In no particular order, we’re trying to accomplish three things: learn new skills, promote the company and make some money. I know I said they were in no particular order but making money out of our lab work is probably the least important thing to us. Heck, we’re probably going to be giving away a lot of it for free. But we’re excited to get these ideas out there and give something back. We’re not trying to turn 76design upside down but there is a certain level of excitement around the notion that one of our ideas could change our business completely.

So why introduce 76labs now? We’ve been working away behind the scenes on a few different projects and ideas and we’re getting pretty close to launching our debut offering to the world developed at 76labs. I won’t get into too much detail about it at this point but I’ll just say that it’s a nifty little web-based tool to help you organize stuff. Pretty vague, I know. But it’s really cool, trust me.

76labs: a place where we can play and learn. Sounds like kindergarten a bit, I know. I guess it kind of is, in a way. Juice and cookies and toys.