I dig that.

Anyway, here’s the page for our conversation:

The competitive advantage of hiring artists, A conversation with Chris Ashworth

Despite the specificity of the title, we hit a bunch of topics in that hour of chatting. Listen in and hear me:

• railing against sick days
• pleading with businesses to question the rules of their workplace
• ranting about pricing your work
• wondering whether your art can be better instead of cheaper
• hollering “F permission”

and

• making my case for how Star Trek, positronic brains, human evolution and racism all relate to hiring.

I’m only really here to share one tip. Kinda like a stock tip, I guess. It’s a tip I am increasingly convinced should be seriously considered by a variety of business owners in America.

The tip is this:

Hire artists.

No, wait, hold on. It’s not that simple. Actually, it sort of IS that simple, but not in the way you’re thinking. You need to understand what I’m proposing here, and to understand what I’m proposing, you need to understand the following story.

The Story

In March 2010, I was in trouble. A year previously, I had released the second version of my product, QLab 2. As a product, it succeeded. It brought new customers. Many new customers. Too many new customers.

In 2008, I sent about 600 QLab support emails.

In 2009, I conservatively estimate that I sent 6000. (But that’s really low-balling it.)

There were days I’d wake up in the morning, start answering emails at 6 am, write responses until 6 pm, take a break for dinner, answer a few more that night, and go to bed with more email in the inbox than when I’d started.

Serious problem. Seriously AWESOME problem, but, you know, still a problem. I needed help.

Now, I already had some help. Meet Sean:

Hi Sean! Sean’s an awesome dude. He was a friend from college. He is an OS X developer too. The summer before, Sean and I had joined our two companies together. Aside from helping with the code, he had already become an invaluable help in answering all those emails in the months leading up to March 2010.

But it wasn’t enough. I needed another person. The time had finally come to, you know, hire someone. Not just join forces with a friend, but flat-out, does-this-mean-I’m-an-adult-now? hire someone.

Meet Luckydave

Hi Luckydave! Luckydave, in case you hadn’t noticed, goes by the name “luckydave”. In March 2010, Luckydave had already been a QLab user for years. He is a working video designer in New York. A really good one. But more than just a user, Luckydave had been a champion. And by “champion” I mean he sold our product harder than we did. Luckydave wrote posts to the QLab mailing lists that rivaled ours in their detail and helpfulness. Luckydave acted like it was his personal mission to convert the world’s theaters to QLab. Luckydave was known to announce that he’d “drunk the QLab koolaid”. Luckydave knew details about how video codecs work “in the field” in ways that we simply did not know. Because we were not in the field.

Luckydave was, in short, awesome. And I, it will not surprise you one bit to know, wanted him on our team.

What I Did

I offered Luckydave a job.

Surprise!

Well, yeah, big deal. But here’s the twist:

I offered Luckydave a job based on the needs of his life as an artist.

First, I told him we wanted him on the team. Then, I told him we would create the job based on what would work for both of us. We talked it out, and we constructed a position specifically for him, with these properties:

• He can sign up to “work support” in units as small as a single day, or as large as a full month.
• He only needs to tell me one day in advance if he’s working the next day.
• He can work the hours that fit his schedule for that day.
• When he is not working for Figure 53, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Including go make art. For a week. Or a month. Or whatever the gig requires.

We created this framework together, and then I asked LD what it would take to make this structure worth his time. He replied, “When I have been the least worried about money, I have been making X dollars a month.”

I could afford X dollars a month. I said yes.

I wrote down the above terms, put them at the end of the legal-speak from the lawyers, we signed it, and it was done.

This all happened at the end of March 2010.

What Happened Next

When someone writes to support@figure53.com, our help desk software tracks how long it takes us to respond. Now, one thing you need to appreciate is that we have customers all over the world. We get questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is no such thing as “standard business hours” for us. Art doesn’t take a vacation. If someone writes me a question at 10 PM, and I wake up at 7 AM to answer it, that person has waited over 500 minutes to get that answer. When your customers are in Australia and you’re in Maryland, that’s a real wait.

Keep that in mind, and then take a look at this graph of our time-to-first-response for the past 9 months:

There are at least two things here worth noting.

Number one: Since joining us at the end of March, Luckydave has helped us pull down our overall response times significantly.

Number two: Those little green bars for the last few months? Those show that our median time-to-first-response since adding Luckydave to the team has been around 20 minutes.

20 minutes. 7 days a week. 24 hours a day.

NOTE TO SKIMMERS: HERE IS WHERE SHIT GETS REAL

So far the story has been pretty good. I found a wonderful teammate. We made a job for him. It measurably helped the company. Life is good.

But I’m hiding one stunning fact from you, and it is this:

Barely a few weeks into Luckydave’s new job with Figure 53, he got a call.

A call from a temp agency. The temp agency he used in the past, to fill his free time between gigs.

Because, you know, that’s what working artists usually have to do. It’s hard to make a complete living in the arts.

And yet people do it. People like Luckydave, who are passionate about what they make, they do it. They temp if they must, but they do it. Because that is the drive of these people. They care. They care very, very much.

And so they temp. And so Luckydave temped. And Luckydave temped for a financial agency in New York. And he learned to operate financial…software of some kind. I’ve never fully understood what. But something tricky to use. Something important to fancy financy-type people.

And Luckydave, it turns out, is really fucking good at this financial software.

Not just a little good. Best-in-the-world good. He is fast. He is efficient. He is really. Fucking. Good.

Which? Is not actually so surprising! Luckydave is the kind of guy that uses QLab like a musical instrument. I couldn’t keep up with him if I tried. He makes things in QLab I didn’t even know were possible. AND I WROTE IT.

So the temp agency calls to say, weeks after Luckydave accepted my offer, that by golly, the financial company would like to hire him to drive THEIR software. Full-time.

With a starting salary of 80,000 dollars a year.

Kapow.

Ka.

Pow.

Now it is not my business to share what Figure 53 is paying Luckdyave, but I will tell you this: it is not 80,000 dollars a year. Not, I am afraid to say, even close. I wish it were. But we are not fancy financy-type people, and we don’t have that kind of cash at the moment.

So by all rights, that graph up there? That graph up there should have started going back up in May.

But I note to you that it did not.

I note to you that Luckydave thought over that offer for a few minutes, and then?

He said no.

I want you to let that soak in for a second. I’ll wait.

{he waits}

Pretty crazy, huh.

Well, pretty crazy if you just focus on the money. But for many (all?) of the best people in the world, money stops mattering once you have enough to not worry about it.

Is 80,000 dollars enough for Luckydave to give up his life as an artist? Turns out, no. Turns out, robbing him of his life’s passion costs more than that. Turns out, I can’t afford to pay him nearly so much, but I can support him as a creative human being who doesn’t fit in a 9-to-5 structure. Turns out, what I get for that support is one of the most dedicated, cheerful, creative, committed, hard-working teammates I could possibly ask for. Turns out, his battery is charged by being him more than it is by counting dollars.

So here’s the thing, here is my tip, and here is what I want the business owners of America to think about very hard:

Artists, as a species, are amazing people. And America, as a general rule, does not fully get this. Show me a good artist and I will show you a highly educated, highly creative, highly passionate, highly driven human being. If they’re a performing artist, I will show you someone who breathes teamwork. I will show you someone who eats healthy critiques for breakfast and grows an inch that day because of it. I will show you a communicator, and a thinker.

I will show you someone you want to hire.

And all you have to do, is not destroy the whole reason you want to hire them.

All you have to do, in short, is create jobs built for artists. The result? Instant competitive advantage.

I think this is a big deal.

I’m sorry it took me so long to get to the point here, but I didn’t know how to do it any more compactly and get the depth of this point across.

I think this is a really big deal. I think the failure to employ artists is an inefficiency in the system. I think it doesn’t need to be this way. I think there’s no reason we can’t collectively set up the same kind of win-win situations that Figure 53 found with Luckydave. I think we should do it.

I’m going to continue working to build my little company. With luck, and work, and grace from the unknown, we’re going to keep making things, and grow enough to make things we couldn’t make before. It won’t be about getting big, but it will be about getting big enough, and every person will count. I don’t have a ton of money to make this happen. But I have enough money, and I have the good sense to give people things more valuable than money.

My tip to you is that you, too, have things more valuable than money. All you have to do is be smart enough and willing enough to give them.

See, at the moment the world of indie theater is having a great big-ol’ chew-it-up hash-it-out discussion about the pros and cons and wherefores and howtos of dynamic pricing.

I find this fascinating, and entirely worthwhile. But, aside from believing some version of dynamic pricing is probably a great idea, I don’t have any direct experience using it. So: can’t really comment.

Thing is, the general topic of “pricing” is something I do have a little bit of experience with, and all this talk of dynamic pricing has been getting me hot and bothered about a related subject which has been festering on my blogging back burner for months.

Well, on Friday Dan Granata made a comment on Twitter that made the pot boil over. Dan wrote:

So it’s been a few days, but the comment re: my theatre, “Let’s be clear, tickets are $18, this isn’t Broadway” is a depressing datapoint.

I asked:

Wait, what? Someone was complaining about an $18 ticket being too expensive?

To which Dan replied:

No – they were saying *because* it was $18, they respected us less. Because we charge so little, we must not be worth much.

I tried to clarify:

Ah. Then: depressing because of all the work that goes in to it, and the quality that isn’t being respected?

And Dan explained:

sort of. More that someone who saw the show (and liked it) would still use ticket price as a indicator of quality.

And also that it supports my long-held fear that a low ticket price may actually hurt your reputation, rather than up sales

Which was, it turns out, the precise moment that

My Pot Boileth Over

First off, let’s just set a ground rule here: you know your customers better than I do. (Or at least I hope you do.) If I say something here that feels clearly stupid, and seems to suggest that you should do something that would offend or abuse or exploit your customers, then the rule is: your gut trumps my bloviation.

But I do want to humbly relate a few things I’ve learned in setting a price on my own hard work. It may be instructive. It may not. But at least hear me out, because the way I think about pricing now is very different from the way I thought about pricing at the start. I think it’s useful to know how, at least in my case, things that seemed obvious from the beginning weren’t always true.

Dear indie software friends, dear indie theater friends, this is a letter to you both, from four years in.

First, a few datapoints.

I make a product called QLab. There have been two version of QLab so far.

QLab version 1 had an audio license priced at $49. It had a video license priced at $149. It was very popular. It won a fancy award. It was so successful, in fact, that I quit my day job to work on it full time.

When I released QLab version 2, however, I changed the pricing. To wit:

• QLab 2 has an audio license priced at $249.
• QLab 2 has an educational discount for the audio license: $199.
• QLab 2 has a new rental licensing scheme. It allows renting a license starting at $3/day, or $1/day for educational purposes.

The story I am telling today is about:

• Why I decided to change the pricing,
• What happened when I did, and
• Whether or not I regret it.

While I don’t want to be overly prescriptive here, I have enough evidence at this point to draw a few firm conclusions. We’ll get to them in a second. But first,

The curious case of the complaining customers.

I’m about to tell you a story which I can only really describe as “freaking weird on the face of it”.

It is the story of how my customers complained about my prices for QLab 1. Specifically, how they complained that those prices were

Too low.

I spend some time paying attention to what people are saying about my product. I check the mailing lists. I check the forums. I check the Twitter. And what I found in the days of QLab 1 was that, mixed in with the astonishing news that some people were buying their first Mac ever just so they could use QLab, was the equally astonishing news that some people were unwilling to buy QLab at all because it didn’t cost enough.

Even weirder, I started getting emails from people who did buy it, asking me to raise the price.

Whaaaa?

That’s freaking weird.

I know, right?

But actually… it’s not. And here’s why: my customers knew themselves. They knew themselves much, much better than I did. I had started down this QLab road unsure there was any destination at the end of it. The first steps were for fun, the next steps were for fun and curiosity, and the next steps were for fun, curiosity, and maybe a little extra spending money on the side.

Yet, for my customers, it was more than that. I’d made something that people wanted to be part of their lives. They looked at my prices, and they knew: if this guy doesn’t raise his prices, he’s not going to be around long. They saw this problem clearly, and they saw it long before I did. So they told me.

And you know what? They were right. It took me a while, but eventually I realized they were right. Because at first, hey, I was actually doing pretty well for myself. I quit my job! I was working for myself! I was living the dream! I’d tell my wife at dinner the sales for the day and she’d look at me astonished and say “how many sound designers can there possibly be?” and I’d say, with a hint of hysterical terror in my voice, “I don’t know! Maybe that was the last one! Ha! HAHAHAHHAHAHOHGODOHGODPLEASELETMESELLANOTHERCOPY” But they kept coming! Eventually I managed to even view each sale not with terror, but merely with mild discomfort. Because they kept coming! Surely probability was on my side!

And yet… each sale also meant a new person in our community. New people in the community brought wonderful energy, wonderful stories, and lots of new questions, new requests, and new emails in my inbox every morning. I loved it! But I’m only one guy! And I was running a company that could only afford to be one guy!

And my customers knew it. And eventually, even I knew it. Which brings me to

What happened next.

Or

Probably the most anxious 9 months of my life to date.

Wow, was it really nine months? Let’s see, I quit my job in April, and I released QLab 2 the following January. Ha! Nice! Symbolism, that was a perfect place to step in. Thanks for that.

What did I do in that nine months? I rewrote my product, and I reexamined my company. Both needed adjustments. The product would become QLab 2. The company would become…what, exactly?

I said in my illustrated history of QLab that I was “literally shaking” when I pressed the send button on the email that announced QLab 2. It’s true; I was.

Whatever happened next was essentially going to determine the future of me and my company. Would people like the product? Would they be willing to support it at the new prices? (The audio license had increased in price by 500%! That’s not a little bump!) Would I be able to make a real company, that could support real employees for the real long term? It had been nine months of hundreds of hours of coding, testing, designing, tweaking, second-guessing, hair-pulling work. And all nine months of it came down to pressing that one button. You’d shake too.

Well, here’s what happened:

<insert stunned silence here>

A fluke? Turns out: no. Here’s the bigger picture:

And here’s the breakdown by count, gross, and license type:

So. What to make of this? The graphs tell part of the story, but what was going on at the human level? Was I fielding outraged emails from customers that could no longer afford my product? Did I raise my profits by turning away large swaths of the community I’d worked so hard to find? When I actually did raise my prices, did everyone, in short, freak the hell out?

To my astonishment, the answer was

No.

Really. It really was.

People did not get angry. I can count on one hand the number of angry emails or Twitter messages I’ve seen about QLab’s price. And for each of those angry messages? I reached out. We talked. I listened to what was making them angry, and we talked about it. And not one of those people are angry anymore.

People did not get turned away. I know of a single customer that turned away because of the price. One. And while maybe there are people who turned away and didn’t tell me, I will remind you that we are selling more licenses. And those licenses are being sold, as far as I can tell, to the same kinds of people as before. How? How could I possibly raise my prices by 500% and not turn people away? Because, remember, I didn’t just raise our prices. I rebuilt our entire pricing structure. I still had the free version. It was still really powerful. I added the rentals. They’re even more powerful, but they’re also really cheap for the situations where it’s most justifiable that QLab should be really cheap. And I added the educational discounts on everything. And, at the end of the day, there was me, a human being who cares and who really wants people to use my software. If someone reaches out to me, we talk. We figure something out. And only once did it get that far and reach an impasse.

In short: I fixed my broken prices, and everyone won.

Or, to put it a different way: Pricing is a single variable in a multiverse of important variables. In this complicated universe of ours, it’s rare that myopically optimizing one variable does the universe any good.

Or, to put it a third way: Pricing reminds us that

There is. No. Spoon.

There’s this single moment in time when money changes hands for a product or service. That’s an unusual moment, because at that moment the product, in some sense, has a real, definable “price”. But before and after that moment the value of whatever is being purchased is a probabilistic blur where reality, emotion, and psychology mix in strange ways.

Each person who buys your software, your theater ticket, your whatever, will assign their own value to the thing. In a perfect world you would charge each person exactly how much they value your software, your theater ticket, or your whatever. But you can’t do that — not just because it will be different for different people but because it will even be different for the same people, depending on when and how you ask them.

By setting a price, you are basically taking a stab or three into a probabilistic soup. We all know there’s no cosmic ledger of “correct” prices. We all know we’re taking a stab. But what we don’t always fully consider — or, at least, what I didn’t fully consider — is how deeply

Psychology trumps.

There is disturbing anecdotal evidence of this in the form of people who spend money they don’t have. But the best evidence I have from personal experience can be summed up in two words: Educational. Discount.

Recall that above I told you the initial price of a QLab audio license was 49 dollars. That was the flat rate. That was the take-it-or-leave-it. That was the here’s-the-best-I-can-do.

And you know wanna know something? You wanna know what question I fielded most often? Any guesses? It was:

“Do you have an educational discount?”

On a 49 dollar license! For a piece of software that, it may also interest you to know, was offering a genuine and viable alternative to a product that, at the time, cost around — wait for it! — 1000 bucks!

Now fast forward to version 2. The price of the audio license has gone from 49 dollars to 249 dollars. But, knowing my most common question about version 1, I also add an educational price: 199 dollars. Or, to put it another way, the new discounted price is 400% greater than the old standard price.

And now? Now we sell more of these than we ever did with the standard price of version 1! Does the new rental license have something to do with this? Probably. It certainly gives a fantastic alternate discount for those who have an exceptionally tight budget.

But I’m telling you that I used to get the “educational discount” question on almost every single license I sold to an educational institution. Now, I have an educational discount, and it’s 400% more expensive than the old non-discounted version, and I have never once received a request for an additional discount!

Psychology is weird!

But also: important to respect!

Alright, let’s bring this home.

Here’s my thing.

You care about your customer. You’re on their team, and they are also on your team. That’s an important relationship. My goal here is not to abuse or break that relationship, but if anything to strengthen it. The right price is the one that’s fair to both of you, and if you’re genuinely on each others’ team, you can stand up for this fact without shame or greed.

When you’re starting out, you try to guess how your customers will value what you do. You’re probably going to be wrong, and you’re probably going to guess low. Because you’re a nice person. You want to make your work “accessible”.

Now, in my experience, there is such a thing as accessibility, but it has a bad psychological influence on you when you’re setting your base price. It skews you low. You’re new at this, you’re not sure what you do is worth money, you’re thinking of all those hypothetical customers who can’t afford more than X dollars for your product, whatever. Point is, here you are, you’ve just started out, you have no data, and you’re a nice person, so you tried to be fair, and accessible, and your price is really low.

Now, shooting low isn’t automatically a terrible way to start. You can always change your price, and it’s not so bad to come out of the gate humble instead of cocky. So the problem isn’t so much where you start, as it is,

What you do next

This is the tricky part, and this is the part I see my fellow young people flubbing.

You essentially have one data point. “This is what happens when I value my work at price X.” Maybe it even works okay. You’re selling a bunch of tickets at 15 bucks a pop. Sure, you’re living on egg noodles, but you’ve got young people coming to see your shows that couldn’t otherwise afford it. Well, maybe. You probably don’t actually have hard data to confirm that, but you’re pretty sure it’s true.

But what if it’s not?

Consider QLab for a second. Lucky for me, I wasn’t just a little ignorant about pricing, I was a lot ignorant. I priced my work so extremely low that my own customers knew I’d overdone it. I’m blessed with smart, professional customers, and they knew my market (i.e. themselves) way better than I did. They knew that in the long run I couldn’t survive on the prices I’d picked. They wanted me to survive. So they warned me: “Your prices are too low. You need to charge me more.”

You’re probably not as dumb as me.

So back to you, and your 15 dollar ticket. Or your 40 dollar piece of shareware. Whatever. The point is, you’re probably not as dumb as me. When you stabbed into the probabilistic soup of prices, you may have aimed better, and gotten a better number up front. If so, that may be a problem, because the warning signs may be less obvious. Maybe your patron thinks to themselves “huh, 15 bucks, that’s a really great price”. And silently enjoys your show. For 10 bucks less than their internal value-ometer was inclined to suggest.

And now, week by week, month by month, where does that extra 10 dollars go? Well, if you never needed it in the first place, good on you; you’re not greedy. A little odd that you’re willing to value yourself less than your customers, but that’s your prerogative.

But if you DO need that extra 10 dollars, then the common wisdom is that it’s going to come out of your budget. Sure, that’s probably true. That’s probably partly where it comes from. But I suspect that maybe only 7 bucks of that really actually comes out of your budget.

I suspect that the rest of it probably comes bleeding out of you.

And that’s a problem.

And, tragically, it may not even need to be a problem. And you don’t even know it.

You’re worth it.

You’re on the same team as your customer. You know that. They know that.

By all means, make your work accessible. But be careful about what you think that means, and how you choose to do it.

Your customer thinks you’re worth it. For the sake of you both, act like you are.

Or, rather, we basically came to the same conclusion as Steve Jobs.

Via Engadget:

Walt: Is the tablet going to replace the laptop? Tell me what you think about where it’s going?

Steve: You know… (long pause). I’m trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy. The PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes, vested interests are going to change. And I think we’ve embarked on that change. Is it the iPad? Who knows? Will it be next year or five years…

Walt: Well you don’t think it will be next year?

Steve: Well… who knows?

The solution is very simple. Do what it is that you do very best; the thing that you would engrave on your tombstone as your proud contribution to society. Put it in a form that is the best and most convenient you can do for your audience given today’s technology. Abolish filler and bullshit. Leave behind, without mercy, any tradition that doesn’t also improve the quality of the journalism. Stand behind this entire product. I will guarantee you that people will appreciate and value your contribution and that means won’t be a problem.

Jesper on journalism.

When I read the article, I tweeted:

Indie Mac devs, I recommend you read this: http://bit.ly/9ZJ8Fq I have this thrilling-slash-terrifying feeling it might be true.

My friend Chad Sellers, the indie developer behind the fabulous application Pear Note, responded:

@Chris_Ashworth While bits of that post may be true, most of it sounds like dumb predictions from 10 years ago (e.g. SaaS kills the desktop)

And this morning Chad followed up with a blog post that expands on this position, arguing that “premium computers are not dying off”, and that Stross’s arguments are tired old lines we’ve heard before, and make as much sense now as they did then, which is to say: not much sense at all.

Chad’s a smart guy, and his argument made me take a second look at Stross’s article, trying to figure out why I had felt such a visceral reaction when I read it the first time.

I think I’ve figured it out.

But first, a summary of the story so far.

I believe Stross’s argument may be fairly boiled down to the following:

1. “PCs are becoming commodity items” with very little profit. Even premium hardware is vulnerable to this trend.
2. Simultaneously, software and data is moving out onto the Internet. The more we see ubiquitous wireless broadband, the less digital stuff will be stored inside the physical computers we personally own.
3. To survive the hardware profitability apocalypse, Apple must transform from a company that primarily makes money on the hardware to a company that primarily makes money on the software.
4. Conclusion: Apple is trying to build the software of the future (the AppStore ecosystem) and buying up cloud computing companies (Lala.com) which will define what software means in the next era of computing and over which they have total control. That way they don’t have to make money on the hardware, ’cause they’ll own the channel for the software.

Chad’s response is, essentially:

1. Don’t be silly. Premium hardware doesn’t die. And everything Apple does is to sell premium hardware.

(Note I say that’s his response, rather than his argument. If you want the argument, read the original.)

My take. FWIW.

You know what? Chad is correct. Stross’s argument doesn’t make a lick of sense. In addition to all the reasons Chad cites, I’ll add one more:

If we’re entering the age of “software as a service”, what the heck is Apple doing building a software channel that is tied to their specific hardware? “Software as a service” does not mean “software compiled for iPhone/iPad/iWhateverTheHellAppleIntroducesNextMonth.” “Software as a service” is hosted on the web. Using the open web standards that Apple supports. In fact, using the web standards that Apple supports so well, that they use them as an argument for why they’re willing to kill Flash. If Apple is trying to own the software sales channel, they’ve left a hole in their plans the size of the Internet. Which I hear is big.

So why did I feel so nervous when I originally read Stross?

Well, mostly I was just being stupid. I didn’t think about his argument carefully.

But another part of it was that I was focusing on small nuggets inside the larger piece. Nuggets that are keeping me up at night. Nuggets like:

• “The PC industry as we have known it for a third of a century is beginning to die.”
• “My take on the iPhone OS, and the iPad, [is] that they’re the start of a whole new range of Apple computers that have a user interface as radically different from their predecessors as the original Macintosh was from previous command-line PCs.”
• “This year, for the first time, the Apple Design Awards at WWDC’10 are only open to iPhone and iPad apps.”
• “I’ve got a theory, and it’s this: Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market.”

Why would I focus on these? They’re mostly just conclusions that, as I mentioned, he fails to back up with good arguments.

But they’re conclusions I have been stumbling toward before reading Stross’s piece. Which painted them in big red blinking letters between the pale gray glow of the arguments around them.

My bad.

FWIW part 2.

So here’s the thing. I actually do think that the cloud computing revolution is happening right now. Yes, people have been predicting it for a long time, but, you know, “the information superhighway” got that silly name way before it actually deserved it. Sometimes the end game takes a lot less time to see than it does to implement.

Back when Jesse Kriss and I were first building QLab, we had the wondrous experience of discovering what a truly beautiful programming ecosystem felt like. We’d need to solve tricky—but boring—problems, and Apple had already solved them. Just a quick search through the documentation and we’d find the Cocoa framework we needed. It felt like magic.

Well, Jesse and I just started building a new product, except this time, yes, the product is on the web. And that magic feeling? It’s happening again. “Gosh, it would be really handy to use HTML 5 web sockets to push update notifications.” “Have you seen PusherApp?” “Gosh, in this spot all we need to do is send a lot of email, and be sure it all just works.” “Golly, those MailChimp guys already do this really, really well.” “What about multi-state load balanced servers that abstract away nearly all the system administration tasks for getting our application up and running and robust?” “Helloooooo, Heroku.”

Jesse likes to say (and I like to agree with him), that we are entering the Golden Age of Internet Development.

And none of this matters.

None of this has anything to do with whether Apple might be planning the demise of Macs as we know them.

After all, Macs are as good a way as any to reach out into that magic cloud of computers in the sky, right?

Actually, that might be the problem.

Computers suck. And it has nothing to do with cloud computing. And Apple knows it.

Here was my response, in three parts to the announcement of the iPad:

Starting to see the critiques roll by: lack of feature X, high price tag Y. First off: folks, remember the iPod & iPhone? Yeah, same deal.

Second: Interaction design. Third: Interaction design. Fourth: Interaction design.

You cannot separate an application from the way you interact with it. It’s just that this part was never a differentiator before. Now it is.

There is a revolution happening here that is relevant to the argument at hand, but it’s not cloud computing or “software as a service”. Those things are good. Those things will happen. Those things don’t matter.

What matters is that computers suck. They just suck. They’ve sucked for a long, long time, and they’re not really getting any better. It’s hard for us to remember how bad they suck, because almost all of us have gotten used to it.

It’s hard to remember how complicated and non-obvious a computer really is. It’s hard to remember how many layers upon layers of mental models and abstractions we have built up in order to let us manipulate the electrons inside this box. And I mean all of us. Not just your grandpa who has no mental model, but has memorized the precise series of button presses that allow him to write and send an email. Not just the mildly geeky computer user who is generally savvy but doesn’t really understand directory structures very well. I’m talking about those of us who program the damn things. Yes, I know some basics of what is happening to the electrons down inside that chip, but to really follow the story of one electron up and down every layer of abstraction until it comes out my printer as my airplane boarding pass? That shit is real, bro.

I am telling you I have watched my mother-in-law, who has chosen not to use computers, try to use a mouse. And I am telling you that she watched her hand move the mouse, and then she looked up to try to find where the arrow had gone. And I am telling you that this makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

I am telling you that COMPUTERS SUCK.

And not only does Apple know it, but

Apple is doing something about it.

This, friends, is what thrills and terrifies me.

If you’ve used an iPad, you know that this is a different way of connecting your brain to a computer. It’s a better way. And if you haven’t used an iPad, you just have to watch a 2-year-old doing it, and you can take the hint.

“Better way? Don’t be an idiot! Have you tried typing on those things?!”

Stay with me buddy, staaaaay with me.

Yes, I know. The iPad is not the pinnacle of human/computer interaction. Typing on them without a physical keyboard stinks. And, well, it turns out it’s actually pretty handy to be able to type words into your computer easily.

I’m not saying the iPad is perfect. I’m not saying that everything the tech industry made up until now was garbage. Yes, computers basically suck, but there’s a reason we use them. Once you get over the suck hump they’re actually pretty handy. And some of the ways we interact with them today are not completely terrible.

But a new day is dawning. And Apple is basically doing it single-handedly. They are redefining what it means for a human to manipulate the electrons in the box, and they are making it better. Significantly better. Paradigm-shiftingly better.

And here, speaking as an independent developer who runs a small software company based on Mac OS X, is where things get… interesting.

When the paradigm shifts, something will be left behind.

In his rebuttal, Chad rightly points to Apple’s most recent earnings report.

Check out that last graph. Down there at the bottom. The one of total revenue. iPhone and iPod? Whupping. Mac’s. Ass.

Simple computers with the world’s best interaction design have, almost overnight, become Apple’s single biggest moneymaker.

[Interjection: DEAR PRODUCT TEAMS THAT STILL THINK INTERACTION DESIGN IS NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE ON YOUR FEATURE LIST—HOW ARE YOU MISSING THIS?]

Apple is not just creating a new kind of computer. Apple is not just creating a new market. Apple is creating a new era of computing — the era of friendly machines. And for those of us who work in this field, this is awesome — in the original sense of that word, where admiration and apprehension mix in equal measure.

But you’ll always need a Mac to run Photoshop

Photoshop? You think Photoshop, or a whole line-up of high-powered desktop apps, can stop this?

Maybe. It’s possible. But as far as I can tell, your Photoshop may not save you.

Look at that graph again. Think about the complexity of the desktop environment. Think about how much it costs to earn that Mac-based revenue. Look at that iPhone and iPod revenue. Think about the comparative simplicity of that ecosystem. Think about how much more money they’re going to make on those devices in the future. It’s not like the iPhone/iPad revenue is flatlining.

Apple is not shy about killing off a successful product to replace it with a new, more successful product. (Hello, iPod Nano.)

Would Apple kill the Mac and OS X ecosystem to focus on the 80 percent of computing activity that works great on the new devices?

No? How much would you be willing to bet? Would you bet the company?

I’ll say this. I definitely don’t know the answer. But I also definitely will not bet the company that the answer is “no”.

Edited May 9 to add: On reflection, and on the observations made in the comments, I’m inclined to refine my outlook on this to the following: Apple may be able to throw out a bunch of desktop software that requires the old style of computer, but the one thing they can’t afford to throw out are the developers, who (currently) still need Macs to write software. So if Photoshop doesn’t save you, XCode may.

Tommy Howells once said:

Truth wanting to lead a quiet life often settles between the extremes.

And that’s probably not a bad bet on this one either. In the mental roadmap I’m trying to form for my company, I’m settling most comfortably near the prediction that Macs will become more of a niche, rather than disappear completely.

But it sure is interesting to imagine what a Mac-less future might look like. And if Apple eventually moves the development environment for iPads on to the iPad? Watch out.

And yes, if you’re viewing this in anything approaching a decent browser, those are real, non-standard fonts. Hallelujah!

EDITED on March 28th to add: And if by “poking and prodding” you mean, “redo everything except the font choices”, then: done and done.

Central principle number one? Be remarkable. Be worthy of remark.

Easy enough to say, I know. But I’m not so sure it’s actually that hard to do. Because all it really means is that you are doing something that is not ordinary. That’s actually pretty easy.

I mean, not everything extraordinary is easy. Creating an extraordinary product is, I admit, not usually easy. Why? Well, usually because everyone else is trying to do it too. You say you’re in a band? Great, everyone is in a band, and they’re all trying to rock. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to rock. You absolutely should. Striving for exceptional quality at your core is going to be the basis of everything else you do. Accept no substitute for core quality.

I’m not saying you can take a shortcut past doing a good job. I’m just saying that once you do a good job, there are ten million ways to not be ordinary, and a bunch of them are easy.

Seriously. Just pick something about your company. Anything. Pick something boring. Pick the most boring thing you can think of. Then flip the creativity switch, and find some way to make that thing less ordinary. And if it seems hard? Pick something else! Somewhere in your company is an opportunity to not be ordinary. An opportunity that’s stupid easy.

Yes of Course I was Leading Up to an Example And Here We Are

This summer I bought a bike. I needed one to get back and forth from rehearsals.

I went in to the shop and came home with a SWOBO Baxter. She’s a beauty:

Now, SWOBO makes great bikes. They no doubt work hard to make them. All that hard work convinced me to walk out of the shop owning a much more expensive bike than I had expected to own when I walked in. Good on them: a hard-earned sale.

But the story doesn’t end there. I wouldn’t be writing this blog entry if the story ended there. I love my bike, but frankly I am not enough of a bike nerd to blog about it just because it has disc brakes and a sick retro/modern design and some kind of fancy self-contained ten gear shifting mechanism that I don’t really understand.

What makes me write about my Baxter—what, in this specific case, makes it remarkable—is something I just found while recycling a bunch of waste paper from my office.

Sorting through a pile of junk, I found the manual for my bike. Just to be sure I wasn’t about to recycle something important, I flipped through it. You know: scanned a page here and there. As I expected, it was nothing I cared about. Nothing I couldn’t get more directly from the friendly folks at Baltimore Bicycle Works.

But right on the last page, the very last page, right before I tossed the whole thing in the bin, my eye caught a single sentence:

Uh, wha?

That’s certainly out of the ordinary. Okay, well, I can’t throw it in the bin until I’ve looked closer.

Page 1

You can click to enlarge this image if you want, but don’t bother. It’s just what you’d expect from the legal guys:

Page 2

This one? This one you should click to enlarge:

That there? That there is remarkable. I mean: the warranty. Seriously. Can you pick a more boring piece of your company? Doubtful. But instead of making it a throw-away piece of crud on the last page of their manual, they turned it in to a surprising, funny, vulnerable, remarkable bit of prose. So remarkable that I actually, you know, remarked on it. And it wasn’t hard for them. It was already the way they were running their company, they were just brave enough and creative enough to write it down. That was it. Not hard. With one page of copy, they A) transformed my sense of them as a company, B) cemented my feeling of loyalty, and C) got me blabbing about how cool they are on my blog.

Just a little creativity and one page of copy. Remarkable.

Why?

I’m not sure. Because I love it, I guess. Because although I’m not convinced the arts are strictly necessary, I am convinced they’re one way we make the effort to survive worth the while.

Do theaters deserve success?

No, of course not. At the level of physical law, no one deserves anything. At the level of human law, we deserve some things, like the freedom to pursue happiness. But it’s important to remember that, when it comes to things we might deserve, “running a financially successful theater company that pays its workers a living wage” doesn’t show up on the list. It strikes me as healthy to keep that fact in view. No matter how many people you know and love who are killing themselves trying to make a living in the theater, the painful truth remains: they don’t deserve it just because they want it really, really bad and are working really, really hard.

But:

We accomplish many things we don’t deserve.

Many, many things.

Is there any hope for this particular thing?

I think so. I think we can build theaters that don’t rely on slave intern labor. I think our theater educators can stop selling snake oil. I think we can give good story tellers a chance to tell good stories without disproportionately favoring the wealthy on both the telling and listening ends.

I’m not entirely confident we can do these things, but I think we can, and I think it’s worth trying.

Ready for some brainstorming? Great. Here we go.

On Profit

Must theaters be non-profit? How far away is the current theatrical model from representing a successful for-profit business? I have no first-hand knowledge of the balance sheets in Baltimore, but I do have a lot of friends who work in the theater. So I started asking around: “How much of your income is from ticket sales?”

Wait, just ticket sales?

For the moment, yes, let’s just focus on tickets. If you prune out the non-profit-y things like grants and donations, what primarily remains is ticket sales.

My informal inquiries suggest that theaters both large and small in the Baltimore/DC area see only about 25-40% of their income in the form of ticket sales. Anything in this range is considered pretty healthy. One venue had, at one point, hit 70%. This was generally agreed, in the circle where I inquired, to be surprisingly high.

Pretty challenging numbers. But they don’t even capture the half of it.

Don’t forget the unpaid labor

Consider my favorite theater company in Baltimore. Last year they were selected as the best new theater company in the city. This year they dropped the qualifier, and boasted the best actress in Baltimore to boot. This band of ten young artists is attacking the creation of a new company with intelligence, vigor, rigor, and moxie. (Moxie!) Every one of these highly educated folks must serve both an artistic and a business development role in their theater. They’re exploring new ways of marketing, they’re drumming up subscriptions, they’re selling out entire runs of shows. They pour their lives into this company, and their rapid success is widely and justly considered astonishing.

This young company has also publicly disclosed that they work under a yearly budget in the low six figures.

The math is sobering: ten extremely talented full-time employees, over several years of effort, have managed to build a company that grosses little more than ten thousand dollars per employee. Before any costs. And this is regarded an astonishing success.

Fight that Sinking Feeling. Fight It!

Okay, so we’re clearly not talking about a field where a hop, skip, and a jump will take us into the land of profits and honey. Ticket sales apparently don’t provide remotely enough funds to make theater. Fair enough. Well, that means we’re back to being a non-profit, with all those extra funding sources. But what kind of non-profit, and what exactly is our funding structure? Oh, neat, they’ve classified them for us. Looks like it’s some form of Beneficiary Builder, wherein the total cost of delivering the benefit (theater) is not covered by the fees we charge the beneficiaries (ticket prices). Get the rich beneficiaries to help subsidize the cost for others, mix in a little old fashioned advertising, grab a government grant with an argument about your benefit to society, and look: we’ve got a theater!

Great, now we have our funding model, right?

No. I do not accept that we wind up where we started. Where we started is not working. I do not accept that this is the best we can do. If this is the best we can do, we suck.

Throw Your Business Models In The Air Like You Just Don’t Care

You know what annoys me a little bit? Theaters may fit inside a non-profit structure, but they share a lot of territory with for-profit companies. Any non-profit that fits inside the Beneficiary Builder model shares huge swaths of territory with for-profit companies. Unlike other non-profits, their beneficiaries are their customers. And from where I stand, it can look like an awfully fuzzy line between a great non-profit company providing a service their customers can’t afford…and a crappy for-profit company that can’t make their service affordable.

So you know what? Forget I ever said theaters should be non-profits. I hate that idea. It might be true, but just forget it. For the purposes of this conversation, that idea is a crutch and I am kicking that crutch out from under you RIGHT NOW.

You only get the crutches back if you do something creative and new with them.

Frantically Searching for the Beat

We’re all trying to find the beat. We can hear the music changing. We don’t recognize the new song yet, but we know something is going on. Witness:

• Actors Equity behaves like your grandparents by clamping down on things they don’t understand.
• Younger, hipper companies not under the stranglehold of Equity start taking advantage of new media channels, by live-streaming their productions, or posting daily rehearsal photos on Twitter.
• Older, bigger companies try out Twitter too, but don’t really get it.
• Consortiums of nervous organizations begin trying to build new tools to find new audiences. They don’t know what they want to build, but they know the want to build something.

Throw a stone and you’ll hit an organization trying to find its bearing in a new culture.

Which means?

Which means I don’t know the answer either. It would be presumptuous to claim I do. But I do have a proposal, and if you’ll stick with me for a few more moments I’ll do my best to sketch it for you.

Back to basics

Let’s get back to basics for a minute. Remember: we’re working under the assumption that our theater must survive as a small for-profit business. To that end, let’s look again at tickets.

Let’s say I’ve got a 100 seat theater. Let’s say I’ve got 10 people in my company. Let’s say I want to pay them each 50K a year. Let’s say I run shows Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, that each show I produce runs a month, and that I do six shows a year. A solid schedule. That makes 96 days a year I’m opening my door, or 9600 seats I can possibly sell. If I sell every single one of those seats, I’d have to sell them at over fifty bucks a ticket to pay my company members, and I’d have nothing left for rent, production costs, or anything else.

Clearly, the numbers stink. This is why our non-profit theaters subsidize ticket prices with charitable donations from individuals, governments, and organizations. But we don’t have those tools right now, remember? We have our product: theater. We have our customers: the audience. Those are our tools. I can add more seats, I can add more shows, I can cut my (generous?) paychecks, but try to wiggle any of these numbers and I hit the limits real fast. How many more seats can I add? 100? 400? 600? When does that transform the product you’re making into something you don’t want to make? How full can you keep all those seats? How many shows can you physically make in one year? The system is against us.

And aside from the fact that the economics of ticket sales are so sobering, there are other arguments against focusing too much on ticket sales. For example:

• Don’t tickets represent a dying transaction model from the industrial age?
• Wouldn’t a theater funded fully by ticket sales experience pressure to reduce artistic risks?
• If we pay undue attention to commercial metrics like ticket sales, aren’t we missing the point of our mission as a theater?
• Doesn’t the entire concept of tickets inherently damage the arts, by dividing us into art producers and art consumers?

I get it, I get it, selling tickets sucks.

And that’s where I disagree.

Wait, what?

This poo-pooing of ticket sales as the foundation of revenue: I don’t like it.

But! But!

Yeah, I know the economics look bleak, but I’ve got some ideas about that.

And the other stuff?

First off, I don’t believe exchanging money for an artistic experience damages the arts. To be sure, it would be unhealthy to think this experience captured the whole value of the art. I strongly support Scott Walter’s work on the CRADLE project (formerly the “<100K Project”). But I want access to the art I cannot make myself, which is, oh, most of it. Exchanging money for art is a way to complete my artistic life, not damage it. That’s what money is for: translating what I can make into what you can make, and vice versa.

Second, it is not a bad thing for me to measure how many people experience my art. How often each one is engaged with my artwork. Whether or not they bring their friends and family to see it too. Tickets are not a bad approximation to these things about which I care very much. The metric can be based on tickets and still be about the mission.

Third, I think it is exactly the wrong idea that you should buffer your artistic risks by disconnecting from your audience. That logic leads you to producing edgy, grant-funded work to an empty room. Your artistic risks should be buffered by the strength of your connection to your audience, not by your financial independence from them.

But the money!?

Right. We can’t make enough money from tickets. But I think giving up on tickets as a basic economic engine is throwing in the towel too soon. They’re not working great, but they’re not completely broken, either.

We don’t need to kill tickets. We need to reinvent them.

Byproducts

One thing a successful company will do is find a way to sell their byproducts. The lumber industry sells their sawdust. American Apparel sells their fabric scraps. It’s a common strategy of successful companies.

But byproducts are the bonus, not the bones. Bones keep you standing up. Byproducts give you a Christmas bonus.

And here’s the problem:

You, my friend, are selling sawdust.

And you’re throwing away the wood.

Bull.

Not bull, and you know it. You’ve said it. You have said, at some point in your artistic life, a sentence very much like this one: “Art is about the process.” You sagely observed to a student that “it’s really all about the process”, or “my work is about a process of [fill in the blank]“.

You’ve said it. Admit it. And then after you said it, you went and sold someone a ticket to the final product. The thing your art is only fractionally about.

The process is the product.

There is a moment in the production of every play when the set designer presents her work to the actors. She reveals the world her imagination has built, she pulls the drape from the model, and the whole team sits in rapt attention.

There is another moment when the costume designer passes his painted designs around the table. You pour over his work. You become excited.

There is a moment when an actor tries a new choice, and the room erupts in laughter.

There is a moment when an artistic director chooses a play the company will embody. He feels a surge of anticipation.

There are hundreds of these moments. And your customers are missing all of them.

But…so much of the process is so boring.

I don’t deny it. Recognizing your product is not the same as packaging it.

But “packaging” isn’t quite the right word. I don’t want you to wrap a little plastic around the surface of your process. I want you to design it around accessibility. I want you to aerate it. The process won’t be exactly the same anymore. It will need to loosen up and let a little sunshine in. Because the surface area of your company determines the depth of its relationships. And what you need more than anything else is really good relationships.

Relationships and their Consequences

Building your revenue around relationships instead of tickets has important consequences. But one of them is not that you get rid of tickets. Ten years from now, there will still be tickets. True, our theaters can’t just churn out a bunch of ticketing transactions. Tickets alone don’t get us there. But that doesn’t mean you kill tickets. It means tickets transform from an artifact of a transaction into an artifact of a relationship.

But what does that mean?

It means you only sell tickets as a last resort. It means people pay you money for something other than tickets, even though they do get tickets as part of the deal.

It means you sell memberships, not tickets. It means that if I pay you ten bucks a month, I get access. I can visit every rehearsal. I get a guaranteed ticket to every show you do. I get unlimited empty seat passes after I use my guaranteed ticket. When a guest artists comes to do a Suzuki workshop with your acting company? I get a chance to sign up too. For free. When you have some down time, your company members teach a class, and I get to come. For free. It means that instead of throwing your unused costumes and props in the dump, you throw a souvenir party. I get to come take home a souvenir. For free. Because I am a supporter, and that special-purpose prop is just more sawdust to you. Could you sell these things in other ways? Sure. You could do a prop auction. You could sell seats in a summer acting workshop. You can sell individual tickets. But I don’t think that’s the best way to sell the sawdust. Remember: we’re trying to stay away from simple transactions. We’re trying to concentrate our value into a long-term relationship. Don’t encourage your customers to track dollar-for-dollar what they get out of every transaction. Encourage them to understand that theater is a process. A process that costs money, but produces hundreds of wonderful results. Let them invest in the process, and then let them reap the results.

Use technology to increase your surface area. Live stream your shows. Post daily rehearsal photos on Twitter. Invest in a qualified videographer, and use the hell out of them. Build a living production document of every show online. Let your audience see how a scene is evolving from rehearsal to rehearsal with a quality video record of the evolution. Annotate each clip with a description of the director’s instructions, of the actor’s new choices, of the salient theatrical choices that made this version of the scene different from the last version. Put them up in a timeline. Let us see the process unfold, even when we can’t be in the room. Let me see how a scene is taken from a written blueprint to a live performance. Edit out the boring stuff.

It bears repeating: Use technology to increase your surface area. Give me a chance to be your dramaturg. Create a Wiki for every production. Let me talk to you about what you’re doing. And then actually listen to what I say. If I come up with a great idea for your production? Use it! And then make it clear you did! Let me influence your work. Give me a chance to become a real part of the process. Can I vote on which set I would most like to see for this new production? Can I tell you what stories I most want to hear? I’m not saying you should run your theater by popular vote, I’m saying give your audience a chance to affect what you do. Find ways to channel their creativity and interest. Don’t hoard the process to yourself unless you want to fund it yourself. Don’t think a few after-show talkbacks count as “opening up a healthy dialog” with the audience. Give them more than that, and I believe they will give you more in return.

As your relationships develop, so will your opportunities. When there is a production you want to fund, you will be able to come to me first, not last. Once our relationship is real, you don’t have to play this stupid guessing game: “People loved the last show, but will anyone care about the next show?” Don’t wait until the end to hope I care about what you’re doing. Let me show that I care up front. I’ll do it if I trust you. I’ll do it if I’m excited about the process.

Focusing on relationships over transactions splits your risks into smaller pieces. Focusing on relationships over transactions means you’re making money on the work you do 365 days a year. Not the work you do 96 nights a year.

Explore the model.

So what does the model buy us? Well, instead of selling 9600 tickets at 52 bucks a pop just so we can cover salary, we get to focus on signing up 4200 members at 10 bucks a month for the same result. We’re asking a lot fewer people for a little more money, and we’re giving them a lot more art in return.

Now let’s refine the structure: use tiers. Figure out what you will give away for free. Make it significant. Good relationships start with an offer, not a demand. After the free tier, build a low-cost tier. Then build the tier for your deepest relationships. Give me a path into the deep relationship, but don’t over-complicate it. Keep it simple. No more than a few options. Ask me to make a choice among a few fair alternatives. Add too many tiers and it feels like you’re just trying to play me. If you create a complex sliding scale I start thinking about our relationship as a negotiation for money. Respect me enough to make it about the relationship, not about the money. When it’s about the money you give me 20 different “membership levels”. When it’s about the relationship, you ask me to choose between “I’m just curious“, “I’m exploring“, or “YES. I’m on board.”

And now that we’ve got a solid revenue structure, give yourself the option to add back the crutches. But don’t do it automatically. The time you spend applying for grants is time you can’t spend developing your relationships.

Winds of Change

Facets of this new model have already appeared on the landscape. But it’s not an easy change to make. The institutions of theater give every sign of being opposed to it. For example, the institutions tend to see technology as the enemy. They think YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and basically the entire Internet is a tool to steal transactions, instead of a tool to increase surface area. And if you are one of the unlucky theaters to be working under the backward-looking constraints of the institutions, I extend my condolences. But all you little companies are free. You’re free to show the world a new way to make theater. You’re free to build a company that won’t burn you to a crisp. You’re free to show the bigger, older companies a better way. You’re free to lead, instead of follow.

Making the Move

What I’ve just described is neither easy, nor complete. I’ve sketched out a plan of action, not a complete and proven result. But I deeply believe in the principles of this plan. And I’m not just saying that. My company, Figure 53, is spending our hard-earned money to build tools based on these principles. Tools that we think will support companies as they make the transition from transactions to relationships. As a software engineer, that’s one way I can help nudge the theater world in a healthier direction. I want to nudge it as an actor and a theater maker too, but I have less leverage there. So until I start a theater company of my own, you get a long blog post and the promise of tools to come. And if you live in Baltimore, you get a neighbor who wants to help. Because I have too many friends killing themselves trying to make a living in theater. I want to see you beautiful people living a more stable life. We’ve got a chance to try. Let’s try.

They also just climbed on board the Twitter wagon.

Now, I’ve got nothing but love for Everyman. And there’s nothing really wrong about how they’re using Twitter. They’ve set it up just like anyone else would. They’ve got a link on their homepage (next to the link for their Facebook page), they’ve got a decent list of followers already (although a fair number of those are fake tag-back followers, like WholeFoods, or BarackObama), and they’re usually posting in a personal, genuine way (although they’re still getting warmed up to the style of a good Tweet, which counsels against awkwardly retrofitting a marketing moment by painting it in the guise of a personal update, or giving in to the lure of generic filler).

All in all? A great company that’s smart enough to know Twitter is something worth investigating.

So why mention them? Because this is a good example of what I think Gavin Clabaugh means when he says:

From the nonprofit’s perspective, [...] despite the increasingly ubiquitous nature of technology, they’re never too sure that they’ve put it to the right use. It may not be true. They may be using it very well. But they’re never too sure that it really fits. [...] It doesn’t ever seem to be fully formed, fully realized.

— Gavin Clabaugh, CIO at the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation

Everyman has every reason to go whole hog on Twitter. They’re already the smaller, hipper alternative to the heavy monolith in town—who, by the way, is also on Twitter, but shows less evidence of understanding why they signed up, and isn’t confident enough in the value of Twitter to announce it on their homepage. Everyman already has the feel of being an accessible, personal organization woven from the people of this city. They’re pros, and they’re our pros. So Twitter is a perfect fit to Everyman. They’ve already shown they want to have a personal relationship to their city. Twitter is a way to do that.

And yet…it feels…tepid. Like they’re sure they don’t want to get left behind…but they’re not completely sure it’s a good fit.

Dear Everyman: Show some confidence! It’s a good fit!

You’ve stumbled on a chance to distinguish yourselves even more as the company that’s connected to Baltimore. Don’t pussyfoot around, man, go for it.

Do it simply—no over-worked slogans that come off as trying too hard to be cool—tone and savvy are everything here. You can’t afford to try to be cool, you have to actually be cool. Your audience can spot a marketing bullshitter from a hundred city blocks.

The key is that you don’t have to be a marketing bullshitter to let people know you really, genuinely care about having a relationship with them, in a small way, each day.

And the way you do that is by starting with an understanding of what the heck Twitter is, and what people might be trying to get out of it. (You’re not just jumping on the wagon because everyone else is, right? You actually have a specific underlying reason why you think that Twitter is a good idea, right?)

The consequence of achieving that understanding is it lets you know how to talk to the people who might care. It lets you know how simple you can go with this.

A Digression: How to Spot a Company that’s Uncomfortable with Technology

Look for an overcompensating explanation.

“Check out our new blog, where you’ll get to hear the inside scoop from Artsy Pants Theatre! You’ll get production updates, thoughts from the Artistic Director, and more!”

Reality check: anyone who might care about your blog already knows why they will. At best, explaining it is just patronizing. At worst, it’s a red flag that you don’t know why you’re doing it—if you feel the need to clarify the point, maybe it’s because the point isn’t very clear to you. You don’t spend time explaining your phone number, so why your blog or your Twitter account? If they don’t already understand phones, they’re not going to call you.

Anyway, back to Everyman

Okay, Everyman, so you’re committed to Twitter. You understand both the possibilities and constraints of a Twitter relationship. You know the etiquette, you know what makes a Twitter account worth following, you know it’s a two-way street, and you’re ready to use all this to lift the Everyman experience even further away from the “generic theater company” brand. Sweet.

Show me that commitment.

You’ve put it on your web site. That’s a good start.

Add it to your business cards.

Put it on every poster you make.

Create an insert for every program.

Make a 30-foot banner for your building.

You’re selling out shows. Every one of the people who walk in your door should see that banner. They should not be able to get to their seat without that thing landing right at eye level at some point on their journey.

You should, and you easily can, have way more than 82 followers.

Keep the campaign simple. You don’t need to explain anything. You’re making an offer to enter into a relationship. All you need to do is make that offer. Do it directly and in good faith. You can relate every piece of information I need with two words and an at sign. Simple. Focused. Easy. The people who get it will appreciate that you respect their intelligence. The people who don’t get it may well be curious enough to figure it out. And the people who don’t get it and don’t care? No harm, no foul.

Sure, you can use Twitter just like everyone else. But being just like everyone else doesn’t win you any points. You guys rock, but you can rock harder.

Photo Credit: Ange Soleil, who has specified that some rights are reserved.