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.

After that, I don’t know the chronological order, and I don’t know a complete list of the experiments. I just know what has fallen in my lap. But here’s what’s on my tiny little radar:

• In New York, Stolen Chair Theatre Company is half way through their first year of Community Supported Theatre.
• In Chicago, New Leaf Theatre took a leap toward developing a new “partnership” model—a sort of uber-membership.
• In Baltimore, fast-growing Single Carrot Theatre is preparing to offer a new membership option for next season.
• In North Carolina, Scott Walters is refining a community membership model for Cradle Arts.
• In Seattle and New York, video crews from OnTheBoards.tv are recording performances, and making them available for unlimited streaming for 50 bucks a year.
• Over in the world of music, Magnatune switches to a no-limits membership business. Because it earns them more money.

Whether live or online, all these arts orgs are making bets on larger, long-term, often indivisible value propositions.

I am really, really curious to see how this all shakes out.

I’m also pretty sure I’m gonna rent this one and see how it goes.

Edited to add: Super interesting: listen to this MP3 interview with the creator of OnTheBoards.tv describing how they’ve built it. Especially note how they had to work around current IP laws to make this happen.

Edited again to add: No really, listen to the interview with Lane Czaplinski. It’s intelligent and fascinating. It’s clear he knows what he’s building, and why, and how it fits into the larger picture. This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Or: “So THAT just happened.”

Or: “In a few hours the circle closes and I am going to yell about it from my little rooftop because although it ain’t really all that huge — wow it sure feels huge to me.”

Warning: personal story ahead. And yeah, it’s kind of long. Skip it if you want. I don’t care. I’ll yell this to empty streets and feel damn fine about it.

Everyone gone? Cool. Alright empty streets! Just you and me now!

[Deep breath in.] Aaaaaannnd…..

August, 2004 — Swallowing the seed

In August 2004, I join my Actor’s Theatre Apprentice buddies John Catron, Jenna Close, and Bradley Wayne Smith as they take their newly-formed theatre company to the Edinburough Fringe.

We pass customs!

We roam the streets!

We hawk our wares! (Seen here: John Catron as the Smallest Full Grown Man Alive!)

We even put on a show!

I serve as light op, sound op, stage manager, and house manager. From inside a coat closet. A very, very small coat closet.

Audio runs from iTunes, on that laptop balanced precariously on a stool there in the middle. To the left: light board and audio mixer! To the right: script and wall switches! Not pictured: the furious concentration needed to run this (uncomplicated) show!

October 14 2004 — “I’m wondering…”

Later that year, John writes me an email. Says they’re doing a new show in January. Says a CD player won’t cut it. Asks if I know of a Mac-based application for running sound effects. I think to myself, “sure, I’ll Google one for you”.

Huh. Doesn’t seem to be a lot out there for Mac. Wasn’t expecting that.

I write an email to my buddies Jesse Kriss and Jen Wang:

Editor’s note: you should check out Cricket. It’s cool, and it does stuff QLab doesn’t.

Jesse writes back:

And, in perhaps the most loaded one-line email afterthought I’ve ever received:

And so it begins.

And when I say “it begins”, I mean “it begins from scratch”. To wit:

• We’d never used CoreAudio before.
• We’d never used XCode before.
• We’d never used Objective-C before.
• We’d never written a Mac application before.
• We’d never written a full application of any kind before.

Remember above how I said they needed something in January? And how it is currently late October?

October 17, 2004 — Who cares?! We’re young, we’re ignorant, and sketching interfaces is fun!

Jesse lobs the first sketch at me (click for larger version):

October 18, 2004 — Hello rabbit hole! Mind if we poke our nose in?

In an email entitled “i heart obj-c”, Jesse writes:

So I’m doing my reading and playing around a bit. Obj-C is pretty damned cool. And the Apple frameworks are pretty nice, too.

October 19, 2004 — Hey this thing makes noise!

I write:

I actually managed to get a little bit of other work done today (although I haven’t even STARTED the ten page paper technically due tomorrow! Wheee!!), but I couldn’t resist putting in a little time on this as well. I am now able to read, write, and play the following file types:

AIFC
AIFF
MPEG Layer 3
NeXT/Sun
Sound Designer II
WAVE
AC3
AAC ADTS

I’ve also been thinking about design choices and I hope to send along some sketches of possible design patterns and object models we could use in the next couple of days.

This is all just to say…ummm…”Cool. We’re making progress.”

Cheers,
Christopher

November 24, 2004

First test version sent to John! Sweet!

John tries it. And…it doesn’t work! Suck!

A few hours later, we figure out the problem. (Hi ZeroLink! A note from future me: you suck, and Apple later kills you because you suck. Just FYI.)

And finally: Off and running!

November-December, 2004

Bug report, fix, add, bug report, fix, add, scramble.

3AM iChat sessions with Jesse.

Homework be damned.

January 14, 2005

First show. IT LIVES! And it looks like this!

Winter, 2005

Exhaustion.

Oh, yeah, and school. Probably should work on that.

Spring, 2005

Man, school sucks.

I want something fun to work on. Hey, that sound cue project was pretty fun. Maybe I’ll dust that code off and take another look.

Summer, 2005

Write write write rip out write write delete write rewrite write rewrite sleep write sketch write.

June 14th, 2005

Hey Jesse! Look at this cool widget I just made!

December 29, 2005

First public beta release. Hey, theatre-sound@listserv.aol.com! Um, anyone here want to take a look at this thing I’ve been fiddling with?

Hi all,

My name’s Chris; I’m a new member of the list.

I’ve been working on a new sound design/playback application for Mac OS X, and I am looking for folks who can help me improve it.

[...snip...]

Theatre making is damn well hard enough, in my opinion, so I set out to build a new tool: QLab. After over a year of work, the first beta versions are ready for public testing. Here’s the address:

http://figure53.com

QLab is free, and will remain so. [Editor's note: yup, we've still got a really nice free version.] My background in theatre makes me hungry to improve it, and my background in computers gives me the tools to do so, but I look to you–those with a strong background in sound design–to help me know how it should evolve to serve you best.

Remember, this is beta software; I need your help to push it and poke it and learn how to make it better.

I hope to hear back from any of you who can spare a moment to give me some feedback.

best to all,
and (early) happy new year,
Christopher

Winter 2006

Wow! People are trying it out! And emailing me! This is so much fun!

Later Winter 2006

Wow! People are using it! People are using it!

Spring 2006

Wow…people are…really using it?

Ohshitohshitohshitohshit.

May 10 2006

Okay, okay, calm down. There are just a few people playing around with it for some high school plays and some community theater productions. It’s cool, it’s cool.

Huh, what’s this email in my inbox?

My name is [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] referred me to your software recently. After lengthy discussions and a good bit of testing I decided I could try using QLab instead of our tried and true Instant Replay Systems. While it might have been better to try it out on a smaller, less significant show; timing worked out that my rig was ready for operation just in time for a huge show, produced by one of our most important clients.

Although I was somewhat nervous to try the new technology on such a high profile event, the potential upside overshadowed my concerns. My ambition was quickly rewarded.

[...] QLab has changed everything. [...]

Thank you for such a valuable product. I would be glad to help in anyway you need to further develop this tool. Feel free to quote me on any of this and if you need any specific quotes or anything I’d be happy to help. I have also included a couple of pictures from the [REDACTED] Show.

Also, can I get a copy of the pro version?

Ohshitohshitohshitohshit.

September 16 2006

Okay, fine. Let’s do this thing.

Version 1.0.0. Base version still free. Pro features available for a small fee. Let’s see what happens.

And man, this is fun.

And it now looks, more or less, like this:

(Click for larger version)

And then, the blur

Things start to pick up steam. More and more folks start using it. More and more folks tell their friends.

February 11 2008

Last release of version 1. I duck into my mental bunker, and begin work on version 2.

April 7 2008

I officially quit my day job. I start working for Figure 53 full time.

More blur

High schools. Community theaters. Regional theaters. Then Broadway. Then the West End. Shows winning Tony awards.

January 30, 2009

Version 2.

My wife will tell you: I was literally shaking when I pressed the “Send” button on that email. Shay. King.

And as a present to myself, I bought a Wii. Thought I’d finally take a day off, play some video games for the first time in, well, years.

Silly Christopher. You really thought you could tear yourself away from your computer on release day? Really? Silly, silly man.

Ze goggles, zey do nothing!

More colleges. More national theaters of foreign countries. More shows winning Tony awards. Then shows that are too big for me to be allowed to mention them. (Hint: do you watch TV? You’ve probably recently heard QLab.) (Edited later to add: The cat’s out of the bag.)

And using the momentum produced by version 2, Figure 53 launches into a new era: I get to invite my dear friend and code ninja Sean Dougall on board.

Closely followed by, yes, you guessed it, the guy who was there at the beginning: Jesse Kriss.

IS THERE A POINT OR ARE YOU JUST GOING TO BRAG AT ME?!?!?

Wow, empty streets, didn’t know you could vocalize.

ANSWER THE QUESTION, IGNOMINIOUS ROOFTOP YELLER!

Okay, fine, here’s the point.

Yes, I’m proud of this stuff, and yes the experience has repeatedly sent shocks of adrenaline through my system, and, god, it’s incredible to serve professionals of such deep intelligence and skill.

But right now all that stuff is just the context for my point. Which is a very personal one, and which is this:

A lot of milestones have come and gone. Except one. I’ve never been part of a show that actually used the damn thing.

Until tonight. Which, dear empty streets, is why I’m up here embarrassing myself with all this carrying on. Taking out the baby pictures. Talking at you until your eyes glaze over. Because tonight at Single Carrot Theatre the circle closes, and I’ll participate in a show run on QLab, and this has been five years in the making, and frankly I’m feeling a little emotional about it.

…

So, um…thanks.

….that’s pretty much it.

Thanks for indulging me, empty streets.

…which way down from this roof again?

Oh, and, Baltimore: maybe come see the show? It’d sure be an honor to have you there. Click below for tickets:

Number 1

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a world-class symphony with a world-class conductor, is taking a sledgehammer to their own pedestal.

Filed under:

• Increasing Surface Area
• You Don’t Have to Be Small to do this Stuff
• Your Immediate Neighborhood (Yours) is Full of Awesome
• Scott Walters Knows What He’s Talking About
• There Ain’t a Lot of Wiggle Room on a Pedestal

Number 2

Man, it’s just so hard to get people to come to see live theater anymore isn’t it? It’s so hard to get people excited about getting out of their houses to go see some real live people tell stories abo–

Hey-oh! Hi! Shut up a second and meet Baltimore’s Stoop Storytelling Series:

Each Stoop show features seven storytellers who get seven minutes each to tell a true, personal story about a specific theme. No notes, no scripts, no actors–just true stories, artfully told.

In other words, the conversation went a little something like this:

The Stoop: “Hey Baltimore, got any good stories?”

Baltimore: “Jesus Christ, I thought you would NEVER FREAKING ASK.”

Result: Well, they’re looking for a bigger space, because their current host, Maryland’s largest regional theater can’t fit all the people that want to come to the shows.

Yeah. Just saying.

Oh, and I’ve heard rumors on the street that some of the theatrical establishment in town is tilting their head ever so slightly upward when looking at The Stoop. Those rumors may not be true. But if they’re true? Hey guys? For your sake: knock that shit off.

Filed under:

• Campfires Will Never Die
• Simplicity Wins
• No, Seriously, Stop Looking Where You Don’t Live. Your Neighbors are Awesome
• Tap That Shit, People.

So heeeeyyyeeeeeere I am. Top of the morning to you. I’ve got a date with the farmers’ market in about an hour, so let’s do this quickly, shall we?

Is your rage an innie or an outie?

Ha ha! Yes, it’s true! I’ve suckered you into reading another blog post about Outrageous Fortune. Oh, come on, you knew it was coming. Well, all you theater geeks knew it was coming.

Yes, back in December, I too, a C-list theater blogger, was offered a free copy of the ol’ O.F. In a bit of simple but effective marketing, I, along with every other far more worthy theater blog in existence, was given a chance to light up my little corner of the interweb with my own two tiny cents about this little bombshell of a book.

For those of you reading this from a position comfortably outside the bubble, here’s the skinny: the contents of Outraaaageous Fortióne are the scandalous topic of the whole darn theater world right now. If you read about theater on the Internet, you have read about this book. Isaac Butler even organized a team blogging effort to dissect the thing. (Currently in process.) It’s also leaking out into the broader media landscape, via outlets like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.

So what we all really need right now is my take on it.

In which it is revealed I am a liar

Ha ha! I’m such a kidder! You need my opinion on this book about as much as you need the salary earned by an American playwright. Which is to say, I guess it could conceivably be useful for something, but the face value approaches zero in a suspiciously asymptotic manner.

So, as it turns out, this is not another blog post about Outrageous Fortune. Which is handy for me, since I haven’t actually read the thing.

Let me stress that

I have not read Outrageous Fortune. I want to be clear about that. I do not own a copy. I do not plan to own a copy.

And I’ve only barely managed to skim a handful of the ten thousand blog posts devoted to the book.

But this is the Internet, which never said “no” to someone who thought he had something to say.

And I do think I have one little, small thing to say.

It’s not even a snarky thing.

Oh, I admit it. I’ve been sorely tempted to snark about this book. Something along the lines of “NEWS FLASH: ARTISTS GET PAID SHIT.”

But I get that the point here is (probably) more subtle. (Again, remember: haven’t read the book.) I get that there’s a conversation going on here about the artistic ecosystem, and how in a team sport like theater, we’re shafting the playwrights even harder than we’re shafting everyone else, which is already a significant amount of shafting from the start. And I get that, if this is a conversation about the health of our national artistic ecosystem, this kind of exploitation of the fountainhead of our art form might be kind of like the global warming of theater: slow, steady, and ultimately devastating. Not to mention fucking unfair to all those playwrights.

Or is it?

Okay. Here’s the thing. And I say this with a heart full of love.

Getting shafted as an artist starts with you.

You signed up for this. I don’t know specifically why, but you did. You made a choice. And we need to start there. I’m not saying this pejoratively. I’m not saying this with the condescending tone of someone who thinks you made the wrong choice. I only want to stress very strongly that a choice was made.

Or, no, that’s not actually it. What I want to stress very strongly is the question: “You actually did make that choice, right? You’re not sitting here getting shafted under the impression that you had no other choice, right?”

Because in the full consciousness of that choice, we can legitimately and constructively talk about dealing with the results. We can recognize a powerful artistic system that some people subscribe to for the opportunity of its momentum, but which may need to be redirected before that momentum carries the system off a cliff. We can have that conversation, and it will be a conversation without whining, because we’ll know that the people in that system looked around, saw a universe of possibilities, and decided, yes, this system is where I can best spend my creative energy.

But what I see instead, over and over and over again, is something very different. I see people wandering across a landscape in the muddy, trampled path of the ones who went before, eyes staring feverishly forward, always forward, at the choices made by someone else.

Look left! Goddammit look left and see that field of flowers!

Roads work so damn well. They take you directly to a pre-determined destination. And that’s very often what you want.

But dammit, not always.

I only tell my own story because it’s the one I know the best.

Seven years ago I spent ten months in the Acting Apprentice Company at Actors Theatre of Louisville. And although I met some of my dearest friends there, I can’t really say it was an unmitigated joy. In ten months, we got two guaranteed days off: Christmas eve and Christmas day. (Although, in practice, we usually got Mondays free as well. And technically speaking, I actually didn’t really get Christmas eve or Christmas day off.) We got no free housing. We got no stipend. And we certainly had no time for a job on the side. We all lived on our meager savings and the generosity of our families, and many of us (myself included) got some extra help from food stamps.

At the end of that ten months comes the Next Big Step, in which the Apprentice Company organizes a showcase in New York to which they hope a million agents will come, and maybe one of them will be looking for you, and that will ease your transition into the great New York jungle where lucky actors will supplement their income with a lucrative soap commercial.

And I just. Could not. Do that. Wanted no part of that. None. I felt crushed by it from the very beginning. Getting crushed on the first step did not, it must be said, seem like a promising way to begin.

So I looked left, and over there to the left was this lovely green hill rising up toward a computer science degree. I didn’t really know what lay over the hill, or if the terrain beyond could curve back toward theater, but I did have some kind of base unformed instinct that a paycheck and health insurance was a lovely foundation on which to reach out toward theater from an as yet undetermined angle.

It took almost seven years to clear the brush on that path. It took a completely unexpected direction. And several times I found myself scared that I had really fundamentally trekked off to where I would never make direct contact with the artistic part of my life again. That was not a comfortable feeling.

But last summer, the path broke through: a theater company in Baltimore gave me a chance to make theater again. And you know what? It worked out. And I won’t claim that I’m especially good at it, but for whatever reason that initial chance has led to other chances. Maybe I’m not completely incompetent as an actor. But it can’t hurt that I also bring my own paycheck, my own health insurance, and my own completely flexible schedule.

Whatever the reason, I’m making art again. Art I’m fundamentally proud to be making. With people I truly respect. And I don’t have to give two flying farts about the average salary of actors in American theater, or how the hell can I afford health insurance, or how will I find the energy to work two jobs and still have something left to give to the creative process of making a play happen.

And that? That’s not just liberating. That is fucking fun.

Crap, this got long.

I’ve blasted way past my self-imposed time limit on writing this post. I need to get to the market and pick up some milk.

So here’s the deal.

My path is not necessarily your path.

And their path is not necessarily your path.

And I believe that intelligent people are saying intelligent things about a set of well-worn paths which have been no doubt thoughtfully mapped in this book Outrageous Fortune. And I think that’s cool.

But I also know, simply on the face of it, that I just don’t care about that path. I don’t have to care about that path. And I can accept that some people will care about that path, and I’m glad they do. And I wish them the best of luck.

I just hope, hope, hope that people don’t unthinkingly cede their fundamental power to create to a system that might kill it. Not without first looking left. And right. And up. And down.

And I’m excited, as I skim the ten thousand blog posts on this book, to see this basic idea bubbling in the soup.

What rules will you break today?

My life fundamentally changed the day I started working for myself. There was no company policy book. I was the company policy book. I was the system. No option was arbitrarily off the table.

I cannot stress this enough. This shift in perspective transformed everything. I’m convinced it is the secret source of power of the entrepreneur: knowing in your bones that the limits you encounter will be the ones that really exist. And that the definition of what it means for a limit to “really exist” is usually up for debate.

Rands recently said:

Unfortunately, progress is equal parts consideration and rage.

Rage can be good. Rage helps you break fake rules.

So I’m glad to be reading about the rage. I think we need it. All I ask is that we give our rage access to all constructive outlets.

And now, the Milk.

Or my wife is gonna kill me.

There are many glorious TED talks, but this may be the most glorious.

I don’t mind telling you: I wept at my desk when I watched this video.

I took little time to share the video on Twitter, and it was not much later when my friend Jen Wang replied:

Re: TED. I don’t agree with absolutely everything he says, but it’s glorious indeed. I’d love to see his pre-concert talks.

Now, when Jen talks about music, I know well enough to listen. There are two reasons for this. The first reason, the technical reason, is that Jen’s at Berkley right now getting a PhD as a composer. The second reason, the better reason, is that Jen and her husband Sean (also a composer) are among the most literate, articulate talkers-about-music I’ve ever met in my life. (And my dad is a university music professor, so I’ve met my fair share of people who talk about music.)

I remember vividly a day about five years ago when Jen and Sean gave me a crash course on a series of modern composers who I had never previously heard. It was a revelation. The way they introduced me, a musical moron, to overtone singing literally sent me skipping around the room with delight. Ever since that day I’ve never missed a chance to get them to talk music to me.

Needless to say, then, I was pretty keen to know on which points Jen disagreed with Mr. Zander. I sent her a little inquiry. She sent me a little response back. It made perfect sense. The end.

But of course not the end.

Tonight Jen wrote me an email. I’ve asked her permission to reproduce it here, because I’d like to share it with you.

It’s a little long, but I want to share the whole thing with you. I think it’s important. Ready? I’ll join you again at the end. Here we go:

Hey, Chris!

I’ve been thinking lately about the TED talk, and how insufficient Twitter was for expressing what I’d thought about it, and it’s been on my mind since then. I hope you don’t mind; I haven’t been able to get it out of my head, so I wrote it out, and thought I’d send it along to you.

I loved the TED talk until the moment he told the audience to hold in your mind the memory of somebody you love that you’ve lost, and you’ll know “everything that Chopin has to say”.

It’s a gorgeous piece, and he plays it beautifully, and he’s spot on with his analysis. But when I hear this piece, I don’t hear grief specific to the loss of a person I love, unless instructed to do so. What I do hear is how the piece is essentially a long descent, and the interplay between the elegance and simplicity of the overarching shape with the delays and detours that are driven by the harmony (as a result of repeatedly thwarting expectation and resolution) is what makes the piece both simple and agonizing—you know where you need to go, but you just can’t quite get there until the end.

And even that end is both satisfying and (to me) not. The long, slow fall of the melodic line has ended but no resolution is given in the harmony, and it’s essentially a tag, a prolonged farewell, that delivers the final chords of the resolution. There’s no moment, like there would be with Beethoven, where the melody resolves the same time the harmony does, where everything comes together in one cathartic, deeply satisfying moment (that would then be repeated ten times just for emphasis, like the musical equivalent of ending a sentence like this!!!!!!1111one). It’s like the difference between coming home through the front door and sneaking in the back window, a bit at a time. You both get there, but in a context where homecoming as an event is a significant one, they come off in very different ways.

There are beautiful, incredible examples from this time period, in Chopin and Brahms and many others’ work, of similar moments where the melody “arrives” and the harmony doesn’t until later, and how wrenching that can feel. And part of the Romantic sensibility is to deny the clear-cut resolutions of middle-period Beethoven, even as they construct structures that make those resolutions seem deeply necessary.

I also love the difference between this tortuous route taken by the harmony and the melody, while the rhythm remains so simple and so regular. There’s something about that juxtaposition that to me makes the piece seem deeply introverted and quiet, that serves as a way of concealing or muting that extremely tense interaction. The fact that the accompaniment is moving while the melody doesn’t also emphasizes how the notes of that melody hang suspended in the air, not only above the eventual E at the end of the descent, but above the gently moving surface of the accompaniment. Each note of the melody just hangs there, you know?

I feel that tension, that subversion of expectation, that tortuous working-through of the interplay of these elements. And that’s what moves me: the suspense, the release. It’s not a happy piece; the narrative of the piece isn’t about delivering results and satisfying expectations. The melody is extraordinarily beautiful, more so because it’s so simple. It’s really just a gem of a piece.

But because of all this, when he says what he says about the Chopin, I felt kind of crushed. Because assigning the piece an external, concrete narrative was, to me, a way of cheapening the piece in this context, as if the notes themselves weren’t enough to make you catch your breath and listen, when for me they really, really are. I can totally see why a piece like this, especially one that is so gentle and yet inexorable in its progress, could tug at a person and deliver a cathartic moment about something in their lives. But I think those moments remind me most of the way that, when I sing an A into the body of my guitar, the A string will vibrate sympathetically. That inexorable progress excites your inner life in some way, makes you vibrate sympathetically somehow. Maybe the way the progress of time is similarly undeniable? Maybe the way what you expected is no longer what you wanted when you get it? Who knows? That may all be true, if it makes you think of a loved one that you miss. But was that “all that Chopin had to say”? I don’t think we have the ability to know that, and (frankly) I don’t think we need to know that in order to be deeply moved by the piece.

Does that make sense?

Wow, this got way, way longer than I thought it would. But I’d love to know what you’re thinking about it.

Jen

A quiet moment.

.

I hope you know very little about music.

I really kind of hope you don’t know much about music. At least, not in a formal sense. Because for those of you who already know a lot about music that text probably didn’t have the same effect on you as it had on me. But for those of you who don’t know so much, you might have had the same feeling I did. Namely, the feeling that someone just gave you a piece of the world as a present.

Those who can’t do, teach?

Earlier this morning, Scott Walters wrote:

Simply making art isn’t enough. It is the responsibility of the artist to speak about the work, to write about the work, to contribute insights to the development of the field.

When I read that line this morning, I nodded to myself and carried on with my day. But when Jen wrote me that email, I felt what it meant.

Every time Jen or Sean has talked to me about a piece of music, it opened up that music in a way I couldn’t do on my own. Even with stupid pop music, it still helps me listen. And not just listen, but hear. Hear things I simply did not hear without their help. And just like I felt with Mr. Zander’s talk, it feels glorious.

And also? It also makes me really, really hungry for more.

My response to Jen

Here’s what I wrote back to Jen:

I wonder about whether he actually thinks about the piece as conclusively as he talks about it. I have this feeling he might not. I have this feeling that it was a little white lie, to give someone who doesn’t understand music a chance to GET it with a capital G. I get the feeling that for him, the first thing he wants to do is make sure you believe, really and truly believe, that a piece of classical music can, like, change your life. And I get the feeling he’s willing to play a little bit of a trick on you to teach you that. But I bet he’d probably say it’s just a trick to get you to the next place. The place where you can hear a piece and take it with all its mystery intact, instead of taking it with all its mystery boiled down to one possible interpretation…..

I don’t know…obviously I don’t know what he thinks, I just get the feeling that he’d say something like that. Because to get to the point where I could hear all of the things you just helped me understand, and to do it like I got hit by a truck, would I think take longer than the time they get for a TED talk…. :-)

I think we both kinda came to the conclusion that this may have been what Mr. Zander was doing, but I’m not totally sure and anyway that’s not the point.

The point is that you? You have the power to teach. Please use it.

This is neat. I like this idea, and in the spirit of public feedback about it, here’s, uh, some public feedback:

The Metrics I Generally Dig

@mentions — Measuring mentions captures something about both re-tweets and conversations. Both of those things feel very important.

Followers — Measuring the number of follower certainly seems, on the face of it, to be a good yardstick. But: it only captures one level. I suspect this metric could be improved by factoring in the 2nd degree followers, i.e. how many followers do your followers have? My own Twitter account doesn’t have that many followers, but when I wrote a proposal for a new funding model for theater it reached the eyeballs (and struck the fancy) of Jess Hutchinson. It was Jess’s tweet, not mine, that gave that post traction. At the time Jess was a 2nd degree follower, through Nick Keenan. So I’d like to see a more sophisticated model for measuring followers.

Web Badge location — I don’t now how to weight this, but I’m so glad Devon tried. I know it can take time to modify a website, and maybe you want to test the twitter waters gently at first, but eventually, if you’re in, then freaking go in all the way. Make the choice. Commit. Don’t go weaksauce on us.

Twitter Name — Again, I don’t know how to weight it, but kudos to Devon for trying. It’s not just a branding thing, it’s a user interface thing. Think like a software developer and imagine what it will be like to actually use your Twitter name. I bet you a lot of money that a lot of people misspell GLTFCleveland.

The Metrics I Generally Don’t Buy

Frequency — Proof by counter-example: I have no qualms about un-following Twitter accounts that won’t shut up, even if they’re great tweets. In my experience quality and quantity don’t seem closely correlated on Twitter.

Total Tweets — See above.

Time in existence — I mean, if you were on the ball early on, cool, but I don’t think you get extra points for this. Maybe you knew you didn’t know how to use Twitter, in which case you should get extra points for not putzing around. Late to the party is no big deal if you come out swinging.

Client — Devon describes this metric as follows: “Included under the assumption that theatres using desktop applications (like TweetDeck) are able to better manage their Twitter presence”. I think that’s a bad assumption, and anyway, don’t grade the tools, grade how they’re used. A great foley artist could beat a lousy QLab user without much trouble.

Running with it

I’d love to see Devon’s metrics refined and extended. I’d also like to find a way to close the loop on evaluating the metrics. Can we connect these numbers to, say, ticket sales? Or volunteer hours clocked for the theater? Until we do something like that, it’s all speculation.

Speculating is fun, though

After reading Devon’s analysis, I wanted to play with some numbers too. However, I don’t really know anything about most of those LORT theaters (with one huge exception). Instead, I wanted to play with numbers for which I have some real-life context. To do that, I browsed through the Baltimore theaters I currently follow. Here they be, ordered by number of followers:

What to make of this, Armchair Edition

First off, what’s that “ERS/ING Ratio” thing? I propose that it’s one way to measure the strength of your magnet. If that number is high, your followers sought you out. A high ratio means you didn’t just troll for followers as a Twitter whore. (The tactic of following every single account you stumble on and hoping for a tag-back.)

The trouble with this ratio is that a high number is good, but a low number isn’t necessarily bad. For example, you yourself might be a tag-back follower. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, at least for an organization. If your style is to tag-back your own followers, then they might have all clicked “Follow” before you returned the favor, in which case you’ve still got a great magnet even though your ratio is diluted.

“I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.” ~ Ralph “Doomed to Ironic Appropriation” Emerson

Another thing worth noting: Lots of tweets don’t translate to lots of followers. Yes, I’m looking at you, CENTERSTAGE_MD. Yes, I know you’re running The Importance of Being Earnest, aka “the mildly amusing play that theaters will NOT FREAKING STOP PRODUCING”. Yes, I know Oscar Wilde was a clever fellow. Now stop using Twitter to quote him every single day, because no one cares.

Is it just me, or is it getting young in here?

Maybe this means nothing, or maybe it’s just to be expected, but I’d like to note that the theaters run by younger people (Single Carrot, BIG Improv, The Strand) are all kicking the Twitter asses of the theaters run by older people (CENTERSTAGE, Everyman, Theatre Project).

I have gone on record respectfully needling the older theaters about their relationship to Twitter. I don’t think anything I said in that post has really changed.

You Don’t Have To Twitter

Look, I’m big on Twitter. I think it’s the best, cleanest, coolest combination of personal and practical social networking that we’ve seen so far. But I can dig that it may not be your style. I genuinely don’t care if you use Twitter or not. I’d much rather see an organization use one kind of marketing really really well, than ten kinds poorly.

One thing I get from these numbers is that the bigger, older theaters maybe shouldn’t be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. That would be okay. No, seriously, I’m a huge technology geek and I’m telling you: it’s okay to not use technology. The marketing that works best is the kind that comes from your heart. Find out what that means for you. If that means marketing a romantic show solely with the stunning use of letter-press printed postcards that double as a buy-one-get-one free coupon, which is the single way in which anyone can get a ticket for your event, which in turn leads to a massive “date night” for your show and you never even think about Twitter at any step of that process, dude, go for it. That would be so hott.

We need data

Despite all that stuff I just wrote, my biggest realization from looking at this table is that I simple don’t know what these numbers really mean. I want tools to give us more data. I want to see follower break-downs by locality (near/far). I want to see multi-level follower counts (1st degree/2nd degree/3rd degree). I want to track the effect of tweets on ticket sales, or volunteer hours, or something else I care about. I want to keep a running tab of how many local actors, designers, carpenters, or directors were found through Twitter connections. (I got my first acting gig in Baltimore because of Twitter.) I want to quantify the strength of the relationship on a per-follower basis (how did they start following? how often do they get into a conversation? how often do they re-tweet?). I want, in a word, more data, with more granularity. But we’ll need some tools to gather that stuff. (Do they exist already? Anyone know?)

Final Thought

Dude, Theatre Project. I love you. I am literally wearing your t-shirt right now. But come on, guys. You didn’t even try. You just gave up.

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.