micah rich

Loyalty, My Dear Customer

2011-03-15T00:00:00-07:00

A lot of companies lately have been sending me emails, saying they’re discontinuing the free version they once offered me, and that I need to either stop using their service or upgrade and start paying.

I know a handful of people that promote exactly this: if you have a free plan on your freemium app, or are offering a beta version for free, transition everyone into a paid plan. If they don’t want to pay, you didn’t mean that much to them in the first place, and then you’re not wasting time and energy on unpaying customers.

It seems okay from a wide angle. As a service owner, I definitely understand the sentiment. A Good Portfolio has 6x more free users than paid users, and moneybox.me doesn’t even have paid users yet. Are those statistics good? Hell no. But will forcing users to either pay or leave make them really want to be customers?

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two. Aesop’s Fables, The North Wind and the Sun

Love & Whirled Peas

Business isn’t about money; business is the art of relationships. If you tricked someone into going on a date with you – “It’s a whole group of us going, you should join us!” – they’re not going to want to do it again. Let alone agree to start going out with you every week.

You want your customers to want to be customers. If they don’t want to be, it’s your job to convince them. People who are good at relationships, whether friendly, professional, or intimate, are the people who can figure out what each individual needs, and give it to them. We have such an immense power with the shit we work with in that we can individualize our software, so that we can target whole groups of similar people while still making them each feel like they’re the only one in the room.

But Let Us Talk Benefits

You may be marginally convinced by the argument so far, but believe it or not, having that free tier can honestly help. Every account is a person, paying or not, who was interested enough to make a connection with you. You have their ear, and that’s half the hard part about convincing someone to buy. Find the right nothing to whisper in her ear, and you have a customer you wouldn’t have had turning them away. And that may well count for your other ventures, too. Assuming you’re using the same Don Draper mentality and not pitching music boxes to people signed up with your motorcycle service, you could well cross-sell them on an entirely different venture.

These people, too, can offer valuable feedback about how you’re doing, and in my experience will do so excitedly when asked. They know they’re getting something for free and will often jump aboard an opportunity to repay you with something other than money. Trust me, beta testing and feedback are valuable if you want to learn what would turn someone from a free customer to a paying one.

And lastly, if you treat them right, like they’re paying customers – as in, treat them as if they’re the only person in the room – you will be rewarded with virality. People will tell friends, blog, and tweet about how quick your customer service is, even for free users, or how delighted they were when you surprised them with the feature hey needed. That’s not advertising, that’s better. People actually listen to recommendations.

In The End

Providing value for people is what we pay for. But we want to be in control of our own decisions. Don’t offer free and take it away. Treat me like my opinion of your business is more important than any other part, and I will reward you with loyalty, recommendations, and an attempt at my wallet.

Playing With New Technology

2011-03-04T00:00:00-08:00

In the past few weeks, I’ve been working here and there on a handful of cool projects. It’s been nice working on whichever I like, at whatever time of day I like, but honestly I think the best part is that I get to learn new stuff, and make shit from scratch.

micahrich.com

Originally, this blog was meant purely as research. It was my job to find out what would be a good blogging platform for a recent client, so I started playing around with Jekyll – I am surprisingly impressed. I love the control of having no database, just static files, and I love the ease of writing in plain text. Ironically, I’m writing this right now on an iOS app called PlainText, which I highly recommend – it syncs using Dropbox, so I symlinked my Jekyll posts folder (did you know Dropbox allows you to sync folders outside the Dropbox folder? I didn’t), so I can write posts on any of my devices, including the phone, from anywhere, and publish once I get back to my computer. It’s almost too easy to git commit and push to Github Pages.

I took a lot of time really paying attention to spacing and the baseline grid, which hopefully is apparent. It’s something I’ve been meaning to get good at and never took the time, and it was worth learning.

The League

Most recently Caroline and I have been re-imagining The League. It’s a long time coming. People have been asking far too frequently about Google Fonts and API’s and Tumblr submissions. It’s too complicated in it’s current state – not to mention the image upload on the backend has been broken for almost a year – and we wanted to not only refresh the look, but change the backend, and rethink some of our policies.

I decide to really push for using Git. It has what we need – version control (even if it’s not perfect with binary files), easy distribution, and Github. Github, I’m hoping, will give us a stab at a real community. People will be able to fork copies of our fonts, modify them and request for us to pull those changes back in. They can make their own fonts from copying ours. They can send us issues, which will be organized in one place, where then anyone could help fix and send us changes. And we’ll be able to display a recent history to show everyone the changes we’ve made.

I’m excited, too, to try to convince the font-making world to use git. I’m looking forward to adding some manuals to our site, and I’m considering working on a tool to help walk newcomers through the process. That’ll be fun to learn.

The other fun I’ve been having, though, is re-learning Sinatra. It’s a perfect candidate for this; our front facing page isn’t more than 3 or 4 urls, and we have some cool ideas for other features we’re gonna relaunch with, so I get to play with making modular apps that all run in one Rack instance. And just today I started implementing a JSON API to access font information: font names, tags, descriptions, authors, etc. It’s kind of empowering crafting information like that.

I think similarly to Jekyll, I’m enjoying the minimalism of the framework.

moneybox.me

Last but not least comes moneybox.me. This poor guy has been a bit neglected lately, and I blame Etsy. Most everything has been in place for a while – upgrades with credit cards, automatic sales imports, and even some really awesome canvas graphs to show your money throughout the year. A few days ago I added yearly excel spreadsheets to help with peoples taxes.

But I held off on launching because there was a silly little bug in Etsy’s API. Specifically just that the listing and renewal fees came back in reverse order, so I can’t efficiently cycle through them to auto-add them. I’m nearly positive all they have to do to fix it is tell the listings to return in reverse order, but they said they’d have it updated pretty much a month ago, so I held off on launching. They were like, “This week!” and since then, with many ignored emails sent out, I’ve come to find they’re really not sure when they’ll get to it. I can understand that, but I wish they’d told me.

I’ve rewritten some of the upgrade copy to say that feature is coming soon instead of already a feature. I should launch it soon, now that that’s that.

Back to work!

Though I’d love to have another heading here for Lettercase, the truth is I haven’t touched it since living in Seattle. At this point, I’m probably 80% finished with a gem to read metadata from font files, and eventually I’ll get back to it and start working again.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying what I’m doing, and I have plenty to work on.

A New Beginning

2011-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

I’m a little late to say it, but it’s been on my mind since January: it’s a new year.

Last year was crazy, for sure. A Good Company did almost exactly twice as well as it’s first year, and we actually got a lot done. We grew the League even bigger, made some well-deserved updates to A Good Portfolio, re-constructed our blog, and had a lot of interesting clients. Despite my political affiliations, I have to say one I’m most proud of was that we were hired to hand-make a social network for the Republican Party of California. And on the other side of the pond, we won a major prize in a contest for what I think is a very democratic re-imagining of the IRS’ website. We got to work on big and small projects – some regular, some hectic, and some that were way cooler than I expected. It’s all a learning experience, and I’m grateful, but it seriously wore me out.

I’m looking forward to taking a breather the next few months; I’ve moved to Los Angeles semi-temporarily with my wonderful girlfriend (who’s going to try to be an actress), and Caroline & I have decided to take time off to do whatever-the-&$@! we want for a while. I’ve grown a strange fondness for doing client work, but my heart is aching for a slower pace.

In the beginning of January, as a birthday present for my sister, I made a little web app for etsy sellers to keep track of sales & expenses. It grew unexpectedly after I launched it, and I’m hoping I have an opportunity to not only work on a project all my own, but maybe make part of a salary doing it. I’m hoping to get to work (finally) on Lettercase, which the Internet has been hounding me about for a long time now. I’d like to make some improvements to The League. I’m hoping to play around with some new ideas for A Good Portfolio – experiment with business strategies and some of the marketing & psychology techniques I’ve been reading about. And, while a bit disenchanted by my previous personal and thoughtless Tumblr blogs, I find myself inspired by blogs like Aza’s, or Spencer’s, and am looking forward to spending an evening every few weeks with a glass of wine and a keyboard – writing only few, but well thought out articles about my success & failures, experiences with design & programming, and theories of business and brainwaves. That sounds eloquent, I like that.

My hope is that all that will make enough to live on for a while, and will be exactly enough work to make me love what I’m doing. I intend to take life at my own pace. I aim to enjoy myself more, stress out way less, and work only on exactly what I want to. And just kind of see what the future brings.

It’s a new beginning.