May 25, 2010

In which we emerge from our coding cave

The light! The light! It burns my eyes!

What? Yes! Of course we’re still here!

Okay, fair enough. We disappeared there for a couple of months. Apologies for the disconnection there. You deserve some updates.

Last time, on As the Chroma Turns…

You may recall we’ve been barreling along, tumbling forward on Storyboards, patron tagging, the box office point-of-sale interface, basic discounts, and so on.

Then, two months ago, Jesse, Sean, and I got on a plane (well, strictly speaking Jesse took the train) and met up in glorious Portland Oregon. Where we squeaked about one very awesome meeting with Trisha Mead of Portland Center Stage, and then we fell silent.

So what happened? What the hell is going on?

Well, we piled into that room at Ace Hotel, threw some blues on the record player, and…

…we talked.

And we started with the question: “When can we ship?”

Because, see, we’re all fervently in the “ship early and iterate” camp. Which means we’re getting to that point where we’re feeling anxious about getting something useful out into the world. We think we’ve got some cool stuff here, but it’s all just speculation until someone can actually use it and tell us if it actually, you know, helps.

So we talked about what we’ve built so far. What are the last must-have features before we can start letting people give this a shot? What is the minimum amount of stuff we’d need before Chroma is useful for somebody?

And there we are, talking through everything we’ve made so far, and everything we have left to make, when all of a sudden Jesse says:

Hey guys, this is probably really stupid…. but… do we have to process credit cards in the first version?

And I’ll admit, I kinda looked at him blankly and didn’t say anything, because my initial response was, well, DUH we have to process credit cards. That’s kind of the whole point of Chroma: to help you do online sales.

But in my defense I didn’t say that, and we sat there in silence for a second, and then in the spirit of brainstorming… we started to talk it through.

Fundamentals

Here’s the thing: the whole point of Chroma actually isn’t to help you do online sales. Online sales are going to be critical. Not only for how you sell tickets but for how we sustain Chroma as a company. But the essence of Chroma is not, fundamentally, to process an online sale. The essence of Chroma is to help you get butts in the seats.

What If

What if the first release of Chroma was so simple it didn’t even process online credit cards? Well, it might only be useful to a very small slice of people selling tickets, but that might be okay. (Start small, right?)

What if the first release of Chroma only helped you…what? It still needs to help sell tickets. But how? Well, how about cash sales?

What if Chroma starts by just helping little venues track and process cash sales?

What if only the box office folks will interact with Chroma directly? If we’re not doing credit card processing, I guess there’s no reason for a patron to visit the Chroma website, or interact with a Chroma widget, or anything like that….and that’s a lot of work we don’t have to do for the initial launch.

Okay, so… We’ve already built the infrastructure to let you establish venues, and create events, and schedule shows, and allocate blocks of tickets, and select tickets from a box office point-of-sale interface….

So what would it mean to use all this infrastructure for the basic management of cash sales?

Well, it might mean we almost have something ready to ship.

“Half, not half-assed.” — 37signals

As we sat there in our hotel room, immersed in thoughts of a simplified first launch, I made the following proposal: if we start with just cash sales, we’ve got to do them very well.

Yes, we’ll have this lovely box office in your laptop to track sales and provide reports and stats. But now the tickets are tied to that laptop, and that’s not very flexible. I want to be able to sell some tickets at the bar tonight when I’m talking up the show to my friend and her buddies. I should be able to do that easily.

At which moment all of us looked down at our iPhones.

I’ll tell ya, when you’ve done a lot of programming on OS X, this native iPhone app stuff is a breeze.

Are we crazy?

Okay, so here’s the deal. We think we’re going to take a shot at rolling out this first cash-only version of Chroma soon. There’s still some stuff to do. We’re still working on the graphic design elements with our designer Eric Kass. There are still some missing details, like calculating taxes, figuring out what sales reports we need to have, locking down ticket sales at a certain hour after the show is over, that sort of thing. Sean and I still need to finish up the Chroma iPhone app.

But maybe this is a way for us to get concrete very quickly. Maybe this is a way for us to become useful to a (probably very small) number of people sooner rather than later.

We won’t make it a big, huge, grand announcement. We’ll just open it up. See if anyone finds it useful, and then get back to work on making it better.

I mean, it’s not going to hurt anyone if it’s NOT useful. All of this stuff will be free. The iPhone app will be free, the cash sales processing and reporting will be free, all of it. And it will stay free. So if we roll this out and it doesn’t do anyone any good, hey, no problem! You can at least play with it, and it’ll be out in the world, and it’ll gives us something to build on for the next iteration, and the next, and the next, until we’ve got the credit card processing, and the seating charts, and all the other stuff we want to put in it, but can only do one step at a time.

BUT. If you, or someone you know, actually does just care about cash sales? We need to talk. You need to be part of our beta group and tell us how to make this thing work for you. Seriously. Leave a comment below or email me: chris@figure53.com

In the meantime

We’re going to get back to updating our sketchbook to show you how our iPhone app works. And how it will also serve to let you take tickets at the door. And how we think we’re going to integrate it with Twilio to optionally let Chroma send an SMS reminder to your patron that they bought a ticket for your show that starts in two hours. And, well, maybe it would even be a nice companion to Square?

Enough with the update

That’s my spiel. I think that gets you pretty well filled in on what we’ve been thinking and doing the last two months.

Now, what I’m dying to know is if you have any thoughts about this.

Stupid?

Cool?

Other ideas about what we should be doing instead?

Gimme the shiggy yo! I really want to know what you think about all this.

Posted by Chris