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We Pay Our Rent By Buying Coffee
Wired is running a story on Delicious Monster, a startup Mac software company whose main office is a Seattle coffee shop. Hope they're drinking decaf.
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> it generated $250,000 worth of sales in its first month
Wow, I must have contributed to some of that.
Delicious Library is cool, if a little bit slow. But it's still new, so that's not surprising. The attention to detail is really amazing. When you add artwork to a catalog item, the application adds a screen to the item image to make it look like it's in a DVD case, or the cover of a book. If you say it's a hard cover or soft cover book, the size of the book changes, too. I wrote a nearly pointless review of it for Gadget Madness.
Scanning in your books, DVDs, games, or whatever into the system is actually a kind of fun. It's one of those Mac OS X applications that when you show someone who doesn't have a Mac, they get that comically jealous look on their face.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Why-ever not? A start up has to start up somewhere, and if the company does not require a fixed premises as such, these guys are free to meet in the park, in the high street, in coffee shops. It's really just an extreme example of how decentralised business is becoming these days.
Quoth the server, "404."
While I like this product (I especially think the barcode thing is spiffy), I don't really like some of their ideas for the next version. They state that you will be able to see other peoples profile with the same taste... Well I think marketeers are going to have a field trip with this... a fully free accessible database of online contacts already sorted by the profile you make... all that for only 40 bucks. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea in principle, but it's just too easy to be taken advantage of.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Especially in the financial centres of big cities it seems that Starbucks et al are not really a "coffee company", but are in fact selling very on-demand temporary office space ("Regus Lite") with free coffee as an incentive and informal time-billing system.
Anyone who's worked for a large investment bank and has tried to book an office for a quick meeting will know this is true (especially if the meeting rooms operate as a "profit centre" and so you have be recharged the costs). It's amazing how much you can find out about the state of the IT dept of a large company just by hanging out in the nearest coffee shop - are they hiring or firing, are the staff excited or bitching, what new projects are they working on.... industrial espionage was rarely so cheap.
Similarly, airports are now in the business of selling multi-day car parking and short term entertainment for an hour or two.
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
In my town, I am Starbucks direct competitor (as in the majority of the Sunday business they do is in the time period from when they open to fifteen minutes before I do), and while other parts of the country may have coffee priced excessively high (especially in light of low prices on the C market for the past couple years), from my perspective Starbucks is charging an awful lot for a product that is nowhere near as good as it could be (my average cost of green coffee is about three times what Starbucks says they pay, though in many cases they have more lossage from over-roasting). For a concrete example, a small chai at Starbucks costs more than a large chai at my establishment. Unadulterated coffee is likewise more expensive. Starbucks competitors charging Starbucks prices (or higher) are probably doing so only because they can.
The Apple developer site has an interesting article on how Delicious Library's use of the Cocoa bindings framework.
It's funny, because most people's reaction to our software when they first see it is, "Wow, how useful! Here's my credit card," but for some it is, "Wow, how useless... here's my credit card."
I don't actually want to argue with your point, although it's worth mentioning, as other people have, that you can print out your list of stuff and tuck it in a safety deposit box, so if you lose your collection to fire or theft it'll all be replaced exactly. Or you can print your collection and take the list to the video/book store and make sure you don't duplicate items. Or you can track your loans and make sure you don't lose items.
Or you can use the smart recommendations and find items you never knew you'd like, and buy with more confidence that you aren't wasting money. Or you can sell items you're no longer using in just a couple clicks, and make some extra money AND tidy up your life.
All of these things potentially make and/or save you money.
But, you may not want to do any of that. What I'd like to point out is, our real goal in writing software is to make you smile.
Did we succeed at that? Because, for instance, "The Incredibles" probably didn't make you better, stronger, faster (etc), but I'm betting you don't regret the $9 you spent on it. And if every company's goal was to make products that made people smile, I don't think the world would be a bad place at all.
Our whole company is predicated on doing things differently, so when we're meeting with clients it's sort of our badge of courage to tell them to meet us at the Zoka.
I don't think it's ruffled anyone's feathers. We've done press interviews and met insurance guys and interviewed employees. Everyone seems to feel very at home. I guess it's not much different from meeting a client when you're on the road.
[The hilarious part is that our Zoka happens to be RIGHT next door to The Omni Group. I mean, literally the next building over. So, for people I've done business with before, it's like, "Uh, remember where I used to be? Well..."]