Contrast continues to grow and thrive. We’re lucky to be working on some of the most exciting web apps being built anywhere, with some very high-profile clients. Our product Exceptional continues to expand—we’ve got a great new release in development and an exciting marketing and advertising campaign in the pipeline. And alongside Exceptional, we might have something else brewing, which we really shouldn’t talk about yet. For now, we’re looking for another experienced, senior developer to join us at our Dublin office.

There are a few hard requirements that will need to be met, but in general we need a talented, hard-working, sensible, nice person to help us out. We’re offering a decent salary and stock options, plus a fair share in our profits. And we’d even consider relocating the right person to Dublin.

Hard requirements

• Computer science (or equivalent) degree.
• Professional experience.
• Programming experience with Ruby and Rails.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Ability to manage projects and manage yourself.
• A hunger to learn and get stuck-in.

You’ll like Contrast if…

• You enjoy programming in Ruby, Rails, Javascript and making the most of web technology.
• You enjoy working with a talented team where everyone understands the web, from protocols through to pixels. There are no pointy haired bosses here.
• You like taking responsibility and you care about quality.
• You’re interested in the business of web software.

Get in touch

If you’d like to find out more, please drop me a quick e-mail: eoghan AT contrast DOT ie. All enquiries will be treated as private and confidential.

Six years ago, two separate studies, one by McKinsey & Company, another by A.T. Kearney, demonstrated how increasing price by 1 percent had the biggest effect on net income compared with similar improvements in reducing fixed and variable costs, and increasing sales volume.

This suggested that the products and services of the businesses surveyed were underpriced and further showed how effective pricing is as a strategic activity compared with other activities like cost cutting. Today, I can’t help but be reminded of these results every time I flick through the top grossing iPhone apps in the app store.

Why are most of the apps in this list not like the majority of those out there, free or priced at less than €1 / $1? Well free apps are never going to make any money. That’s obvious, right? You wouldn’t think so with some people. But if cheap pricing was a good money-making strategy, the top-grossing list should be full of cheap apps. But it’s not, because it’s not. iPhone apps are underpriced and businesses smart enough to purposefully price them are laughing all the way to the bank.

This is applicable beyond the app store: most web apps are underpriced too. Think about the effect a 1 percent increase in price would have on your sales, then think about the effect it would have on your bottom line! Would Basecamp, for example, really see a significant drop in sign-ups if they increased their prices by 1 percent?

I think not. But would Jason and David quickly realise they need to upgrade their company cars?. I think so!

Ultimately, a business is defined by that for which it collects revenue, and it collects revenue only for that which it decides to charge.

In “The Experience Economy”, Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore describe simply the place of price. They remind us that deciding what to charge for and how much to charge for it is part of business strategy, not simply a function of a cost.

You’ve probably come across a book, blog post or talk where you’re told, for example, that movie theatres don’t sell tickets, they sell an escape from reality! Or self-help books don’t sell advice, they sell a better life! On the surface, this sounds like trite bullshit. But it’s actually more accurate than you might realise.

A person’s willingness to pay for something is directly related to the value they see in it. And like it or not, that value may be as fluffy as “a better life”. Or it may be something quite straight-forward that you just don’t realise. Either way, if you don’t charge correctly for that value, you lose.

Very often, business people in the web industry charge for a service too far down the value chain. For example, the majority of agencies for a given project will charge for, say, 30 days of their senior designer. This might cost €30,000. But their customer might really be buying a whole new business. They may have a large amount of capital ready to put to work to break into a very competitive but lucrative market, where the user experience of the app will make or break the business. They may value a killer, ground-breaking user experience at €50,000. At the very least! So the agency charging for a much-lower-value service—that of a bunch of days of a designer and whatever he comes up with in that time—has just left €20,000 on the table.

This works the other way too: frequently freelancers and young agencies in the web industry lose business because they over-value their work. Be honest, how often have you cursed the other guys that won the job on price? The cowboys. The jokers that couldn’t mark up a holding page. Idiots. Their own site doesn’t even validate! But all that happened was that you tried to sell your expertise to someone that just didn’t value it. And can you blame them? Maybe their site needs to describe their business and provide contact details, but doesn’t need the latest, greatest HTML 5 tricks? They don’t give a damn about “perfect” markup and neither do their customers. So why would they pay for it? Would you pay €20 for a pint if the barman told you he’s serving it in his favourite glass, made by a famous, naked, dancing, glass-blowing tribe from Brazil?

So think about what you really are and what you should be charging for—make sure to purposefully price your service.

Freelancers: nine times out of ten, your clients value only your availability, flexibility and malleability, not your sweet Javascript skills. Price downwards accordingly.

Established agencies: nine times out of ten, your clients value your professionalism, reliability and prestige, not just the hours you bill. Price upwards accordingly.

“Pricing on Purpose” by Ron Baker is by far the best business book I have ever come across. It is my business bible. It will kick the living shit out of even a regular reader—it’s a quite sober, 374 page tome packed with quotes and references from everything from the writings of Thomos Edison to the Bible. But in my humble opinion, unless you’ve proven the business accumen of your gut—and by proven, I mean you’re Steve Jobs, Richard Brandson, Henry Ford—you can’t but benefit enormously by studying this book.

The start-up scene is all about dancing. Doing isn’t sexy. You can’t do at a drinks reception. You can only dance.

Dancing is yapping about what you’re going to do. It’s giving you and your business partner sweet titles. It’s printing impressive business cards. It’s an incorporation party. ^[1] It’s celebrating the closure of an investment round. It’s “connecting”! It’s staffing-up. It’s TechCrunch. It’s a pretty conservative yet exciting set of financial projections! It’s an awesome holding page for an awesome stealth product. It’s a stellar advisory board. It’s entering start-up competitions! It’s a press release sent to any prick that’ll put your name in print.

Doing is coding. It’s selling. It’s revenue. It’s loss and profit. It’s failure and success. It’s stress. It’s joy. It’s responsibility. It’s working late and hard. It’s learning something about your strengths and weaknesses and those of your business. It’s progress. It’s the only thing worth starting a start-up for.

If you really must dance, make sure you do first.

^[1] I was actually at one of these. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: they held a party to mark the registration of their company. I enjoyed the wine.

Every year since 2007, I’ve created a compilation of my favourite tracks first heard that year and shared them with friends. Last year I made a mini-site built around an invisible, javascript-controlled Flash player, and for this years collection I decided to experiment with HTML 5’s new audio features.

You can find my best of 2009 collection here. Twelve of the tracks include audio commentary (click the “Why?” button in the top left). I learned quite a lot doing this and I want to share that.

Supported browsers

The site works in Firefox, Chrome and desktop Safari; these are the major browsers that support HTML 5 audio at the moment. Due to their support of CSS animations and the HTML 5 range input, I recommend using Chrome or Safari to check it out; they get the added bonus of a master volume control in the bottom-right corner of the page.

The site navigation works fine in mobile Safari but music doesn’t play. Unfortunately mobile Safari doesn’t support HTML 5 audio, which is a shame. I’m hoping this will be something they’ll fix in time for the iPad launch.

That’s a small fraction of the market

It doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, which would be a problem for a lot of sites, but although I wouldn’t suggest going solely with HTML 5 audio for the mass-market at this time, it’s definitely worth investigating. There’s a good chance that HTML 5 audio represents a part of the future direction of the web, and if that’s the case it’s likely IE will pick up these feature eventually.

The site as it stands doesn’t support a Flash fallback for two reasons. The first is that adding the Flash fallback would have made the code messier. The second, more important reason is that it would have been absolutely no fun.

Pain points and gotchas

As usual, what I thought would be difficult was not as hard as what should have been easy. There’s plenty of gotchas when it comes to HTML 5 audio.

• Rapidly queueing new audio in your browser can cause it to crash. Hitting the play button, and then advancing rapidly to subsequent tracks, can take out your browser.
• To support Firefox, Safari and Chrome, I was required to encode and upload two sets of audio files: one in MP3, the other in OGG format. Though I appreciate the position the Firefox team is taking regarding the patent issue, uploading 200 megs of files on a home DSL connection is a right pain in the bum.
• By default Amazon S3 serves .ogg files as “application/x-ogg”, which Firefox refuses to play. Getting S3-served .ogg files to work in Firefox required going in and changing each individual content-type to “audio/ogg”.
• Creating new Audio objects isn’t a great idea, at least in this case. Twenty of them will kill Chrome so bad you need to quit the browser. The best way to add audio dynamically in HTML 5 seems to be adding <audio> elements to the DOM.
• Some browsers seem to throw the “ended” event too early. Overall, there appears to be a bit of a lag between what the browser thinks is going on and what is actually happening. Firefox appears to be the worst offender: songs continue playing for a few seconds after you close the tab.
• Google Chrome, at least the version on my Mac, doesn’t support variable bit-rate MP3s very well. Chrome will happily report VBR MP3s as finished seeking and tell you that the playhead is at the start of the file, but when you attempt to play it you’ll hear what appears to be the sound going in reverse.
• The “canplaythrough” event seems to be thrown a bit optimistically.

Overall impressions

HTML 5 audio support is nice but unfortunately it’s still pretty buggy across browsers that support it. It’s probably fine for smaller audio needs (like sound effects in a web app) but multitrack playback with multi-megabyte files seems a bit flaky at present.

It’s also a shame you can’t do a lot with the audio itself, other than change the volume. You can do some pretty cool stuff with HTML 5 video but unfortunately things like audio filters, graphic equalisation or any sound visualisation are impossible as far as I can tell in the official versions of these browsers (unofficial builds are a different matter).

Typefaces

“By” is set in Bickham Script Pro, but everything else is in Alte Haas Grotesk, a font I’ve been dying for an excuse to use. It’s free, too.

What does a napkin tell you about a restaurant? Quite a lot. A restauranteur friend told me about a survey that showed a massive correlation between category of napkin and customer satisfaction. That’s not to say you can hand out deliciously thick napkins in a shitty burger joint and immediately win customers over. It’s a cause and effect thing. The napkin represents a degree of care, preparation and devotion that goes above and beyond asking if they want fries with that.

Nathan Bowers recently wrote that quality is fractal. That is to say quality offerings display self similarity. Any small part of it, is indicative of its whole. This lets you make a good judgement about an entire product by looking at a very small portion of it. This is as true in software as it is in restaurants.

Gordon Ramsey, in his auto-biography, defended his obsessive perfectionist nature, arguing he has to obsess. You don’t win Michelin stars without it.

“It doesn’t matter how amazing the steak is, if it’s served on a cold plate it’s crap. If it’s served with a dull knife it’s crap. If the gravy isn’t piping hot, it’s crap. If you’re eating it on an uncomfortable chair, it’s crap. If it’s served by an ugly waiter who just came in from a smoke break, it’s crap. Because I care about the steak, I have to care about everything around it. “

The parallels in software are obvious. If you see a few lines of atrocious code, you can make a judgement about the programmer. By judging the programmer, you can judge his boss, and by judging his boss you can judge the company. That’s the nature of fractals. The desire for quality trickles down to everything from making sure that the homepage photo isn’t blurry all the way through to making sure that font in Christmas card is correct. As Aristotle said, excellence is not an act but a habit.

We judge humans this way so it shouldn’t be surprising that we judge software the same. That’s what is so clear about Apple. They are what they repeatedly do. They design everything, even the bits that allegedly “don’t matter”.

You’re in a department store, looking to buy a shirt. “Excuse me,” you say to a staff member, “where can I find the menswear department?” “Are you looking for casual wear or formal?” they ask. Immediately, they shut their eyes and cover their ears, leaving you open mouthed and offended.

This interaction is weird, right? And a really stupid way to treat customers? But it’s exactly what we do on the web when we send e-mail from a no-reply address.

Here’s a recent communication from Amazon AWS—as instructed on their site, I mailed them about a specific billing issue.

Hello,

I checked our records, but I can’t find an AWS account associated with the e-mail address you wrote from. I’m not able to answer questions about your account unless you write to us from the e-mail address associated with your account. Please write back from that other e-mail address. You can go to the URL below to contact us again…

[A load of links to and bumf about forums, feedback forms, etc.]

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.

Best regards,
Scott R.

Given the crappy copy and links in the message, after a quick scan, it’s not difficult to miss a key line or two and be left thinking you can hit reply and continue the conversation. After all, they originally asked me to e-mail them, they just replied to my mail, they ask me to “write back”, speak in the first person and they sign with a staff member’s name. I typed “Hi Scott, there must be some confusion. There is no another e-mail add—” before I noticed the “cannot accept incoming e-mail” line.

Yes, I’m an idiot—I should have read the mail properly. Yes, this is an especially bad example—Amazon have really messed this one up. And yes, I fully understand that there are operational reasons why you don’t want tonnes of unorganised, unfiltered mail going to one address.

But, I’m not the only idiot in the world. And Amazon are not the only company that talk at their customers like this—some Contrast apps make this mistake. And most importantly, operational challenges are not your customer’s concern! If you ask for payment in return for a product or service that sometimes doesn’t meet expectations, you better not ask a pissed-off customer to jump through hoops to let them give you a second chance!

But this isn’t just about customer service situations. E-mail is a two-way medium. If you break that key facet of the medium any time you send any message, you break e-mail.

So say no to no-reply e-mails in your app. Let your customers talk to you! Even if it’s hard work trying to answer everyone, it’s a damn sight better than covering your ears.

Pick an entrepreneur from your local tech scene. How can you tell if he’s a “good” entrepreneur? The kind of guy you might ask for advice with your own business? Well if he’s been successful he must be good, right? Not necessarily.

All that matters is results?

Humans have always held a high regard for results. It mattered little that Johnny Caveman made a valiant effort to defend his family from a pack of wolves if he failed. The prevailing rational is that someone who has produced desirable results is someone worth following. “Self-help author and motivational speaker” Tony Robbins:

If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.

You can just imagine this line on a PowerPoint slide at some seedy “make millions in 7 days” seminar. But this logic is actually quite pervasive. The salesman with the best annual figures gets the promotion or the movie producer that drops a box office hit gets a bigger budget for his next film.

The Law of Small Numbers

But our intuition about the relationship between the results of someone’s efforts and their actual abilities is just plain wrong. In fact, the misguided thinking whereby we make assumptions about an underlying probability—in this case, the probability that an entrepreneur has the abilities to be successful—based on a small sample of results has a name; psychologists Kahneman and Tversky called it The Law of Small Numbers, a sarcastic reference to The Law of Large Numbers.

In The Drunkards Walk, Leonard Mlodinow illustrates the problem with this example: Take a CEO who, because of his abilities, has a 60 percent chance of success in a given year. Over the course of five years, how many will be a success? Three? Mathematics from Jacob Bernoulli shows that this is unlikely. “[The] chances that in a given five-year period a particular CEO’s performance will reflect that underlying rate are only 1 in 3,” says Mlodinow. Looking at the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, this means that “over the past five years about 333 of the CEOs would have exhibited performance that did not reflect their true ability.” In fact, by sheer luck, “about 1 in 10 of the CEOs [will have] five winning or losing years in a row.” Funny, huh?

Good or lucky entrepreneurs?

For entrepreneurs, you can replace “five winning or losing years” with “five winning or losing startups” or “five winning or losing products” and the odds still hold. So what does this teach us? That it’s all just a game of chance? Definitely not. A “good entrepreneur” will make their own luck. As Calvin Coolidge said:

Those who trust to chance must abide by the results of chance.

Then what can we actually learn? Well back to my original question, when taking business advice, be careful how you choose who to listen to. And about the much lauded, serially successful entrepreneurs: investors of money (like venture capitalists) and time (like startup employees) should understand how easily results can fall against the odds—there’s no such thing as a “sure thing”.

But to oppose The Law of Small Numbers takes balls; questioning the abilities of a successful entrepreneur is almost heretical and won’t make you many friends! As Ken Blanchard says:

People who produce good results feel good about themselves.

Merits before results

So if you’d like to sidestep these pitfalls of standing up for mathematics and rational thinking, please at the very least give the losers the benefit of the doubt! Often failing plays a natural and healthy part in the learning process, but it can also come about through chance alone—many times in a row! Judging an entrepreneur, or anyone for that matter, is harder than looking at a small sample of results and drawing neat conclusions. It takes instinct and tacit knowledge. It’s not for everyone. It really requires true character to be able to analysis a person’s action and logic, and to judge them on their merits rather than take the shortcut, skipping straight to the bottom line. As Bernouilli advised:

One should not appraise human action on the basis of its results.

The irony of 99designs is that its customers are actually paying to use their own design intuition! All they benefit from is the contestant’s Illustrator (or Photoshop or MS Paint) abilities.

If they actually valued design, they would pay a designer to deliver to them a solution he believed was correct, rather than choose from an assortment of shapes and colours based on their own ideas about design.

The result, of course, of a typical 99designs competition is complete crap. Not designed, but rather one of the pieces of shit thrown at a wall that stuck. And that’s all the economics of the competition can support; what real designer can actually take time to create an effective design solution when the potential prize is less than a couple hour’s work on a far-less-risky contracting job?

But I don’t advise people against using 99designs as long as they know what they’re buying. They’re buying their pick off the rails in T.K. Maxx. They’re buying their choice of sandwich filling in Centra. They’re buying LASIK@home. They’re buying a half-hour off a cheap hooker. They are not buying design.