MetaLab

William Wilkinson: Every Friday at MetaLab we add a frame to...

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:32:40 -0700

William Wilkinson:

Every Friday at MetaLab we add a frame to this GIF.

Back in 2011, when we all fit in one room.

Just another day at the office.

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:35:22 -0700

Just another day at the office.

We won a Webby and submitted a new client app this week. You...

Fri, 03 May 2013 18:02:48 -0700

We won a Webby and submitted a new client app this week. You better believe we ate pizza and took dumb photos.

We are excited to announce that MetaLab has won a Webby...

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:42:36 -0700

We are excited to announce that MetaLab has won a Webby Award for TED Connect! While having the opportunity to work on this app was a reward in and of itself we’re thrilled and honoured to be recognized – especially when competing with the likes of the BBC, NYTimes, MLB, and 2012 Olympics. Those weeks of late nights were worth it, despite the grumbling from certain significant others. Love you babe.

When you’re a computer operator the biggest obstacle you face is...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:18:40 -0700

When you’re a computer operator the biggest obstacle you face is the sun.

The Future Of Flow Big things are happening with Flow. Read more...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:02:00 -0700

The Future Of Flow

Big things are happening with Flow. Read more about it on their blog.

About a year and a half ago, we first heard from the folks at...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:45:00 -0700

About a year and a half ago, we first heard from the folks at TED about building an app for their 2012 conference in Long Beach. They wanted an app that could connect their 3,000 attendees, but without the inherent social (i.e. real life) disconnection that goes hand-in-hand with continually looking at your phone. By the time the conference rolled around, we had an app that had been distilled into a lightweight compass for navigating TED. Where are people hanging out right now? How can I get in touch with that person that I met at that session earlier? What’s the schedule like for today? It was all within a couple of taps in TED Connect.

Though it was a hectic few months to get the app finished and out the door, hard work always pays off in unexpected ways. The latest dividend is that TED Connect has been nominated for a Webby Award in the category of Mobile App - Events. We’ve got some tough competition: among the other nominees are MLB, the BBC, and the New York Times.

Do us a favour and vote for us - it would really mean alot.

The Dream is Now

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 11:12:00 -0800

We’re proud to introduce The Dream is Now, one of our most important projects to date.

Through a close collaboration with partners Davis Guggenheim, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Emerson Collective, we established a beautiful and intuitive web presence to get the word out about the DREAM Act, and allow people to share their personal stories. The legislation has the goal of providing a path for young, undocumented American immigrants to earn their citizenship. You can read all about the DREAM Act here.

We approached The Dream Is Now as more than just a website: it’s a social movement, and a platform for people across the US to contribute, share, and spark change. Thousands of people have already shown their support, and deeply personal stories have been pouring in daily. All of these voices will culminate in a massive call to action, one that we believe will push the DREAM act through congress.

This is just the beginning of our collaboration with this amazing group of people. Submissions are beginning to pour in: the voices are being heard. We can’t wait to show you where this all leads.

Introducing: The New Pixel Union

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:51:41 -0800

Introducing: The New Pixel Union:

Pixel Union just launched their kick-ass new site. Check it out!

Pixel Union: Introducing Vanity for Tumblr If you’re after a...

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:49:00 -0700

Pixel Union:

Introducing Vanity for Tumblr

If you’re after a personal website— a “business card on the internet”— you’ve got two major services to consider: About.me and Flavors.me. One has an ongoing yearly fee and the other a somewhat ugly way of doing things. As of yesterday, there’s now a much more appealing third option: Vanity by Pixel Union.

Vanity consolidates your web presence and it does so beautifully and simply. It’s a tumblr theme, but it does much more than frame your blog. It pulls in massive amounts of content from other services around the web: Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, etc., and displays it all neatly and without distraction. You’ll be able to utilize the social connectivity of Tumblr and Twitter while retaining the professionalism of a website that isn’t just a blog or a feed.

Vanity has a simple, no-nonsense price tag: it’s $49. There are absolutely no monthly or yearly fees and, like all of our products, it’s backed by our premium support staff. Check out Vanity in Tumblr’s premium theme marketplace and let us know what you think.

Introducing a Brand New Ballpark

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:55:00 -0700

After eight months of hard work, we’re excited to share a brand new Ballpark. After many false starts over the past few years, we’ve knuckled down, built an amazing new team, and redesigned the app from the ground up. We’ve also added some great new features to the mix, including time tracking—our most requested feature—and a slick new iPhone app. You’re going to love it.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Ballpark gives you everything you need to run a small business in one app. You can send estimates, track your time, invoice your clients, and keep track of cash flow, all in one place. Can’t wait to hear everyone’s feedback. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Beating the Combat Mentality in 'Difficult Conversations'

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 14:03:00 -0700

All entrepreneurs struggle with truly difﬁcult conversations—the conversations that deal with hiring, ﬁring, raises and discipline. Since we want to stave off these showdowns for as long as possible, we’re rarely prepared. I’m usually a skeptic of the “business book mentality”—offering advice that’s strong on paper, but questionable in practice—but in the past couple months, I’ve found a lot of valuable advice in Stone, Patton & Heen’s, ‘Difﬁcult Conversations’.

In many ways, a difﬁcult conversation with a coworker or employee is like public speaking: you prepare and think youʼll will your way through it. But once you sit down, all bets are off. It isn’t only managers that struggle with this. No matter which side of the table youʼre on, preparing for these discussions usually requires asking some crucial questions about identity: what you do, why itʼs important, and why you deserve to get what you want. Because itʼs stressful, we can make assumptions about what other people think and allow it to inﬂuence how we view ourselves:

“Working to keep negative information out during a difﬁcult conversation is like trying to swim without getting wet. If we’re going to engage in difﬁcult conversations, or in life for that matter, we’re going to come up against information about ourselves that we ﬁnd unpleasant…the bigger the gap between what we hope is true and what we fear is true, the easier it is for us to lose our balance.”

Itʼs easy to convince yourself that someone has preconceived notions about you and the conversationʼs outcome and itʼs even easier to let their feedback hang over you once itʼs over. This creates the winner/loser or combat mentality and a zero-sum-game approach can make you forget that youʼre sitting across the table from another feeling, rational human (well, maybe not always rational).

So, rather than thinking about the dark side of who we or our counterparts might be, we should learn to be aware of where we’re the most vulnerable and realize that those vulnerabilities are much more complicated than we think—what we need is never black and white.

“The biggest factor that contributes to a vulnerable identity is the ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking: I’m either competent or incompetent, good or evil.”

This means that asking for a raise isn’t going to label you as competent or incompetent, just as potentially handing one out doesn’t make you a spendthrift or a cheapskate. Tough conversations are unavoidable, but not every one has to shake us to our core.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Thereʼs a lot more great advice to be harvested.

Introducing Design Capital

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:03:00 -0700

There’s a big difference between money and ideas. Money buys desks and pays salaries. Ideas buy you evangelical customers and set you apart from the crowd. We’ve built an amazing company around our ideas, and now we want to help others do the same. With our consulting work, we’ve helped hundreds of great companies build amazing products and services, but we’ve gotten big. Most small startups—the people we built our business around six years ago—can no longer afford us. Today, we’re changing that with Design Capital.

Design Capital is different from venture capital. It isn’t about money, it’s about execution and ideas. We see too many smart entrepreneurs obsessing over securing massive investments and primping their advisory board instead of executing. Tim O’Reilly puts it best: “You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car—you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road—but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations.”

We want to give entrepreneurs rocket fuel for great ideas, help them excute better, and build profitable real-world businesses. We won’t be writing big checks or pimping our companies as acquisition targets, but instead using our wealth of experience and amazing team to provide our companies with the resources to build simple, useful, and profitable web-based software and services. This could mean design work, strategy, marketing, or development. Whatever the weak spot is, we’ll fill in the gap.

We won’t be making a lot of investments, probably only a couple per year. We’re looking for people with great ideas that are in it for the long haul, not serial entrepreneurs looking for a quick flip. If you think we’d work well together, we’d love to talk.

Learn More

We have now expanded to a second floor. We’re hoping...

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 15:46:00 -0700

We have now expanded to a second floor. We’re hoping this’ll stop our parents from telling us to go back to school.

Last week we got to truly express ourselves creatively as a...

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 14:38:00 -0700

Last week we got to truly express ourselves creatively as a team.

Build The Rocket First

Sun, 06 May 2012 21:44:02 -0700

When we started building Flow, it was to scratch an itch. We were frustrated with having to use three different apps to manage our daily workflow, so we decided to build a solution ourselves.

It took three of us nine months to go from napkin to reality. We were close, efficient, and most importantly, cheap. We epitomized what it means to be bootstrapped and were damn proud of it.

We broke all the rules. We didn’t raise money, worked short days, and even did client work on the side. And yet just three weeks after launching, Flow was turning a profit. One year later, we’re bringing in over $500,000 in recurring revenue and growing like crazy.

Here’s how we took Flow from zero to half-a-million in under a year without a cent of VC money…

We scratched our own itch.

Starting from a personal need meant we had a leg-up from day one. We understood the market, where our product would fit into it, and what features were needed to stand out from the crowd. We didn’t need to pivot: we were tuned-in to what our users wanted because we built it for ourselves.

We grew organically.

Often when startups get a big injection of cash, their first move is to go on a hiring spree. They take on an army of “rockstar” developers, designers, and biz-dev types, and create nonsense titles like “Chief Catalyst.”

We kept our team down to three until right before launch so we could make quick decisions and keep communication straightforward. Once we had some predictable revenue, we brought a few more people onboard.

There are now 10 of us working on Flow full-time, and since we’ve hired organically, our bottom line is growing along with our headcount.

We slept in our beds, not under our desks.

At MetaLab, everyone is responsible for their own schedule. No bunk beds in the office or ramen-fueled overnight programming melees. We usually clock between four and six hours a day, and most of us don’t even get to the office before noon. We believe in working smart, not hard, and having lives outside the office. It might sound wimpy, but it’s working.

We self-funded.

Instead of distracting ourselves building pitch decks and flying all over the country, we allocated about 25% of the team’s time to client work and used that money to cover our development costs.

By the time we launched, the pricetag on Flow came in around $300,000. Not only is that way less than your average VC-fueled startup, but by doing it ourselves, we retained 100% of the equity. Plus, if we do choose to take on investors in the future, our predictable growth and recurring revenue will mean we fetch a much higher valuation. Would I have slept better for the past year with $5 million in the bank? Of course. Did not having it stop us from building our product? No way.

There’s nothing wrong with venture capital. Given the right circumstances, it’s rocket fuel that can take your company to the next level. But why not try building the rocket first?

It’s pretty rewarding to watch one of your designs evolve from a...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:56:00 -0800

It’s pretty rewarding to watch one of your designs evolve from a rough idea in the back of someone’s brain to a full-blown site or app. Like watching your kid grow up, develop a personality, and head off into the world, you can’t help but feel proud of what you’ve accomplished.

We’re lucky enough to experience that just about every day with our client work, but when the project is personal, the feeling is just that much sweeter. Which is why it’s with great pride that we’d like to introduce you to the new, improved, and beautifully re-imagined Flow site. By bringing in new features like user stories and a way more in-depth tour section—not to mention a pixel-perfect redesign led by Luke—we think it does a great job of communicating to people just how much Flow has to offer, both in terms of function and form.

Go check it out, have a look around, and feel free to give us your feedback anytime. We’d love to hear what you think.

Andrew Wilkinson on Founders Talk

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:58:00 -0800

If you’re looking for a little weekend listening, head on over to Founders Talk and check out Andrew’s recent interview with Adam Stacoviak. Andrew shares his thoughts on happiness, fatherly wisdom, Steve Jobs, building a multi-million dollar interface design company, leading a growing team to success and there’s even a teaser to something super-secret on the way.

When I emailed Andrew Wilkinson, MetaLab’s founder, for...

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:00:00 -0800

When I emailed Andrew Wilkinson, MetaLab’s founder, for the first time two years ago, it was on a whim: I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was impressed with the beautiful work MetaLab was producing, but I didn’t know much about the company, and they were 3,000 miles away from where I lived in Washington, DC. I didn’t even expect a reply, but as it turned out, a reply was the first of a few surprises: not long after, I joined the company.

Looking back, I’m amazed by how much we’ve done in that short time. I’m singing our own praises, sure, but it’s true: we built a collaboration tool that has changed the way we and a lot of other people work, we created a new digital goods business, and we continued to grow our consulting business. And we did it all with a small team. More than once recently I’ve found myself wondering: what (besides the great people) makes MetaLab such a productive company?

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that we’re not perfect. But I think that’s actually been key to our success: we don’t spend our time trying to be the perfect company. We focus on products instead: we want to make great things that our clients (and the world) can use and enjoy. That might sound facile or even obvious, but I think it’s the reason we’re so productive. It’s why we enjoy sane work hours and autonomy, and it’s what sets us apart.

As you might imagine, we’re constantly examining and improving both what we make and how we make it. As part of that process, we’ve decided to share some of our behind-the-scenes thinking here at MetaLab in a series we’re calling “How We Work.” Over the course of the next few months, we’ll talk about topics like some of the challenges we face as a quickly growing company, the philosophies that guide what we do, and how we manage everything from coding practices to design decisions. With several people contributing from different parts of the company, there should be a pretty diverse range of perspectives and insights, so make sure to stay tuned!

Happy Holidays from MetaLab Taken by Antonio at our wonderful...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:32:44 -0800

Happy Holidays from MetaLab

Taken by Antonio at our wonderful office party last weekend. This isn’t even everyone: we’re missing Chris, Geordie, Jake, Jason, Jeff, and Oliver. We’ve posted the rest of the photos on our Facebook page.