metalab

It's not a VC company. We actually usually buy majority stakes, this was a bit of an exception - www.tinycapital.com

Ack! Don't think there's any way to edit, either.

Hey Steve,

We view this as a business within a business. Nobody from the Flow development team is being distracted with Concierge, it's just another part of the MetaLab umbrella.

Also, I find it weird that you think us "focusing on monetization" is a bad thing. What's wrong with having a sustainable business?

-Andrew

The video cost us way, way less than that.

We managed to get some nice launch press and a lot of organic word of mouth/referrals.

Of course, definitely a lot of money. We funded using cash from doing client work part-time.

"but it didn't copy it pixel-by-pixel" They used their image assets. How much more pixel-by-pixel can you get?

Hm. We do have an awesome web experience—it's our primary focus—and we're working on a mobile-friendly web version as well.

Just Flow, not GetFlow ;-) Appreciate the kind words.

Just called Flow ;-)

Not true. We've been working on it for just over a year.

My Comment to Joshua:

I appreciate what you're saying here, but I think you're mischaracterizing the point of both of our articles. Neither of us proposed our mockups as comprehensive redesigns or attempted to address anything past the basic visuals. I wanted to buy shoes, and I found it to be a really frustrating experience, so I said something.

If the door to a retail store is hard to open and you complain about it, does it make you an arrogant prick for failing to think through all the potential reasons for the problem? Maybe the company handyman only comes every two weeks. Maybe there's a mountain of paperwork required before any repairs can be made. Maybe the staff needs approval from management. Does that make your frustration with the door situation any less relevant? It definitely makes you empathize with the staff, and speaks volumes about the company's ineffective management, but that doesn't change the fact that the door is really hard to open, and this is a problem for you as well as other customers. Understanding the context is important, but it doesn't make our critiques any less relevant.

You argue that, "it’s easy to 'design' when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality". Of course, but think about all the companies that manage to get it right. Huge, lumbering corporations like Amazon, JetBlue, and Virgin all manage to pull off great user experience despite facing the same challenges. Why shouldn't Zappos and American Airlines be held to the same standard?

I found the Zappos website insanely frustrating to use, so I spent an evening identifying some of the problems I spotted and added a mockup to clarify. Yes, I was a little inflammatory, but the overarching message was a positive one. I wasn't trying to tell them how to sell shoes or reinvent their business - my article was intended to show how a few simple changes overtop of the existing website could help make it easier to use. Blurry images have nothing to do with metrics, business acumen, or sales experience. If this helped push them towards making their website easier to use in any way, then I'm happy.

I feel awful for any designer who has to deal with Dilbertian management and bureaucracy, and I agree with the previous commenter - our frustration should have been primarily directed at the management team at either company. That still doesn't change the fact that there are designers responsible for crafting the pixels, and the pixels show a general lack of care. This might be due to the culture of the company, poor direction, or a myriad of other factors, but it doesn't make the work itself any less sloppy.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a brash 23-year-old, but I'd rather say something and risk looking like an asshole than continue to patronize a company that doesn't care about their customer experience.

-Andrew

So when you glance at your car dashboard do you look for "DEFROST" or "RADIO POWER"? No, you look for cues based on positioning, size, and the icon on the button.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Apple does both, why can't Zappos?

Huh? http://cld.ly/xc57d0

No, you're right. We shouldn't push the boundaries of what we can do on the web, we should always stick to the browser defaults.

Any competent front-end designer could easily figure out how to code this.

Hey Max,

I'm Andrew, the guy who did it. The key thing that I want to drive home is that their execution stinks. I figure they know how to sell their product - they did $1 billion in sales last year - but the site itself is incredibly sloppy.

-Andrew

Hey Sunir,

I'm not planning to, but fire me an email (andrew@metalabdesign.com) so I can get your contact info. I'd love to get a coffee sometime.

-Andrew

Admittedly, we do have a bit of an obsession with Gotham. It's our Helvetica.

This is Andrew from MetaLab. I just wanted to say thanks for all the compliments on the design. I hope that you guys will take it for a spin and let us know what you think.

Quoted from cominatchu: "The 'under 10k' price tag is misleading because it does not include the opportunity cost of the web designers time. In other words, one has to calculate (the hours spent by Metalab web designers * their normal hourly rate) and add this to 10k to arrive at a more accurate cost for building this site."

Yes, we really did build it for less than $10k. Our key expenses were: Rails development (1 developer a few hours a week), a SliceHost server, and some custom icons we hired out. We're planning to break it down in more detail on our blog in the next little while, but I'd like to debunk this a bit here. You're absolutely right about the cost being higher if you consider what it would normally cost at a full consulting rate, but I feel like that's kind of fallacious logic:

If you learnt how to woodwork, built a bookshelf, then told your friends that it cost you $15 (the price of the wood and a couple of screws), they aren't going to argue that the true cost was $500 (the hours spent learning woodworking or a carpenter's rate).

If a founder who was an incredible programmer paid himself $1,000/month during the early months of his startup, would you say that his time really cost the company $15,000 (what he would have charged at a consulting rate)?

The point isn't that someone with no technical skills can do this for 10k (after all, this is Hacker News, and I assume most of you are highly skilled in the field), we're just pointing out that we managed to create a business by pulling a few extra hours a week over 6 months. We didn't have to quit our day jobs, move to the valley, or build a board of advisors - we just went ahead and built it. This isn't to say that it's an especially complex app or that it is some sort of technical feat, just that a little bit of money went a long way.

I don't think taking funding is always bad or anything, especially small seed funding like YC. Sometimes advantageous ideas need money to make them happen. The point is that most of you already have many of the skills required to build things, so funding really shouldn't be a barrier to entry. If your idea requires more money than you have, boil it down to the bare minimum and build it within your budget. We could easily have decided that we wanted to build the best invoicing app ever, figured out that invoicing was a 1.3 kagillion dollar industry, secured some funding, built up the stakes, then gone crazy with features. We could have convinced ourselves that we needed to close down our consulting business, hire a full-time Rails developer, and move in together. Instead we took a simple idea that we felt wasn't being done right, boiled it down to its core, then built it when we had the time.

I think the key differentiation is the fact that Ballpark is built for teams. This might not resonate with freelancers (who might just use it because it works well and looks pretty), but, in most small businesses, more than one person is usually involved in the process. For example, we run a design firm (www.metalabdesign.com), and while I don't personally send out estimates or invoices, I can easily keep track of incoming payments via the dashboard, give sign off and comment, see what the numbers for the month were, etc.

Regarding PayPal: Nobody is required to use PayPal - it's totally optional. We're definitely planning on looking into offering payment gateway solutions, but at this point we are focused on polishing the core functionality and adding some really cool new features that will help differentiate us from the pack.

Ronin looks cool! We're glad to have some solid competition, and FreshBooks could really use some.

Can you elaborate? I'm the designer. While I definitely drew some inspiration the way that Basecamp is laid out, I don't really see any similarity in terms of the styling.

We used a really great app called ScreenFlow for the Mac.

We actually do have a free plan. If you look on the plans page, it's in the blue bar "Or, sign up for our free personal plan".