A lot of the web services industry (our company, BitMethod, builds mobile and web apps and services, in case you didn’t know) is built around Free-with-a-capital-F and cross-selling. Give away X to sell Y, offer Premium Z to Enterprise level customers, etc.

As BitMethod’s Creative Strategist a lot of what I do involves product strategy. I’ve learned that giving something away to sell something else—or up-selling current customers—doesn’t work very well if the other stuff for sale sucks or doesn’t address a customer need.

I was hanging out working at Smokey Row last weekend and two things happened: 1) I really needed a highlighter, and 2) I noticed what comprised nearly an entire wall teapots and t-shirts for sale. I started running the coffee shop cross-selling experience through the same mental wringer I put a lot of our ideas.

Extra things normally sold at coffee shops:

• T-Shirts
• Mugs
• Teapots
• Magnetic Poetry
• Audio CD’s
• Local Art
• Brew-at-home Coffees and Teas
• Mini French Presses

Notice a trend? Except for the mug, none of those items are things you would actually use or need while you’re at the coffee shop. They’re “gift” items. I’m uncertain of the reason for the ubiquity of these items at coffee shops—except, perhaps, that “everybody else does it”. Not good business logic.

Successful coffee shops are known for more than just their coffee. They have a great atmosphere, great service and great marketing. They make it comfortable for folks to hang out, get to know each other and even get some work done. When I see signs at little hippie coffeeshops admonishing customers against staying too long or an epic poem about why they don’t offer Wi-Fi, I really feel like they just don’t get it. If you can’t figure out how to capitalize on an environment where people feel like hanging out all day and consuming things, you might want to hang up that Small Business Owner hat.

Below are some of my ideas for things to sell at a coffee shop. I’m sure that enterprising shop owners the world around have sold some or all of these things—a Twitter follower working at Caribou informed me they used to sell pencils and chapstick. What intrigues me is why this type of cross-selling is not very commonplace. I believe these items would go over much better than a Gildan shirt emblazoned with an amateur-designed coffee shop logo:

• Pencils, Pens, and Highlighters
• Bus passes or other public transit related items or services
• Memo Pads, Legal Pads, Journals, and Drawing Pads (bonus points for uber-hipster Moleskins)
• Art, Culture and Design Magazines (tailored to taste and your marketing). Many coffee shops have a free-to-read pile of outdated and boring magazines. Why not have a killer selection funded by people actually buying those magazines?
• Decks of playing cards, UNO and easy-to-learn indie card games (check the Indie games section at Mayhem in Des Moines for an idea of just how much cool stuff is out there).
• Paperbacks—maybe a periodic staff pick, or something connected to a monthly book club hosted at the shop.
• Crossword, word search, and Sudoku books
• USB Keys
• Recordable CD’s and DVD’s
• Earbuds/Headphones
• iPhone/iPad stands

Notice a trend? They sell a lot of this stuff at Barnes and Noble and Borders. Those stores present more competition for time and money otherwise spent at a neighborhood coffee shop than people probably realize. Both of them have business models encouraging you to come in, hang out, and enjoy the experience without having to buy anything. Lots of people buy something. In fact, I would estimate at least 80% of the time that I’ve spent money at Barnes and Noble, it hasn’t been on a book. It’s been a muffin, or a journal, or a game, or a magazine.

I remember hearing once that laundromats and coffee shops are the easiest business to get loans for, implying that they are very “safe” bets for the bank. The trouble with a safe bet and a safe business is that, unlike the software industry, the pressure to innovate is extremely low. Whatever industry you’re in, no product is ever safe. What might be your main focus will be given away as an afterthought by someone else or cross-sold to a bigger audience than you could ever hope to capture. Start thinking now about how to expand your offerings quickly and easily by analyzing your environment, your community and your users to identify their needs.

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I went bowling last week, but that’s not what this post is about. This is about how, as an industry, bowling alleys confuse the hell out of people with too many options and wholly unremarkable “promotions”.

Bowling isn’t a regular hobby of mine, so I hopped online to do some research about the alleys in Des Moines. Our fair city had no shortage of places to look into. Unfortunately, those same alleys had no shortage of specials, deals, hours, pricing matrices, league nights, combos, packs, buy-one-get-ones, punch cards and untold other options and oddities I didn’t have the brain power to absorb. Setting aside generally terrible UX and design choices that would be right at home on Geocities, it was still a very unpleasant experience trying to plan an outing for myself and a few friends.

Let’s say you’re planning a hot date and want to do Cosmic Bowling (or glow-in-the-dark, or Galaxy, or Blackout, or Blacklight—I won’t even dare to get into the industry’s lexicon issues). Air Lanes draws your attention to this convenient schedule for “Glow-In-The-Dark” Galaxy Bowling (quotes theirs) –

Monday -Thursday: 9:30 pm – 12:00 am
Friday: 6:00 pm – 2:00 am
Saturday: 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm & 8:30 pm – 2:00 am
Sunday: 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm & 8:30 pm – 12:30 am

Good luck committing that to memory. An anamoly? Hardly. From Val Lanes:

Thunder Alley Glow Bowling: $4.75 per person per game 9:30pm-Midnight on Fridays and Saturdays

Okay, a little better, but 9:30? Wouldn’t nine or ten be simpler? Why Friday and Saturday but not Sunday? Or Thursday—a night that many folks treat like the weekend?

Plaza Lanes offers “Lazer Glow Bowling”:

Friday & Saturday 11:30 PM to 2:00 AM only $15 per person for 2.5 hours of unlimited bowling and shoes (regularly $4.29 per game).

How long does a game of bowling take? I just went bowling and I don’t know. I can tell you it varies greatly depending on the number of players and the number of beers. Is $15 a good deal? Is it still a good deal if you roll in at 12:30? It makes even less sense when you compare it to the onslaught of information containing their other hours and deals:

(Click for big.)

Yeesh.

I could go on and on, but the short story is: the typical bowling alley is using an overly complicated, overly nuanced, and impossible to memorize set of prices, hours, and specials. It’s hard to understand and it’s hardly exciting. Look at this cra-a-a-zy deal (sarcasm) from Merle Hay Lanes:

$5.00 Per person receives a half hour of bowling and shoes.
Want to bowl longer?
An extra hour is just $5.00!!

Jesus H. Christ, hold me back! $5 for a half hour?! That’s…a good price? Maybe? I don’t even have a frame of reference.

I’m reminded of a great bit from Seth Godin about being remarkable (I think it’s in Free Prize Inside). A restaurant deciding to stay open an hour later is unremarkable—literally. It’s hardly worth remarking upon. But deciding to be open 24 hours? That’s different. That’s remarkable.

These bowling alleys have the same problem. They shift hours and prices 30 minutes and 30 cents at a time as if it’s going to ignite some sort of magic price/time/supply-and-demand-based frenzy. I don’t have any data on it, but my instincts tell me that most casual bowlers just stumble into whatever deal/price/hours are going on at the time.

When my lottery ticket hits and I get to open up Scott Lanes, here’s how we’ll do business:

1. We’ll be open the same hours every single day of the week.
2. We will determine the least popular night of the week and have league night that night – if at all. If possible, we’ll leave lanes open during league night anyway so that nobody has to care.
3. We will not charge for shoes. Ever. We don’t charge to rent balls, so we’re not charging to rent shoes.
4. We will, at any given time, choose one promotion to run and promote the everliving hell out of it. The promotion will not be based on the price of bowling and shifting numbers up or down fifty cents or a dollar. Instead, it will focus on something remarkable such as live entertainment, giveaways, theme nights, or the stuff we really make margin on: beer and munchies.
5. If the easiest way to explain something is to use a matrix, we’re not going to do it.
6. We’ll have free popcorn. Customers will love it. It will be salty as hell. You will buy lots of expensive sugar water because of this free popcorn.

I know how much a movie ticket is going to run me, and I’m rarely surprised by the price of beer or the closing time of my neighborhood haunts. Choice is can be good, but simplicity is better. Don’t sacrifice the latter for the former.

I really, really, really, really like the blog Clients From Hell. It’s annoying for people in the office when they post an update, because I will immediately read most of them out loud. It’s funny, it’s fast, and it exists without any narrative from the blog itself – all content is created from user submitted stories. The design is simple, clean and stylish as many Tumblr blogs are. Posts get liked and reblogged like crazy on Tumblr and it’s pretty popular in its own right.

The site is run by MetaLab, a successful interface design company that boasts “Simple is Beautiful”. That’s true for many of their projects, but certainly not all. While MetaLab is pretty awesome overall, the hard truth is that simple isn’t beautiful when it’s boring, too. The Clients From Hell app epitomizes boring.

I’m not sure that most would be able to tell the difference between the mobile site automatically generated by Tumblr and the app built by MetaLab. In fact, the application ends up with less functionality than the mobile site. I cannot think of many reasons for downloading this app other than to “see what it does.”

Okay, so it’s a simple site with a simple app, what’s the problem? One dollar. The CFH app is not free. One dollar will buy you any number of great apps on the app store. I won’t miss my dollar – it’s a tax write-off now, right? – but to create an app offering an experience inferior to the free one in every way and then ask for money for it seems a bit odd to me.

People are going to be expecting more and more out of their apps as smartphones become more ubiquitous. Consumers will be getting increasingly savvy about what is possible with an app, and know when they are getting ripped off. Recently, Apple has been cracking down on licensed cookie cutter apps that simply syndicate RSS feeds — the Clients From Hell app isn’t much more than that. To warrant more than a “dollar donation” for their foray into the mobile space, a lot more functionality is needed. Maybe die-hard fans are comfortable throwing a dollar at a lame app from their favorite musician, but even that is a stretch.

I hope that MetaLab takes a second stab at their CFH app in the future. Here are some possibilities for immediate improvement:

• Post by post navigation – something that would be helpful with longer stories (and is already available on the mobile site).
• Visual indication of what I have and have not read.
• Landscape view & text zooming like Mobile Safari allows.
• Copy/pasting of choice little bits I want to share with someone or use as a tease to link on Twitter.
• A fave star in the corner so I don’t have to inexplicably click twice to add something to my favorites (and SOMETHING to do with my favorites once I have them – what is this feature for, again?)
• Instapaper support – another thing I already have via Mobile Safari.

And that’s just the basics. If the only primary action you have to offer your users is the ability to read a site that is already quite easy to read on the iPhone, you might want to consider giving them a little something extra for their money. Some random ideas off the top of my head:

• An illustrated client-from-hell voodoo doll I can hold a lighter to or put stickpins in to relieve stress.
• A sleek and stylish interface to submit stories.
• A stupid photo toy that lets me add devil horns to my contact photos to remind myself not to pick up the phone when a client from hell calls.
• A weekly comic only available via the iPhone app.
• Clients From Hell bingo with cards for different industries that I can play during terrible meetings.

In the end, I think doing nothing may have been a better option than doing something. Simple can be beautiful – I don’t think the app needs complication or heavy engineering to make it worthwhile. However, a little more effort into translating the existing concept into a compelling new product for the App store would go a long way.

BitMethod will be launching a new humor-blog product soon, and it lends itself very well to an iPhone app. If we reach that point and can’t imagine any functionality or purpose beyond “have an app in the store”, we’re not going to do it, plain and simple. Just because you can do something with technology doesn’t mean you should – a truism a great interface design company like MetaLab has likely internalized. Alas, even the best of us stray from the path sometimes.

1 comments

Hello, I’m Scott! I am the Creative Strategist at BitMethod. I just officially joined the team on Monday, though I’ve been behind the scenes doing some copywriting and marketing stuff as a freelancer since the fall of last year. I’ve been brought on to help execute on Interactive projects and lead up some of the more “fun” internal stuff. I’m looking forward to getting to know more creative agencies in the Midwest that have clients interested in building mobile and web products.

In addition to my role with BitMethod I do a lot of cool and fun art-related projects via make\break, a thing-making, event-planning, arts-organizing something-or-other that I run with my wife.

I live in downtown Des Moines, IA. It’s an awesome little city in the middle of everything with a lot of great stuff in it and a lot of great stuff ahead of it. I’m married to an artist, which is cool already, but is made cooler by the fact that she’s a really really good artist.

I fall on the geekier side of life: video games, comics, action figures, etc. There is already a healthy (or is it unhealthy?) amount of action figures covering my desk here in the BitMethod office. I game on the PS3 and the PC, though I can certainly hold my own in Mario Kart Wii (Dry Bowser fo’ life). Favorite all time game is the Team Fortress series. Don’t make me choose between Team Fortress Classic and Team Fortress 2, because it is a false choice. They are equally awesome.

Computers and the Internet have always been a big part of my life and it’s really exciting to get a chance to actually work in the tech field. I remember fondly learning DOS commands with my dad, and even dialing into our town’s BBS and playing little text based adventure games. I never got into programming as media was always more interesting to me: blogging, video, sharing media, online games. I ended up with a journalism degree from Drake, which never felt quite right, but got me as close to what I wanted to do as I could manage. It feels like it’s all coming together now and I’m excited to see what the future will bring.

When necessary, I can grow an impressively unruly beard, amongst other talents.

When I grow up I want to be a Ghostbuster.

Some fun links to learn more about me:

• Read about my wedding on Offbeat Bride
• Random weirdness from my Tumble Blog
• See my take on local “Black Friday” shopping in a CNN Money article

I hope that you’ll say hello in the comments or drop me a line on Twitter (@scottrocketship).