Earning the chance to ‘let things happen’
The blood, sweat and compromise of part-time product development
The most memorable advice I’ve been given is this: ‘things don’t just happen, people make them happen.’ The year was 2000, and it wasn’t Jeff Bezos or Paul Graham that said it. The words came from a property developer in Solihull called Mike Vining - a guy who had built his own business and ridden it through several tough periods. It’s one of those unapologetically raw sentences that is as true as it is simple and it’s always in the back of my mind.
I’ve spent the last three years ‘making something happen’ with my friends Ben Tomlinson and Katy Theakston. We’ve been making Guilty Pledgers happen — a fundraising Spotify app that lets people donate to charity to add their guilty pleasures to the party playlist. And never have Mike’s words felt so apt, for this was a project that tried its best to not happen.
But that’s the thing about making things happen. The forces are against you and you have to fight. You see, your project doesn’t *want* to happen. It would be quite happy to continue lazing around in thought-fragments, lurking in sketches and generally not existing at all. It’s a battle that wounds your best intentions and leaves you exhausted. Compromise stops being a rational design principle and starts representing a way of life, leaving a simple question: how much do you want this?
Here are just a few of the challenges we faced:
No time
All three of us work full-time, which made it hard to get momentum at the start. We threw a test Christmas party at Katy’s house in December 2010, using paper pledge cards that guests filled in and handed to me and Ben, hunched over a laptop. We took cash and manually added each song to the Spotify playlist. The whole thing went down brilliantly, but somehow ten months passed before we managed to move forward. Even to this day, we struggle to find time to get together because of other daily pressures.
No skillz
We of course have some skills, but crucially, none of us is a developer. Ben can noodle about a bit, but we certainly couldn’t build the necessary software to turn our paper prototype into something real. And we’re not designers, so we needed help there too.
Unfortunately…
No money
Sure, we could have dug into our pockets (we have at times), but this was a not-for-profit venture. There was no business model. No revenue plans. We wanted to do something nice, something meaningful, but we weren’t so altruistic and self-sacrificing that we were willing to bankrupt ourselves for it.
Luckily for us, we knew some people at Spotify — wonderful, enthusiastic people who loved our idea. We walked them through early designs, excited them about the concept and they were eager to help us make it a reality. No one had made a charitable app on their platform and they kindly gave us some funding to get things off the ground.
After quite a search, we found and hired the awesome guys at Abstraktion who had the skills we didn’t and were willing to work to our meagre budget, because they too wanted to see it happen. (a nice side effect of having an innovative, charitable idea on the table)
Will Cheyney was the next person to save us. Talented designer, and friend, he lent us his skills without charge for an extended period that went way beyond the realms of friendly favour.
But inevitably, many other problems lined up to make sure things were as difficult as possible:
Payment barriers
Turns out it’s not easy to both create a frictionless experience *and* facilitate payments (surprise!). Ideally we wanted a solution where donations were made at the moment of adding a song, but even using the excellent JustGiving API required that donors enter the CVC number from the back of their credit cards for each individual donation. Not a great experience for someone at a house party who is more interested in having fun.
The solution we settled on was imperfect, but it did work nicely: Users can pledge freely during the party and receive an email the morning afterwards, reminding them how much they owe and sending them to the charity’s JustGiving page to pay up.
Legal barriers
Hoops were jumped through with some regularity. I won’t give too many details out of respect of the people involved, but let’s just say we didn’t make life easy for ourselves by creating an app that allows users to upload content into the Spotify client. Actually, that was only one of many unforeseen issues. Legal issues alone eroded a number of months. Perhaps we were asking for it, combining payments, music, charities, user-generated content and social technologies.
App approval barriers
It took five months of back and forth to get the finished app approved and published to the Spotify app store. By this time, we had worked our developers, Abstraktion to the bone, tackling countless unforeseen issues, and each request of ours feeling less reasonable than the last. Being underfunded middlemen between developers that were trying to run their business and an app store team with a strict approval process was very testing. We sadly missed a Christmas 2013 launch — which would have been perfect for the concept — despite the product being ready by September.
Tiny violin
Of course, all this is the part of the story — as with other stories like it — that no one else knows. People don’t see the pain, the challenges, the compromises, they see only the result. Which leads them to do what we all do: point out flaws as though the makers aren’t aware of them. As though the risks and benefits hadn’t been weighed. Or they scoff at the time spent on the project (“Three years? What the hell have you been doing?”)
For all the time we obsess and discuss methodology as though there is some perfect way to do everything, the reality is much messier. We can’t always do what we should do; sometimes we do what we have to.
But it happened!
Four weeks ago, Guilty Pledgers launched. We made it happen, despite not having the time, money or skills to do so. Despite the lawyers and late nights. We’ve had some amazing press, getting picked up in the Guardian, Wired, PSFK and Springwise. And two weeks ago week the first Guilty Pledgers parties were thrown, raising almost £1000 for seven different charities. So we feel pretty proud right now.
Making things happen vs letting things happen
Writing this post made me think of a quote from Sugata Mitra in Tim Malbon’s post about ‘School in the Cloud’:
“It’s not about making learning happen — it’s about letting it happen”
It struck me that letting things happen should always be the ultimate goal. There is an implied, existing desire. If people don’t want to do something then that something will fail. For Guilty Pledgers that desire is the motivation to do more for charity.
But sometimes you have to earn the opportunity to ‘let things happen’. Sometimes the barriers are so great that you have to first make things happen - work hard just to line up all the pieces and get to the start line.
We’re at the start line now with Guilty Pledgers. We have v 1.0 of a product that could one day be amazing. Now we start phase two: Improve the product again and again until the issues diminish and all that’s left is an experience that fundraisers choose and enjoy without hesitation or niggle. Then, and only then can we truly let things happen.
