Tips for Student Designers and the Small Businesses Who Love Them: OrangeSlyce Life

Your first design will be ugly

All too often I find internet startups delay launching their site to “tweak the design” and improve the aesthetics. Your first design will be ugly. Several months down the road, you will be embarrassed that you even considered launching with the horrendous UI and color scheme. However, your first design shouldn’t matter. You should be solving such a huge need that users and customers will do anything to use your product to solve their needs. When your hair is on fire, the look of the firehouse doesn’t really matter. If poor usability or bland visual effects push away early adopters, then you haven’t actually solved an important problem (at which time you pivot). Early adopters will figure out your application. They will hack their way to using your service if need be. This isn’t to say to create unnecessary obstacles in your service, but delaying launching for design is never worth it.

Eat, sleep and breath your product launch

I find that most startup advice generally targets companies that have already launched but doesn’t really address entrepreneurs just trying to get an idea into fruition. If you are still at the idea-stage, everything you do should be focused around launching. I don’t have concrete data, but in my experience I see that most startups fail before they even start. Non-technical founders never find developers to build their product, and technical founders get caught up in features and miss the market opportunity after several years of development. As a pre-launch startup, you should eat, sleep and breath getting your product out. At this stage, there is no room in the company for anyone who doesn’t contribute to launching the product. Your business development person better close Excel and start testing, sketching mockups, and writing web copy. Simply launching a web product is a very difficult feat, and the whole team needs to be aligned to this single goal.

Stalk Your Customers

Rule #1 of any startup is to build a product that solves your own needs. The most successful consumer web startups are founded by people who personally experienced the problems they are trying to solve. 37Signals, Twitter, and even Facebook are a few examples of companies that developed a product that solved their own problems. Basecamp and Twitter actually started as internal company applications to solve contextual challenges. The 2 startups eventually realized that they could offer their solutions to the world. However, startups need to take this a step further because eventually you will probably evolve from being your own target customer. As a startup, you need to stalk your customers. You need to know what their passions are, what they do for fun, typical hangout places, their sleep schedules… You need to know your customers better than you know yourselves so you can always answer the question: What Would Customer Do?

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A few weeks ago, a blog post over at 37signal’s blog caught my eye.  The idea was “How cool would it be if you could design signatures as a side job?”.  An intriguing thought.  You don’t see many signature designers around nowadays and calligraphy is almost a lost art.  I tried taking a crack at my own signature and just wasn’t pleased with my results.  I wondered if my muscle memory was too embedded to be able to make any changes to my John Hancock.  Speaking of John Hancock, look how cool his signature was:

I’m also a fan of Barack Obama’s signature as well:

Design shouldn’t be nothing but logos and color schemes.  With personal branding becoming more prevalent, start thinking of other ways you can improve your client’s product including, but not limited to, their signature.  Many years ago, calligraphers would create seals for powerful families to use in their businesses.  If you can carve out a niche like that, you could be the modern day Wang Xizhi.

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I usually don’t jump on and write blog entries (I leave that to better writers in the company). However, as the CEO and engineer behind OrangeSlyce, I know that this will help some startups looking to simplify billing with Chargify. For those of you who don’t know, Chargify is an easy-to-use service to manage recurring billing, with features such as hosted payment pages, subscription management and simplified payment gateway setup. What initially attracted OrangeSlyce to Chargify was the customizability of the hosted payment page. There are plenty of services that offer hosted payment pages, including PayPal, but none offer much in the way of style customization. Chargify gives you the ability to add custom CSS and even Javascript to your payment page, finally making it possible to match your entire brand. PayPal seems to think slapping a logo on the page is “brand matching” – we obviously disagree.

Chargify specifically targets web-based services and SaaS companies with a recurring billing revenue model, e.g. $30/month (possibly with multiple tiers). This works great for most startups, but what if you sell one-time services? At OrangeSlyce, we sell freelance job postings for a one-time fee. This model is obviously applicable to all job boards who only charge per post. We were interested in using Chargify, but it took us a while to hack together a way for single item payments. Chargify outlines this solution for one-time purchases, but unfortunately coupon codes simply don’t work with it.

We finally came up with the exact setup to create single item products for one-time payments, with working coupon codes:

1. Setup a new product family like you would for a recurring item. Note: Chargify used to have a drop-down for “product type” with only one option of “recurring.” It seems they got rid of this.
2. Create a new product within the family using the following setup (Important! This is the only configuration that will work with coupon codes).
3. Set the “one-time, up-front charge” to $0. (I know, you’d think this is where you’d put the one-time fee, it got us too).
4. Set a trial period of 1 month that costs whatever one-time fee you want to charge.
5. Set the “after the trial, a recurring price of” to $0 and to reoccur every month.
6. Set the “recurring charge will expire” to 1 day.

Here is screenshot of what your Billing Structure should look like:

This is the only configuration (trust me, we tried them ALL) that will simulate one-time, single-item charges AND allow coupon codes to work. Other configurations will charge correctly, but the coupon codes won’t have any effect.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well there’s one slight problem that we still need to fix. On the hosted payment page, your “purchase summary” will display your hackerish options:

• 1 month trial at $49.99 (or whatever you set as your fee).
• $0.00 recurring every 1 month thereafter.

I know if I saw this confusing purchase summary, it would make me second guess the company and probably close out the window. Thankfully, Chargify’s custom CSS options gives us control. Simply add these 2 lines of CSS code to the custom CSS box and it will hide the confusing, unnecessary purchase summary text:

.section_one { display: none; }

.tint { display: none; }

This will hide all references to monthly billing or recurring payment. Personally, I think Chargify is an excellent, much needed service so I’m hoping they release official one-time payment product types soon.

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