The Red Thread This Week:
“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.” — Charles Eames
Years ago, there was a ticket on our sprint board labeled AYSL. (A sprint board is where software teams track the work they plan to finish in short bursts, or sprints.)
AYSL stood for Are You Still Listening.
It’s what we called the pop-up that fired on our website when music had been playing for hours, to ask if anyone was still on the other end. Streaming songs to nobody still costs real money.
It looked like a borderline error message: black background, technical, a little alarming. It was the kind of thing that makes you think you broke something.
We’d lost a full-time designer a few weeks earlier, so the conversation went where it always goes: “Welp, there’s some design work here. Can’t we just find a cheap contractor?”
So the ticket went to Robert, a 1099 designer in Romania who, to this day, I’ve never met in person.
He redesigned the modal. Then he went looking for every other pop-up we fired: the 404s, the buffering messages, the nag to create an account before you can listen, and the notice when the licensing on an album has expired.
He sent back a proposal for the whole system, along with a note. Fixing one modal and leaving the rest, he said, wasn’t a great look. It would make the brand feel inconsistent and cause us problems down the line.
I had asked for the redesign of a pop-up. He handed me the reason the ticket existed in the first place.
One of the other pop-ups Robert went looking for. Before and after.
In 1937, an economist named Ronald Coase asked a question that sounds almost childish: why do companies exist at all? Why not buy every task from the open market, project by project, at the best price?
His answer was that the market carries hidden costs. You have to find people, vet them, check their work, and wonder if they’ll come through.
When those costs add up to more than doing the work yourself, you build a company and hire full-time people.
I do this math all the time, deciding which music programming work needs a full-time curator and which can be a scoped project for a contractor.
Robert never quite fit that math. I’ve worked with full-time designers down the hall who left me with more to worry about than a guy I’ve only known through Slack.
Coase called it the cost of using the market. I’d call it the cost of wondering.
Robert took that cost off my desk because he saw the need behind the ticket.
Whether you’re full-time or freelance, the person who hired you is buying fewer things to worry about.
If all you remove from their desk is what’s written on the ticket, the market can probably find it cheaper.
I’ve still never met Robert. I never once had to wonder whether he was listening.
~ Jaime
Co-host, Slackers podcast (Season 2 lands Thursday, Oct 29)
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P.S. Any thoughts or reactions to this one? Hit reply, let me know.
And thanks for being on the other end, I’m glad you’re here.
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B-Sides
By the numbers: The Top 100 Consumer AI Apps
Olivia Moore’s 7th edition of the a16z list. Here’s a stat: only 4.5% of U.S. consumers pay for ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, but the top 1% of payers average about $903 a month 😳. Once again, your best customers are rarely your typical ones.
Great read: Paul Graham’s “A Project of One’s Own”
Just as meaningful for young people as it is for old crusty folks. Graham says working on your own project is like skating vs. walking, and that school and work slowly train it out of us.
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