If you have an emergency during that time, though, just shoot us an e-mail – we’ll do our best to get you taken care of as quickly as we can.

Happy Holidays!

- Paste

We drank the Kool-Aid more deeply than most. We made our first foray into remote workers, our first pushback against meetings, and a concerted effort into being a next generation development studio. All of this was built on the back of 37s apps.

Sure, some of us seemed to struggle with the organization of the apps. Sure, the remote workers among us always felt slightly more isolated than the rest. Sure we split our time between multiple browser windows always wondering what was happening in the other.

We were logging our time in one app, chatting in another, keeping track of most things in another app, but a few others in another app still. Finally we were doing the bulk of our work in Jumpchart, and feeling even more disconnected for it.

Un/luckily we hit a relatively slow period in our design studio workflow, and we decided to see what we could do to fix the problem.

We started with chat, and built on top of that. We wanted to keep the keyboard central to the experience, and push the mouse to the secondary experience. (maybe because we’re primarily programmers?) What eventually evolved was “Staction” —a weirdly named app that was a sort of Twitter that also allowed you to tag jobs, and todos right there in the stream of the chat.

No joke; Our workflow changed overnight. We were so much more connected, so much faster, and honestly, so much happier. Staction was our water cooler. Our meeting room. Our buddy chat.

As much as we loved it, Staction was also a commercial failure, never making more than a few thousand dollars a month. We still use it today, but it’s apparent that it is on it’s last leg. Slower, weirder, and more out of tune with the modern web all the time.

Change the world?

Despite our effort to change world, Basecamp is still a world dominating force, and Staction is an aging novelty. Why? We built Staction for nerds. That’s not to say a niche product cannot be successful, it can! but it needs a unique marketing pitch, and a unique process to sell. We built a niche product, and marketed it like a mass market product.

So of course the history is written. Basecamp owns the world of productivity, so much that 37S is changing their name to that of their most successful product. Staction never owned a fraction of a percent of the mass market… But we still cannot give the stupid thing up. Here are a few reasons why:

• We hate switching between apps, tabs, and keyboard to mouse.
• Basecamp, apologies to the king of the world, feels like talking to a filing cabinet.
• Speed.
• We need to log time as we work, not as yet another thing to do.

So we continue to try out Basecamp, and a myriad of other apps. All brilliant at some facet of group work or more, but even more-so deficient in the next. And so we continue to use an app that we haven’t found time to update much since 2010 for our day-to-day.

Cut to today

We’ve been actively working on a new version of Staction for quite a few months now. It’s been a wild mess, and we’re having a blast digging into it. We’ve already got one failed demo under our belt, and we’ve started in on a few new exciting rounds of mockups. Maybe this is headed nowhere, but we want to share some of our progress with you.

Showing people your half baked ideas is terrifying really. It’s going to be great!

I don’t think that means we should quit working our tails off to create the best web app or website just because something similar has been done before. I do think it means, though, that we should not feel defeated because we’re working with ideas that existed before us.

We knew we were reinventing the wheel to some extent when Jumpchart was born. Fact: there are other website organization tools out there. Same thing with Staction and Paprika. But we felt we could do it better. We didn’t look at wheel reinvention as a negative. Instead, we recognized how important it is in the grand scheme of things. Versions are what get us to the best.

I mean think about it. Writers don’t publish an unfinished book. Architects don’t let tenants move in before the building is done. Hundreds of logos are sketched before a winner is chosen. There are steps to finishing a project, and many versions are created along the way.

Sixty years from now when we’re all old and wrinkly, there could be a revolutionized way of organizing website content that works for virtually everyone. And that’s great – it truly is.

All we hope is that Jumpchart somehow played a small part in its existence.

I’ll admit, I’m bitter about my recent experience with my cable company, but it’s opened my eyes. For years at my house we’ve been putting up with crap like intermittent service during big games, a stubborn DVR box that works only when the stars are perfectly aligned, missed recordings because of “unknown technical difficulties” and only the rarest of opportunities to talk to a real human being when we need help. Not to mentioned we get absolutely zero monetary refunds to cover our emotional damages from getting so worked up. When we finally called to find out how we can get more for our money (and threaten to take it elsewhere), we were not-so-politely told deals like that are stubbornly reserved for new customers only. I didn’t feel so much shocked as I did betrayed.

I Would Like Some Cheese with My Whine, Please.

Alright, I’m just going to say it. What about me?

I’ve paid for their service for years, and even sent them business a couple times. I trusted them to give me the best quality possible, and haven’t cancelled our account when they’ve fallen short on their promises. And then when I so desperately need them to come through for me, they made me feel like I was two inches tall and not worth their time. #bigcompanyfail

It got me thinking how different big brand loyalty is from small brand loyalty. As part of Paste, I thought about how we try to make the most out of our users’ brand loyalty. Since we’re such a small company, we have every opportunity in the world to make each experience a positive one. Of course, it’s ideal that our users never get frustrated enough to contact us complaining, but if they do we want them to feel like their problem is the only one on our plate.

We’ve Done a Few Things Right.

I must say how awesome our users are. There are lots of reasons they e-mail us, but they’re almost always sure to give us feedback of both the positive and constructive variety.

This, for example:

“I adore Jumpchart and found it very useful indeed. I downgraded because I am a designer by trade and am not often involved in the IA of a site. If I need it again in the future however, I will definitely re-upgrade. I have also recommended Jumpchart to associates.

A couple of things that would make the tools more useful to me personally would be to have the ability to:

+ Add a header and footer to each page (with things like a search bar and registration sign-up elements)
+ Associate a design comp with each page

I hope this feedback is helpful and thanks very much for the wonderful service!”

(Full disclosure: When this user e-mailed us, we were in the middle of launching our newest features, which included design mockups, so she didn’t know about the goodness headed her way.)

That support e-mail validates for me that we’re doing something right in the brand loyalty department. That this user would come back to us instead of searching for something else speaks volumes toward the success our attention to customer service has seen. And I think as a big company you’re just not able to give each customer the attention they need to feel special. It’s one of the benefits of being the small guys.

But how did we do it?

We’ve made absolutely certain to respond quickly to all support inquiries. We do everything in our power to go above and beyond when answering questions about how a feature works. We’ve showered our users with gifts of free space, free memberships, and even some of these to show our appreciation for feedback and loyalty. But the most important thing to me is that we didn’t discriminate who we gave what to based on how long they’ve been a customer, or how much they’ve used our products.

We love our new customers, but we have our older customers to thank for being where we are today.

QUESTION: (referring to the boss)”...The time entry feature will be great for us, but he will want to know if can it be integrated into his billing process. Basically, does it have the ability to go beyond project communication and management to reporting and billing?”

ANSWER:
I think a lot of this answer depends on your particular workflow, and tools. Here are a few random thoughts that might help:

Staction has a robust API just dying to be integrated with some quick code into the billing app of your choice.

Even if you go for a manual approach, the reporting in Staction is great. -But you have to customize it for your needs.

-Since you can create “saved views” in Staction, you can grab any info you need quickly over the day. Like “all time entries for Paul this week on Projects X,Y, and Z.”

-If you hop into the “projects” tab up top, you can see detailed time reports for every project you have going. You can also click the little
icon to get a summary of hours by person, recent entries, and todo status.

-If you hop over to the “people” tab up top you can pull date range reports of hours logged for each person on your team.

-Don’t forget tags! Staction has it’s own built in tagging system, but we encourage people to take it further… Using #hashtags in your entries is a great way to track job status… Try tagging posts with #done #revisions #jobcost to get even more out of your posts. If you do, then you can pull cool reports like: “all jobs with a post that has the keyword “#done” in it that have time entries logged this month”

To be honest, Staction’s flexibility, and complete lack of rules is what we’re so incredibly proud of about the app. But also to be honest, it’s what keeps a lot of people from adapting it into their flow. It’s a blank slate… You can do almost anything you want with it, -but you will have to get creative.

Thanks for getting in touch. It means a lot to us when our customers take the time to write. Please send us an email any time you like.

Thanks for using Staction!
-Joe
-Paste

One thing however that it’s not so great at (in our opinion) is session management. The default garbage collector from PHP isn’t perfect, and consistently removes session files that it shouldn’t, almost totally ignoring whatever setting you have for expiration time. It’s frustrating for us, and often causes untimely logouts for our users.

A few weeks ago we started working on a bespoke database driven session system for Staction. The first part came together much easier, and better than we expected. But we still had a problem. After launching the new programming on our dev server we were still getting booted and timed out. Or more to the point, I(Joe) was still getting booted out.

I’m a long time Safari user, and Brian, who was working on the programming, is on the Chrome side of life. Not everyone here was having the problem on Safari, so we started thinking maybe it was just me. After resetting Safari totally, the problem still persisted. Brian, who had also started using Safari as a daily browser for testing, started experiencing the problems, too.

Lots of research, and trial-and-error later we wound up here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12078357 -10 pages long of people with the exact same problem. Safari occasionally, and arbitrarily sends a new HTTP header without any session information. So after our WTF moment, we started thinking of a workaround.

After a couple other ideas that were non-starters, now once in every 50 calls (approx.) we regenerate the session data, duplicating it into a new session, wiping out the old data and sending the browser a new cookie.

We’re incredibly happy to tell you that since making that change we haven’t been logged out once on our dev server. On Safari, or any other browser.

This morning we pushed out the new session management programming to all Staction accounts. We hope to push it to all the other apps in the next couple weeks.

As we always like to learn from an experience, here are our takeaways:

• Don’t always assume the problem is with what you’re doing. Check external factors too.
• When you start to work on solving a problem, be prepared for the problem to evolve as you learn more about it.
• Make time for solving the little problems with your app. There is nothing glamorous or exciting about improving our session management programming. We can’t say “With sessions that actually keep you logged on!” on our sales site. But we think improving the foundations for these things helps make the app more satisfactory to use. You’ve got to do them, even if it would be more fun to work on email-in on Paprika, or new Jumpchart import/export features.

“I’ve been a staction user for a while now, and I started to “get” the flow of using staction after a few days.

With paprika, I got one of the free accounts, but I haven’t really been spending any time in it. For me, the mark of a good productivity app is whether I willingly jump into using it in the course of a normal day.

I find myself reaching for staction to put post-it notes, todos, and it’s a pretty smooth experience.

I would like to get to know paprika better, but the thought of having to retype or copy and paste over my notes from staction makes it a bit of a chore.

Now that the product has been out there for a bit now, what kind of workflow feedback are you seeing from your users? Any suggestions or tips?”

A legitimate question, and one we were happy to answer!

“To be honest, – we’re not too sure about everyone’s workflow so far. We’re trying to gather info via support, but we haven’t done any surveys, or customer interviews yet.

But here’s how we use Staction and Paprika. 80% of everything we do still gets recorded into Staction. But those occasional projects that have buttloads of todos, or lots and lots of notes have never fit well inside of Staction. It’s an admitted weakness. Staction is for short bursts, and quick communication check-ins. But it’s not great at the long-form. So when we don’t want to cloud the stream with long posts, or too many posts at once, we create a Paprika project, and share it in the stream via a link.

I think of it like a folder inside the project. Share a link, mark it as a todo. Visit the Paprika page, and mark all the todos complete, then hop to Staction, and mark that whole link complete.

But Paprika is much more a personal-use tool right now. I use it tons for my non-work-related tasks, and notes. I use it for my “do this today” stuff that the group really doesn’t need to know about. I share little lists with my wife. I hope with some upcoming updates, we’ll make Paprika even more friendly for quick notes, and better sharing. It’s a small app, and not everyone needs it now, but we have some really exciting plans to grow it over time.

Thanks for writing. You have no idea what it means to us when people care enough to write to us about our apps.”

Do you have any additional tips you’ve picked up while using Paprika?

Unfortunately, we had a big problem. The Staction website is designed to be used with a keyboard. The whole application is built around using the mouse as little as possible. But on the iPhone the keyboard is, well, small. Using a tiny keyboard to bang out tags, and a clunky half-visible auto-completer just wasn’t the experience we wanted to give our users. It wasn’t the experience we wanted for ourselves… It just wasn’t great, – believe us, we tried it.

After lots of experimenting, eventually we realized we had to rely on touching and scrolling for tag input. Like with lots of ideas, -it seems quite obvious looking back.

As of Today

As of today, all of our paid accounts have access to the Staction web app. Simply visit your normal account URL, and you’ll be directed to the optimized site. (You can still access the regular site if you like.)

Once logged in, you’ll have access to all the most commonly used features of Staction. Creating todos, logging time, and keeping up with your teammates.

Make sure to tap “+” and add Staction to your home screen, – it works really well that way.

If you want to see the web app, but don’t have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad you can visit your normal account URL and add a /m at the end like this:

http://accountname.staction.com/m

We think you’re really going to like the web app experience. In some ways it’s the best Staction experience yet.

Why Not the Free Account?

We’re going to be honest in a way that I don’t think most companies would. We really hope that the web app drives upgrades for us. By far the biggest portion of Staction users are on the free account. It seems that when we created our plans for Staction, we gave away too much on the low end.

It’s no problem, -we’re happy to have our users, on any account that fits their needs. But we do have to make money to keep our jobs!

Talking over the problem, we came up with a plan that we hope will make sense to you. As we add new features to our apps, you’ll probably see most of them added only to the paid accounts at first. As we recoup the cost of our development time through the upgrades that the features drive, we hope to trickle the features down to the free accounts as well.

We’re hoping this is a sustainable system that can keep everyone happy. Paid accounts just get the features a bit sooner than everyone else. We hope you’ll think it makes as much sense as we do.