Week 882

Hello!

We’ve had another productive week spending time on Jam and business development.

Schools are gearing up for Christmas so we’ve been to various concerts and fairs during the week. And we’re celebrating at work with a Christmas lunch today before heading to Space4 for their Christmas party.

Bizdev

We’ve had some good conversations about potential projects due to start in January. Nonthing’s guaranteed yet but we’re hoping that at least one of them will go ahead.

Chris is doing a good job of driving conversations internally about the idea of value-based pricing. It’s something we attempted to do in the early days of GFR when we talked about a price per sprint, but the idea has become eroded over time as we’ve fallen into the trap of thinking in terms of hours caused by us often having to fill in timesheets for our clients. Chris has suggested we all read Hourly Billing is Nuts by Jonathan Stark so we’ve bought the book and plan to set aside some time to read it.

Jam

We’ve continued to make good progress on Jam, adding new functionality and continuing to research the business model and our regulatory requirements.

Chris released some basic functionality to allow music labels to be represented on the site and we were pleased to see UNTONE Music create their page soon after. Chris has also made it possible to set an album release date in the future based on feedback we had from a few people. James has also made a start on a persistent audio player that allows you to continue to listen to music while you browse around the site. He was pleasantly surprised to find that Turbe Drive makes implementing this sort of persistence across pages relatvely simple.

We had a really good follow-up workshop facilitated by Polly where she led us through the process of identifying risks and opportunities to the product and business. I had a call with Stripe to try to better understand how their various products can help us with the Jam marketplace. Chris and I met with some researchers from various universities who are hoping to put a proposal together for some funding to help explore/grow these sort of alternative platforms to the mainstream. We’ve also contacted a number of different people/organisations to find out whether they can help us fully understand our regulatory/compliance requirements of operating such a marketplace. We’re trying to talk to as many people as possible at the moment so if you, or someone you know, have knowledge of and/or an interest in things like marketplaces for digital sales, platform coops, a fairer deal for musicians then please get in touch!

Code Club

I’m in the process of setting up a Code Club for my daughter’s school and was pleased to receive a clear DBS check during the week which I believe to be the last barrier before allowing people to sign up.

Until next time.

– Chris