Billups Design

Well, Jason Fried, the President of 37signals, announced the imminent release of Haystack on his Twitter page in October, and now it’s officially here – Haystack. Haystack is similar to a job posting board, but is engineered to allow design agencies to post themselves in a single destination and hopefully get located (like a needle in a haystack) by prospects all over the country or in their city.

This is a good idea for 37signals (the company behind the product) as it potentially places them squarely in the middle of that intersection where design agencies and companies in need of interactive services meet. But, one wonders, is it good for the agencies?, the prospects?, or even the web design industry as a whole?

What we’re not so keen on. One thing that resonates as a negative for the industry as a whole here is the obvious commodification of design and perhaps the introduction of yet another middleman. Good design is difficult to place a value on. One thing we all agree on is that it affects the bottom line online. Yet when multiple agencies are placed side by side on a grid with their main qualitative information being their price range, then ‘complex interface design and development capabilities’ begin to take on the appearance of a Yellow Book page on engine repair. I quickly found myself comparing prices of listed agencies since that was mostly all that was offered on the list page. Further, those participating agencies were given only a few price ranges to choose form. Further still, it is somewhat counter-logical that an interactive agency will tell a prospect the price of their services without first hearing what the prospect needs.

What do we like? The site is slick and possesses the signature ‘friendly usability’ that we’ve come to expect from 37signals products. It is simple to enroll in the listing program and easy to upload content and images associated with your agency. We also like that they’ve employed the time-tested model of all successful SaaS start-ups: offer a lite version of the service for free. (We did this for Meer Meer) This is great for the developer of the SaaS because it increases participation in the subscription service and it allows prospects to test drive the service before subscribing. For agencies (who would be subscribers) the free mode allows them to ‘join the gang’ and be seen without having to call a meeting and discuss the investment.

In the two weeks we’ve been watching Haystack, we have seen a marked increase in agency listings there, mostly free. But for those who pay a monthly fee, the listing displays multiple panels of their work and pushes them to the top of the listing page in each city. 37signals definitely has national reach and their participating numbers probably will not disappoint.

Is it working? Well, it’s a young destination and 37signals has some responsibility to promote the site as a service to its agency subscribers. Jason Fried claimed in his Tweet of last week that he’d already received a lead from his listing in the site. We, as of this writing, have not. As one colleague put it, “Right now, it’s just an empty room where all of the agencies in our city are looking at each other.” Another noted, “It’s a job board by another name.” To my mind, it’s a little of both but we do expect this will become a fairly trafficked marketplace for companies and interactive vendors in the future. As we have a few friends in the company, we’re certainly rooting for them!

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