One of the most consistent questions we’ve received since we launched Spreedly is, “Can I use it to collect in currency X?” where X is any of British Pounds Sterling, Canadian Dollars, Euros, etc. While we’ve really wanted to make Spreedly more accessible to the wider world, we’ve had to put it off to date since collecting in multiple currencies is a huge task and we’ve had to spend our time working on other priorities.

But then, about two weeks ago, we figured out how to “make half a product” and get a big part of the benefit of multiple currencies without a lot of the complexity. What we realized is this: a majority of those wanting to transact in different currencies weren’t wanting to collect in them simultaneously, but rather they wanted to pick a currency other than US Dollars and run all their transactions in it. And when we dug into allowing this simpler multi-currency support (we dubbed it “variable currency”) we realized that not only could we build it faster and release it sooner, it also moved us closer to full multi-currency in really important ways. So we got cranking and now you’ll see an extra option when you create a new site:

So how does it work? Well, whatever currency you select when you create a site will be used for all business within that site. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can only collect from subscribers who have a credit card in that currency – just like it’s always worked, your gateway and/or the subscriber’s credit card will happily convert from whatever currency you’re using into the subscriber’s native currency.

As you can see in the screenshot, you can’t (at least for now) change the currency once you’ve created the site. You can of course create another site anytime you’d like and set it to use a different currency, but a given site is locked to its transaction currency when it’s set up. We may revisit this limitation in the future, but for now you’ll want to decide on the currency before you go to activate and start using a production site.

Also, if you are interested in using a currency other than those listed, let us know at support@spreedly.com. We’re adding support for additional currencies as we get requests from clients, so don’t be shy!

We recognize that some of our existing clients paid for Spreedly when it didn’t support this and may want to migrate their sites to a different currency. If you’re in that boat, drop us a line and we’ll work through it with you. In particular if you Kickstarted a site, haven’t used it yet, and would like to use a different currency, we can easily accommodate the switch for you.

We’re super excited to see Spreedly used by businesses all over the world, so go create a site in your preferred currency and let us know how it goes! We’d also really appreciate if those of you in far-flung places would help us spread the word about Spreedly – your heart-felt recommendations mean a lot to us.

P.S. Don’t forget that you can still get a great deal on a Kickstart. It’s definitely worth it if you plan on running a business on top of Spreedly.

Spreedly is doing really, really well. We’re cranking along on features, we’re fielding inquiries from interested parties left and right, and signups (and renewals) are coming in at a good clip. The Spreedly team is really happy with what we’ve built, and we’re loving where it’s going.

But: Spreedly’s still a young business, and it doesn’t get as many hours a week as we’d like. We’ve thought about taking on funding, but have preferred to focus on building a market and getting more paying customers rather than doing market research and navigating the tricky waters of startup investment.

And yet, one of the best sources of funding is clients – what if we could raise a chunk of capital from our clients and use that to accelerate development for everyone? It would benefit clients by accelerating the rate at which we’re able to add the features that they’re asking for, and it would allow us to keep Spreedly’s interests directly aligned with our client base rather than getting distracted by taking on investment.

And so we are offering the Spreedly Kickstart plan: with one payment you lock in a sweet deal on Spreedly services, and once we sell out of the plans (we’re only offering 100 this time around) Spreedly will have a moderately sized chunk of capital to use towards accelerating the business.

We’d love to have you as one of our Kickstarters, and you can get all the details and start the sign up process on our Kickstart page.

What will you do with a Kickstart?

Josh and Adam of Web 2.0 Show fame had Nathaniel on to talk about Spreedly, and talk he did! Tune in to hear about Spreedly’s origins, why we’re priced the way we are, and what we have up our sleeves for the future: Spreedly on the Web 2.0 Show.

A big “Thank You” to Josh and Adam for having Spreedly on – it was a blast!

It’s been weeks in the making, but we’ve finally rolled out the final piece: you can now invite your business partners, developers, and anyone else of your choosing into your Spreedly site so they can keep track of what’s going on and help you administer the site. Rather than try to describe the process or give you screenshots, here’s a little screencast that shows you exactly how it works:

Spreedly – Site Invitations from Spreedly on Vimeo.

We hope this is useful to you – we know it already has been for us!

Sometimes you implement something and go, “That wasn’t hard – why didn’t we do it a long time ago?” Such is the case with a feature that got rolled out in the past few days: you as the client will now get BCC’d on the receipt email that goes out to a new subscriber. Oddly enough, we’ve been BCC’ing clients on renewal notices for a long time, and just hadn’t gotten around to adding the one line of code to make the same thing happen on a new subscription.

Hopefully you’re now happily buried under a deluge of new subscription emails, and this helps you see how your business is growing and thus provide better support to your customers. Have other ideas for how Spreedly can give you better insight and keep you up on what’s happening with your business? Let us know!

One of the things we want to do with the Spreedly blog is highlight some of the businesses that are using Spreedly for their payment collection. We love the fact that we get to be a part of so many businesses, and we’d like to share that love with you!

One really interesting business that just launched is Squid. The goal of Squid is to help you manage the project of increasing in-bound links to a website the upstanding, ethical way: by having conversations with high-value sites and convincing them to link to you and your content. Rather than go in to a lot of detail, though, I’ll just point you at this great post by Jake Scruggs that includes two screencasts showing off exactly what Squid is: Get Better Page Rankings With Squid.

We’re psyched that Squid is launched, and we’re double-psyched that they’ve launched with subscriptions already implemented. One of the ways Spreedly changes the game is by cutting the time necessary to collect payments down to a point where you’d be crazy not to launch with them!

P.S. If you’re launching or have launched a business on Spreedly, get in touch with us as we’d love to feature you. We know how tough and important it is to launch and we’d like to help you celebrate!

One of my favorite things about my role at Spreedly is that I get to tell you about all the cool improvements that we’re pushing out for you to enjoy. I’ve got three things for you today: a new look (which you’ve already seen if you’ve been to http://spreedly.com in the past few days), the ability to manage multiple sites, and some details about API v4.

New Look

We’ve done a major overhaul of the Spreedly homepage. Here’s the newly launched homepage up next to the old homepage for comparison:

vs.

Check out those spiffy new screenshots!

This round of work was mostly focused on improving the content and is really only the beginning. We know we need a logo, and we have a couple of brand spankin’ new pages in the works. But it’s a start, and we believe a big step in the right direction.

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Currently, when you sign up for Spreedly, you get a free test site and an (inactive) production site. They’re yours and yours alone, and it’s hard to share access to them with other people on your team. Also, if you want to use Spreedly for another business, or run some experiments in a fresh test site, you have to sign up for a new user account with a fresh email. While this worked OK to get Spreedly launched, it’s become a major thorn in the Spreedly teams’ side, and we’re sure our clients find it bothersome as well. It just doesn’t fit the way businesses and teams work, and it needs to be fixed.

If you’ve done any web application development (and I’m sure a lot of you have), then you know that the challenge we face is that the account/site structure is a fundamental part of the application, and changing it is a pretty big deal. And yet we have to tackle this now, for two reasons: first, the longer we put it off, the harder it gets, as the application continues to become dependent on the current structure. Second, there are a lot of smaller tweaks and features that are getting backed up behind this larger task. As our designer put it, it’s hard to think about designing a place for a new feature when you know that it’s just going to have to change again once we add multi-user access.

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There are three basic ways people make money on the internet:

Ads: Content or a service is provided for free, an audience is attracted, and then advertisers are charged for access to that audience. Example: Google

E-commerce: Physical things (or digital goods such as software, stock photography, etc.) are purchased in a one-time transaction and shipped to the customer. Example: The Apple Store

Subscriptions: A service is provided and customers are charged for time-based access to that service. Example: Basecamp

If you’re wanting to use one of the first two models – ads or e-commerce – there are some pretty clear ways to get set up to start collecting payments. In ads, you have massive services like Google AdWords and smaller boutique setups like The Deck. If you’re selling stuff, there are a bunch of great options, such as Shopify or Ebay. And if you want to sell subscriptions, well then you can use something fantastic like… like… wait, what can you use?

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If you’re in the market for a merchant account, we’re big fans of the Merchant Account Blog. It has tons of great info and some great tools that can help you make an informed decision when shopping around for a good account to run your transactions through. A great post to start with is The processing fee is the least important one on your application!.

Have you found any good, vendor-neutral places to learn about the complex world of payment processing? Link them up in the comments – we’ll approve all of them that are clearly not shills for a given vendor.

Opening a business to the public is a lot like bringing a child in to the world: you never feel ready, you know you’re signing up for years of hard work, and in retrospect it’s so worth it. To stretch the analogy a little further it turns out having pets, i.e. being in closed beta, doesn’t really prepare you for being a parent (though it can help out a bit). All that to say that we’ve thrown the doors to Spreedly wide open! No more invite required, you can sign up and start playing with a test account at your leisure. Like what you see? Upgrade to a paying account and you’re all set to start tracking subscriptions and making real money.

At this point we’re elated, we’re scared, and we’re motivated in a new way to improve, polish, extend, simplify and generally make Spreedly the most amazing subscription management platform ever. We’ve got a task list a mile long filled with things we want to do to make the service better, and we’re especially looking forward to feedback from new clients to help us prioritize our efforts over the coming months. It’s going to be a fun ride, and we’re glad to let everybody on board!

Exciting news: one of our Spreedly early adopters is developing a WordPress plugin to allow the selling of subscription content on an existing WordPress site. It will allow anyone currently using WordPress to add a “subscription wall” that some of their content is behind, and then charge people for access to that premium content.

We’re super-excited about this development, as we believe that WordPress’ legendary ease of publishing combined with Spreedly’s simple subscription setup will enable a lot of new people to dip their toe’s in the premium content market. We’ll definitely be posting a follow-up here when an initial version of the plugin is ready!

You might look at Spreedly and think, “Wow, they’re going up against some big competitors! How will they ever survive?” But we have a secret weapon that the big companies just can’t match: we’re small and lean and can respond to our clients at a rapid rate. For instance, we’re paying close attention to the feedback we’re getting from our latest round of invitees, and while we’ve queued some requests for later, in two cases we’ve rolled out an enhancement within 24 hours of receiving the request. To give you a peek in to the process, lets walk through the timeline of one of those…

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Julian Migura of Galaxy News got in touch with the Spreedly team last week and asked if we’d do an interview with him about Spreedly, and I jumped at the opportunity. If you’re not familiar with it, Galaxy News is a major source of news and info for online game creators, especially in its German-language edition, so it was great to fill the readers in on all the Spreedly details. The best part of the interview, though, is that it’s not really gaming specific, so go have a read to get another perspective on what Spreedly’s all about.

There are lots of highs one hits when starting a new software business: settling on the name, seeing the first version up and running on the staging server, getting featured in a publication, signing investment on, and many more. But there’s one high that takes the cake in my opinion, and that’s the feeling you get once the service is real and real clients can start signing up and using it. While Spreedly has been handling subscriptions for real sites since October of last year, we’ve just sent out a batch of invites that will increase our client base 10×. Needless to say, we’re psyched!

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