This is a busy travel week for us here at Spreedly, with two of us at conferences on two different ends of the country.

John Carlin, @thejohnny on Twitter, is in San Francisco, CA for Apple’s WWDC. Look him up to chat about the optimized mobile payments interface we recently rolled out, and how you can integrate Spreedly with your native iOS apps.

Nathaniel Talbott, @ntalbott on Twitter, is in Baltimore, MD for RailsConf. You can see him on the e-commerce panel after lunch today (Tuesday), and look him up anytime to chat about using Spreedly in your web applications.

We’d love to meet you, so don’t be shy!

Almost a year ago we asked ourselves an audacious question – could we give our most enthusiastic clients an amazing deal while at the same time raising working capital to improve Spreedly? The answer was the Spreedly Kickstart and we couldn’t be more pleased to have sold 60 of them in less than twelve months. For those that don’t know, the Kickstart confers the benefits of no fixed monthly fee and half-price transaction fees, and pays for itself in saved monthly fees alone in less than three years.

But the Kickstart was always intended as an elite benefit – a “thank you” for our early adopters – and with it’s anniversary coming up this week, it’s almost time to bid it a fond farewell. This coming Thursday, May 6th, is the last day we will be offering new Spreedly Kickstarts for sale. We know that some folks have been planning to purchase a Kickstart “some day”, but if you want to get ahold of this fantastic discount on Spreedly services, this is your final opportunity.

Over the past year the Spreedly Kickstart has helped us add in a whole pile of new features and give our existing clients top-notch support, and we have some amazing things coming down the pike in the coming months. In the meantime, if you have any concerns or feedback on the discontinuation of the Kickstart or our pricing in general, please sound off in the comments or drop us an email.

Now, go give your entrepreneurial endeavors a Kickstart!

One of the great things about building a platform like Spreedly is that the possibilities are literally endless – we have a big list of great ideas for how to extend the experience, with more added every day. But of course the corresponding challenge is that we only have a limited amount of time to work on that endless list, and so we often have to leave ideas – some of them really popular – on the table. Wordpress support has long been in that “great idea, can’t work on it yet” category, with requests coming in on a regular basis for a simple, non-technical way to monetize content using Spreedly.

We’ve been hoping for awhile that someone in the community would step up and make a Spreedly Wordpress plugin a reality, and I’m happy to announce that that time has come: Luke Ehresman of Tebros Systems (one of our implementation partners) has just launched his Spreedly WordPress Plugin. It’s a supported, professional plugin that the Spreedly team has a lot of confidence in based on our long interactions with Luke. If you have an existing Wordpress blog you’d like to monetize, or if you have an idea for content you’d like to add on a subscription basis, we’d highly recommend it!

Learn about and purchase the plugin here: Spreedly Wordpress Plugin.

2010 is becoming “The Year of the Gateway” here at Spreedly HQ – we’ve just added support for two more to our already extensive line-up: RealEx and BBS Netaxept. Both of them are international gateways; RealEx is one of the largest processors in Ireland and services much of the EU as well, and Netaxept is a Norwegian gateway that covers all of the Scandinavian countries.

If you decide to use one of these gateways, let us know – we’re hoping they open Spreedly up to an even wider international audience. And don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need help setting them up, as we’re always happy to lend a hand however we can.

Back in 2005 I gave a talk at RubyConf in San Diego entitled The Railroad, Then and Now. It was about how the cost of building software continues to go down, and that as that cost approaches zero it will fundamentally change not just how software gets built, but what software gets built.

But it’s one thing to build software, and it’s another thing entirely to get paid for it. One of the chief reasons we started Spreedly over two years ago is that we wanted to make it as easy or easier to get paid for our creations as it was to create them in the first place. And so we’ve strived to build a system that is so simple that it can literally be integrated in an hour or two.

Apparently we’ve succeeded because recently Jeff Lindsay built an application in 9 hours including a subscription system leveraging Spreedly. Rather than me tell you about it, I’ll let him do that in this excellent screencast.

I hope that gets your creative juices flowing – I know it does mine! Do you have an idea for – or have you already built – a small, useful, monetizable service that Spreedly’s recurring billing system could power? We’d love to hear about it!

One of the huge benefits of using Spreedly is that it gives you negotiating power: you can shop around and find the best gateway for your needs, and you can even mix any number of gateways and use different ones for different payment methods – your customers access them all through the same unified billing interface.

Even more importantly, Spreedly allows you to switch gateways seamlessly: since Spreedly does the card storage, you don’t have to “get it right” when you’re just starting out. Instead, you can get up and running with an easy to acquire gateway, then switch to another one once you have sales volume. To give you even more options both when starting out and over the long haul, we’ve just rolled out support for three additional gateways:

• Braintree
• PaymentExpress
• Payflow Pro

This brings the number of gateways supported by Spreedly up to a whopping 13, and we hope it makes your job a bit easier as you work to find the right processor for your needs.

Don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you have any questions about getting one of these or any other gateway set up with Spreedly – we’re glad to help!

While link surfing earlier today I ran across the term “BATNA”, and while I had seen it before I couldn’t remember what it meant. A quick trip to the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement article on Wikipedia was a great refresher: when you’re negotiating, the BATNA is the alternative that the other party will go with if they don’t choose to go with you. Sometimes this is a competitor, but often it’s “the same way we’ve always done it” or “we just won’t do it” or something similar. Part of successfully negotiating is discovering what the other party’s BATNA is and realizing that you have to beat it to win the deal. Keeping the BATNA in mind can also help you ensure a win-win outcome to the negotiations.

What does this have to do with selling services? Well, you need to think about the BATNA your potential customers have in mind when they’re reviewing your service. Is it one of your competitors? Doing it on their own? Not doing it at all? What are you offering them that makes your service better than their best alternative? How are you convincing them of that extra value?

I don’t know about your service, but when I think about Spreedly in these terms, I realize we have a lot of work to do. Folks who are interested in our service always have alternatives in mind, and while in almost all cases we beat those alternatives hands down, that’s not necessarily easy to figure out. For instance, many folks figure they’ll just use their gateways recurring billing service to handle their subscribers, and before Spreedly came along that was often the best alternative. Spreedly, though, has multiple advantages over gateway-based recurring billing; multiple gateway support, a usable UI, and quicker integration to name three. But we don’t currently do a good job of making that value-add clear.

What BATNA’s do your prospective customers typically have in mind? What techniques have you found effective for presenting your service as superior?

One of the things you have to do constantly when working on a product over the long haul is update your outdated legacy assumptions. One of those assumptions in the early days of Spreedly was that there wasn’t anything terribly sensitive shown on the subscribe page, so it didn’t have to be authenticated to a particular subscriber. Even if we pre-filled it with data, the most anyone would see is someone else’s name. Also, was a miscreant really going to pony up their credit card in order to buy someone else a subscription? <sarcasm>That would just be so mean!</sarcasm>

But when we originally made that decision it was before we collected a subscriber’s email (a long time ago!). There is a privacy concern with emails leaking if someone figures out another user’s Spreedly customer id. Also, what about when we do start to pre-fill credit card data, i.e. allow someone to upgrade/downgrade without re-entering their details? Since we plan on adding that ability soon, we knew we had to tighten up the subscribe page’s security.

At the same time, we didn’t want to complicate getting started with Spreedly, and we didn’t want to break everyone currently using it. The subscribe url as it is today is still a great solution so long as no data is pre-filled. So here’s what we came up with:

If you’re in the European Union, we have some exciting news for you: Spreedly now supports the Iridium Payment Gateway! Iridium was originally requested by a Spreedly client in Spain, but it’s also an option in the UK and some of the other EU countries as well. Integration is simple, and we even have a full Setup Guide to walk you through the process once you have your credentials.

Iridium makes the ninth payment gateway supported by Spreedly (the full list is here) and there are more to come!

Did you know that Spreedly tracks a “credit” amount for each subscriber? This internal account is critical to our pro-rating process, but it has a lot of uses beyond that. It’s a great way to give someone a discount on future service when they’re already a subscriber – just go into the UI, add $30 of credit, and it will get automatically applied to the subscriber’s next invoice.

Until now you’ve only been able to add credit via the UI, but we just rolled out the ability to add a credit via the API. This opens up a whole new set of possibilities, as now you can implement automated incentives and rewards for your subscribers. A few ideas:

• Hook it into an affiliate system and automatically give subscribers store credit when they sign up a friend.
• Hand out coupon codes and put a box on your account page that lets a subscriber apply a code and get a credit. Spreedly will support this in-system eventually, but why wait on us?
• If you have a system outage (oops!) write a little job that gives everyone affected a $5 credit. That’s the sort of service that turns customers into fanatics.

What other ideas do you have for leveraging the Add Credit API?

We have a small new feature for you today, or rather a new way to access an old feature. Spreedly’s long had the ability from the admin UI to add lifetime complimentary subscriptions, allowing you to give your family, friends, and biggest supporters free access forever. I just checked, and this feature has been used hundreds of times since we first launched it.

But as so often happens, we release something and our clients – all of you! – think of uses we’d never even dreamed of. In particular a lot of folks have wanted to track all their users in Spreedly, not just the paying ones, and a lifetime comp with a feature level of “free” seemed like a nice simple way of doing that. But since it wasn’t possible to add lifetime comps via the API, it wasn’t a workable solution.

That is, until now: check out the documentation for the new Lifetime Comp API and let us know what you think. We’re betting there are even more uses for it that we haven’t thought of yet, and we’re waiting for you to tell us about them.

This is a specific example of a general process we try to follow: work to add general purpose tools and then see how clients use them. Learn from that and tweak the tools to be even better. Rinse, repeat. And of course what makes it work is the amazing feedback we get from all of you – keep it coming!

It’s pretty amazing when you slip a new feature in, and before you even announce it, you see that it has already been used over a dozen times. So it is with in-Spreedly refunds, the latest feature we’ve rolled out to help you as you interact with your customers. Using this new feature you can refund your customers from right within the Spreedly interface, making it easier than ever to turn a disgruntled customer into a fanatic customer.

We went ahead and recorded a quick screencast to walk you through it:

(FYI, this is raw and uncut, so you’ll probably notice an incorrect flash message about half way through. It’s already been fixed in production.)

The folks over at Creately recently ran an experiment to help them figure out how to price their service. In it, they allowed customers to choose their own price – from $1 all the way up to $100 – and used the data from the experiment to validate and set their ongoing prices. This is really similar to the pick your price setup that Radiohead did for their 2007 album, but Creately is a recurring service rather than a single purchase product.

Of particular interest to me in the context of Spreedly was this quote:

Another very interesting point that stood out from our experiment is the difficulties that so many of our users faced with completing their subscriptions with PayPal. The complaint emails as well as large percentage of abandoned transactions – forced us to work on alternate payment methods.

While Spreedly doesn’t currently support a “pay what you want” plan, we’ve already seen a need for ad-hoc plans, and hearing about this experiment makes them all the more interesting. We definitely want to give you the tools to experiment with your billing, and this could be a really powerful one. Look for more on this topic in 2010.

In the meantime, definitely check out Creately’s experiment, and let us know if you’ve heard of other good ways for subscription businesses to experiment with pricing.

One of the most important tasks I (Nathaniel) handle at Spreedly is pre-sales and customer support. It’s critical that I am the one handling it at this point in Spreedly’s life for two reasons: first, because awesome customer support is core to Spreedly as a business, so as CEO I am setting the long-term tone and putting in place the procedures that will make it great over the long haul. And second, since I’m responsible for making sure Spreedly as a business has a clear and coherent vision and direction, being in constant contact with customers helps me stay very aware of where we’re at and where we need to go.

But if customer support is one of the most important tasks I handle, it’s also one of the hardest, but not for the reasons you might think. I don’t mind the time, or the occasional complaint, or researching the various questions we get. What I find really hard is when someone asks for something that I know Spreedly needs, but that we’re just not able to roll out yet. As a founder of Spreedly, I feel the inadequacies in it strongly, much more strongly than I had ever imagined before getting to this point. When those inadequacies get pointed out, saying “I know, that would be awesome, but no we don’t have it yet and we won’t for a while,” is really hard.

When 37signals tells us to Start with No, what they fail to mention is just how hard it can be to do so. But better to say “no” than to make false promises and let people down. So I shall continue to persevere, and now you know that when I say “no” to something you ask for, I probably want it even more than you do!

Equal partnerships are hard to make work. I’ve seen them fail even when the most easy-going, non-demanding people are involved. But the benefits of having co-founders are huge: moral support, complementary skill sets, high levels of commitment, etc. So how do you bring cofounders in without getting stuck in a bad situation?

Before we can fix them, we have to at least have a theory on why equal partnerships fail so often. There are lots of opinions about it; here’s mine: I think equal partnerships (50/50, thirds, quarters, etc.) often end in unresolvable conflict because the buck doesn’t stop at anyone’s desk. It’s not so much a rights thing as it is a responsibility thing: who’s ultimately responsible for resolving disputes, providing focus, and making the business successful? Of course everyone has a part in each of those things, but when there’s a disagreement, who takes responsibility not just for resolving it but also for the results?