Creating a new product: betaworks Studios
This is a piece about how I went from making software to building a physical space from scratch. The real estate shenanigans, the architects, the whole nine yards.
We’re trying something new. Having built software for the last ten years we are launching a new physical space, a club that celebrates builders. Betaworks Studios will launch in Spring. You can read all the official stuff on Fast Co, Tech Crunch, PSFK and Business Insider — but I thought it might be fun to go into the creative process a little.
The Idea.
I’m not exactly sure when we first started thinking about this. John our CEO has many, many, many, thoughts swirling around in his head. I remember going to a board meeting in January of 2017 and talking about two ideas: Studios (or Workshops as it was first called) and a crazy live VR thing. The board said go ahead with both. We soon dropped the VR thing.
Here we are, roughly a year later, and we are launching. If this was a software product, one of our normal betas, that would be criminally slow. But this is real. Real estate is real. Really real.
Along the way we have partnered with some great people. Early on we did a quick workshop with IDEO. Even though we had made the strategic breakthrough on the product idea— a drop-in space that brings together the betaworks community and somehow productizes the magic — we thought it would be good to get some outside counsel.
Being an ex advertising creative director and all the ego bullshit that goes with that, I’m sometimes reluctant to get other ‘agency’ people involved. Can’t help it! But the older I get the more I know this is the only way forward. We worked with Paul Bennett and his team — just for a few days — but it was great. We talked about shit. We did post-it notes, we wrote some words, ripped up magazines and we ended up with eight principles. Even though they were written last summer and A LOT (holy shit, so much) has changed since then, the principles have remained the same.
A strategic breakthrough
As a creative you know there are some days when you just get it. You have an aha moment. One of the things that we always talked about when working on Studios was WeWork. Even though we said from day one that Studios would not be a co-working space, WeWork is so omnipresent that any conversation around this topic always includes some reference. In early investor meetings people said, ‘Oh but isn’t there a WeWork in Meatpacking and Chelsea?’ We had meetings about the WW problem. But then one day we figured it out. WeWork is not a competitor — it’s actually a feeder.
The more people spend more time in WeWorks (or any other co-working rathole — did I say rathole? I meant something less controversial, umm space?) — the more they need something like Studios. As people leave traditional offices, with their water coolers and sense of community and stability — perceived or not — the more they need to find their tribe. I know tribe is a weird word, but it’s true. Go with it. By all means do your 9–5 work at WeWork, then come to Studios for an inspiration break. Come for some magic. If WeWork is your cubicle, Studios is your water cooler.
The Language
A club that celebrates builders.
I know there are so many things wrong with this line. It raises problems. Our PR agency hates me! But if it was easy it would be easy. The difficulties provide us with opportunities.
Clubs are seen as exclusive and elitist. Doesn’t tech already suffer from that? And WTF is a builder? Betaworks has always walked a fine line between exclusivity and inclusivity. We are exclusive in that we want the best thinkers, makers, people who can genuinely build great things — and those people are few. But if you are one these people then it doesn’t matter what sex you are, race, age, religion you are welcomed into our community. When I think about the sorts of products we have made over the years, GIPHY, Bitly, TweetDeck, Dots, Digg, Instapaper, Poncho — these are all products of diverse minds. I don’t think they could have happened any other way.
And builders? As technology changes the world, we believe the ability to ‘build’ becomes paramount to future-proofing yourself. Building might mean being a coder, but it’s equally applicable to someone building a team at a fortune 500 company. Building is just as much a mindset as a skillset.
We know we will have been successful if people rethink what a club can be and if the language of builders becomes commonplace.
The best way to understand new technology is to build something for it. When we were investing in a lot of podcasting and audio companies we built our podcast, The Intern. Having released eight episodes I was so much clearer on everything surrounding the ecosystem, including data, metrics, advertising, sharing audio content, as well as all the technical difficulties of editing audio. You can read a million articles but you’ll get better by building.
The Design Process.
Dom and I worked on names and logos for the new company for a while. We had a break, then went at it again. We went through a ton of names and designs. As mentioned above we spent some time on Workshops as a name.
We liked the idea of a workshop because it had that ‘builder’ element to it. And we had thought for a long time that we might have an open coffee shop to the public. So we played with some logos:
Obviously the work part of betaworks was a big consideration here. But it was a bit clumsy saying work instead of works. So then we hit upon this:
We noodled with this for a while until Gerry Laybourne told us to stop trying to be so clever. We had to use the name betaworks in the product name. Note to Self: Listen to Gerry, she’s pretty much always right.
Based on that we went back to the drawing board. Often the best ideas are staring you in the face. You have to get out of your own way. We had always called betaworks a studio. This was based on the idea of a film studio or a record studio producing hits. Remember, John, set up betaworks to create the conditions for sustained innovation, not just one offs. So we settled on betaworks Studios. The relationship between betaworks the mothership and Studios the public facing product will emerge over time. I’m sure people will say, ‘I learn’t about blockchain at betaworks, Santa Monica’, or ‘did you hear, betaworks opened in Berlin?’ rather than Studios but I’m ok with that.
On to the actual design for Studios. It has the elements of betaworks that I like. The in-beta implication, that it’s not finished. It is not entirely clear what it is at first glance, you need to add a little yourself. It has a Bauhaus feel to it that feels different — but not entirely alien — to similar spaces.
In my head I see the ‘S’ of studios becoming something important. We’ll see. It has strength and simplicity, so if we can execute on an amazing space then the ‘S’ can be the recognizable graphical element of Studios. Like everyone else, I’m just going to copy Supreme and try to get some cool collabs going. Look out for some crazy iterations of the S soon.
Illustrations.
One of the things I said from the start about our space is that I didn’t want to get into a war of who has the best chair. What I mean by that is there are all these amazing member clubs and cool offices that spend a shit-load of money on nice chairs. But if you’re coming to Studios because we have nice chairs then you are missing the point. We will have nice chairs. We have a partnership with Knoll (got a discount, hit me up if you need) but our focus is on the events, the community and how the space will make you become a better builder.
This focus informed how we thought about imagery. Again, there are lots of member clubs, hangout spaces with pictures of nice chairs. Alma, created by my friend Fredrik Calstrom, is one of the only ones that doesn’t go down that route. And they have REALLY nice chairs, so that must have been incredibly tempting.
Enter the Shu.
So, no chairs and no crappy stock photos of people hanging out. But we do want to show people hanging out. Enter Shu. I first saw the above image on Ello. I purposefully never look at dribble or any of the other ‘portfolio’ sites. I don’t even know why I look at Ello. I think I joined when it first got going and now I get an email once a day with some interesting imagery that I mainly keep for presentation decks. Shu’s image of two people connecting, but not in an obvious sense was one of those images I saved without knowing why. When we started thinking about imagery I went into my ‘cool pics’ folder and made a mood board of about 30. This one always made the cut. All you design nerds will howl at the Millennial Pink but in the context of a new tech space, it’s pretty different.
I contacted Shu and asked if he was up for doing some illustrations for our new brand. Then things got fun. I thought Shu was a professional illustrator, but he’s just a kid! He won’t thank me for saying that, but he’s still in college studying interaction design at Sheriden in Toronto. He was born in Pakistan but spent most of his childhood in Canada. He had never done any paid for work. He would send stuff through at random times or go quiet for days on end — all because he was actually going to class. Or putting the trash out ;-)
But look at these images. There is a sophistication — both in terms of technique, but also subject matter, that totally belies Shu’s age (he’s now 24). I love them. But I also love that we got out of our network to find talent. It would have been incredibly easy to call up friends and get famous people to do this, but we didn’t. Maybe we got lucky, but I don’t think so. If you look hard enough, talk to people and then trust them they can constantly surprise you. I never had to say to Shu that the images should be appealing to both women and men. He just got that. The same thing happened with Allison who made the podcast with us. That was her first gig, but she made very grown up decisions. She’s now making her own show and holding down senior producer gigs.
As a creative director if you can’t get excited about finding young talent and helping them blossom then you’re in the wrong job. That’s the buzz. Not winning some meaningless award.
The first public expression of all of the above is a little book we printed. Some layouts below. Give me a shout if you would like a copy.
That’s the first part of the brand story for Studios. There is much more to come as we finish construction. I’ll do another update around the space, our architects and some the events that we have coming up.
Stay tuned and hopefully see you in Studios when we open in April.
James — March 2018
