Dave Concannon

It's been about twenty years since I first met Eoin Ryan, the artist behind Space Avalanche. While spreading the news of his latest Batman-themed comic everywhere and anywhere I can think of, an odd thought struck me - The reason we first met and eventually became friends was Batman.

Twenty years ago I was five feet tall and had an outrageous twang to my voice as a result of six years of American schooling in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Apart from the desert heat, great sports fields, and pools, Jeddah was fantastic for it's imported technology at bargain prices, and access to freely pirated music and movies from Asian countries. This meant that I found myself in a small Irish town with access to the summer's biggest blockbuster several months before it would appear in Irish cinemas - Tim Burton's original Batman. Not a bad bargaining chip for a fish-out-of-water twelve year old in a new school in a country he didn't really remember very well.

Long story short, Eoin hatched a totally transparent plot to make friends based entirely on the fact that he'd be able to watch Batman before everyone else in the country. Minor disagreements aside, we've been good friends ever since.

Twenty years down the line, we've been working on this web comic nonsense as a bit of a labor of love in our spare time. Eoin does the creative bit, and I play the part of the town crier who moonlights fixing webservers. In the meantime we've been nominated for the Irish Web Awards, made the front pages of Digg and Reddit, and become rich and famous. What have we learned in the process?

Well, mainly that it's bloody hard work. In a later post I'll go into the various ways we've tried to spread the word and how it's affected our traffic.

I've been living in Berkeley for about a month now, and have passed by one particular pizza restaurant a few dozen times but never gone in. Why? Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights there are lines from the door of this restaurant back to the start of the block. Eventually we decided that the food must be good enough to hang around in a queue for a while and after hearing a few recommendations from friends we decided to check it out.

This particular restaurant puts on a jazz band, so the wait wasn't going to be too terrible. There must have been 25 people in the queue when we joined. How long did it take to get our pizza?

About 4 minutes.

A restaurant this popular has to have dozens pizza toppings, right? How many different types of pizza were there on the menu?

One.

By focusing on creating one style of pizza a day, this restaurant succeeds in being able to rapidly produce delicious food that people will queue around the block for. People sometimes come as much for the jazz band as they do for the pizza - after collecting their box they'll sit on the street median eating pizza and listening to jazz. It's not uncommon on a Saturday evening to see dozens of people sitting out.   That they can focus on creating this one type of pizza means the queue moves rapidly. Also, they only accept cash, and the pizza is priced to be easy to manage - 10 dollars for half a pizza, 20 dollars for a full one. Perhaps slightly more expensive than your standard pizza, but how did it taste?

Amazing

If you care about the software you write, then you've read "Getting Real" by 37signals. Think of this pizza restaurant the next time you're creating software - Build less, but make the "less" amazing. Your customers will love you, and if you get it right they might just queue around the block.