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Ink Interview: Stefan Magdalinski [MOO.com]
Daily Ink
Stored in: Interviews
Posted On: October 16 2006
By: Bryan Partington
Photo © Richard Moross
A couple of weeks ago we posted about moo.com and their free mini card promotion for flickr pro users.
The promotion is over now and the dust has settled somewhat, so what better time to have a little chat with the folks whose website proclaims "We love the web but you can't put it in your pocket"?
To get a handle on the service's inner workings we asked Stefan Magdalinski, moo.com's Chief Technical Officer, a whole lotta' questions. He obliged us with a whole lotta' answers.. some were very long, others were very short.. but all were very good.
Hear now the voice of Moo!
Why "Moo"?
That's a good question.
The cards have a very distinctive shape, very much unlike that of a traditional business card. Why did you go with such a unique design?
Minicards are business cards for people who don't carry business cards. They're more social, friendlier, more fun. When we did some testing with prototypes that were business card shaped, we got some interesting feedback - people instinctively felt that they were too corporate, so we changed it. The exact size and shape they are now (28mm x 70mm) are also at the sweet spot of efficiency for our printing technology.
I've received some printed cards, and they're of really impressive quality. What's the workflow and technology involved in the printing and ordering process? How have you dealt with the intense demand generated by the free sample card offer?
Firstly, thanks!
After people have chosen their cards, and placed their order, we have a background process that pulls the hi-res images down, and combines large numbers of orders together into a massive pdf, that we then send to the printer. We've refined it quite a lot, and now we're doing volume, the gap between ordering and printing can be as low as a couple of minutes.
This actually creates a customer service issue - users decide they want to change a detail, which we're happy to do *until* the cards have been rendered and printed. We're going to introduce a cooling-off period to allow users some time to make changes, but still hit well within our shipping window.
The free card offer:
We didn't really have any good estimates of how quickly the 10 pack would go, but we certainly didn't expect to get boingboinged and so massively blogged on the first day. I think internally we expected it to take about a month, and in actuality it took less than 5 days.
It was hairy at times, and the site slow at first. This was because of poor optimization rather than hardware capacity. Over the course of the first day I estimate we increased capacity 1000 fold. We'd fix a bottleneck and the traffic would shoot up and then plateau again. Then we'd go hunting for the new bottleneck.
There's a load-testing problem when you're building systems that depend on APIs, and especially when those systems are authenticated. The worst performance bug we had would not have been revealed by *any* performance testing we could have done with a limited set of users, only when we had thousands of authenticated users on the site. Luckily it was an easy fix.
The real headache was not software, but when we had to sort, pack and ship our first 8,000 orders over a weekend. The first time round, we wanted to do everything ourselves, so as to fully understand (and hence, later, optimize) the process. In the end, we fell back on old tech to solve the problem: friends, family and pizza.
How have people been creative with their sample ten packs? How have people been working with the panoramic crop?
The response in the flickr group has been astonishing:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/moo/pool/
Again, we tested a lot to ensure that the default crop size and position would make most photos look great. Some people have been trying to take pictures especially for the format, but we generally hope that people shouldn't have to. We want to make everyone feel like a designer, that they've created something beautiful, effortlessly.
Do people tend to print out their best photographs or images that work in series? Have there been any unexpected image selections?
Our office is a former TV studio space that has a huge projection wall at one end, so we project the order stream as it comes in. The thing that has totally blown me away is the sheer quality of the flickr community's photography. I would say that in the first few days, more than 99% of the images were not just good, but *great* shots.
The two most popular subjects, without doubt, are kittens, closely followed by babies.
Somebody did a set of closeups of dead rats. That looked great projected 12ft tall.
What do you like most about Moo.com?
That we've made something (that could have been) very complicated, very simple.
Otherwise, in Interviews:
- Previously: Ink Interview: The Magic Donkey
- Next: Ink Interview - Squishyface!
Utata Ink is a daily publication edited by Bryan Partington (striatic). Photos used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and obtained via the flickr API unless otherwise noted. To make a contribution to Ink, please visit Ink Me.
