For those that don’t know yet, the startup is a subscription coffee service. We source the finest ‘single-estate’ coffees from around the world and deliver them to our subscribers each month. It’s for people that, when confronted by the rows of coffee on the supermarket shelves, always go for the same old stuff but want to branch out and don’t know where to go or what to look for.

We’ve got an initial sign up page capturing email addresses of interested parties to alert them when we go live. www.kopi.co.uk Using our joint networks, which has worked work out really well for us – thanks everyone, we’ve managed multiple hundreds of expressions of interest. The hard thing is to convert those people into paying subscribers.

The biggest headache in this first month has been packaging. There are certain things that we just cannot get way from but also things that we want to do to ensure we give our customers as ‘Gucci’ an experience as possible.

The things that are fixed:

• We’re selling 250g of coffee
• Coffee really does have to be packaged in foil. No getting away from it, it’s the only way to deliver it fresh.
• The foil bag has to have a valve to let the carbon dioxide – that the beans give off after roasting – escape.
• Because of our low volumes (hopefully only in the short term) we have to have a standard bag. Producing our own bespoke bag would be prohibitively expensive at this stage.
• We need to be able to get this bag through a letterbox. We don’t want people having to trot off down their local Royal Mail sorting office to pick up coffee each month. Where’s the convenience in that?

The things that are variable:

• What do we put this bag in to deliver it to the customer? Personally I hate jiffy bags. They’re perfectly functional and all that but they’re not very premium. Cardboard box? Yes, but can we get it thin enough to hold the coffee and go through a letter box?

This last point has been the most difficult thing to work out. I haven’t quite done a James ’5000 prototypes’ Dyson job but I have been ordering all sorts of boxes from suppliers across the country. I even broke out the metal rule and scalpel yesterday to fashion, what I believe, is the right answer to the question. At least for now.

Other things on my mind?

• Leaflet insert design
• Label design
• Copy writing
• Designing the site
• Launching an extreme beta version of the site to start gathering credit card details for our first delivery.

There’s probably more stuff, but that’ll do for now.

It has been, and continues to be, an incredible ride. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Oh yeah, one last thing. Did you know coffee is zero-rated for VAT? That’s going to make it a little cheaper for you all.

You read so many stories about people giving it all up to follow their dream. Well, this isn’t really one of those stories.

It’s more by a strange twist of fate that I left my job at the agency Made by Many last Friday and am now sat here in the late summer London sun with no salary and no office.

I met my business partner two or three years ago whilst freelancing in a shared office space on Greek street in Soho. We did some small pieces of work together and stayed in touch after I joined Made by Many in June 2009.

18 months ago he asked if I would like to be part of his last startup but the timing wasn’t right. I was in the process of moving house, sorting mortgages and embedding myself in Made by Many. Fast forward to a couple of months ago and Phil asked me if I wanted to be a part of his latest idea. This time it felt right. The idea instantly made sense to me and I wanted to be a part of it. Also, after 12 years of agency life I felt it was time for a change; to (part) own my own ‘thing’ and witness the other side of the internet industry away from client services.

I’m excited and scared in equal measure with a renewed enthusiasm for the work I do.

The next few months are going to be interesting.

Let me explain.

I have a theory. If there is an important event that the piece of work needs to be completed for then the deadline will be hit. Take the printing of an annual report. It absolutely, definitely, no-questions-asked has to go out on time. All nighters are timesheeted. Everyone from the agency account junior to the receptionist is called in to proof-read. All the stops are pulled out to hit the deadline.

Then there are the other types of deadline. The arbitrary ones that are plucked out of thin air when someone makes a finger in the breeze estimation and sets a date with a pin in the calendar. These nearly always get missed. There’s no urgency. No reason why a manager can’t just push the launch date back a week or two. After all, no one has to make any compromises or sacrifices of features, functionality or ‘completeness’. There’s always more time to ‘make it a little bit better’. To keep tinkering.

What’s to loose? Nothing, apart from team morale, enthusiasm and work quality.

Beware the project with the arbitrary deadline.

I’m also going to use the move as an excuse to broaden the remit of this blog beyond simply design. You see, I’m not a very good writer. Blog posts are hard to do, let alone maintain the habit for any length of time. As I blog on my employer’s site www.madebymany.co.uk about all things design and digital I’m a bit short of time / inspiration to keep this blog talking about design as well.

So, reset your bookmarks to http://blog.simonianson.co.uk and let’s see where it takes us.

Update: 6 December 2010

Change of plan. Over at www.simonianson.co.uk/blog you can find a blog about cycling. This blog will stay here for the foreseeable. I might get round to writing more stuff though.

A simple answer to a simple question. Is Gordon Brown still Prime Minister?

I’ve found this many times when interviewing designers. Lots of style over substance and surface gloss. An impressive portfolio of expertly executed Photoshop effects but lacking when it comes to reasoning, process, rigorous thought or any of the other traits or skills that mark a true designer out from the stylists. Anyway, enough from me, I’ll leave it to Eric and his post - Drones at the karaoke lounge of design.

“The newest design blogs are particularly telling of this as they largely seem to concentrate on a steady-stream of eye-candy and visual masturbation. Seemingly, the past year has played host to the superseding of actual writing and reflection on design to vapid graphical lists like “25 Great Green Websites”. Easy to create, bookmark, and subsequently mimic, it’s as though we’ve collectively walked into the great karaoke lounge of design–all of it somehow comforting but unlikely to result in anything of substance.”

I talked last October about wanting to search out the new, the innovative and the exciting. At the time I felt I was being ground down by the ordinary. Creating marketing sites for average companies wasn’t, and indeed isn’t, what I wanted to do.

I’ve spent the last seven months doing all sorts of things. I’ve written some HTML, done a bit of affiliate marketing, done IA wireframing work for clients, sharpened my knowledge of PPC and a whole host of other things – including some service design. And I’ve loved every minute of it.

Over the last couple of months, however, I’ve been spending more and more time with a group of people who are doing some extraordinary things with technology and creative in the digital space. The more time I spent working with them, the more I realised their approach and ideas were very well aligned with how I felt a digital agency should be both structured and run. It was a very comfortable fit for both of us.

As such, the approach to take up a permanent position at Made By Many came a few months ago and I’m pleased to announce that I accepted at the end of last month.

Made By Many don’t do websites in the traditional sense. They build platforms, utilities and services. They use creative and sketching to articulate complexity and build services in whatever technology is appropriate using agile process. (I should mention at this point that the founding partners of Made By Many have been colleagues historically / friends for years.)

It’s a very big position and what I hope will turn out be a tremendously exciting opportunity. I’m already ensconced and working on a whole suite of services in the youth volunteering sector. But more on that at another time.

In the future, you’ll be able to see me blogging over on www.madebymany.co.uk though I’ll still pop up here from time to time.

Historically, I’ve always felt that the conference never gave any answers to the question its name poses. But, as I’ve blogged before, it didn’t really matter because there were often very useful and insightful presentations from very talented practitioners and speakers. That was enough to keep me going back wanting more year after year.

This time round, however, I didn’t feel that I got anything of true substance out of the conference. With a few notable exceptions the presentations lacked any depth or insight and on a couple of occasions the future of web design turned into a history lesson with a couple of (well known and respected) speakers delivering retrospectives on their work from the last decade. Not good enough. We attend these conferences to hear some gems of insight into what these guys and girls, who are supposedly at the top of their game, think the future will hold or at least what direction it’s heading. I’m not talking about crystal ball gazing, but a few ideas about emerging trends would slake the audience’s thirst which is derived from the very title of the conference.

In a whole eight hours of presentations not one person mentioned ideas around designing sites and services from APIs and open data. Nothing about designing for UGC. Nothing about service or utility design. Nothing about designing apps for the Air of Silverlight platform. These challenges are the future of web design. This is what’s happening out there in the wild but it seems that the very conference whose job it is to address these issues is failing. There was one presentation about designing on projects using agile methodologies which didn’t get nearly enough stage time and was levered into a dead space early on in the conference. Too many of the presentations seemed very lightweight with little substance or evidence.

Having said all that, there were a couple of notable exceptions – presentations which exhibited a great deal of preparation on the part of the speaker. Mark Boulton‘s talk on web typography was knowledgeable, insightful and he showed feeling, passion and opinion towards his subject matter. Molly Holzschlag, similarly, displayed great passion about web standards, but did drift towards web development. And Robin Christopherson gave a superb demonstration of the frustrations of browsing the web with a screen reader.

But these were scant compensation for the failings of the rest of the conference. And judging by my Twitter search stream at the time (#FOWD) and retweets of my own comments, there were genuine pockets of disappointment around the room throughout the day.

How to mend this broken conference? Well, better briefing of the speakers would help. Allowing them to present a re-hashed agency creds. presentation is lamentable. And, if you get a print designer to talk to a room full of digital folk they better have something really interesting to say and not just hide behind some nicely designed slides.

If this conference is to work long-term then I feel they should get the direction right or change the name. The web is a tremendously exciting place to be working at the moment with an incredibly exciting future. We have the conference to celebrate this. What we seem to be lacking are the speakers.

I was eating with two work colleagues and, being the gannet that I am, I finished first so was sat chatting and waiting while they finished. On seeing this, one of the waiting staff brought me over a complimentary glass of mint tea.

And when my friends had finished they each got a glass too so as not to feel left out.

The cost of doing this is negligible. But it shows a great commitment to quality customer service and left me feeling as though they valued my custom.

As Apple’s Steve Jobs says, it’s about the total end-to-end experience. Having a great product that people want is one thing but making it a great experience to buy the product, use the product and a pleasurable follow-up service is what makes companies stand out. And in this market, coupled with the highly competitive landscape of central Soho at lunch, Hummus Bros. deserve to do well.