- Carv's Thinky Blog - http://christiancarvajal.com -

Thinking Locally, Selling Globally

So I was eating lunch with a friend of mine--Kitzel's corned beef, delicious--when my friend mentioned a company called MerchantOS. Ever heard of it? If you're looking for a "No" button to click, don't bother; I assume you haven't. That's because the company is based in Olympia, Washington, and I live in Olympia, Washington, and I'd never heard of it until just that moment. A search of the Olympian newspaper's website reveals exactly three references to MerchantOS, all in reference to a college startup workshop the company supported and attended. MerchantOS has one of those generic names that could refer to an open source Windows 7 competitor or, just as easily, a Russian Mafia front. In fact, one must scan its "About" page to learn the company has already handled a billion U.S. dollars in business transactions.

Uhh, excuse me? Say what?

See, that gets my attention. Now, most of you aren't fortunate enough to live in Olympia, so I should tell you a bit about our disgustingly livable environs. (I dig that word, "livable," by the way, as if the less "livable" city of Houston, Texas were slathered in poisonous gas. Which, let's face it, it kind of is.) Olympia is our state capital, a college town full of highly educated, mostly liberal people. Education doesn't always enjoy a one-to-one correspondence with intelligence, but in our case, it usually does. What we loosely call Oly is really four small towns: the west and east side of Olympia proper, the eastern workaday community of Lacey, and the southern, decidedly middle-class Tumwater (where my wife and I happily reside). Together, they contain about a hundred thousand citizens. We enjoy a somewhat bohemian reputation, thanks to a mostly defunct brand of beer, the Evergreen State College (aka Berkeley North), and our place in rock history as the birthplace of grunge and its distaff cousin, the riot grrl movement. Things you expect to find in Oly: sleeve tattoos, deep-fried vegan burritos, "Coexist" bumper stickers, and people who smell like Woody Harrelson's man-cave. Things you don't expect to find in Oly: haut cuisine, Rick Santorum, and multimillion-dollar business security outfits.

MerchantOS created and sells an online service for handling POS (point of sale) transactions. For about fifty bucks a month, each card-swipe transaction handled by a small business is processed over an Internet-based service that also keeps track of purchase orders, inventory, daily batches--all those boring essentials. It's a pretty nifty way of solving a variety of everyday problems, and while online POS may not be as sexy as Near Field Communications or Google+ (ah, Google+, you were cool for a week), MerchantOS has attracted a surprising flow of dinero in less than a decade. It was started in 2004 by Ivan Stanojevic and Justin Laing, two San Jose bicycle geeks who set out to code a POS program specifically for bike shops, including their own. The product worked so well that it escaped into the wide world of small businesses, so MerchantOS set up a full-time operation here in Thurston County, staffed largely by idealistic young Evergreen alumni. But don't be fooled! For an unpretentious company you'd need GPS to find, MerchantOS is surprisingly secure: its defensive protocols include 128-bit encryption, Level III explosion resistance (take that, Hans Gruber!), and what the company website calls "multiple mantraps"...which are really just hardened airlocks, but sound awesomely like pits full of Malay curare spears, or perhaps giant rolling boulders to chase intruders from the server farm.

Now, if you happen to be someone who runs a small business--say, a bike shop with half a dozen employees--you might desperately need a POS transaction system, but know relatively little about POS transactions. It may surprise you to learn, for example, that there are dozens of vendors offering POS software, the best-known being the impersonal software giant QuickBooks. A company called Imonggo offers a web-based POS system free, and with very high ratings. MerchantOS, like many of these companies, succeeded by targeting a specific niche first (in this case, small bike shops). Soon, however, thinking locally morphed into selling globally. The free edition of Imonggo, while certainly first-rate, has some significant limitations: it can only handle one store with less than a thousand product items, it doesn't offer tech support by email, and vendors are unable to download sales data to their in-store computers. These features are available in Imonggo's Premium edition, but its cost is comparable to MerchantOS's standard cost per month.

What MerchantOS sells first and foremost is a quality product, but it does so by conveying the scrappy, idiosyncratic personality of Olympia at every level of service. Local flavor is all over the company website, from pictures of its founders' vacations to mild profanity to beer pong at the office Christmas party. Don't get me wrong, the MerchantOS product itself is entirely professional, but potential clients get a feel for the people--not just the product--they'll be working with. When vendors sign on with MerchantOS, they don't feel like they're buying a boring Firefox add-on and getting a generic product and email receipt; rather, they're forming a relationship with Ivan and Justin and the whole support staff on a personal, multidimensional, first-name level. Not every small business owner runs a bike shop or even owns a bike, but potential customers learn Ivan and Justin ran their own small business so they know what vendors need. When you scan the About page on Imonggo's site, by contrast, pretty much all you get is a stamp-sized PNG of a featureless office building in the Philippines. Yikes.

It occurs to me that MerchantOS is a web-based service that greets the world by using a web-informed approach. The company has a personality that's been crafted for Internet social conventions. Twenty-first-century customers respond positively to quirky, individual elements that would've seemed unprofessional in the old business model and atmosphere. This actually hearkens back to a pre-corporate mentality, when the local barber was a hit because a.) he cut hair professionally and b.) (this is just as important!) he told wonderfully off-color fishing stories. I may not be able to get my hair cut by a charismatic barber in Trenton, New Jersey--I'd need a true local business for that particular service--but cool vendors in Trenton can buy quality, scalable transaction services from two laid-back dudes in Olympia. The day will come, I think, when we all need and expect every vendor we do business with, for any service or product at all, to feel like our "friend" via Internet social media. I can tell you from trying to sell my novel that the only way to interest potential readers (aka buyers) in a no-name, first-time author was to put my individuality out there. It's not about becoming a name brand. It's about establishing a relatable identity. If I told a few bad jokes and put my book in someone's hand, chances are, that person would decide whether to buy my product based on what they knew about me. Not my publisher...not my credentials...not even my product (which, after all, he or she hadn't read yet)...but me. You can offer the best product in the world, but trust me, someone out there has a product very nearly as good. If you're reading my site, you should be reading hundreds of other authors whose books are comparable, perhaps even (dare I say it?) superior to mine. But you read me first. Why? Because, whether you like everything about me or not, you have a feel for who I am. I suspect that's how every product will be sold in the brave new web-life world.

The greatest benefit of all this is that nothing has a necessary, inflexible center anymore. "Things fall apart," Yeats wrote, "the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...Surely some revelation is at hand." The poet wrote these lines in 1919 to commemorate the War to End All Wars (sigh), but they apply more happily to the Internet Age. Thanks to digital technology, one needn't be Spielberg or even an L.A.-based slicko to be the auteur of a visual effects movie. Peter Jackson works out of distant Wellington, New Zealand, Battlestar Galactica (the good one, I mean) was made in Vancouver, and Sin City was shot in Austin, Texas (an arts capital not unlike Olympia, Washington). Writers need no longer relocate to New York or Los Angeles to find publishers or readers. And yes, a small startup in Olympia, Washington can be a hidden money fortress bristling with intrusion monitoring, mantraps, and (for all I know) the zombie Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang.

I realized this would happen way back in 1994, but I was too broke and busy (I was just starting grad school, among other personal crises) to take advantage of the opportunity. I remember asking my then-boss if I could teach "electronic mail" as part of an Intro to Microcomputers class, and although he was a bona fide genius who wrote the book, literally, on the Ada programming language, he predicted it was a minor diversion that would never catch on. I knew the Internet would generate superficial celebrities, which it did a la Rebecca Black and Antoine Dobson, but also that it would decentralize other glamorous professions. The Internet, for better or worse, is the great democratizer, and if you, my friend, want to make metric crap-tons of money without leaving your parents' basement, this is still a pretty great place to do it. The web is a functioning meritocracy, so one good bike shop POS transaction system can generate a global empire.

There's a song from the musical Title of Show that goes, "I'd rather be nine people's favorite thing than a hundred people's ninth favorite thing," and that used to be my whole raison d'etre. But it occurs to me that what we used to call, aptly, "the World Wide Web" is now a place where the best and brightest among us can make exceptional cake and sell it, too. The next Great American Novel will be written in hypertext. Some kid who's now directing Star Wars fanfic videos will one day oversee the next Pixar. And a couple of GORP-scented bike geeks from San Jose can juggle billions of dollars from a nondescript bunker in Patchouli Town, USA. It could happen to you, Gentle Reader. We live, work, and dream in unprecedented times.

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