A while back, we posted about the no-nonsense, opinionated, shopping/educational content at Rivendell, a small specialty bicycle business based in San Francisco. Recently, we talked with Rivendell owner Grant Petersen to find out more about his business. (Grant also answers some reader questions in the comments.)

What custom means
When Grant Petersen was 19, he ordered a custom bamboo fly rod made by Doug Merrick of the Winston Rod Company. “I wanted red winding on the guides — ‘Like a Leonard rod,’ I said — and a cork grip shaped like a Payne rod. They were two other fancy rods,” explains Peterson. Merrick refused. “I won’t do it,” he told Petersen. “It wouldn’t be my rod, then.”

Petersen says, “I felt ashamed for having asked, but glad to have been told that. And it made me appreciate the details that made a Winston a Winston.” Decades later, Petersen points to that interaction as inspiration for how he deals with customers at Rivendell, his biking business. “I don’t want anybody to feel ashamed for asking us to drill holes in forks or make a bike with low ‘trail,’ but I’m resolved not to do it for the same reason Doug Merrick held his ground.

“To a customer, a custom frame can mean ‘I pay you money and you let me design the bike,’ but that’s not what custom means here. We’ve turned down ‘custom’ orders when it’s meant all we do is collect the money and facilitate the customer’s own design. It can be seen as not customer-friendly, but in the end it means I know that every custom has the qualities I value and a certain amount of integrity. If you stand for something and are committed to it, then you dilute it if you introduce something that’s less pure or hard-core.”

If you stand for something and are committed to it, then you dilute it if you introduce something that’s less pure or hard-core.

Opinions are mandatory
Rivendell sells the kinds of bikes and bike gear you can’t get in a normal bike shop. According to Petersen, “99 percent of the bike market — designers, buiders, distributers, retailers, buyers, and riders — are selling the wrong bikes to the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

Strong opinions are at the heart of Rivendell’s mission. “Specs are fine, but they take two seconds, and opinions, if they’re based on experience, are more interesting. If you know about something, you have an opinion about it.

“There’s always a story behind the pure specs of something. Does it mean anything to anybody that a Nitto handlebar may be made from 2014 T6 aluminum? If you leave it at that, it doesn’t. It not only doesn’t, it’s a bad thing to just say that, because it’s really saying, ‘I read that this is true. It sounds important. I don’t know what it means. But I hope you think that I do.’ But I can add that Nitto handlebars are the strongest and safest and most rigidly tested in the world and if Nitto says it can’t make a strong enough bar that weighs less than 265g, then you can believe nobody else can.’”

Grant Petersen (photo by Martin Sundberg)

The opinionated path is one that has long appealed to Petersen. “In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, I worked at REI in Berkeley and there was a rule: No Handwritten Signs. We had a sign-making machine, and the store wanted a consistent look in all the signs. There’d be a sign for ‘Camping Books’. It was yellow-brown with dark brown letters and that’s all it said. But there was one book with the unfortunate title of ‘Pleasure Packing’ that seemed super soft-core by its title and cover, but was actually really radical inside with stuff I didn’t even know. And I thought I knew everything.

“I looked up sales on that book. Berkeley sold about 10 a year; Seattle (the only other REI at the time) sold about 20. I wrote a note about the book on a piece of cardboard, put clear packing tape over it so it wouldn’t smear, installed a grommet in the corner of it, and hung it in the book section. The first year after that we sold 215 of them. To me, it wasn’t about the sales. It was about getting the information out there.

Sketchnotes of Ryan’s talk at WebExpo Prague 2010 from the book “Sketchnotes 2009 & 2010” by Eva-Lotta Lamm. It features 101 pages of notes from UX and design events. The full set is also available at Flickr.

Here’s what happened in Campfire when I found out Noah, our stats guy, uses a calculator that came out in 1981:

Related: Reverse Polish notation [Wikipedia]

Fast Company has a list of 12 of the Year’s Best Ideas in Interface Design. Two neat items there:

Master Lock’s Speed Dial combination lock reinvents an object that’s remained static for decades. It opens on up/down/left/right directional movements which are more intuitive than numbers or alpha-numeric code and easier for folks who are elderly or have disabilities.

In “How Do You Reinvent Something as Common as the Padlock?”, Lea Plato, lead designer of the lock, explains the design process.

Electronics in general hint a lot at directional movement. We use that kind of movement all the time in all different things, whether it’s volume control or play and fast forward. Even way back, the VCR used directional symbols to show what you wanted to do. I think being around technology everywhere—and it hinting at directional movement—played a part in the actual function of the lock. You just remember directional movement more easily. It’s more intuitive than numbers or alpha-numeric code.

John’s Phone is a great example of underdoing the competition. It’s a cell phone that makes and accepts calls. That’s it. The phone even includes a store-it-inside-the-phone paper pad and pen for jotting down numbers.

Obviously it’s a poor fit for most folks, but it carves out a nice little niche for people who just want a phone that gets out of the way. Plus, it seems great for toddlers in a “My First Phone” kinda way. More details at Fast Company.

37signals and Meetup go way back. Meetup was one of our first design clients back in the day. And founder Scott Heiferman was even a guest poster for a month here at SvN back in ‘03. We’ve watched closely as Meetup has grown and evolved since then, especially during the tumultuous period after it began charging customers. It’s been almost six years since that fateful decision so we decided to sit down with Scott and talk about it.

In April of 2005, Meetup went from free to pay and started charging organizers of meetings. Many customers were outraged:

Congratulations, you’ve officially joined the “Asshole Club” along with the likes of BELL CANADA, EXON, KFC, McDONALDS, and all the other mega-corp. conglomerates who don’t give a shit about anyone or anything but lining their own pockets with money.

Others predicted the company’s demise:

I think it’s fair to say most organisers were shocked, and most of the ones I’ve spoken to will simply cease organising for their groups…There isn’t anything Meetup is doing these days that users can’t simply do on their own and more effectively, and there’s plenty of open source software to make use of and create your own website.”

Meetup wasn’t expecting the harsh response. “We were really naive,” says Scott Heiferman, founder of the site. “We figured that if people didn’t like it, they would just say, ‘OK, I’m not going to do this.’ As opposed to really taking it personally. Because this wasn’t like we were taking away their medicine. But people were so upset and we got such anger and such vitriol. The backlash was very bad. And we were surprised by that.”

According to Heiferman (seen at right in a photo by Tim Wagner), the site lost around 95% of its activity. “Now imagine you’re the hot startup – people forget we were the hot thing that was on 60 Minutes – and all of a sudden, in a flash, you see 95% of your activity go away. I mean, that’s the backlash in its most visceral form. It was like, ‘Oh, man what did you do? What do we do?’ We never really wavered seriously, but it’s a punch in the gut. It’s saying, ‘We were touching this many lives and now we’re touching not many lives, and oh, everyone hates us.’

“Now, did we think it was going to be less? No, not really. We knew. We said, ‘OK. If we get 10% or 5% to continue and pay that would be great.’ Because we were in this to make something great for people.” And Heiferman knew to do that, something had to change.

Little goes according to plan
Back in 2002, the original revenue model for Meetup was to charge venues $1 for each person brought in to a café, bar, pizza joint, bowling alley, etc. for a Meetup. “For a number of reasons it failed,” says Heiferman. “It was too early. It was hard. There was a discrepancy between the number of people who said they were going to come and who actually showed up. And too many people were going to their Meetup [at a coffee shop] and not buying coffee.”

Little was going according to plan. Heiferman explains, “Most of what we thought Meetup was going to be used for, people didn’t use it that way. And what they did use it for were things we didn’t imagine when we were building it. It never crossed our minds that this would be a political mobilizing tool.” Yet that’s where Meetup was quickly gaining the most attention. Politicians like Howard Dean embraced the tool and so did a then-unknown Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama.

At the same time, Meetup began pursuing additional revenue streams. It charged political organizations. It added AdSense. It experimented with Meetup Plus, a premium offering.

None made much of a difference though. When asked what made Meetup Plus special, Heiferman answers, “God, I don’t even remember what it got you. It got you some kind of features where you would be able to…I don’t know. I can’t remember.” Heiferman laughs and continues, “That was the problem. That’s a problem with a lot of freemium things. We refused to handicap the core, free product. So it wasn’t compelling.”

It’s been almost a year since we published REWORK, a book that violated a lot of the publishing industry’s conventional wisdom…

Conventional wisdom: Books targeted at entrepreneurs generally don’t sell very well or usually end up on the bottom shelf.
REWORK: Written specifically for starters and small business people.

CW: For the price point of our book, it must be at least 40,000 words. Readers want something bulky that’s got lots of content.
REWORK: We chopped the final edition down to 27,000 words (from 50,000+). You can get through it in just a few hours.

CW: Business books don’t have illustrations.
REWORK: Each essay accompanied by Mike Rohde’s artwork. (Mike explained the process in these posts: part 1, part 2.)

CW: The copyright page goes at the beginning.
REWORK: The copyright page is at the end. And there’s no foreword either. That lets readers get right to the meat of the book.

CW: The back cover should be filled with a lengthy explanation and blurbs.
REWORK: The back cover is as pretty as the front cover. A few key points and that’s it.

CW: The format should be long chapters.
REWORK: Filled with short essays, most just a page or two.

CW: A business book should use business-y language.
REWORK: Plain language throughout (and even some cursing).

CW: Books don’t have commercials.
REWORK: Coudal helped us created great trailers and even a Karl Rove “attack” video that helped get the word out about the book.

Things turned out alright. Last night, 800 CEO READ named REWORK business book of the year. 800 CEO READ said, “If you are an aspiring business book author or publisher and want to know what a truly exceptional business book looks like, REWORK is the example…[It’s] the best-conceived and designed book of the year.”

REWORK has now sold over 110,000 copies in the US and remains on the New York Times’ Hardcover Business Best Sellers list. It’s also been translated around the world. And best of all, every day we get letters from readers who tell us they’ve been inspired by the book. Thanks to everyone who purchased the book and has taken the time to write us. And thanks to 800 CEO READ for the award. Also, we have to give credit to our team at Crown for giving us the slack to run with these ideas.

We hope REWORK’s success shows that 1) business books don’t have to be like business books and 2) you can fight back against the “it’s the way we’ve always done it” mentality that homogenizes so many books (and plenty of other stuff too).