Image released under the Creative Commons by opensourceway on Flickr.

In January we were still deciding whether or not to continue with toggle. Toggle Design LTD was in the process of being closed as Mike had just left to start a communications company with his wife. We had a choice to make and we stuck with toggle. We are so glad we did.

We registered our new company in February (Toggle Labs LTD) and we have not looked back since. This year toggle has allowed us to make steps towards our ideal creative lifestyle. We have managed to buy our own place, make it our home (and office) and continue experimenting with our own projects. We cannot measure our success this year in terms of money – truth be told we did not make a great deal in 2010. We are now beginning to ask ourselves some difficult questions about where toggle will take us in the coming years.

Where’s the work?

We worked with fewer companies on longer projects during the course of 2010 which has been far more rewarding. Developing long term relationships with clients is a better way of working for us. The majority of our work was brought to us via other agencies which has resulted in less work for our own portfolio. This highlights an interesting issue; other agencies can see the quality and craft in our work but we are not communicating this properly to potential new clients. This is something we hope to address in 2011.

Pixie

It has been a turbulent and slow year for Pixie. After careful consideration we decided to sell the project a few months ago. The sale has just been completed and we are now going to use the time saved to focus on new projects. We were hoping one of those projects would be BoffinBase but this has been delayed due to its size and our work load. We also have smaller projects boiling in the labs which will likely be launched first.

Shop

2010 has been the best year for shop sales to date. We are hoping to do some data analysis on this once we reach our year end in February. Amazon contacted us in September and asked us to sell our products on their .co.uk website. We were very excited about this opportunity and of course accepted. Our Amazon store was only open for a short time though due to disappointing sales. We quickly realised Amazon is not the place for limited edition, handmade items. It has been a valuable lesson in understanding our target market and what they are truly looking for. This year we will continue to sell on just a small handful of online shops (toggle, Folksy and notonthehighstreet.com). We also want to bring the focus back to our upcycled and limited editions items.

2011

One of the fun parts of running a business is choosing in which direction to take it. This year is all about focus, direction and delivering a specialist service. We have a handful of aims for the next twelve months including:

• To specialise and carve a name for ourselves locally here in Farnham
• Deliver environmentally sound hosting for us and our clients
• To write much more and re-design the journal to accommodate new content
• Find a small and cheap (hopefully shared) office space in Farnham
• To no longer pitch or write lengthly unpaid proposals
• To communicate the science of design
• To improve the toggle shopping experience
• To make the time for research
• To make sense of the bonkers world around us using graphic design
• Releasing a number of projects we are currently pondering

Thanks for taking the time to catch up with our progress and we look forward to collaborating* with you in the near future.

*Collaborating is interchangeable with “drink beer”.

Image released under the Creative Commons by superflexnet on Flickr.

Pixie was always going to be an open source project. Free to own, free to modify. When I first started putting the project together (around five years ago now) I had already committed to the idea. The Internet relies on free and open source software and Pixie had to be part of that. I believed in it, and for the most part I still do.

Without a doubt the project has been a success; on a personal level and for getting toggle off the ground. Pixie was the launch platform for our first year in business, it has been deployed by us on many websites and continues to work flawlessly. On top of that Pixie has been downloaded well over 25,000 times, translated into 18 languages and awarded second place in the Packt open source CMS awards (2009). Pixie has raised our profile and stood its ground against larger projects with more funding, more support and bigger communities.

Its not all good news though and after a few months of reflection at the start of the year we decided it was time to consider stopping the project. My passion for developing the software started to fade towards the end of last year which coincided with a very difficult time for us. Our finances, jobs and business were on a knife edge.

So at the start of April we listed Pixie for sale and so far we have been unsuccessful in finding a buyer. Pixie has not sold because it does not generate (easily measurable) revenue and potential buyers are faced with the challenge of monetising a project that requires time, development and support for the community. These are the same reasons it’s difficult for a young business like ours to invest time on it and when you look at the numbers it makes for a very interesting story:

Help & Support

There are 2824 messages in the forum – if we assume half of those are answers and half are questions that works out to be 1.9 questions per day for the lifespan of the project. Each reply has to be carefully considered and that adds up to a great deal of time. This does not include the personal emails that arrive in my inbox too. The real challenge is that for the project to grow it needs to be supported and realistically that support (at least at the start) needs to be free. This particular problem is one we hope to address with our latest labs project.

Code contributions

The number of downloads is fast approaching 30,000 – out of those people there are only three that I would class as core contributors. That is 0.01% of people giving back to the project and that is not good enough. There are lots of possibilities for why this is: perhaps I could have given the community better tools? maybe lots of people felt it was good enough already? I can only speculate as to why this might have happened but I wish the number was higher.

Financial contributions

In two years we have had three donations to the project (totalling £70). This leads me to the conclusion that people do not appreciate the amount of time and effort it takes to run and develop such a project. We need to learn to value the things we do not pay for and/or lower our expectations. We have had some fairly insulting emails for taking our time when replying to support questions or because Pixie did not work as expected. Thankfully that has been a minority of people.

Advertising & Referrals

To try and generate a small and steady income we looked at both advertising and partnerships. None have worked out very well. Our first attempt was to use Google Adsense across the site. After a few months our balance had made it to $30 and when we hit that milestone Google shut our account. The money was gone and there is no appeal procedure to get it back. To this date I am unsure what happened. So we replaced those advert units with ones powered by buysellads.com. To date these adverts have generated us $20 and we are unable to claim this money as it does not hit a threshold amount. That money might never make it to our account.

We also formed a hosting partnership with a company called Arvixe. They pay $70 for each hosting referral we send to them and it started out well. Within a few weeks we had five registrations but we had to wait three months before being paid. As time went on those initial payments disappeared – apparently they cancelled their accounts before we could be paid the referral. Nearly 12 months on and we have only ever had $140 from Arvixe. Referrals no longer show up despite people in the forums claiming they clicked through from the Pixie site.

Last week I removed all advertising from the Pixie site. It is a real shame when open source projects have to turn to advertising to support themselves. I recently switched my laptop to Ubuntu and have been searching around for open source software. Take a look at gimpshop.com – the site is littered with adverts and you can tell by the language and layout that the developer is struggling. As a result the last release was released a very long time ago. I find it strange that we are happy to spend thousands of pounds on Adobe Creative Suite yet so reluctant to drop the developer of an alternative some beer money.

Content creators across the web face this same problem every single day and thankfully a new service has appeared that tries to address the issue. It’s called Flattr and I recommend grabbing an account. We have already created a Flattr button for Pixie (to test the service) and at the end of the month we will be getting a small income from it, likely to be fractions of Euro. But its a great start and beats having tacky adverts littered across the site. You can even Flattr this post… after all, it took weeks to write (I started writing back in March!).

What next?

Collectively we need to get better at collaborating on open source projects. We all have a part to play and we must learn to appreciate the hard work that goes into the projects we take for granted every single day.

Despite what it may read like we remain confident in open source. Open platforms will eventually win (see Google vs Apple) and the future we all want relies on this being the case. We have plans for some smaller projects that we are going to open source in future… actually most of our labs projects will either be open source or support open source projects.

With regards to Pixie I feel we have taken the project as far as we can. We are now trying to decide what the next steps should be. The great thing about open source is that a project can live on regardless of what happens. If you have any ideas we would love to hear them.

This is a massive achievement for such a small CMS and I would like to thank everyone who took the time to vote for us. We came joint second with Pligg, while Impress CMS took the top spot. From Packt Publishing:

We are pleased to announce that ImpressCMS has won the Most Promising Open Source CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. While ImpressCMS took first place in this category, Pixie and Pligg weren’t far behind and settled for a tie in the first runner up spot.

ImpressCMS has featured in the top three in this category for the second time in a row, and has lived up to its reputation this year by winning the top spot.

Pixie and Pligg, on the other hand, featured in this category for the first time and managed to impress a lot of judges with their quality and support.

Here’s the distribution of the prize fund for this category:

• ImpressCMS: $2,000
• Pixie: $1,000
• Pligg: $1,000

Thanks again!

Once again we need your help. Voting has started and we are up against some great competition, the final five are:

• ImpressCMS
• Manhali
• Pixie
• Pligg
• Redaxscript

Public votes will be combined with ratings from a panel of Judges with winners announced on November 9. Packt is also giving away an 8GB iPod Touch to three lucky winners chosen randomly from the voting stage. Vote for Pixie »

If you have found Pixie a useful tool we would really appreciate a vote:

Your votes (for this first stage) must be made by 10th September 2009. Simply click the banner above and fill out the form at the bottom of the site. Thanks :)

For the less technically minded it can be a challenge to get Pixie installed and setup so we thought it might be useful to offer a fully hosted environment which allows new comers to get setup quickly and easily. The package will include hosting, email, a domain name and support. We have not worked out the numbers in terms of cost, bandwidth or storage space as we wanted to gauge your interest first. If it is not too much trouble pop your thoughts into the questionnaire (we will post up the results to the Pixie blog soon).

Fill in the Pixie questionnaire »

Google Apps

• By: Google
• Cost: Free

Google Apps needs little introduction these days. We make full use of Gmail, Google Docs and the Google Calendars on a daily basis. The great thing about the apps is the collaboration; sharing not only between ourselves but with our clients too. If you want to know more about getting started with Google docs then I suggest watching some videos on the subject. We have also transferred some of our clients over to the platform as well.

Remember the Milk

• By: Remember the Milk
• Cost: Free or a pro account for $25 a year

Remember the Milk is one of the newest apps in the toggle tool kit. After deciding to leave Basecamp we needed a robust to-do application and found Remember the Milk. The great thing about it is the fact you can add to-do items from a whole range of devices and services; our favourites being Gmail, Email and via the iPhone application Todo <- iTunes link.

Pixie

• By: Toggle
• Cost: Free

Shameless plug alert! – We use Pixie every day (I am writing this post in Pixie). It allows us to easily manage the content for the sites we make, and our clients can join in too. For those of you who have not tried Pixie, it is our open source CMS. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Delicious

• By: Yahoo!
• Cost: Free

Tired of never having your web bookmarks with you? Try posting all your favourite sites to Delicious. We have been using Delicious for quite some time now, its one of those services that quietly gets on with its job and works flawlessly. The tagging is great and the recent re-design has made it even more of a pleasure to use.

I think that just about covers the really important applications we use, other honourable mentions go to Flickr, FeedBurner and Google Analytics.

All we knew was that this was a chance to see some innovative ideas and hear talks from the likes of Bob Geldof, Tim Berners-Lee and the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. (Other great reasons to visit included free food and a great chance to meet new people…)

We can now safely say (with the help of the Nesta website) that…”Nesta is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – a unique and independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative. They offer investment in early-stage companies, inform and shape policy, and deliver practical programmes that inspire others to solve the big challenges of the future.”

The two underlying themes we took away from the event were:

1. We need to innovate in a way that is positive to the global community, solving issues such as climate change, poverty, health and debt. To do this we must work collaboratively across the globe.

2. We need to make money to strengthen our local economies and place the UK at the forefront of innovation.

The real shame is that this seemed to be presented as two conflicting goals… Is it not possible to innovate, solve global issues and at the same time make some money?

Here at toggle we might be a long way from solving any major global issues, but we’re doing what we can. We’re promoting open source development and helping people get online through Pixie. This is a free project that we have spent a great deal of time developing. While it won’t solve world poverty any time soon, it will enable people to promote positive causes through the web for free.

Parallel to this we are experimenting with different business models alongside running what I would call a “normal” creative services company: client -> project -> fixed cost -> deadline -> complete.

Mix all these things together and I think we are stepping towards the right way to run a modern business. We still have long way to go, and a great deal to learn. Finding the balance between free, value and the necessity to make money is extremely difficult.

Looking back on the day I think we felt the morning talks from Bob Geldof and Tim Berners-Lee were the highlights of the day. Bob in particular was very inspiring. In the afternoon we headed into separate “expert seminars” which I felt were lacking in content and a little out of date. On the whole though a very interesting day and well worth the visit.

To promote Pixie, we decided to create a limited number of pre-realease Pixie cd’s (400) to give out at Internet World starting on 29th April. For those not familiar: Internet World is a free digital business trade show held annually at Earls Court. If you are heading to Internet World, look out for us and you can grab a copy of Pixie early!

The cds are all homemade in the toggle office and were put together over 3 days. We decided to keep the cd’s very simple and used ejector cases with rectangular labels for the packaging. Here are some photos from the production line…

You can find more photos on Flickr.

I guess you could say its similar to WordPress, except Pixie builds complete websites not just blogs. We have been working on Pixie for quite some time and have always planned to open source the software and today I am pleased to say we have a schedule for its release. So when can you get your hands on it?

Beta testing – 14th April to 25th April:

Those of you who have signed up to the Pixie mailing list will have chance to beta test the software before the official release. The mailing list sign up will close on the 14th April.

Pixie release day – 29th April:

Pixie will launch. As part of the Pixie launch we will be producing 400 CDs that we aim to give away at this years extremely geeky Internet World exhibition at Earls Court, London (its free!). We will also be posting out a number of CDs to people who have helped support the project with code they have written.

One of things we are most proud of with Pixie is its ease of use which is largely due to the interface we have designed. To wet your appetite for the launch we have uploaded some screenshots of the application to Flickr. We are really excited about this release and look forward to your feedback.