This Weinachten provided my family with the best times we’ve had in years. The very last gift was a small round box my stepbrother Mathias handed to my mother. Inside were two small knitted socks, one red, one blue. Between the socks and cotton padding was a sonogram. There was a small pause before comprehension dawned as everyone at the table looked at the young couple. The celebratory drinking started shortly after.

My mother decided before I had even got on the plane that we would travel together and catch up. I suggested Hamburg, or more formally the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. What I originally came to see was the Miniatur Wunderland; a 6,400 square meter attraction of impossibly detailed miniatures. Imagine a COSTCO sized building with a fully active ecosystem of trains, planes, buildings, communities, an active airport, a day/night cycle, and over 200k human figurines. Pictures do not capture the extraordinary amount of lights, mechanisms, detail, and thought put into each model; so this video will have to suffice.

The first night in Hamburg we met some acquaintances that soon became friends in St. Pauli, the quarter of Hamburg famous for its mile of sin known as the Reeperbahn. That area is ripe with sexual energy and you couldn’t find a better place to go in Europe for a night of drinking with friends. If I wasn’t there with family, that portion of the trip would need to be omitted from my travelogue.

While I will never forget being harassed by sex workers on Herbertstraße, what left the biggest impression on me was a hole in the wall Portuguese restaurant named after its owner, Franco. There was no menu in Casa Franco. You enjoy your meal by paying 20 Euro while the open kitchen prepares the fresh catch of the day in 4 courses. While we were being seated our new friend Markus pointed out that the soft orange walls were significantly darker than the ceiling. I couldn’t help but think there must have been an epic kitchen fire that was just not cleaned up thoroughly. Amidst our introductions to one another, Franco walks the three slate steps to our table carrying our appetizer of shrimp in a garlic wine sauce. Did I mention it was on fire? Not just a dull blue blaze when you light strong alcohol (which we enjoyed throughout the evening) but a tall flame, over a foot high!  All the while having a casual conversation with us in his comical and romanticized German. All of this accompanied by good wine, live guitar and serenata, an owner who loves to yell Caramba and, in jest, berates his cooks for their cuisine and expediting. Franco ended up treating the four of us to the best dining experience we could have had. That evening, my mind was opened to what I now see as the right way to serve food to people.

Our 3 days in Hamburg were just not enough. My mother and I were upset that we didn’t make it to the Fisch Markt open on Sundays. Alas, we had festivities back in Grafenwoehr to prepare for. We ended it the best way possible-splitting a case of Astra Rott Licht (6% ABV) between four people. There was a lot more to Hamburg than I imagined. It’s a place I’ll be visiting again and would recommend you do the same.

I did my best to conceal it but I was more than disappointed that I came home to not a drop of snow. I flew all the way to Germany in the heart of winter with scarves, gloves, and multiple coats prepared for the wurst, worst. The same crappy weather I left behind in Washington was there to greet me when I got off the plane.

Just before New Year’s Eve the rain drifted much slower to the ground, dancing in the wind, but not sticking to pavement. That night Tobias asked me if I wanted to go snow hunting with his friends. We get in his 4-wheel drive Audi and sped off into the night. With his foot all the way down on the pedal I watched the speedometer climb over 120 km/h when we finally found snow-covered roads and fields. When we arrived Tobias asked “Haben sie angst?”. Having watched The Green Lantern on the plane, I thought the line “I have no fear.” seemed appropriate. I realized I was the only one in the car with a seatbelt on and who hadn’t been drinking that night. All those drifts and offroading, on what I believed to be a ski course, seemed like a terrible idea that I was happy to be a part of.

The only day I had to myself in the 10 day vacation was well spent in Nürnberg. It’s just a 45 minute train ride from the nearest train station in Vilseck.

None of my friends really believed my story of accidentally finding Nürnberg’s red light district, but it really doesn’t look like anything during the day. To me it was a magnificent wall with beautiful arches made of black, mossy stones unlike anything we have in a country so infantile in comparison to Germany. On my way back from the 1 FCN fan shop I took the same route, still mesmerized by the dark stone wall as dusk approached. As I hurried to catch my train a pink glow to my left distracted me from the wall.  I was instantly struck with the realization as to why I was the only one on this street before. Scheisse! I used my experience on the Reeperbahn to keep my head forward and ignore the aggressive sex workers behind the windows and caught my train home with just one minute to spare.

I know this is a generalization, but seriously, the Germans know how to party. In a town of just 9000 people, you would think the locals would be content with a few sparklers and roman candles. No, not Grafenwoehr. It was turning 650 years old and it was going into 2012 with a well-lit sky, battle simulators that needed to be detonated with car batteries, and illegal fireworks you can pick up from the Czech border just 30 minutes away.

While I lived in Germany for over half my life I hadn’t realized until this trip how much I took for granted. I’m not sure when I’ll be returning, but while I was there I already knew that I would. So I did my best to capture the things I experienced with this photo gallery, I hope you enjoy it-

Ubahn stop to St. Pauli

Surprise on Weihnachten

Tobias' bar

blutwurst

Franco with the appetizers.

Say Cheese!

fireworks

fireworks1

fireworks2

Well lit tree in the Hamburg craft market.

Hamburg rivers near the Miniatur Wunderland.

Hamburg docks

A nice local symbol of love.

Gluhwein und Bier

Neuerwall

Lit stands in the Hamburg market.

knodel

Nice piece from Miniatur Wunderland.

Murdoc in Hamburg train station

Nurnberg Craft Market.

nurnberg2

nurnbergaltstadt

Spin this ring in Nurnberg 3 times around for good luck.

The Occupy Movement didn't skip over Germany's 2nd largest city.

The mesmerizing wall in the red light district.

An inside look of the Herbertstraße.

seafood

shrooms

Cheers!

We are proud to annouce some changes and improvements to our API that are coming in our next release. Here is a quick overview of what is coming.

API Errors Returned in the Requested Format

Now when the API encounters an error instead of returning an html error page it will return error information in the format that was selected in the request (XML or JSON). This should allow for better error handling by client applications.

Fixes to API Datetimes

There was a bug that was causing some datetimes in the API to be returned incorrectly. Datetimes are now returned as GMT corrected for the timezone set in account.

Add Category and Tags to Receipt Template Items

We had a request to load the Item Category and Tags on the XML returned in the receipt template. This change will give access to those values to people using custom receipt templates.

Load Customer and Employee on Workorders

Another request we had was to load Customer and Employee information on returned Workorder objects. This gives access to the Customer name and address and Employee details for a Workorder without having to make more requests.

Sale Write Access

The biggest change that we have made is open up write access to Sales via the API. This is an important step forward for our API as it exposes more of the functionality of our application via our API. There are some important caveats to the functionality that we have exposed:

• Refunds and Returns are not yet supported
• Sales can be Archived (using the Delete method) or Completed, but they cannot be Unarchived or Uncompleted
• We have made every effort to fully test Sale write access via the API, but proceed with caution. If you find an error or discrepancy please contact us and let us know so we can correct it.

We still have plenty of work to do to improve our API including improving performance and exposing write access to more objects. We’re excited about these changes as they allow us to make big improvements to our product in the future.

If you have an API question, comment, suggestion or issue feel free to contact Nate at nate@merchantos.com.

A Look Back At 2011

We accomplished a lot this year and added a number of awesome folks to our team. In 2011 MerchantOS…

• Reached the 1,000 customer mark. We now have over 1,300 retail locations using our point of sale software. Thank You!
• Processed our One Billionth dollar in transactions. We averaged $1.4 milion per day in our point of sale system.
• Added 7 full time employees, a half timer, and an intern.
• Released 28 versions of our software with over 400 individual improvements and fixes.
• 525,570 minutes of up time, 10 slow, 20 minutes of downtime for a subset of customers. 99.994% uptime overall.
• Secured a bank loan for 2012 expansion.
• 2 awesome parties, many ping pong matches, beer-pong games, and trips to the bar downstairs. Along with 2 babies born.

Seven 2012 Apocalyptic Resolutions

It may be the end of the world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still make plans:

1. Focus on making our point of sale software awesome:

I want to take our point of sale to the next level. Making it easier and more pleasant to use while adding functionality. This is a difficult balancing act but we have a good plan for how to accomplish it and I’m excited about the challenge.

2. Have Fun:

I started this company because I didn’t like the other jobs I had. There weren’t fun. It wasn’t rewarding the way I wanted it to be. In 2012 I want to make sure that everyone that works here (and hopefully our customers) have some fun, enjoy their work, and feel valued.

3. Provide the best dang support:

We spent a great deal of effort searching for awesome support heroes to hire this year (adding Ciara, Ryan, Chris, Vanessa, and Jered). We try to treat our employees like we’d want to be treated ourselves. And we ask our employees to do the same for our customers. We have fun. We also take our jobs seriously and really care about our customers and the product we give them. That’s our recipe for awesome support.

4. Hire awesome people:

We are what the people who work here make us. If we want to be awesome we have to hire awesome. We’ve already got 2 (a programmer and designer) lined for the start of the year. We’ll probably add a few more before the year is over. I’m going to make sure we take the time to hire the right people.

5. Stock pile food, gold, and guns…

To fight the zombies. Oh we might also need this.

6. Sign up another 1,000 retail locations:

This is a high bar to reach for. With purely natural growth and without any change in our marketing strategy, I’d predict we will add somewhere around 700. How will we get those extra 300?

We have a bank loan so we can spend more on Adwords, that will help. We are optimizing our sign-up process. Working on our website marketing. We want to improve the look and feel of our application while we make it easier to use and more powerful. And I’ll just give you a hint there might be something with Mobile and web based accounting systems (no promises! It’s software development, nothing is guaranteed).

7. Build a product we are proud of.

Most of all in 2012 I want to build a product we are proud of. I want to write excellent code, create awesome user interfaces, build solid and reliable server and network infrastructure, and provide awesome support.

I’m Proud Of Our Employees, And Thankful To Our Customers

Without the great people that work for us and all our customers who support us, we wouldn’t be able to take on these goals. So thank you for making this all possible!

Best Wishes In 2012!

I recently learned that for about five years now, MerchantOS has been quietly giving it’s software away to non-profit organizations all over the country that do good work in their local communities. We have no personal connection to them, we just like that they’re giving back, and like the idea that we can support their work. Since it’s my job to highlight all the cool things we do at MOS, I put together the following showcase, partly to show off the cool orgs we support, and partly to give props to VP Christina Gilpin, who originally thought up the idea, and ran with it, right after she was hired five years ago. I caught up with Christina, and asked her how the idea originated in the first place. She said it just seemed natural -

“…these non profits do so much for their communities…and if we can help them be even that much more successful, then that is just awesome”

The following are the non-profits we’re currently providing with free software and customer support:

Bicycle Kitchen Los Angeles, CA

The Bicycle Kitchen is a nonprofit bicycle repair educational organization. We are a group of volunteers who run a space in Los Angeles filled with tools and stands for working on bicycles. Our hope is that you will come down and work on your bike! We will help you. We ask $7 per hour SUGGESTED DONATION, no one is turned away for lack of funds.

BicycleKitchen.com | Facebook | Twitter – @bicyclekitchen

Bikerowave Los Angeles, CA

Bikerowave is a bicycle repair collective, much like the Bicycle Kitchen, Bike Oven, or Valley Bikery here in LA County. We provide space, tools, and equipment in order to effectively teach people how to build, repair, and maintain their bicycles. We are a not-for-profit all volunteer member run organization. Our goal is to empower cyclists with the basic knowledge to maintain their steed, as well as enable them to more easily connect with the cycling community.

bikerowave.org | Facebook | Twitter – @bikerowave

Christmas is right around the corner and we’ve got the spirit! Our Christmas party was a blast! Ivan even made a surprise visit to Olympia to join in the festivities. There was dinner, drinks, conversation, drinks, karaoke, dancing, shouting, and there was also some drinks.

A little too gleeful...

Typical frat life at MerchantOS

Drinks were set, the place was ready

Even Ivan showed up!

Quite the gathering

I'm addicted to you, don't you know that you're toxic!

Look at those smiles!

A little Xmas Party office bromance in the making?

Gathered at the Bowerman residence

Ciara doing Karaoke

Good company, good food

The bartenders hard at work

From the ether…

What Louis C.K. Teaches Us About the Power of the Web For DIY Content Distribution – My favorite comedian, Louis C.K., has just self-released a stand up special that he’s selling for $5 on his website. By skipping all of the traditional methods, he’s been able to keep the price way down, and still turn a profit. Has he just changed everything? Read his latest statement here

Fight Club Soap, Sex Panther Cologne, And More Pop Culture Holiday Gift Ideas From Omni Products

The Milky Way’s black hole may spring to life in 2013 – My New Year’s Resolution? Don’t get sucked into a black hole.

Hipstamatic Introduces ‘World’s First Social Camera’

Credit Sesame Brings Your Credit Score To The iPhone. For Free.

Buying Wins – a brilliant blog post from HappyCog’s Joe Rinaldi on business development.

…This is a sentence disdained by Venture Capitalists and others who would look to turn a quick buck off of our hard work. What does this mean to us?

• We’re doing what we love. We’re geeks, we love technology, we love building stuff, growing a business, and learning new things all the time.
• Building a place to work where I would myself want to be an employee. I can’t in good conscious approach being an employer in any other way.
• Treating our customers how I would want to be treated. It constantly amazes me when I see business after business treat customers in a way they themselves would never want to be treated.
• We put building a great product, service, and company over profit. Of course we want to be rich, that would be awesome. But we’re not sacrificing our product, our work environment, or how we treat our customers for the sake of eking out a better profit margin.
• Growth at a rate we can handle. We have no problem with growing, and I think it’d be awesome to build MerchantOS into a huge company. But we want to grow at a rate that allows us to do great work. Often when companies grow too fast they start producing crappy products and services. They hire people they shouldn’t, they stop listening to their customers, and waste a lot of money in the process.
• Staying focused. We’re here to help small retailers by providing awesome software. We aren’t chasing some giant customer that will double our revenue overnight and change our business completely. We’re in this for the long haul.
• Surfing. I love surfing. As Yvon Chouinard said: Let my people go surfing.

Venture Capital

As our business grows and our good fortune continues we get more and more requests from VC’s and other institutional investors. They see a good thing and they want in. But here’s the rub…

They don’t want to invest in a lifestyle business. Specifically to them this means we should:

• Chase the big opportunities. Grow big as fast as possible, add revenue as quickly as possible, go after those big fish that can make this happen. This leads to…
• Hire a sales force. We love the fact we don’t have dedicated sales people. We want you to buy our software when you are ready. We want to provide a service that is so clearly superior and offers so much value that you can’t resist paying us the small monthly fee. We don’t want to take the money and run. As I said… We’re in this for the long haul, we want a sustainable sales model.
• Scale up engineering, fast! If we’re going after those big fish with sales people who will promise the moon, we are gonna need a horde or engineers to implement all those new features. It won’t matter so much how easy those features are to use, as long as the C-level executive can put a check next to all the things on his list, you’ll make the sale. But what about the users of our slapped together feature invested software?
• Put profit before employees and customers. No matter how nice an institutional investors is as a person, they still have a primary responsibility and it isn’t our customers, employees, or us. It’s their investors, the people they took money from with the promise of a high return. That’s their job, return more money to their principals.
• Take a Series B,C… Once we’ve taken $8mill in cash and ramped up our sales and engineering team, our burn rate is going to be off the charts. It’s unlikely that our subscription revenue is going to catch up with our costs. Our costs are front loaded and our revenue comes in over time from each customer. This means if we’re growing fast we’ll be back for a Series B and C round of investment. Further down the rabbit hole we go…
• Win Big Or Go Home. VCs are looking for a big win. They are making a number of investments and on average they are going to fail. They need their winners to win big. What would be a good outcome for Ivan and I, might not satisfy them.

For now our answer is “No”

So at this point we don’t want institutional money. We don’t have a big need for it, and we don’t want all the negatives it brings with it. This means we might be sacrificing some speed that could lead a competitor to over take us. But we’re betting that focusing on our core values of creating a great place to work, building an awesome product, and providing excellent support will win in the end.

Alternatives

We’re currently working on another source of capital. We did some thinking and came up with a list of everything we wanted to do and how much it would cost in the short term. This led us to a number that’s not so big. So we’re going the traditional route: a loan from a bank. No strings attached, just a promise to pay the money back and an interest rate.

Never Say Never

There might come a time when the stars aline and a knight in shining armor appears on the hill carrying a huge brief case full of cash. So I wont’ say we’ll never take VC investment. But not right now.

What Does This Mean For You?

For our customers, this means we’re focused on creating an awesome product and providing excellent support (from our happy employees). We’re in it for the long run and we hope you are to! We’ll keep working hard to make that true.

We’ve got three new employees settling into their jobs. A big MOS welcome to Ellen, Jered, and Vanessa!

A new system update was launched which addresses a couple of small issues pertaining to: employees restricted to a shop, and tax rates shown on sales by line report. Contact our amazing support staff if you have any questions.

Also bouncing around the MOSiverse…

• NASA found an Earth-like planet, and only 600 light years away.
• Wired Magazing tells us The Right (and Wrong) Way to Die When You Fall Into Lava
• Amazon, in what seems like an attempt to undermine local retailers for their own gain, are offering people money to go into local shops and price-check products. The L.A. Times covers it here.
• Everything about the way we publish content is changing because of tablets. ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell walks us through ‘Web Publishing’s Next Level’
• He’s NOT on fire! John Timmer, over at ArsTechnica, debunks the myth that basketball players “get hot” during games. ‘NBA players wrong about “hot hands” from three-point land’
• Last but not least, Mashable gives us a look at their Top 8 iPhone games for the Holiday Season.

Happy reading, and see you next time!

• Two Posts to Craig’s List, one each for Customer Hero, and Office Admin
• 117 applicants for Customer Hero
• 203 applicants for Office Admin
• 106 phone interviews (~10 minutes each)
• 43 short in person interviews (~10 minutes each)
• Seven long in person interviews (~1 hour each)
• 30+ Hours Of Interviewing Candidates
• Three awesome folks hired.

I’ve already covered our phone interview process pretty extensively: Why You Failed Our Phone Interview. So, here’s what I’m looking for in an in-person interview.

Preparation – You Ready For This?

At this point, we’ve weeded out the truly un-prepared during our phone interview. Yet still, amazingly, some people walk into an in-person interview completely unprepared. There isn’t too much to say on this one, except: do some preparing. Eat your Wheaties, get a good night’s sleep, dress appropriately (I’ll cover this a little more later), read over our website, and generally do whatever you need to do to walk in confident and prepared.

Bonus: Take some time to think about why you want this job in particular. How does it fit into your goals professionally and personally?

Nerves – The #1 Interview Killer

This one is especially hard for me to critique because I wouldn’t consider myself a super confident person socially. However, I think I can fake it long enough to get through an interview, and I think you can too. For the lucky few of you who don’t have this problem, skip on down to the over-confidence section!

Here are my main tips for playing it cool and not letting your nerves get between you and the job you want:

• Pump yourself up for the interview. Do some laugh yoga, or whatever it takes to get yourself in a positive mood.
• Cover the basics: smile, make eye contact (with each person in the interview), shake everyone’s hand, introduce yourself clearly.
• Don’t be afraid to joke around during the interview. This is a little tricky, because you don’t want to treat the whole interview as a joke, but don’t be afraid to laugh or throw out a few puns.
• Remember: we are people just like you.
• Speak clearly.
• Bring some water with you. If your mouth gets dry and it’s bothering you. Take a second to take a drink. If Steve Jobs could sip from a water bottle during a key note, you can definitely do it during a job interview.

Why it’s hard to give a thumbs up to a super nervous candidate: I just can’t accurately judge your personality. Your nervousness obscures who you really are, which is what I’m trying to find out. If I can’t find out who you really are, what motivates you, how you’re going to interact with me and the rest of the team, then I’m left with a big question mark. I’m looking for a candidate that gives me positive signals that they are the right one for the job. Nerves obscure these signals.

You Can Be Overconfident

Nervous people, skip this, it doesn’t apply to you.

Don’t walk in thinking you’ve ‘nailed it’ before you actually have. We’re interviewing a lot of people. Assume that a lot of those people are awesome too. There isn’t a lot I can say on this subject, it’s fairly straight forward–have some sprinkling of humility. Typically this is more of a problem for men, for whatever reason.

What Not To Wear

What to wear to an interview totally depends on where and with whom you are interviewing. If you’re not sure if you should wear a suit or sweat pants, you should probably ask. You need to wear something that fits with the company and people you are interviewing with. This doesn’t mean you have to look just like us, it just means you shouldn’t come in a 3 piece business suite and tie if I’m gonna be in jeans and flip flops (well that’s really Ivan’s role). It’s going to make us both uncomfortable.

Why is it important? Whether we want to or not, in some ways we are going to judge you based on your appearance. It’s just human nature and it’s extremely hard to override.

Tip: Figure out the company culture. Is it super professional (lawyer’s office?), or is it casual and laid back? Try to fit your apparel choices to this. But, I’d say it’s ok to dress up more than you think you would just coming to work on an average day. You still want to look put together and like you are taking the interview seriously.

Bonus: Think about the position you’re applying for and what sort of personality we might want to hire for that. We usually give some clues in our job description. We are not totally superficial, but again it’s human nature, and it definitely can’t hurt your prospects to try to craft your image a bit to what we are looking for.

Age, Race, Gender, Or Other Protected Status

We’ve had candidates draw attention to these issues regarding themselves during the interviews. If you do feel the need to bring it up, say, if you want to make sure it’s not an issue: Keep it brief, to the point, and then move on.

Why? Because we won’t be able to say anything in response. The only thing we can say is something really generic like “we don’t discriminate on the basis of…”. If you bring it up over and over, it makes it an uncomfortable conversation because there is nothing for us to talk about.

For example if someone is significantly older than me and they repeatedly mention this throughout the interview. I start to think “is this person going to have issues working for someone way younger?”.

We keep these issues off the table when making a decision on a candidate, and you can help by not making it the focus of your interview.

Motivation

This is a big one. Why do you want to work here? We know that no one is going to work for us forever, but we still want to know that this job is something you want to do (for reals) and you are going to be happy doing it. Hopefully you’ve thought about this before you even applied because if you really don’t want to do this type of job you’re wasting both of our time.

Personality

This is like ‘Location’ in real-estate. And unfortunately it seems you either have it or you don’t. That’s not to say that one personality is right for every job. It takes all kinds. But there are certain personalities that don’t work for a particular job. For example, if you don’t like to talk, then talking customers through problems all day on the phone is not going to work for you.

Most of the stuff I’ve written about up to this point is to get you to the point where we can fairly evaluate your personality and fit with the position. I’ve come to rely on personality as my main final criteria in picking candidates. I’ve been burned when I’ve ignored it, and delighted when I’ve focused on it.

That’s what it looks like from our side of the table. I’d love to know your opinion. Please leave a comment below.