Interview: Joshua Keay of Magnetism Studios

You probably read the title wondering, “What is Magnetism Studios?” It is more likely that you have heard of Monkey Business Labs or Insanely Great Tees. Well Magnetism Studios is a new parent company created to combine Monkey Business Labs and Insanely Great Tees along with some other cool new stuff under one roof. I was lucky enough to be able to talk to Joshua Keay, one of the masterminds behind it all.

Steve: Josh, thank you so much for joining me. Can you tell me a little more about your company? You guys seem to do a lot of things.
Josh: Thanks Steve. You’re right, we do have a lot of different projects going on. Many of your readers may know us for our Insanely Great Tees and Monkey Business Labs brands, though we also develop a lot of other projects. We have a company called Magnetism Studios which focuses on developing these different products and putting them out there. Basically, we develop products that we would like to use ourselves, put them out there, and see what comes from it. It’s a lot of fun.

Steve: What is it like working for Monkey Business Labs/Insanely Great Tees?
Josh: There are three of us right now, Josh and Dave and Paul. We’ve designed our working environment to suit our personalities. We all work from home, which gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of hours. Sometimes we’ll have really busy weeks when we’re trying to get a project out the door, sometimes we’ll have more experimental weeks when we’re just tinkering with things that we think would be fun. Those experimental weeks oftentimes lead to some of our most interesting stuff. A perfect example is our Filemark Maker tool, that lets users save desktop files onto their iPhone or iPod touch so they can view them anytime, even when they don’t have network coverage. It was a problem that was frustrating us, we sat down, played with some different options, and came up with the tool in a few hours while working with a friend. It was easy, and now thousands of people have used the tool.

Steve: Right now the focus of Monkey Business Labs seems to be on Dashboard Widgets, which of your widgets is the most popular?
Josh: You’re right, and we’ll probably be reserving the Monkey Business brand specifically for just widgets and Mac software. Our widgets have been really suprisingly popular, I think they were the thing that really got us started doing product development on the web. We started out doing a lot of widgets that were more utilitarian, like TV Tracker, to tell you what’s on TV, and To Do Tracker, to keep track of lists. TV Tracker has been immensely popular, though Checkmarker, the new version of To Do Tracker, has plenty of loyalists. Checkmarker is great because it’s so simple, I use it every day.

Steve: Do you have plans to write stand alone native apps for OS X?
Josh: We have a number of ideas for native Mac apps, though right now it’s just a matter of finding the time for them. Lately we’ve been focusing more on entertainment properties, like our Idea Generator widget, rather than serious utilities (really, who could trust a spreadsheet from a company called Monkey Business?)

Steve: What made you make all your widgets donation-ware except for Picture Framer Deluxe?
Josh: We’ve encountered a lot of resistance from people paying for software. A lot of customers believe that because widgets are so tiny and cute that they should be free. It’s a nice idea, though to continue to develop software it’s really key to have a healthy income. We offer our widgets using the “freemium” model where there’s a free version and a deluxe version, you can choose which you pay for. That said, the t-shirt sales help subsidize our widget development time.

Steve: How did you come up with all the designs for your t-shirts on Insanely Great Tees?
Josh: We’ve done all the design for our projects in house. I’ve always loved designing shirts and I’m quite pleased with a lot of the shirts we have for sale. My usual point of reference is “would I wear it?” I love wearing the shirts with just icons on them, really simple ones, though some of the more fanatic shirts like “Steve Jobs for President” and “I’m a Mac” are quite popular as well. We like to carry both kinds, appeal to all sorts.

Steve: What’s your current hardware setup?
Josh: We do all our development on MacBooks, which we plug into our nice big monitors when we’re working at our desks. I just picked up one of the wireless razor thin keyboards, which I adore.

Steve: What is in your dock?
Josh: All the Adobe apps, of course. Also, I have this little thing which I think would be quite handy for your readers — it’s an icon you can press which opens a new message in Mail.app. It’s really simple, I made it a million years ago, though it still runs perfectly and uses basically no resources (it’s not like an applescript or something, which would be slow). You can download it from here, stick it in your dock and when you click it, presto, a new mail message. I must use it 50x a day.

Steve: Nice thanks! Do you guys have anything new and exciting for widgets, applications, or t-shirts coming?
Josh: Let’s see — we just launched two new tees, one for the inventor (see above) and one for the Apple History nut. Aside from that, we’ve got a brand new brand coming from Magnetism which we’re calling Bureau of Communication. It’s a formalized way of communicating with your friends. Let’s say your friend is always late to your meetings — you could go to our site, fill out a very serious looking but pretty funny “Airing of Grievance” form, send it along via email. Then your friend gets that, decides to respond with a “Formal Apology” message. And then you can follow that up with a “Statement of Gratitude” form to thank them. We like to think of it as fill in the blanks + tax forms + email. It’s a lot of fun, and we’ll have it out in time for the holidays.

Steve: Thank you very much for your time! It was a pleasure interviewing you.
Josh: Thank you, Steve!