Galaxy-News: Hi Nathaniel! Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Nathaniel: I'm a 27-year-old guy that lives in Raleigh, NC with my wife and four kids. I've been mucking around with computers since I was 10, and doing serious software development since I was 14. Not long after that I got seriously interested in entrepreneurship, and have been working on my own projects and businesses in one form or another since 2004. In addition to Spreedly, I also own and run Terralien, a Rails-focused web design and development shop. Needless to say, I stay pretty busy these days! Of course, I'm only a small part of Spreedly - I like to call myself the janitor, as I just take care of cleaning up whatever's left over when everyone else is done. Also on the team is Duff, our main developer; Alex, our designer (you might know his work from Weewar); and John, who does security and system administration. One of the really fun parts of doing a startup is getting to work closely with other passionate people, and that's certainly been our experience with Spreedly.

Galaxy-News: Could you give us a brief description of the services Spreedly is offering.

Nathaniel: Spreedly's all about subscription management, which basically means our software helps entrepreneurs and business owners set up subscription plans, sign users up for subscriptions, and manage their subscriber base over time. Our goal is to be as invisible to the end consumer as possible, and instead really focus on making it drop-dead simple for businesses to turn their hard work into real income. One thing I want to clarify before moving on is the word "subscription". A lot of people think "automatically recurring payment" when they hear that word, but in our view a subscription is much broader than that. Any time you pay money to get access to a service for a given period of time, you've "subscribed", whether that subscription auto-renews or not. It turns out that when Weewar first started taking payments via Spreedly, we didn't support auto-recurring subscriptions at all. We've since added that functionality as it's very important, but it's not fundamental to the subscription model.

Galaxy-News: When and why did you come up with the idea to create subscription-based payment solutions for websites and web games?

Nathaniel: The work that I do as part of Terralien is often with startups, and many of them have a need for subscription management. After implementing Paypal's subscription "solution" for a client and getting very frustrated with how awful their programming and user interfaces were, I was left muttering to myself that "there has to be a better way." A quick follow-on realization was that there are literally thousands of businesses that have implemented nearly the same logic for subscription management, all with varying degrees of robustness and feature richness. There was clearly a spot in the market for a simple yet robust platform that all of these sites could use, and a quick look around came up with a very limited set of alternatives. So I grabbed the best developer, designer and system administrator I knew, and said, "Let's build this thing!" As a business owner myself, Spreedly's value really boils down to one thing: it allows creators to focus on what they're good at and what they enjoy instead of on the nitty-gritty of collecting money and managing subscriptions. As an avid Weewar player, for instance, I know I want them to be spending their time making Weewar a better gaming experience, not on figuring out how to collect subscription fees from their players. And that's exactly what we've seen happen since getting Weewar using Spreedly.

Galaxy-News: The payment options needed within the web gaming markets can be different from game to game. What solutions are you supporting and are you able to offer individual solutions designed to exactly fit to each type of game?

Nathaniel: Every business is certainly different, but we've found that their needs in subscription management are awfully similar. That's one of the reasons we built Spreedly - it just seemed silly for everyone (including ourselves) to keep inventing the wheel over and over again. So the first thing we do in any situation is try to figure out the simple solution that will fit for the majority of our clients. If we then find that there's still a large number of clients that need something different, we come back and build in the ability to tweak the feature. One thing to emphasize here is that we've built a best of breed API (Application Programming Interface) for our clients to use when integrating Spreedly into their site. It's lean and light, it offloads the hard work on to Spreedly, and yet it gives the client a lot of flexibility in how they decide to tie in to our service. What this means is that even in the cases where we might not support a feature that's really important to a given client, they can often easily implement that feature themselves and tie it in to what Spreedly provides. So to answer your direct questions about individual solutions, the answer is a qualified "no". No, we don't plan on doing custom implementation work for individual clients, but in the end we really don't see that being a problem for 99% of clients due to our top-notch API.

Galaxy-News: Are service users able to integrate localized payment options e.g. PayByCall or eBank2Pay are popular in Europe, whereas credit card payments are dominant in North America.

Nathaniel: Currently we only support using a Paypal merchant account, which is kind of ironic since Spreedly was originally conceived as a reaction to Paypal's incredibly annoying subscription solution! Even so, Paypal has a huge user base, and we recognize that it's one of the easiest kinds of merchant accounts for many new businesses to get. (And just to clarify, subscribers to Spreedly-powered services do *not* have to have a Paypal account, they can pay directly via credit card and never see Paypal). Of course, Paypal is only the beginning, and one of the things we're hoping comes out of the latest round of invites we sent out is feedback about which payment solutions are most important for us to implement next. We're using some excellent underlying software for actually interfacing with payment solutions, so adding new ones is not terribly hard. That said, it's important to keep our focus and make sure we're adding what's most in demand.

Galaxy-News: How can you cope with possible hacking attempts? Is Spreedly able to protect private data and can you guarantee an adequate security?

Nathaniel: This really highlights one of the major advantages we see to using Spreedly: we focus on security so our clients don't have to. Security is at the forefront of our minds as we implement each component in the system. Even more importantly, we have the time and motivation to implement security, where many of our clients simply do not. While no system can guarantee absolute security, Spreedly uses the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard as a foundation for implementing security. The PCI DSS includes requirements for network architecture, software design, policies, procedures and much more. By implementing these requirements and adding in a good dose of our own paranoia, Spreedly is constantly working to safeguarding our clients' data.

Galaxy-News: Let's say a developer is interested in your services. What kind of costs would there be? What would a bill look like?

Nathaniel: First of all, every account comes with a test site and a production site. The test site is exactly like the production site except it uses our internal test gateway. This means you can easily check out the service, get it all integrated in your staging environment, and generally kick the tires without paying a dime. Once you're ready to start collecting real fees, you simply activate your production site, configure a few things, and you're ready to go. From then on you'll be charged $19/month plus transaction fees, where the transaction fees are 3% of the first 50 transactions, 2% of transactions 51-5000, and 1% of every transaction thereafter. A transaction is simply anytime you charge a subscriber money: initial signup, subscription renewal, plan upgrade, etc.

Galaxy-News: Thanks ever so much for you time and good luck with Spreedly!

Nathaniel: Thanks so much for the interview! As you can imagine, we're super-excited to get the word out about Spreedly. One of the things we all love about the project is that it fuses our technical skills with our passion for entrepreneurship and helping out other entrepreneurs. For those interested in getting their games/businesses using Spreedly, we have an invitation signup on our homepage. We'll be sending out the next round of invites before you know it, and we can't wait to get even more business up and running on the Spreedly platform!

To check out Spreedly yourself visit: Spreedly.com