Last week while going through our webstats (we use IndexTools) Mike found a referrer from Stumble Upon. Having never heard of this site we checked it out and admittedly it took quite some time before either of us understood what the heck it was. As far as I can tell now, it is a community bookmarking type site (a la del.icio.us).

It works like this:

After downloading the app and installing on your Firefox toolbar (it don’t think it works with IE) you can select from the following list of categories:

You then click the stumble button in the toolbar and you are presented with a random website. At that point you can flag it as either “like” or “dislike” with up and down thumb signs and then can comment on or tag the site.

Other users can see what sites you like and interact with you much like with MySpace.

Seems a lot like del.icio.us; however, as a business we can setup a campaign for our site to show up and we pay StumbleUpon 5 cents per page view. I thought this sounded fairly reasonable and not knowing what kind of traffic we could expect, I gave it a try. Within our first 8 hours of trying it out, we maxed out our visits at 500 and used up our $25 USD.

The traffic seems quite good considering the small investment. However looking closer at the results and thinking about how the users actually view your pages (normally a quick scan then they move on to the next page), it is clear that this is not very high quality traffic. After 500 visits, we had only one conversion. Since a one day test is never very indicative of whether a campaign will succeed, we added an additional $50 and tried to narrow the types of people we could target (aged 25 to 40, interested in web development). We quickly burned through the last $50 and only saw a total of five conversions who have yet to actually properly trial our product.

We will certainly keep an eye on Stumble Upon, but unless they reduce their prices or have a better way to drill down prospective visitors, we will not be trying any more campaigns anytime soon (although Mike really likes to see that jump in traffic).

One of the things I like to see when I subscribe to someone’s service is that THEY use their own service.  I call this “eating your own cookie”.

We are in the process of redesigning our timesheet.  It’s a great design project to sink my teeth into.  How to we start something like this?  We USE THE TIMESHEET.

Starting this morning everyone around here is responsible for tracking their time in 10 minute  intervals – this is going to force us to use the timesheet regularly and get in touch with the painful activity of accurately tracking your time down to the minute.

If you are building web applications, using your own product is KEY.  We built FreshBooks to help us manage our web design company and we still use it to manage the billing of a handful of clients we have not let go of…. And after three years, the cookie still tastes good, but with our upgraded timesheet, it’s about to get sweeter.

I recently received a support email from a client who was concerned about our security in reference to two articles he had read on internet security with regards to the Web 2.0.

The first article was about a recent worm on Yahoo which outbreak was aided in part by their AJAX functions.

The second article was about how AJAX can amplify security threats if you are not careful.

Here is part of my reply:

Thank you for sending me links for those articles.  I have just read through them.  FreshBooks does not use AJAX for e-mailing or sending/creating data, so the majority of the vulnerabilities described in those articles do not apply to FreshBooks.

However, those articles serve as a good wake up call for where we are headed in the future: Social software.

As one of the article states:
“While AJAX by itself doesn’t create new security risks, it has a tendency to amplify the seriousness of several well-understood threats…”

In FreshBooks, we use AJAX functions in controlled and confined situations such as using a coupon for an upgrade or retrieving your invoice item data.  The data flow is always for information retrieval.  As a result, there is no medium to amplify any threats that could exist.  While we expand our online application to more community base software, this is something we will be increasingly considering.

For those of you who are concerned about security and backups, I can assure you that your financial data is very well protected.  Our server is hosted by Rackspace, the leader in managed hosting with clients such as the US Marines, Pfizer, General Electric, Cisco, Sony Music, and Hershey.  They are based in Texas and we have in place a number of procedures to prepare for a major disaster. 

Your data on our server is backed up daily and weekly.  The backups are transferred to a separate facility located in several locations and a long distance from our data center.  In the event of a disaster at one of our data centers, your data is protected and we have a plan in place to restore a new server in a different location with the backed up data.  Our databases can be restored within 24 hours. 

Don’t forget that we believe that you own your data, so you can always export your data in your reports to CSV/EXCEL spreadsheet and keep your own backups.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding our security or backups, feel free to post them.

If you have not seen it already, WorkHappy.net is a great resource for freelancers and home based business.  It has lots of product and literature recommendations.

Anyway, we just got reviewed there and we got FIVE STARS.

Aces.

Thanks be to Greg Turnbull for taking the time to review us.  We now have a case study about Greg that we’ll be posting soon, so look out for that.

If you want to be a case study, send us a note.

I actually thought this was a really cool way to show that your service is down when I first saw this plumber yesterday on my Bloglines online rss reader system.

However, now that I have seen it over five times since then, I’m starting to get a little worried. I know there are plenty of other blog reader services out there, so I’m almost ready to switch.

Is anyone else getting tired of this guy?

What is social software?  It’s software that deepens relationships between human beings - at least that is my take.

I started thinking about this last night because of a conversation I had with a FreshBooks user.  He has a design studio and I was interviewing him as part of our on-going client outreach initiative.

I told him that we are going to socialize our timesheet.  He said, “Socialize your Timesheet?…Like put tags on it?”

This client is a regular reader of websites and blogs like Signal vs. Noise and A List Apart… He knows what social software is, but clearly it has lost its meaning.

Social software is not tags [you can go here to see some reasons why I think tags suck].  Tags facilitate a relationship, but hey do not deepen it. Presently, FreshBooks does an excellent job of facilitating relationships and streamlining billing and time tracking.  When we socialize our timesheet we are going to embark on a new era whereby we help people work and communicate like people, not like users of software.  We’re excited.

Go here if you want to learn more about how we are going to socialize something as mundane as a timesheet.

Levi, drumroll please…

[sounds of a drumroll as the FreshBooks team bangs their hands on their desk]

Prepaaaaaaaare the ribbooooooooonnn!!!

Here at FreshBooks, we have that little ceremony when we surpass a user milestone and update the user count ribbon on our homepage.

And me, I’m Jeff. The creator of that sweet looking ribbon and the one responsible for it’s updates.

Just after getting off a call with a potential client today, I happened across Seth Godin’s post about sales calls:

I wonder if the sales call has a lot of life left in it.

Before you faint, let me get my terms straight: I think a sales call is a meeting (in person or on the phone) when a salesperson endeavors to sell something to a prospect, and where the prospect is doing the salesperson some sort of service by being there.

He is absolutely right, and I am willing to take it one step further. Not only are outgoing sales calls dying, but (in our space at least) so are incoming sales calls.

What I mean by this is the old way of transferring any sales calls over to a true “Sales Guy” that can answer every question to a T and truly sell the caller on the product every time is dying quickly.

My call today was a consultancy that called me to ask about training. A genuinely interested buyer called and had his colleague on the speaker phone. They proceeded to pepper me with very common questions for businesses evaluating a potential vendor:

• Do you offer onsite training sessions?
• What are some of your larger customers? Would I have heard of any of them?
• How can I be sure you will be around in the future?
• etc. etc.

If I was a slick sales guy I would have great well-rehearsed answers to all these questions because they are very common in the software industry, but alas I am a developer/operations/business/support/integrations/sales guy and I really don’t have time to B.S. our customers. Therefore, I responded with reasonable and truthful answers, that perhaps this person did not want to hear:

• There are no onsite training sessions, just an easy to use application with good online help
• Most of our customers are small consultancies that you would not have heard of
• Our application has been live for over two years, our business has been here for over three and we are here running the business and answering the phone from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM Eastern

Most of my answers came down to the fact that we run a business focused exclusively on running and improving this application. We have designed it to be easy to use and to sell itself, so please give it a try.

I hope they do try it out and I hope they weren’t turned off by my answers, but if they were - so be it.

When you are getting started as a web designer, finding a good contract can be a real obstacle.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but here is a contract for web designers that I used to use when I did consulting and web design projects for less than $10,000.  It’s a great contract for those small brochure-type websites in the $0-$5,000 range (we used a different contract for engagements over $10,000).  Why is it a good contract?

1) it describes the process
2) it puts onus/responsibility on YOUR CLIENT – VERY IMPORTANT
3) it is short
4) it is easy to understand
5) it breaks down gracefully

Over 6+ years I found this was all I needed for small web design projects.  In fact, it worked very well for me early on in my contracting career when a dodgy client tried to take advantage of me. 

Feel free to use this contract if you like.  Please note that you ought to include a detailed description of the work you are going to do (i.e. number of pages, description of the functionality, etc.).  So without further adieu, here is the contract:

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Additional Costs:
* Copyediting: $***/hour
* Additional graphics and HTML: $***/hour
* Programming: $***/hour
* Significant updates to site and/or database: $***/hour (minimum $*** fee)
* Search engine optimization consulting: $***/hour

Payment Schedule:
* 50% to commence design and development
* 40% upon delivery of completed site - certified cheque required
* 10% hold back for 30 days to ensure the site operates in accordance with project specifications

Upon, but not before, delivery of the completed web site and upon payment in full, all HTML and programming and finished graphics will become property of YOUR CLIENT. YOUR COMPANY’s liability will be limited to replacement of any defective works.  YOUR COMPANY will not be held responsible for any consequential damages resulting from errors in the work. It is understood that YOUR CLIENT is legally responsible for all project content (including, but not limited to, text and images).

YOUR CLIENT is responsible for the provision of all site content in a timely manner. A two-week lapse between a request for content and the corresponding delivery will constitute a termination of the contract, in which case YOUR CLIENT will be invoiced for the services performed to date. The fee for services is based on three rounds of design as detailed in Section 3 above.

Additional charges will be incurred by YOUR CLIENT at the rates outlined above for further revisions. Revisions/feedback will only be accepted in written form.

Please sign here to signify your acceptance of this Statement of Work:

Signature: __________________________   Date: ____________________

I leaked some of the new features coming in our next release in an earlier post.

Today I will provide you with some screenshots and go into more details about the new feature to notify your clients of payment and/or thank them for their payment.

The new payment notification email can be customized in your ‘system setting’ area under ‘Emails’.

The interface will mirror your other customizable emails.  There will be a checkmark to enable this feature.  When this feature is enabled, all recurring invoices that automatically charge your client’s credit card will send out payment notification.

If you typically receive payment offline and enter your payments, you can also choose to send a payment notification when you enter your payment.

The beauty of this feature is that you can customize this email to be a simple payment notification such as a receipt or a friendly thank you letter or even both.  People often tell us that this level of customization will allow them to improve their relationships with their clients.  That is what we think software should do.

If you have any questions about this new feature, feel free to post your questions.