Archive for January, 2007
To all FreshBooks users, we are releasing Version 3.7 tomorrow morning (Tuesday, January 30, 2007).
Please expect a short period of downtime between 6:00 AM and 8:30 AM EST (NOTE: this is 3:00am in LA, 6:00am in NYC, 11:00am in London, 7:00pm in Hong Kong, and 10:00pm in Melbourne).
We sent a detailed email out about this and other FreshBooks news last Thursday. If you didn’t receive it, you can view it online here.
Version 3.7 includes a complete overhaul of timesheets. It is very cool, and we are all very excited about it. Expect to be WOW‘ed! And any way it goes, please visit this forum thread and send us your feedback.
FreshBooks is growing – not just our user base (which crossed the 125,000 mark yesterday) – but our staff. As our company grows I am working hard to ensure that me and our other team members grow into our evolving roles as leaders, managers and domain experts. To that end I have been thinking more and more about team dynamics.
When you introduce a new member into a team there are a number of approaches you can take, and based on their knowledge and what they add to the team, you should vary your approach. Personally, I believe in giving responsibility to new team members as a sign of trust – a project I know they will succeed at. By giving a new team member an important project you send strong signals of trust and respect to the new member as well as the incumbents. These signals are paramount. That said, once you have given the project over, you have work to do.
To ensure the success of your new team member with their project, you need to support them. Presumably the new team member will be reporting back to the group. This could happen in a series of meetings or one grand finale. Any way you slice it, it is important that you make yourself available to your new team member at reasonable intervals. You need to check periodically (daily, weekly, hourly, whatever) so that the new member can bounce ideas off of you and you can validate the work that they have done. This is especially important leading up to the presentation.
To ensure the success of that meeting, you need to be on board with WHATEVER is being presented. That way this new person has buy in. If they have that, then their presentation is likely to be a success. With a series of successes like this, the new team member is well on their way to becoming an important part of the team.
This morning FreshBooks was featured in the Globe and Mail – Canada’s largest newspaper with a national distribution of a few million. It’s a great article with a profile of Troy Assaly, a long-time FreshBooks user who manages a web hosting and consulting business, as well as a Whistler Chalet rental site, all while making time to ski the slopes. Check out the article.
I’d like to extend my thanks to Denise Deveau who did a nice job on the article, and Michael Snider who is the technology editor at the Globe, whom I met at the Web 2.0 Summit. Next stop – the front page!
SIDE NOTE: it looks like FreshBooks will cross the 125,000 user mark today. Very exciting. We’ll update the “ribbon” on our home page when we do.
I recently wrote this post about the benefits of Software As A Service (SAAS).
Around that time we received an email from one of our customers:
“On your interstitial page where you try to convince people to cough up
information about themselves, the only way to move forward is by clicking
the Save and Continue button. The no thanks link is broken. Nice!”
This bug was really embarrassing for us – especially given the sensitivity of the action at hand. The bug was short lived, but we are truly grateful for the feedback we got from this user. We spotted him an enhanced account as a token of our thanks.
Now imagine if we were not running a web application and we were developing a desktop or server-installed software…getting that email from our user would have been unlikely because he would have had to make a real effort to send it. In this case he simply used the send feedback/help button all our users see when they login and as a result we had this bug fixed within one business hour. If we offered software that runs on your server or your computer, we would have had to make a bug fix and then post it. Then you would have had to install it. Pain, pain and more pain.
SAAS rocks. You can’t help but build better software because of the better, faster feedback loop. SAAS is the best form of software delivery, period.
It’s time for this month’s edition of ReFresh. Last month, I posted the top 5 FreshBooks blog posts with the greatest number of comments. This month I am posting our 5 most popular podcasts. In these podcasts from our “Build Your Business” teleseminar series will find a lot of great content on succeeding with Google Adwords, generating referrals, and even Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Enjoy.
5th Place: Introduction to Web Site Analytics with John Marshall
“Michael spoke with John Marshall, founder and CEO of ClickTracks, last week. Award-winning web analytics software, ClickTracks was created out of frustration with existing web site analysis tools in the belief that there had to be a better way.”
4th Place: Building Traffic to Your Website with Jennifer Laycock
“Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide, talked to Michael about how search engines can help attract visitors to your web site … What is a keyword phrase, and how do you rank for your keywords? …Use your competitors’ web sites to look for variations on your keyword phrases”
3rd Place: Introduction to Pay-Per-Click Advertising with Andrew Goodman
“In the second of our Fall teleseminar series, Andrew Goodman, author of “Winning Results with Google AdWords”, shares his knowledge and answers your questions about how to get started with creating and managing a pay-per-click advertising campaign.”
2nd Place: Generate Referrals for Your Business with John Jantsch
“… John Jantsch, author of “Referral Flood” and twice voted best small business blogger by Forbes Magazine. John has practical and proven advice about how to build your business by getting people to refer you to others. John has joined Michael once before and we were delighted to have him back.”
1st Place: Google AdWords Teleseminar Podcast with Andrew Goodman
“Last Thursday I had the privilege to conduct a teleseminar about Google AdWords with Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media …People sent in some excellent questions, and the second half of the call was very engaging as Andrew got rolling.”
Hotkeys, I have to say I love them. They are a great way to speed up your productivity and get work done faster. I use them all the time on my Window’s machine. Basic hotkeys that most of you are probably familiar with are:
Ctrl + Alt + Delete = Opens your Windows Task Manager.
Alt + F4 = Closes your current Window.
Alt + Tab = Shifts between your Windows.
Most Applications:
Ctrl + C = Copy, Ctrl + V = Paste, Ctrl + Z = Undo, Ctrl + P = Print,
Ctrl + S = Save, Ctrl + F = Find
Learning new hotkeys is an excellent way to increase productivity, as they are almost always faster then using your mouse and manually performing the operation. From my experience, you can navigate at least 3-5 times faster by using Hotkeys rather then moving your mouse. Here are a few less common hotkeys that I recommend:
Windows Button + D: The windows button is the button that looks like this:
Press Windows + D will minimize all your windows and bring you to your desktop. Performing the same action again, will restore your previous configuration.
Windows Button + Shift + M = Maximize all windows.
Alt + Spacebar + X = Maximizes your current window.
Alt + Spacebar + R = Restores your window to its previous form.
For Geeks:
Windows Button + E: Opens Window’s Explorer. This is a quick way to access system files.
Windows Button + Pause/Break = Opens your System Properties.
Windows Button + R = Opens Window’s Run command.
Windows Button + L = Lock your system.
Feel free to post your personal favourites.
As many of your know I have been working on a project to determine what the environmental impact of our office is. Last week I got our assessment back, complete with the cost to offset our impact – here is a rundown.
First things first, you should know how our impact was measured. There are four main categories for a business like ours (all figures are annual totals):
Electric (our total – 5245.9 KWh): we got this figure from our electric bill.
Natural Gas (our total – 592.97 cubic meters): we got this figure from our gas bill.
Commuting (our total – 19,257 km): to calculate this we took our respective driving distances (using Google Maps), multiplied by two (drive to work, then home from work) and then multiplied by 5 days x 49 weeks (three for holidays) and arrived at 19,257 total kilometres. So you know we had to submit the names of our vehicle models because different models are more or less friendly to the environment.
Air Travel (our total – 14, 594 km): This was the distance I travelled for two trips to California to speak at Office 2.0 and the Web 2.0 Summit.
Paper Usage (our total – 150 lbs): this equates to 15,000 pages of standard 8.5″x11″ printer paper.
So…I passed this info along to the folks at Zerofootprint.net. About one week later they came back to me with this report, which includes a dollar value for the trees that will have to be planted to offset our environmental impact:
I’m off to cut a cheque so we can earn our Zerofootprint badge which acknowledges FreshBooks as a company that has offset their environmental impact. We’ll post it on our website once we’ve got it.
In December I was in a car with a CEO of a successful Canadian technology business and I was a little nervous. The reason was because the CEO was driving at full speed while simultaneously checking his Blackberry for new emails. Some people would be quite freaked out by this, but I was quite calm, because I knew he was a good driver and that thanks to the usability of the Blackberry, checking email did not actually take much of his attention.
I don’t have a Blackberry, but I know that they have a great wheel on the side that makes them incredibly easy and powerful to use. You can scroll through emails and read them with one hand no problem.
Enter iPhone:
I don’t have an iPhone yet, and likely won’t get one when they are available, but I can see just from the reviews and the pictures that everything is dependant on the touch screens. There are no mechanical buttons or wheels. Unless you are one of those people with unbelievable dexterity that can flip a coin through your fingers with one hand, I really doubt you will be able to check your email on the iPhone with one hand. Strictly because of this, I don’t see too many CEO’s (or millions of other busy business people) using the iPhone on a regular basis.
Jason Fried also thinks the iPhone’s lack of touchy feelyness and the fact that you are forced to look at it could be a concern.
A few days ago I got a package I was not expecting. The package came in a yellow paper bag and it had a number of Chinese characters on it with an address located in Taiwan.
I opened it and found a large book with a nice cover along with this letter:
“Dear Daniel:
It is our honor to introduce FreshBooks as a successful innovative Web 2.0 application in our yearly publication, the Internet Application and Development Yearbook in 2006. We thank you again for granting us the authorization to use your logo in the book, and are happy to send you one copy as promised. You would find FreshBooks and previous 2ndSite logo placed on page 144. Happy New Year.”
I was really impressed that they had followed through with their promise to send us a copy. In late September, I had spoken briefly to Judy Liu from Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan.
It also came with a CD at the back which contained a copy of the entire book. This was extremely helpful, since I was able to post a copy (see below) of our entry in the book without having to use a scanner or take pictures.
For those of you, who can read traditional Chinese, enjoy.
(Page 144, Page 145)
Other companies worth mentioning that were profiled in the book include: Zillow.com, PayPal, Skype and SalesForce.com.
I have always loved back of the envelope math. Yes, some things need more research and more analysis, but before you even think of doing that, grab a pen and a napkin and see what you can “figure”.
Here is some back of the envelope analysis from Fred Wilson regarding the monetization of his blog feed:
“Here’s how I am thinking about it. I make about $1000 per month with FeedBurner [by allowing advertisements in his RSS Feed. Fred has about 10,000 subscribers]. So I am going to use half of that money to market my blog’s feed. What I want to see is how much I can increase my feed subs with that money.
Each blog sub is worth about $0.10/month to me (I have about 10,000 subs). Let’s assume that the average subscriber stays with me for 6 months (I honestly don’t know and I need FeedBurner to give me the tools to figure that out). Then the lifetime value of a sub is $0.60. If I spend $500/month, I’ll need to add 830 subs each month to breakeven.”
In probably two or three minutes he has established a set of goals to measure his results against. Goals are important.
Simple and interesting (at least to a data wonk like me). Nice.
[Full Disclosure: Fred is an investor in FeedBurner - the service he is talking about...that said it's a great service.]
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