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.