mesh conference 2007 is Now Open For Business

As some of you may know, I am a co-founder of a conference here in Toronto that addresses the question, “What’s next online?”. We just started selling tickets this morning (and they are going much quicker than expected). Jeff (from FreshBooks) built the site.

Here is a post from my personal blog:

It is with great pleasure that Mathew, Stuart, Mark, Rob and I announce that the mesh conference 2007 is now open for business.

What’s mesh? It’s a two-day conference in Toronto that endeavors to answer the question “What’s next online?” This is our second year and we sold out last year to a crowd of 400.

We try to answer that question by talking about how the internet is disrupting four streams: media, society, marketing and business. Our way will be illuminated by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Robert Edelman of Edelman Public Relations, Jim Buckmaster of Craig’s List, Tom Williams of GiveMeaning and Austin Hill of Gifter, all of whom will be joining us for keynote conversations. We’ll be releasing more about our other speakers and the topics and panels over the coming weeks.

A number of people have asked me to fill them in when event goes live…so I’m telling you now. I’ll add this too, we want you to be there and given the interest we have received prior to today, I’m guessing we will sell out well before the event. So please buy your tickets now if you want to come.

So, there it is. Please visit the site and come join the conversation.

On a side note, I don’t think I could have possibly imagined how much I could learn or how much fun I could have by being a part of this group. Mathew, Rob, Stuart and Mark – thank you very much. I would also like to thank our sponsors who make it possible to bring in such wonderful speakers. I can’t wait for May 30/31.

Tips for Attending a Conference

With mesh just around the corner (full disclosure: I’m one of the conference founders), I’ve got conferences on the brain.

Most of the content you read about conferences is how to plan one. Here are some snippets from an excellent post with tips on “How to Attend a Conference“:

Know Your Questions. Seek Your Answers. Never attend a conference without at least three questions you want answered. Never leave until they have been.

The most important people at the conference are sitting next to you. Think Tom Peters gives a rat’s ass about your new business strategy? Is Seth Godin going to give you personalized marketing advice? Of course not. The people at any event who are most likely to have already faced your challenges (and maybe even solved them) aren’t the highly-paid keynoters, but rather your fellow attendees. They are like you. They can help you. Ignore them at your peril.

Read the whole post. Hat tip to the author, Matt Homann.

Open Thread: Motivational Tools – What Do You Use?

I’ll let you in on a little secret…here at FreshBooks HQ we ring a bell every time someone upgrades to a paying account. Inevitably it’s a race to “ring the bell” whenever one of those emails arrives. And while there are varying degrees of competition to actually ring it, everyone in the office loves the sound of that bell.

When you have a team, you need little ways like this to acknowledge your small successes. Maybe it’s a group lunch or something new for the office that benefits everyone, some form of public acknowledgement, but you need something. Little rewards like these build camaraderie and keep people focused.

Is there anything you do to keep you or your team motivated?

Business Values: Some Things I Just Don’t Believe In

Sometimes I see things I just don’t believe in. Here’s an example.

A recent Fortune Magazine article describes how Dov Charney, the founder and CEO of American Apparel, raised money through a SPAC. SPACs are shell companies that raise hundreds of millions in equity and go public. Once public they wait for an opportunity and once they find one, they put their equity to work. Since going public is such a painful process with Sarbanes Oxley and all the other red tape, SPACs are attractive to entrepreneurs as a quick way to raise big capital.

Here’s my thing: I just don’t believe in SPACs. Time may prove me wrong, and if that’s the case, so be it.

American Apparel is an interesting company who has grown very quickly. They do untraditional things like manufacture all their garments in the US, which in these times of outsourcing, I applaud them for. That said, SPACs seem like soulless entities to me. What are the odds they share the business values of the people at American Apparel? Slim to none I’d say. What if the dark clouds come when you have an investor like that? Wouldn’t be pretty I suspect.

Time will tell. Let’s give it 5-10 years. Standing here today, American Apparel’s decision to take investment from a SPAC seems like folly to me.

SPACs remind me of something we recently went through up here in Canada – income trusts. Income trusts were all the rage in Canada in recent years, and with all due respect to those who believed that simply by converting to an income trust corporations could simply side-step income taxes, you were fools.

Things that sound too good to be true, usually are too good to be true. Other things like SPACs, they fall into the category of things I just don’t believe in.

FeedBurner and the Google Bump

As of last Friday, FeedBurner RSS stats now include Google Reader stats in their results – so if you have a feed like we do, you probably got a nice bump in your readership over the weekend (we went from 446 to 622 overnight…a 39% spike).

It’s interesting to see that Google has already established a 2:1 lead over the previous leader for our audience: BlogLines. Pretty impressive…can’t wait to see what happens when they start to offer ads like the FeedBurner ad network…should be an exciting race there…perhaps an acquisition…the future of advertising…stay tuned.

Sunday Morning Maintenance

Hey everyone, FreshBooks is doing some maintenance this Sunday – February 18, 2007 between 7:00 AM EST and 8:00 AM EST.

(NOTE: 7:00 AM EST (GMT – 5) is 4:00am in LA, 7:00am in NYC, 12:00pm in London, 8:00pm in Hong Kong, and 11:00pm in Melbourne).

Please expect your FreshBooks account to be unavailable for a brief period during this time.

Fresh BaseCamping (coming soon)

It’s almost here…coming very soon to FreshBooks is a seamless integration with 37 Signals’ Basecamp project management service.

Here is what you can expect from this integration:

All of this will allow you to take advantage of Basecamp’s project management excellence, along with FreshBooks’ invoicing and time-tracking genius. We’ve been working hard at this to make sure the workflow will be smooth and un-intrusive.

Using both services, we hope you will have everything you need to manage your projects, communicate better with your clients, bill more and collect faster.

Starting A Business – Ideas Matter Less Than You Think

I love Fortune Magazine – I’ve written about it before.

Here is a snippet (republished without consent) from the most recent issue – it’s email Q & A with Jim Collins:

Q: If you were to offer advice to a beginning entrepreneur, what would it be? – Franciso Romero, Alburquerque

A: First, don’t obsess on finding the “great idea”. In fact, our research shows a somewhat negative correlation between pioneering a great idea and building a great company. Many of the greatest started with either no great idea or even failed ideas. Sony started with a failed rice cooker. Marriott started as a single root beer stand. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard’s great idea was simply to work together – two best friends who trusted each other – while their first four products failed to get the company out of the garage. They followed the “first who” approach to entrepreneurship: First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn’t the market you target, the product you develop, or the financing, but the founding team. Starting a company is like scaling an unclimbed face – you don’t know what the mountain will throw at you, so you must pick the right partners, who share your values, on whom you can depend, and who can adapt.

In the past I have talked about how Fear of Failure gets in the way of many entrepreneurs. Analysis paralysis (”I’m waiting for that billion dollar idea…”) can be a manifestation of that fear. As Jim makes clear in his answer, a solid team is the foundation for success. Once you have that, almost every success story I know boils down to one secret formula – consistent excellence in execution.

If you are interested in business, I highly recommend reading Good to Great or Built to Last. Jim Collins is a co-author of both and they are two of the best business books of the last decade.

How to Name Your Company

I wrote an article for ThinkVitamin about “How to Name Your Company“.

So far there are 30 comments and counting… check it out.

Ripe Data – the January 07 Edition

This is the third edition of Ripe Data. What’s Ripe Data? It’s a monthly series we’re going to be doing on the FreshBooks Blog and it is an assortment and analysis of various metrics we track here at FreshBooks. Please note, Ripe Data will not include the valuable industry benchmarks active FreshBooks users will have access to in 2007. With that said, enjoy.

For companies who accept online payments:
- In December, 14.7% of payments were accepted online
- In January, 17.0% of payments were accepted online

Analysis
This is a fairly significant month over month increase in the number of people who choose to pay their invoices online as opposed to sending payments via check. It looks like people are overcoming the holiday season cash flow issues which likely caused the drop in online payments we saw last month.

Payment Methods:
- Visa: 16.5% in December, 15.5% in January
- Mastercard: 7.7% in December, 7.6% in January
- Amex: 4.2% in December, 4.19% in January
- Paypal: 5.6% in December, 6.5% in January
- Other (including check, cash, account credit, etc.): 65.9%% in December, 66.3% in January

Analysis
It’s hard to account for such significant growth for PayPal over a one month period. Whether it speaks to market penetration for them, or it’s just an anomoly remains to be seen, but I suspect the trend towards more use of PayPal over time will continue – it’s a great service.

For companies that send invoices by both email and by ground mail:
- In December, 95.9% of invoices were sent by email and 4.1% were sent by ground mail.
- In January 95.9% of invoices were sent by email and 4.1% were sent by ground mail.

Analysis
Since our August snail mail release, in which we introduced the ability to send invoices through the US Post, we have seen increases in the percentage of invoices sent by ground mail climb every month. Despite the fact that the number held in January, I believe that this trend towards more invoices being sent throught our ground mail service will continue in 2007 until a balance is reached (the numbers did trend upwards again when you move out another decimal place).

Browser Usage:
- Internet Explorer 7 – December 15.42%, January 20.40%
- IE 6 – December 34.78%, January 37.28%
- FireFox 2.0 – December 21.85%, January 1.06%
- FF 1.5 – December 17.61%, January 12.56%

Analysis
Alarming for the Firefox community. Microsoft IE 7 has stolen significant market share from Firefox over each of the last three months.

Operating System Usage
-Windows – December 86.97%, January 88.85%
-Macintosh – December 10.27%, January 9.04%
-Linux – December 2.09%%, January 1.54%
-Unix – December 0.06%, January 0.07%

Analysis
This is the second straight month of Windows growth and it may be an early sign that the market is experimenting with Microsoft VISTA, but time will tell.

Conclusion
That’s all for now folks.