In June we released the FreshBooks forum.  Since then our 800 members have made over 2000 posts, and the team here at FreshBooks has learned a few things that I thought I would share in case you are thinking of starting a forum.

The easy and obvious advice is:

1. Choose and install a decent forum software. We use PunBB. Also worth a look are vBulletin, BBPress, PhpBB and Invision Power Board.

2. Respond quickly to all posts.

3. Respond to all posts in a personal manner.

4. Be on the lookout for spam and zap it as fast as you can. Spammers will come - you can count on it.

5. Keep an eye out for active participants - community members who are active posters are likely to make great moderators. Contact them directly and see if they’d like to help you grow your community. We’ve been very lucky to have Donna, VortexPortal and Bastketcase moderate with us, and chances are strong candidates will emerge in your community if you keep your eyes peeled. If they do, take it as the compliment that is it and reach out to them.

Those were the easy lessons, here some of the are the hard ones:

6. Start with as few categories as possible and let your forum members decide the direction of the community. We started our forum with seven categories - two related to FreshBooks and five others on topics we thought people would find useful and that we thought we would have some expertise to share.

What we found was we overwhelmed people with choice, so we cut our forum down to four very basic categories (”Introduce yourself”, “Need Help with FreshBooks?”, “FreshBooks Feature Requests” and “General Chat”). The “Introduce Yourself” is a good one for setting a welcoming tone in your forum. The “General” category is a sneaky but really important category…it’s where the community magic happens.

By creating an open ended category like a “General Chat” you turn the direction of your community over to your forum members - and that’s the key. To successfully run a forum (and this is a bit presumptuous on my part because we are still just getting our forum going), you can’t force people to talk about things that interest you - so don’t force things. Create an open category and let people talk about things that interest them, and then support the discussion as best you can. So far our “General Chat” category has not yet taken hold, but it will. And I guess that brings me to my seventh piece of advice…

7. Be patient.

Any advice for us?

Here is a quick and dirty look at our totally redesigned timesheets. It includes a fairly detailed tour of our new capabilities in the time tracking arena and some other news - let us know what you think.

Click the image to watch the video:

FreshBooks Version 3.7 is now out and the feedback has been pouring in. Almost everything has been positive, thank you to those of you who sent in some comments.

With the new timesheets, FreshBooks users are now able to:

Keep better track of your staff timesheets. A new and improved Staff timesheets tab lets you navigate, view and edit your staff timesheets if needed.

Here is some of the feedback we have received from our appreciative user community:

Peter Riley Osborne, Groik Productions:

Very cool. I like it. It is very intuitive and is pretty easy to navigate. Thanks so much for making me the most organized vendor ever!

Dylan Hodge, Digital Vault:

Project Timer Rocks! It is exactly what I needed for my phone and email support clients. Nice work, keep it up!

Sonora Beam, Digital Hive:

Upgrades to the timesheet functionality are much appreciated. I LOVE the timer feature. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for that. immensely helpful to have.

It’s very rare that we have meetings that keep us away from our phone lines and email, but today we are closing up shop early to take the team for a final tour of our new office! That’s right…and then we’re going bowling. (You think I’m kidding but I’m not).

Today we will not be available by phone or email from 3:45-6:00 PM ET. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and we promise to bring pics of people in bowling shoes tomorrow.

Bon soir.

What is our core competency at FreshBooks? Walking the Tightrope.

Walking the tightrope is a term I use around here more and more…What does walking the tightrope mean if you are a web application developer? It means finding a balance between what people need and what you *can* put in your application.

Believe me, we’ve dreamed of a million things to add to FreshBooks, but that does not mean we should add them all. If fact, the whole point is we should NOT add most of the things we come up with. We should only add what people need…or what most of the people need. The guys at 37Signals call this the 80/20 rule. I like that. If 80% of people need something you dream up, chances are it should be added. What else should you add? Things that *pain* people…if you have a nice tight feedback loop, and you stay close to your customers, it won’t be long before you know very clearly what pains people.

Increasingly I talk with people outside our company who say, “What if you added this? What if it worked this way? I bet people would like this feature?”

The thing I like most about these questions these days is the way I get to answer: “Well…we have over 2.5 years of customer feedback, I’ve read every one, and no one has mentioned that so while I can see it might be *nice to have*, people just don’t seem to need it”. If I give it a moments thought I can come up with a very logical reason as to why no one has asked for it: It’s out of context of the relationship/the workflow/people’s expectations, and every time that happens, I get more insight into what we’re doing here that I can use to help better walk the tightrope carrying forward. It’s a virtuous circle.

Largely thanks to the efforts of David Crow, over the past 12 months new life has been breathed into the Toronto technology community. Popular “unconference” type events that are free to attend (such as BarCamp and DemoCamp) have drawn developers, designers, marketers and entrepreneurs out of the woodwork. I’d like to take a second and recognize some standout companies that have been born of Toronto and surrounding areas over the last 24 months.

ConceptShare - launched about three Months ago, my favourite service of 2006 is ConceptShare. It was founded by a three person team based out of Sudbury Ontario and the service is a FANTASTIC way for teams to collaborate on visual designs.

B5Media - B5 is a blog network - a new media company with over 2 million unique visitors a month. My friend Mark Evans left the National Post to pursue this opportunity as COO. I was looking at their site yesterday and they have over 14 verticals advertisers can place their content. If you are an advertiser or marketer, or if you are an aspiring blogger looking to earn some revenue, check them out.

Shopify - based in Ottawa, Shopify is an on demand shopping cart service. The technology behind the service is simple and quick to use and the layouts and designs are gorgeous. If you are looking to sell something online - or test if selling something online will work - you can get started quickly and effectively with Shopify.

Nuvvo - Ever wanted to teach a class on something, but you could not figure how to find students? Look no further than Nuvvo. You can prepare, manage and teach courses using Nuvvo - as well as collect payment. The couple behind the product are an exciting pair of technologists who I’m willing to bet you will hear from for years to come.

BubbleShare - run by serial entrepreneur Albert Lai, and recently sold for several million dollars, BubbleShare is one fantastic photo sharing service. I wrote it up here.

Next Monday is DemoCamp12 and I expect there will be 150 or more people in attendance to hear all about BubbleShare 2.0 and annual updates from several of the companies above. If you are in the area, sign up and join us.

PayPal Website Payments Pro, PayPal’s version of a payment gateway that is reasonably priced and does not require a merchant account, has now been released in the UK.  It was previously only available to US merchants.  I am not sure when it became available, one of our customers in the UK who is keeping us very well informed gave us the tip.

At first glance this is great news for UK merchants who have had difficulty finding UK payment gateways that operate as seamlessly as their US counterparts.  Unfortunately for FreshBooks users, the UK Website Payments Pro API is slightly different from the US Version, so it is not yet available with your FreshBooks account. Our development team has not yet committed to integrating with the UK version, but as long as they meet our requirements, I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t build the integration.

Thanks to Marcus for tipping us off to this.  We will keep you abreast of our plans.

Now a note to PayPal…get on the Canadian version…STAT!