Archive for April, 2007
Hey everyone, Ben here. I’ve been working nearly a month now at FreshBooks, and Mike felt it was about time for my inaugural blog post. I thought I’d mark the occasion with a couple of updates on the FreshBooks API.
Before starting here, I’d actually written a Ruby wrapper for the current version of the FreshBooks API. It’s hands-down the easiest way to integrate with your FreshBooks account, plus it’s free for anyone to use and modify. If you’ve got some experience in Ruby, you might want to check it out.
Based on my work in this area, I’m pretty stoked to announce the team has put me in charge of continued development on the FreshBooks API. If you’re interested in working with the API, whether it’s to build a 3rd party time tracking widget, a wrapper like mine in PHP, or to use FreshBooks as a back-end billing engine, I’d like to hear from you. I think the more communication we have, the better it’ll turn out for everyone.
So that’s it – short and sweet. It was all business today, so I’ll be sure to throw some office shenanigans into my next post to balance things out.
Last night members of the FreshBooks team donned the FreshBooks tees and climbed the CN Tower for a good cause: the WWF and the fight against global warming.
We had a final donation amount of $585.00 (but it’s not too late to add to that), we also had a strong performance in the climb with our team average at 14:21. The veterans Joe and Levi had impressive times pushing themselves to try and beat last years time. Joe clocked in at 12:21 and Levi at 12:25. Naama (Levi’s fiancée) did awesome for her second time out and just missed her goal of breaking 15 minutes with a time of 15:11. And I did well in my first time out with a time of 17:25. For results on the overall top performers visit the CN Tower climb website.
It was a fun night and we are all looking forward to next year where we will hopefully have two FreshBooks teams out.
UPDATE:
The team times are in! FreshBooks places 2nd! View the results here.
Something I have taken an interest in over the last couple of years is product reinvention. I’ve been thinking about this lately because of something Triscuits has done. I grew up in a Triscuits household. Two things we ALWAYS had in stock when I was growing up were granola and Triscuits. Don’t ask…my friends used to tease me about this because it was something that never failed. Anyway…take a look at Triscuits. All they have done over the last ten years is change the amount of salt and sodium in their product – that’s incredible boring if you ask me. But look at Triscuits now…
Just recently I have come across two new ingenious variations of their crackers: Rosemary and Olive Oil (which is awesome), and Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil (which is even better…I can’t believe how good these taste).
These new offerings have totally reinvigorated how Triscuits are positioned in my mind. Sadly I went to their website to learn more and find links to point to in this post and was utterly disappointed by the uselessness of their marketing collateral…no dedicated pages for each new product, links that are confusing, hard to find and, in some cases, barely work. Classic flash driven advertising agency approach to usability…no wonder ad agencies are in trouble these days. And to top it off, Nabisco has not domain-proofed their brand by buying Triscuits.com. But I digress…
Despite all that, if you are a Triscuits fan, it’s time to go shopping. And may I recommend some Brie cheese with the Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil for your delight? Happy snacking.
Just wanted to let you know that we are closing the FreshBooks office two hours early today for an all-hands meeting, and then some snacks and libations. So… as of 4 PM EST today we will not be available by phone or email or in the forum, as we are meeting to spend some quality time with one another. We will resume our regular hours of exceptional customer support starting tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM, continuing until 6:00 PM as usual. All-hands meetings will be a monthly affair at FreshBooks from here on out. We hope you have a lovely evening and thank you in advance for your understanding.
Warm regards,
—The Fresh Folks
P.S. We are still on the hunt for a full time designer to help us get more done. If you know someone with real talent and a willingness to live in Toronto, please contact us. Thanks.
Handling an upset client the right way can mean the difference between losing that customer forever and having them share their great experience with prospective clients. Worse yet, you never know when you might be talking to a blogger. If you upset a blogger like Jeff Jarvis whose unpleasant run in with Dell prompted a not so friendly blog post, you can see how just one person can hurt your company’s bottom line with one mishandled customer complaint.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
It’s going to happen. While it’s rare to get an unhappy customer on the phone at FreshBooks, it’s our job is to ensure that by the time the call ends, the client is as happy as possible. Sometimes a customer might call and ask for something completely unreasonable or demand a change to our service that will only fit their own needs and will complicate everyone else’s system.
What do you do in this case?
1. One thing to help defuse the situation is to let them know that you understand their concern and that you have listened to their complaint. You can’t just say “I understand your concern, but.” this involves really listening to their complaint and even repeating their concerns in your own words. You want to make sure that they know that you understand why they are upset.
2. After you have fully understood their concern, you should have a good idea of why they are upset. Letting your client know that you agree with them is also another method to help defuse the situation. However, you have to mean it and really put yourself in their shoes.
3. If you have already done everything in your power to make the situation right and your client is still not happy, let them know you have forwarded it for consideration to someone with more power (upper management?). It is important not to reject any idea no matter how crazy it may be. Everything should be open for discussion and every idea should at least be considered as a minimum.
I hope these tips help and I will share some more with you on our next edition of “On Service”. Remember, you never know when your client is the next “Jeff Jarvis” so treat all calls and emails as if they were.
This post is a second in a series we are calling “On Service” where we will be sharing some lessons we have learned over the past few years.
After the release of our benchmarking Report Cards we received a few pieces of feedback from our clients saying that they could not determine their percentile rating because of colour blindness. Mainly distinguishing between the green and orange boxes for “Your Percentile” rating. See below:
So we decided to make a slight design change to these boxes so they would be easier to interpret regardless of what colours we used. See new design below:
About 1 in every 20 people suffer from a colour vision deficiency – something to consider when you are designing your web pages, and not only when you choose colours, but also when you decide to display information. Clearly it’s important to display information in a simple and easily understood format and not rely too heavily to certain colours to convey meaning.
Here is a cool little online tool which I stumbled upon. It allows you to check what your images or website(s) look like from the eyes of someone who is colour blind.
Toronto is an amazing city, not quite on the scale of cities like London, New York and Paris… but it has a few claims to fame that those cities don’t have. One of which is the tallest free-standing structure in the world — the CN Tower.
Every year around this time, the WWF (World Wildlife Fund — not the wrestling federation) puts on a great fundraising campaign where people flock to the tower as individuals and teams to climb the 1,776 steps up the tower. Joe and I have done it a few years on our own, but this year with Jeff’s enthusiasm and Naama’s gumption, we have decided to put in a FreshBooks team.
To make it a little more interesting (and life threatening), we always try to go up as fast as possible. When its over, we all collapse at the top and swear up and down that we won’t do this again next year. Luckily for the WWF as the year passes by our memory of the climb fades. So here we are again. Our goal is to raise $1625, so if you want to help out, you can pledge us here.
The WWF seems to be really playing up the climate change angle on their site where they say they “strike major blows in the fight against global warming”. Thanks for you support, and have a happy Earth Day this Sunday.
Moments ago we released FreshBooks Report Cards Service. I wanted to take a moment and talk about where this service is heading.
The Report Cards service is a new FreshBooks offering and it will evolve over time. Gradually FreshBooks will be releasing features that help the businesses within our community connect so that the best performers can share insight and advice with other businesses. There will also be a historical component to the service so that businesses can measure their progress over time and continuously improve their results and improve their businesses. This is all part of our on-going goal of ensuring that FreshBooks adds value and effectively pays for itself. We believe that when you succeed, we succeed. We believe that you deserve products and services better than you have available to you today, possibly better than you have ever imagined, and we believe that it’s our responsibility to imagine those services for you and with you, then bring them to life.
In many ways the FreshBooks Report Card service is a groundbreaking service that delivers valuable data to small businesses. We are unlocking data that they need and that they could not previously find. After all, where does a web designer from England go to find out how their business stacks up against other English web designers? Now, thanks to FreshBooks countless under-served professions like computer technicians, PR firms, pool cleaners, residential and corporate alarm monitoring companies and design studio can access that information without having to spend thousands of dollars on a report from Forrester or Hoovers, and the quality of the data itself will be better thanks to the fact that it is source data. And the entire service is delivered automatically without taking any time, effort or money from small business owners who are already too busy being the true engine of almost every economy on the planet.
We want to thank all the FreshBooks businesses that have chosen to participate in our Report Cards service and we hope you will help spread the word about FreshBooks so that we can deliver ever improving data to your quarter from now until far, far, far into the future.
The following is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about the FreshBooks report card service.
How do I access my Report Card?
When you logged into your account, you can access your Report Card from the right hand side of your “Account info” page which is available from the “Home” tab.
When is the next Report Card coming out?
Every calendar fiscal quarter (i.e. every three months) you will now receive a Report Card from FreshBooks.
Why can’t I see my industry averages?
If you can’t see your industry average there are two reasons why. First, you need to tell us your industry – if we don’t know what industry you are in, how can we tell you what your industry average is? Second, you need to have been with FreshBooks for one full fiscal quarter. Without a full quarter of data we cannot tell you anything meaningful about your business.
What about my privacy?
Your data is only contributed to the report cards if you chose to opt in. If you don’t opt in, no one will know your profession so your data can’t be used at all. Only active users are asked to participate, though less active users are able to sign up to the service from their company info page if they want to participate.
What is the quality of the data and who is in my industry?
The companies included are other FreshBooks companies who indicate they are in your profession AND who chose to be involved in the report cards AND who collect money in the same currency as you AND who sent and collected payment for more than 10 invoices last quarter. Oh yes, and over time the top and bottom 10% performers are removed from all large samples to guard against statistical outliers.
Presently there are over 80 service-based industries from engineers to web designers, PR firms to ISPs, web hosts to dog walkers. Each of these industries is fairly niche and therefore your data is relatively granular, which is a good thing. Therefore, whatever data there is will be good, even if there are less than 10 companies to compare your data against.
Why are there less than 10 people in my profession?
See “What is the quality of the data and who is in my industry?” above.
Why don’t the averages add up?
Good question. I (Mike) turned to Joe (co-founder, Chief Architect and PhD Computer Science) for the answer on this one. Here’s what he said:
The “average invoice size” for your profession is an average of an average. Here is an example:
Your Account:
“# of invoices sent this quarter”: 10
“Average invoice size”: $15
“Amount invoiced last quarter”: 10 x $15 = $150
Another Account:
“# of invoices sent this quarter”: 40
“Average invoice size”: $5
“Amount invoiced last quarter”: 40 x $5 = $200
Your Profession:
“# of invoices sent this quarter”: (10 + 40)/2 = 25
“Average invoice size”: ($15 + $5)/2 = $10
“Amount invoiced last quarter” = ($150+$200)/2 = $175
As a result, the “Amount invoiced last quarter” for your profession equals to $175 even though 25 x $10 does not.
Hopefully that’s as clear as mud.
What can I do to affect the accuracy of my data?
Over time, and as more businesses start using FreshBooks, the data will become better and better. You can help improve the data by spreading the word about FreshBooks and getting more people on the service, or by sending us a note and telling us where we can advertise to find more businesses like yours.
What is next for the FreshBooks Report Card Service?
To learn more about where this service is heading, please read this post.
We are holding a virtual press conference about the launch of the FreshBooks Report Card Service today at the Web 2.0 Expo facilitated by the good folks at Yugma. You can join the “press conference” for free and ask me questions if you like. Here is how you dial in:
First, join the presentation at:
https://www.yugma.com/app/loading.php?user=&collsession=109917228&role=4
Meeting ID: 109-917-228
Meeting Date: 17-April-2007
Meeting Time: 02:30 pm (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada); Tijuana
Duration: 30 Minutes
Telephone Conference Bridge Number: +1-218-486-3889 Access Code: 109917228
If you would like to install Yugma prior to the session, please register at www.yugma.com
If you have any difficulties logging on, please contact Yugma support at support@yugma.com or +1 952-232-5840
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