Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, April 17, 2007), we are releasing FreshBooks Version 3.8 with report cards.

Please expect a short period of downtime between 6:00 AM and 8:30 AM EDT (NOTE: this is 3:00am in LA, 6:00am in NYC, 11:00am in London, 6:00pm in Hong Kong, and 8:00pm in Melbourne).

We sent a detailed email out about this and other FreshBooks news last Friday. If you didn’t receive it, you can go here to view it online.

Version 3.8 includes your industry benchmark reports, updates to reports and new features on the invoice page. We hope you enjoy it.

Here’s some more food for thought from “Founders at Work” for those of you who are tracking Web 2.0.

While it’s a little out of context because Joe Kraus - founder of Excite and Jotspot (a wiki service recently sold to Google) - was answering the question, “What important lessons did you learn at Excite that you carried over to Jotspot?”, I think it’s also a good indication of how much different this boom is than the first internet bubble:

“Get the legs of the business underneath it before you run terribly fast. We were always playing catch-up at Excite and I never liked the feeling.”

He also said:

“The hardest part in a start-up is you wake up one morning and you feel great about the day, and you think, “We’re kicking ass.” And then you wake up the next morning , and you think, “We’re dead.” And literally nothing has changed.

If you’ve ever been there you know that’s funny because it’s true.

Great news — we’ve added a new person here at FreshBooks. His name is Ben Vinegar and he comes to us by way of the University of Toronto computer science department. Ben has some great experience working with Epson Canada and the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.

Ben is going to be pitching in on support as well as helping us develop things faster and better as we continue to improve the FreshBooks application. We met Ben in February and he started on April 2nd and we’re pleased to report that we already feel like he is an integral part of the FreshBooks team.

To learn more about Ben, you can read his profile, check out his personal blog where he talks Ruby, or send him a note to welcome him aboard.

Yesterday Kurt Vonnegut, the mastermind author behind classics such as Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five, died. He was 84.

Mr. Vonnegut was truly one of a kind, steeped in original thought and inspired moral guidance, both of which he delivered in his own dark and laugh out loud funny kind of way. I’ll never forget reading Cat’s Cradle (my personal favourite) one summer in which I read about 30 books. It stands tall among many great works, with indelible characters and curious concepts (anyone else here remember Ice Nine?)

In an editorial over at the New York Times Dinitia Smith writes how Mr. Vonnegut’s “dark comic talent and urgent moral vision…caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation”. I’ll do one better and say that’s an understatement. His writing has already informed the imagination of many generations, and will no doubt continue to inform many more over the decades to come.

Here’s an interview I saw live a few months back with John Stewart on the Daily Show. It’s Windows Media player formatted (sorry about that), but if you want a taste of a legend, check it out.

Could you ever imagine making a billion dollars in a year? Not your company — you.

Rest assured it’s not me or anyone else here at FreshBooks who made a billion dollars last year, but Paul Kedrosky just posted a list of hedge fund managers who did:

Wow… I saw this yesterday and I still don’t know what to say.

This is the fifth edition of Ripe Data — the monthly series that includes an assortment of metrics collected here at FreshBooks. My comments are written below in italics. Please note, Ripe Data does not include the valuable industry benchmarks active FreshBooks users will have access to next week. Remember what Mark Twain said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” Enjoy!

For companies who accept online payments:

• In February, 17.9% of payments were accepted online
• In March, 15.7% of payments were accepted online

A drop in payments that were accepted online is likely due to the large increase in new businesses trying FreshBooks in March and initially not accepting online payments.

Payment Methods:

• Visa: 16.0% February, 14.4% March
• Mastercard: 7.8% February, 7.3% March
• Amex: 4.3% February, 4.2% March
• PayPal: 6.5% February, 7.6% March
• Other (including check, cash, account credit, etc.): 65.5% February, 66.5% March

PayPal had a significant jump in usage this month - it’s the biggest jump and the greatest market share we’ve seen PayPal take since we started tracking in November 2006.

For companies that send invoices by both email and by ground mail:

• In February 96.2% of invoices were sent by email and 3.8% were sent by ground mail
• In March 96.0% of invoices were sent by email and 4.0% were sent by ground mail

4% seems to be a consistent benchmark for this stat, February was just an unusually low month.

Browser Usage:

• Internet Explorer 7: February 22.59%, March 24.04%
• IE 6: February 34.36%, March 34.23%
• Firefox 2.0: February 28.92%, March 29.02%
• Firefox 1.5: February 10.03%, March 8.08%

It appears that the distribution of the Microsoft IE7 browser continues to gain ground on Firefox. This has been a consistent trend since December 2006.

Operating System Usage:

• Windows: February 88.93%, March 88.53%
• Macintosh: February 8.55%, March 9.14%
• Linux: February 2.01%, March 1.67%
• Unix: February 0.00%, March 0.05%

Macintosh looks like it is making a comeback after the Vista jump in February.

Presently my bedtime reading is “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days” – it’s a collection of interviews between the founders of some of the Web’s best known start-ups, and the author Jessica Livingston. Here is a quote from Steve Wozniak on the early days of Apple:

“All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, (b) not having done it before ever. Every single thing that we came out with was really great, I’d never once done that thing in my life.”

What can you take away from this?

a) Focus on the resources you have, not the ones you don’t.
b) Designers don’t need to have done things before, they just need a vision for where they are heading.

Stories like Apple’s are an endless source of inspiration; it never ceases to amaze me how far a company can go if you just take the first steps - no matter how insignificant they may seem at the time.

This message comes a little late in the day, but it’s a national holiday here in Canada on Friday April the 6th, so our office will be closed until Monday the 9th at 9:00 AM. We will reply to all your phone and email support and sales inquiries then. Have a great weekend.

Here is a great article entitled “Five Benefits of Software as a Service” in which FreshBooks is cited. Here’s the intro:

Jason Maynard, an analyst at Credit Suisse, compares software to electricity. Most firms don’t own generators, he points out. They buy electricity from the grid.

That’s the direction he sees things going with software. Soon all applications used by organizations, except made-to-order applications that provide competitive advantage, will be delivered as web-hosted services via a browser.

Read the full article.

Customer service…the hallmark of great service businesses. Great customer service builds brand and generates referrals, but it’s not easy to provide a great customer service experience day in and day out. In a new series of posts we’re calling “On Service”,  I’m going to share with you some lessons we’ve learned over the past 34 months serving our customers here at FreshBooks, and some lessons we’ve learned from other businesses.

Lesson #1: Customer service response times matter.

A few weeks ago, I purchased a new IKEA television stand for my home theatre system.  When I brought the television stand home and assembled it half way, I noticed that two pages were missing from the manual.  I called IKEA’s technical support line and after a few minutes of being placed on hold I spoke with a representative that let me know that they could either fax or email me the instructions without having me return to the store.  At first, I thought “wow”, emailing me the instructions sounds great as I won’t need to return to the store.

Then they let me know it would take one day for me to receive the email.  I thought that was kind of outrageous, since it would take less than 5 minutes to send me the attachment and email it to me.  I could understand if it would take a few business hours, but not up to one day.  I was not too happy as half my living room was taken up by wooden parts and the room would be un-usable for the rest of the night.  As a result, even though their support representative was able to resolve the problem, their slow response led to disappointment.

When we handle email and phone support at FreshBooks we try our best to get back to our clients as soon as possible. Getting back to someone fast, especially when they have a problem, is the best thing you can do to keep your clients happy. Even when you are not able to provide your clients with the answer they want to hear, they will appreciate the speed at which you got back to them. It builds goodwill and helps you overcome rough patches if you ever encounter them.