Archive for July, 2007
Over the past few months we’ve been hard at work on a redesign of FreshBooks. Don’t panic—the app will work the same way, we just wanted to achieve a higher standard with our aesthetics… to some degree, FreshBooks the app has always had a year 2003 feel to it, and it’s high time we brought FreshBooks up to date.
The following are a series of screenshots highlighting some of the changes—they’ll be rolled out soon:
Navigation Simplification
As these “before and after” pictures indicate, we’re making a move to a more traditional tabbed navigation. This will simplify the FreshBooks experience and make it easier to navigate the app, and it allows us to ensure the navigation is more contextualized. For those of you who are power users, we’ve worked hard to keep frequently used links ever-present, so FreshBooks is still fast fast fast and you can get where you need in the fewest number of clicks.
Better Notification Messaging
For a long time now I’ve wanted to tidy up our error messaging. With our upcoming release our messages will be better—much better. You might think this is a small thing, but we’re guessing you will find it’s a pretty big deal.
Colour Picker Redesign
The picture pretty much says it all. This colour picker is way easier to use and it’s dynamic so you get instant feedback. We’ve included more samples too. In a word: magic.
Tidy Page Numbering
Since they are not primary navigation items, we’ve toned down the page numbering to make the links pop out less (i.e. classic blue links really pop out on white) . We also used CSS to make the clickable area larger for the page numbers, which in turns make it easier to click on a number (design note: a one letter text link is never ideal and that is what we were using before).
What Else is New?
Under the hood this signifies our move to CSS/XHTML with the application—standard stuff these days, but a big move for an application designed in 2003 when this was not especially common. So our pages are leaner and tighter, and we’re also taking better advantage of compression technologies which have reduced our average page size to about 1/3 of what they are today, so you can expect faster page loading.
As you can see the app has a new, fresher feel thanks to this redesign. We’ve affectionately titled this release “Sexy Beast” and it’s going to be easier to use for first-time visitors and less cluttered for regular users. This release will include more changes than I have outlined here, and as usual you can expect a steady stream of continuous improvement thereafter—it’s the FreshBooks way! We’ll send an email just before the release like we always do. We hope you enjoy it.
When you are in business, it’s really important to be able to tell your story well—it’s both an art and a science. To do this effectively, I find it helpful to have a good verbal logo.
The key to a verbal logo is to focus on the benefits—not the features—of what you do. For example, when people ask me “what do you do?”, I could say, ”I help run an online bookkeeping service,” but that doesn’t really compel the average cocktail party guest to ask more, does it? What I say instead is, “I’m in the business of saving people time,” and that never fails to hook people… they are inevitably compelled to ask, “geez… how do you do that?” And once you have people curious I find the conversation has a lot more momentum… and once you have momentum your correspondent will indulge you with their attention and their time and you’ll have the opportunity to describe what you do in Technicolor. Once you can do that you’ll be remembered for sure, and chances are whomever you are talking to will be well enough informed to refer people to what you do—and that’s when you know you’ve hit it out of the park.
Depending on my mood and the company I’m keeping, my verbal logo tends to vary and that makes things fun for me. 
So… what’s your verbal logo?
Introducing AideRSS.
A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting the folks behind AideRSS, a truly amazing new tool for bloggers based in nearby Waterloo, Ontario. With AideRSS, you can just plug in the address of your blog and it tells you very quickly how much buzz you’ve generated. Think how useful this is: you can quickly determine who is saying what about you, where, and how much. Figure out at a glance what rocks your audience, and what bores them to death.
Give it a whirl. Here are a few examples:
Ilya Grigorik and Kevin Thomason were kind enough to invite me into the beta last week, and I have been waiting impatiently for them to go public so I can tell you about it.
Well, this past Tuesday, they launched. So I want to highlight some things that are particularly awesome.
A masterpiece of clarity.
Nothing about AideRSS is confusing. Everything about it is charming. It didn’t take long before half the company were huddled around my desk looking out how our blog was performing. The essence of its appeal is that it doesn’t take more than 1 second for anyone to understand exactly what to do, and what it’s good for.
Start at the beginning.
Let’s start with the clean design of the front page. Look how well balanced it is. The elements on the page are well separated and obvious. The description of the product at the bottom is cleanly segmented into Features, Benefits, and Video tours. The call to action is obvious. Type a blog URL and click Analyze!
Where I spend too much time a day.
The analysis is clean, direct, and uncomplicated. First, they quickly segment the blog posts into quartiles, and they use nice, simple visual cues like the bolder the colour, the higher the quartile. Second, they make it easy to figure out which posts are outperforming others with their nifty sortable table. Third, their PostRank system is fantastic at quickly visually identifying which posts are hot and which are not.
Let’s hear that noise!
The real benefit is that AideRSS subscribes to all the services that track blog conversations, and then organizes them in a handy table. This saves so much time tracking down who is saying what about you, and where. In this case, it is showing comments on our own blog, and impact on Technorati, Bloglines, and Digg. Just click on the little logos to swim in the sea of buzz your latest musings on cat pictures generated.
Why it matters to me.
For someone who is entrusted with the health of the FreshBooks blog, AideRSS is really my new favourite tool. The cold hard reality of this gig is I need to demonstrate that we’re saying what people care about. While FeedBurner gives me readership, AideRSS measures impact, and that is powerful stuff.
I’m a Lewis Caroll fan. I’ve always wanted to follow Alice and jump through the looking glass. I discovered something this morning that may be my best chance yet. An enterprising lad named Edgar has posted a job offer to any plucky freelance developers:
I am looking for a site similar to http://www.freshbooks.com/ Please register to the site and do a tour of the site and what it can do. Please note that I would need original work due to copyright issues.
I’m not sure what to tell my parents. Why did I sign onto a company whose current valuations, according to ScriptLance, range from $1000 to $5200 USD?
I was happy to chuckle and move on with my life, but fellow FreshBooker, Ben, posed an interesting question. Aren’t you ever curious what you’d get back from one of these clone shops? What if we raised a few grand just to see what would come back?
Anyone willing to pitch in a couple bucks?
Hi, I’m Josh Simmons. I’m a self described emerging yuppie living in sunny San Diego. I wear many hats, but mostly I’m an independent web designer, developer, and entrepreneur. Oh, and let’s not forget, I’m a totally thrilled FreshBooks user too.
I’ve worked in the industry for quite some time now (relatively speaking) and, while I love my line of work, I always seem to get stuck on trying to figure out the best system for managing billing and aiding in communication with client relationships. Being that I’m very much so an idea person and a freelance developer to boot, I always wanted to create my own solution to these sticky problems, but how many freelance developers do you know that actually have their own website, let alone their own CRM system? I think the point is moot.
“I’ve got four clients that I’m doing work for on a consistent basis, and while this would have been a hellish scenario just a few months ago, it couldn’t be much easier than it is right now.”
Fast forward through four years of torturous billing solutions and half completed CRM systems and enter FreshBooks.
Now, I’ve used online CRM systems for a year or two now, but now that I know how easy things can actually be, they’ve all been judged and found wanting. I may only be working with about three clients at any given time, but nonetheless keeping track of billing terms, project resources, and hours logged for both old clients and new clients alike is a monumental task in and of itself, and unfortunately, I don’t get to bill clients for administrative work, so that’s ultimately money lost.
“My clients [are] happier because of the control they’re given and the ease with which they can pay invoices among other things.”
Right now I’ve got four clients that I’m doing work for on a consistent basis, and while this would have been a hellish scenario just a few months ago, it couldn’t be much easier than it is right now.
If a client requests some maintenance on a website, I bust out my handy dandy time clock from the Timesheet section, specify what it is that I’m working on, and click “Start.” I think that takes me all of 60 seconds, if even. When the work is done and I’m ready to bill the client, I click on “Generate invoice,” fill in some details and choose how I want the hours to be listed, and bam, I’ve got myself an invoice just waiting for me to click “Send by Email” or “Send by Post” (the fact alone that you can have them mail things out for you is pretty amazing).
If I’ve got a new client or a large project, I go to the Estimates section, fill in the obvious information (what services, how long, and at what rate), and in no time my client has an email in their inbox inviting them to view the invoice at which point they can choose to accept the estimate. At the risk of sounding cheesy… can you say easy?
“The fact that I’m up at 3:30am writing a guest blog post is a testament to the quality of the service and the resulting loyalty of the users in and of itself.”
The fact is that FreshBooks has not only saved my bottom line, but it has also made my clients happier because of the control they’re given and the ease with which they can pay invoices among other things. My bottom line is looking better than ever, my clients are happy, and guess what? I’m pretty darned cheery myself.
Sure, it would have been superb if FreshBooks was around four years ago, but, it’s around now and I’m quite in love with it. I think the fact that I’m up at 3:30am (ah, even working a 9 to 5 job I manage to have the sleep cycles of a true developer) writing a guest blog post is a testament to the quality of the service and the resulting loyalty of the users in and of itself. Do yourself a favor and spend a little time with FreshBooks, even if you’re already a user, try exploring more, I know that I find new and useful features frequently. Let’s just say that you and your clients will all be grateful.
Dial this conversation up to 11.
FreshBooks has been looking for a web designer, UX expert, and marketing master lately. I received a cold call from a recruiter today who I presume found us through our job ads. He wanted to sell us his services to help fill this position.
I asked him what his process was. They interview candidates at their premises, and summarize their skills, personality, and communication skills for us. Communication skills were rated on a scale of 1-10.
Confused, I asked him to explain the last point. “10 is like you.” Oh, how flattering. He continued,
9 is someone with an accent. 8 is someone with a heavy accent but doesn’t have to repeat themselves. 7 is someone with a heavy accent that has to repeat themselves.
What about the Liverpudlians?
Riled, I said straight up that I didn’t believe in that since we live in Canada, and he honestly insisted on defending his position: “well, many companies only hire people with communication skills of 9 or above.”
Translation: natural-born, english-speaking North Americans only. South Asian? Quebecois? Newfoundlander? Get lost.
Some pigs are more equal than others.
In this industry, in this country, accents are par for the course because this industry and this country are global in scope. I would never have thought that an accent would mean poor communication skills; I would assume a tendency to use animated clip art in PowerPoint presentations did.
Sadly, this is no surprise to me. Immigrants in Canada have a hard time finding work because of attitudes like this. A lot of people claim to be equal opportunity employers, but really aren’t.
So, folks out there, tell me if you’ve hired someone with an accent? How’d it turn out?
Great news, second quarter report cards are now available inside your FreshBooks account. If you have an account that was created any time in 2006, you can compare how you did last quarter with this quarter.
That’s not all. You can also see how your industry is changing as a whole.
We sent a detailed email out about this and other FreshBooks news this past Monday. If you didn’t receive it, you can go here to view it online.
If you have any questions about your second quarter results most answers can be found in this FAQ blog post.
Check out Sunir and I teaming up for a television interview. Thanks to CityTV for having us. I’m on holiday till next Thursday so have a great week everyone.
Although I’m currently doing marketing for the good folks at FreshBooks, I came from a tech background. Two of the bigger things I have worked on in my life are wikis and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a XML standard clone of Flash. I have an undying love for the <g> tag, which does not need your prying questions.
So, I was pleasantly surprised to find amongst our customers one, Gliffy, a company I have been watching and admiring for a long time. Joining other Office 2.0 apps like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gliffy is the web 2.0 version of Visio. Gliffy lets you create a diagram, share it with others, work on it together, and publish it when complete. All versions are kept. Everything is entirely web-based and so you can access and create diagrams anytime, anywhere. And it looks and feels like standard desktop drawing tools, which I found makes it very, very easy to learn.
Even better, they have released a plugin for Confluence, the current market leading enterprise wiki. And they export SVG! Too awesome. How I would have loved to have Gliffy at my last gig while negotiating message sequence diagrams with our client.
Anyway, checkout the Examples section on the Gliffy website to see what you can accomplish. Some of the diagrams are quite impressive. Gliffy has a natural fit with information architects, software developers, engineers, and architects.
Update: Gliffy suggested I mention their demo, which is très cool.
Niall recounts a speech by W.P. Kinsella, author of Field of Dreams, whom he saw speak at the University of Toronto.
This was just before we started the business. After his talk somebody got up to the microphone and, obviously a fan, said, ‘Mr. Kinsella, the passion in your writing really comes through, it’s just amazing. Maybe you can speak a little bit about your love for baseball, the culture of Native Americans, and talk about that and how that led you into writing.’
Kinsella replied, “Well, I don’t want to disappoint you but I was a writer in Vancouver. And I was working away and I was not selling much; I wrote a story about baseball and it sold, so I wrote another one about baseball and it sold. Then I wrote a story about Native Americans and that sold, so I wrote another one. Like a miner who finds his vein of gold, we are working that vein and I will follow it until it’s done.’
“Putting Health on the Map.”
That attitude reflects a common trait in Niall’s life that led him step-by-step to become CEO of one of Canada’s hottest young health informatics companies, Infonaut. After university, he became a writer just as the Web was new, and Niall found himself attracted to it. He quickly found himself doing a lot of web work for the entertainment industry. Looking at what he was doing, Niall realized the web was becoming a giant database. Inspired, he jumped into the financial industry to learn about data warehousing. In 2001, he translated that experience to provide management reporting to health care on a $1.5 billion long term care project.
As Niall describes,
The government had started to seriously impact and affect a system that had been in equilibrium for years, without quite understanding that system. As a result, issues and problems started to emerge. People couldn’t wrap their head around what the solutions might be because we didn’t quite understand the industry that we were having such a profound impact on. And all of the information was there; it just wasn’t organized and reported in a good manner.”
When we used data to predict problems before they emerged, we stumbled upon a really clean solution. “We started coloring some maps based on our reports; red in this area is bad, green is good, here’s the hotspot. Those resonated, and they asked for some more maps and then more maps. Before long everyone stopped asking for the spreadsheets and just wanted the maps.”
Thus, Infonaut was born with their neat tagline, “Putting Health on the Map.” They are one of the leading solutions companies that helps health planners visualize, analyze and integrate their data. By layering data over a map, planners can drill down from a national overview, all the way down to a local neighbourhood - based on hundreds of health metrics and health outcomes that are tracked, like various wait-times for surgeries - or access to Primary Care. When planners can make decisions that relate to your circumstances and your neighbourhood, they can do a better job delivering services.
So, has Niall finally found somewhere to stick? Not a chance. “I’m 36. I’ve got a countdown to 40 on my laptop. At the age of 40 I’m going to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life - and I’ve got a feeling it involves something completely different – probably working with my hands.”
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