By day, Anthony Carbone is an engineer at DuPont Canada. From 6pm to 2am, he’s his own man. Not only does he travel back to his old university town, Guelph, to grow his property management firm, but he also moonlights as a web designer for hire with his partner Vinay Menon.

It’s in his soul. He has to be busy. “I’ve always been an entrepreneur, ever since high school; cutting lawns, doing landscaping, selling my time as a web programmer and developer back in university.”

Why does he do it?

Sure, there’s the obvious reason. “Just extra money, basically.” But it’s more than that. Rattling around the back of his head are a huge number of unexpressed ideas that he feels compelled to act on.

In fact, there is one idea in particular Anthony and Vinay have been
driving towards since they met in undergrad. As Anthony tells it,

I met my partner outside of the engineering building at the University of Guelph in my second year and the topic was cars, money and the Internet. It was just at the time when everything was peaking and the Internet bubble was at its prime.

They decided since to moonlight as web designers to raise enough cash to launch their true passion, a car spotting online community called MadWhips.

Car spotting?

Taking photos of sweet rides. Whips? Well, I had to ask too.

Anthony

Obviously the “whips” is referring to the new slang term for your ride.

Sunir

Is it really?

Anthony

Yeah, well, like your crib is your house, your whip is your pimped-out ride, right?

Sunir

I feel old now. Thank you very much.

But isn’t moonlighting a problem for DuPont?

Anthony says,

I have a really good relationship with my boss and he knows that I’m not really interested in going anywhere for the next two, three, four years and I still enjoy that corporate education that I’m getting by being at DuPont and interacting with all the different business units. That kind of corporate experience to me is more important than venturing off on my own right now.

Moonlighting is a distraction, though.

They’ve been striving to achieve their dream for years, working hard on the side. But it’s on the side, and their day jobs rule their schedule. The question Anthony left me with was, “when do we take on that certain level of clientele and when can we afford to say, ‘Okay, one of us can quit our jobs’?

Shared values—that’s what makes a business sing and helps an entrepreneur sleep at night.

I remember sitting down with Justin in our first interview and listening to him talk about software. He spent almost all his time talking about design of software—he wasn’t as fussed about the technology per se (though he is most definitely a hardcore technologist, a LISP nut and has a bearded idol), he was more interested in the approach and philosophy with which a code base is developed and refined. As someone who doesn’t write code anymore, my contributions around our software team are high-level (and marginal at best), so listening to someone who enjoys communicating his passion and values for software the way Justin does is a treat for me.

Justin has been with us for about a month now—you may have received an e-mail or two from him if you have been in touch for support, as he’s been spending a good chunk of time helping out with e-mail inquiries and getting to know you (our customers) and the FreshBooks application in general (support is something every FreshBooks team member starts out focusing on). Anywho, Justin has fit right in with everyone here at FreshBooks and we’re all extraordinarily pleased to publicly announce his arrival with this post.

First off, we’d like to express our deepest gratitude to all the contestants in the “why is FreshBooks better than an iPhone?” contest. We received some really great entries, and it’s obvious a whole lot of effort went into these creations! A job well done by all.

Unfortunately we only have one iPhone to give away. It was definitely a tight vote here at the office, but after every single staff member had their say and submitted their individual voting card, here’s how things turned out.

Our grand prize winner!

The comedy stylings of Boomy the bunny-like creature won the hearts and minds of our staff members, making heymonn the winner of a brand new iPhone! Congratulations and well done — in doing the best job of proving the iPhone is worthless, you earned yourself one! Alanis would be proud.

But wait, there’s more…

Hold on, what? More prizes? That wasn’t in the rules!

Well, all the efforts put in by the entrants put us into a giving mood today.

Second and third prize!

Putting in a strong showing in second place was caj531 with his very clever parody of a recent UPS ad campaign. He’ll be retiring to his nerdery and invoicing his clients using his six free months of FreshBooks service!

And coming in third place was BradyBoyShaw, whose animation skills were second-to-none in this contest… quite literally, since it was the sole animated entry! He will find himself rewarded with three free months of FreshBooks service.

Alright… prizes for everybody!

What the heck, let’s go crazy! We’ll also be sending a spiffy FreshBooks t-shirt to every one of you who submitted an entry, from the grand prize winner right on down. We’ll be getting in touch to get shirt sizes and shipping addresses — expect to hear from us in the next day or two.

For those of you who missed out on this contest, be sure to check out all the entries for your enjoyment. And don’t forget, we’re still looking for somebody to send to the SEED conference, too! If you’d like to go, check out the contest details on our blog and get your entries in.

Merci beaucoup!

Thanks again, everybody; this contest was a lot of fun, and I hope you all enjoyed yourselves as much as Sunir and I did. Keep an eye on those YouTube accounts, I’ll try to get a message to everybody tomorrow. Cheers!

If you read our blog often, you might get the impression we’ve got something against PayPal; well, as of today, I for one officially do.

First: a FreshBooks support story

Today one of our clients’ staff members called in with a problem she was experiencing: some reporting features weren’t working the way she expected.

First I took the time to go through exactly what she was doing, step by step. This always works far better than the usual “describe your problem” you’ll often get elsewhere, because instead of trying to interpret their words, you can just hit that stumbling block right there with the user; it’s like the mechanic hopping in your passenger’s seat. Nobody does that anymore, but it’s still the only way to be sure.

While I was looking at their FreshBooks system, though, I noticed last month’s payment hadn’t gone through.

A glitch in the matrix

We use PayPal’s Payflow Pro product for charging our users. Logging into their system, it appeared the regular monthly transaction had simply declined.

This happens all the time, and it’s often a bank issue; heck, the same user successfully made a separate purchase hours later, so obviously this was just a hiccup. Normally our system resolves these “hiccups” a day later. But for some reason that hadn’t happened here, so the account was past-due—but the user hadn’t done anything wrong!

Since their next regular monthly payment is due tomorrow, I wasn’t just going to retry the payment—the problem wasn’t their fault, so it wouldn’t be very polite to charge them twice within a few hours. So I called the client, explained, and apologized for what happened. Thankfully he was very gracious about the situation, and said it would be fine to charge his card twice.

So after thanking him and hanging up, I clicked the button to retry the payment. That was when I got a very odd error message (which seems to be PayPal’s specialty):

Error: Error in forcing the recurring profile payment: Cannot force a future payment

Admittedly, I did not invent the Gregorian calendar. But to my knowledge, September 13, 2007 is not in the future.

Next: a PayPal support nightmare

I phoned PayPal. After a few minutes navigating their automated system, I waited ten minutes before I had a service representative on the other end. It quickly became clear neither her, nor her technician’s manual, had ever used Payflow Pro before.

I explained my situation, and she seemed very confused. Since there was no number accompanying the error message, she said she couldn’t look it up. So she decided the error message didn’t matter; instead she just spent the next five minutes repeating, “you can’t re-process if the card failed with response code 12.”

For those of you who don’t speak technical gobbledygook, she was saying it isn’t possible to retry a declined payment. (Yeah, it must have been one of those single-use credit cards.)

Trying not to get frustrated, I asked why there was a retry button, why I was receiving an error I’d never received before, why the error message was complaining about the transaction being in the future, why she was calling something impossible that I do multiple times every single day.

So she put me on hold while she went to talk to her supervisor… for ten minutes.

From bad to worse

When she finally returned, her first words were, “are you still there?”

(Folks: if you put somebody on hold long enough that you have to ask if they bothered to stay on the line, that’s a bad thing.)

I replied with a “yes,” only to have her repeat what I’m guessing is PayPal’s new mantra: “you can’t re-process if the card failed with response code 12.”

Apparently those ten minutes were spent fixing a sandwich.

There were no higher-level support folks I could talk to, she said; she’d already talked to her supervisor, and that was all she could do. The error was because I was trying to do the impossible. If there was anything wrong with the gateway, it already would have been fixed. Up is down, the sun revolves around the earth, there are five lights. Thank you and goodbye.

Dejected, angry, yet not the least bit surprised, I hung up, having re-affirmed everything I ever believed about PayPal.

In conclusion

For what it’s worth, before VeriSign sold Payflow Pro to PayPal, the interface and support for this service were amazing. So VeriSign, if you’re listening… could you buy Payflow back?

And to the rest of you, could you share some of your horror stories? I could use a little consolation here.

Our friends Jim and Jason at Coudal Partners and 37Signals are teaming up with Carlos Segura of Segura Inc, are putting on the SEED Conference on October 29th in Chicago. The sold-out event is a:

…discussion on design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration.

You’ll learn about taking control of your own work, seeking out methods to inspire new ideas, and adopting unconventional ideas about collaboration and business. The SEED conference will fill your head with knowledge you can use.

I was so inspired by the event (largely because I’m a big believer in the personalities behind it) that I bought two tickets — one for myself, and one someone out there with the best answer to the challenge I outline below…

Preamble: At FreshBooks we believe we are a service — not a technology. We believe in outstanding service experiences, and as a result we’ve been doing the little things we feel matter to people for more that three years now. Things like ensuring a real person answers the phone when you call — not a phone system. Giving you timely and thoughtful replies to your emails when you reach out to us, and maintaining our forums with enthusiasm. We’ve been doing all this, day in and day out since May 2004, on top of continuously polishing and perfecting the web application part of the FreshBooks experience.

So here’s the challenge: Tell us the best story of customer service you know, and send it to us by Tuesday October 23 at 3 PM ET, and we will give the winner (as judged by the team here at FreshBooks) a ticket to SEED. You’ll have to get yourself to Chicago, and find yourself a place to stay, but we’ve got your $399 USD entry fee covered to this sold-out event. We’ll post the winning story here on Fresh Thinking and I’ll be looking forward to meeting the winner in the flesh at SEED.

We ordered a few of the new brushed metal iMacs recently.

They’ve been on order for a little while and Jeff and Aaron have been patiently waiting.

Today, their new iMacs arrived, and as you can see, Jeff and Ben could not keep their hands off them. Look at Ben rip that puppy out of the box!

Screen envy abounds at HQ (apparently cowlicks too ).

On a totally unrelated note, we’re going golfing for the annual FreshBooks golf tournament (here’s a link to last year’s) and as a result will not be attending to the phones or email from 3–6 PM today. Have a great afternoon and see you again tomorrow.

Rob just left me a comment over on my blog:

Hi Mike. I read somewhere that being an entrepreneur can be the loneliest job in the world. I didn’t understand until I started my business. I think it’s great that you recognize the value of good advice. Do you currently mentor up and coming entrepreneurs?

I have long been convinced that mentors provide great value, and I because I am outspoken on the topic, I frequently get asked by other entrepreneurs if I know any mentors that could help them, or if I can help them myself. I don’t and I’m not able to presently, but here’s what makes a good mentor and how to discover a mentor for yourself.

Step 1 - Admit you don’t know everything and you need help. No mentor is interested in a know-it-all who is closed to the advice they bring. While this may sound obvious, many entrepreneurs are not open to mentors or their advice - it’s a shame.

Step 2 - Consider your personal network of family and friends- consider it long and hard. I’m willing to bet you already know someone with great business and management experience, or someone in your network who does. I recommend appealing retired business people and/or people who are a few years ahead of you in the same industry. If your network comes up dry, create one. Go to a conference, talk to the local chamber of commerce, reach out to your accountant, your lawyer, the local coffee shop owner - entrepreneurs know other entrepreneurs, and so do the professionals entrepreneurs rely on.

Step 3 - Reach out to your prospective mentor and ask if you can buy them a coffee, a donut, 15 minutes of their time. Do not make it a pain to spend time with you; fit yourself into their schedule (i.e. this is why lunch is a great option - everyone has to eat, and it’s during the workday so it does not cut into family time). Travel if you need to, a good mentor is worth the commute. Since it helps to establish a personal connection with a prospective mentor, don’t send an email asking if someone wants to be your mentor. Instead make a phone call, visit their office or send an email and say you are wondering if you could take them out to lunch and “bounce some questions” off of them because you are wrestling with some things as you grow your business. This will appeal to their vanity (they are human after all!) and it gives you the chance to “try before you buy” which is *always* a good idea. If they are not interested in meeting with you after you make this ask, then they may not be the right fit for you anyway. If you are sure they are, be persistent and follow up after a suitable period (measured in months).

Step 4 (key ingredient) - When you do finally meet, lay yourself bare. Wise people are drawn to less experienced people who are open about their areas of weakness and concern. Tell your mentor (or prospective mentor) your true state of affairs. Sugar coat nothing. This will foster trust and stir genuine desire to help in a prospective mention - it’s the un-written rule: mentors need to be needed.

I hope this helps.

Wow! As we approach the Monday night deadline for video entries in our iPhone contest, it looks like the competition is starting to get fierce; after a quiet Friday, we received four entries on Saturday!

Watch the new videos

Sadly, there’s simply not enough space here to include everyone’s submission. But you can watch all the new entires in the nifty, all-in-one YouTube player on our contest page!

Creativity looks to be the order of the day — from animation to puppeteering, these videos are really running the gamut. It’s fantastic work from all those involved, so be sure to check it out!

Remember: to keep up on new FreshBooks videos from ourselves and the community, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel. (Feel free to add us as a friend, too! Don’t worry, we won’t bite unless you ask.)

Excellent work, folks!

Thanks again to all the entrants; your response to this contest has been incredible! Here’s hoping we can look forward to a few more videos by the time we’re back in the office Tuesday morning.

To our Canadian friends, a happy Thanksgiving; to the south, enjoy your Columbus Day; and to the rest of the world, have a good weekend!

Now it’s time to get back to mine.

This is just a little reminder to all our Fresh users out there that the FreshBooks office will be closed on Monday, October 8th, 2007 for Thanksgiving. A day of spending time with family and friends and feasting on some delicious home cooked meals. I’ve actually made a prediction to the team that I’ll be 5 lbs. heavier come Tuesday morning due to turkey and sweet potato overload (YIKES!).

If you need assistance, visit our forum and you may find the answers you’re looking for. If not, email and phone support will be back up and running on Tuesday morning.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I just got my most recent copy of the Harvard Business Review, and there is a lengthy interview with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in it. Here’s what he had to say about competition:

“We don’t ignore competitors; we try to stay alert to what they are doing… But a lot of our energy and drive as a company, as a culture, comes from trying to build… customer focused strategies… I think they work better in fast-changing environments”.

I believe many companies spend too much time setting strategy against what their competitors are doing—especially in large organizations like banks. One of the things I love about FreshBooks is our proximity to our customers. Everyone on our team answers the phone, replies to e-mail and is in contact with our customers, and we make decisions and set strategies based on the close relationships we have with our community.

When people ask us about competition, from now on I’m going to direct them to this post.