Archive for January, 2008
Since we started in May 2004, we have been relying on our own smarts, and our teams at Rackspace, to manage our servers and infrastructure. In those nearly four years we have had two windows of unscheduled downtime — not perfect, but pretty good for a growing web service.
That said, we have some big goals to achieve over the next while, so we knew we needed to deepen our network and operations capabilities with someone in-house full-time. Enter Rich Lafferty, the man who had me at “hello”.
Had you at “hello”? That doesn’t sound quite right…
Hang in there, and allow me to elaborate. In the final quarter of last year we did a lot of interviews, and the more you do something, the better you get at it. We had been struggling to find a systems administrator; the best candidates tended to be stationed in other countries. Then Rich entered our little office. Just like the day we met Aaron, I just sort of knew Rich was our guy. I wasn’t even involved with the first interview, we just said a passing “hello” — and funny enough, that was pretty much all I needed. Don’t get me wrong, we did our due diligence and I was involved with later interviews; but right off the bat, I just knew he was a fit.
Rich started in early December, and his impact was felt immediately. I guess our needs are growing beyond the realm where a generalist is the best fit. Now we need people with deep domain expertise, and Rich has fundamentally changed our confidence levels in all things network related. Our dev team is able to run a heck of a lot faster with someone now dedicated to operations.
We’re delighted to have Rich here in Toronto with us, along with his wife Candice, who just arrived from Ottawa this weekend. Please join me in welcoming him to team FreshBooks!
We’re pleased to announce the U.S. leader in online payment processing, Authorize.Net, has selected FreshBooks to be included in their Merchant Toolbox, a set of twelve best-in-class tools recommended by Authorize.Net to help online merchants run their businesses more effectively.
With this announcement, Authorize.Net’s parent company, CyberSource, becomes the second major public company to partner with FreshBooks. The first was Amazon, who chose FreshBooks in August 2007 to be one of the first four services to integrate with their brand new Flexible Payments Service.
We’re very proud of this latest recognition from our friends at Authorize.Net! They’ve been an online payments industry leader for years, and we’re delighted to be given their seal of approval. It’s a very big deal to recommend products or services to a friend, colleague or customer — it means putting your own reputation on the line. The fact Authorize.Net is willing to recommend us to their over 200,000 merchants, and has even dedicated a page to us, really gives us that warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
Our close mutual relationship also benefits anyone wishing to use FreshBooks and Authorize.Net together. If you sign up for Authorize.Net through us, you’ll benefit from reduced signup and monthly fees, and a lower percentage fee on credit card transactions; and once you’re an Authorize.Net customer, you’re entitled to a discount on FreshBooks, too — $12 off your first month, to be exact! You’ll save money all around, and enjoy all the benefits of using both services together.
So be sure to check out our excellent discount on Authorize.Net, and get signed up with both services today!
FreshBooks is all about our users.
We communicate with them in several ways. E-mails, instant messages, IM, Twitter (new!), Facebook, newsletters and other assorted tried-and-true methods. Heck, we even post silly photos of ourselves on Flickr. However, our primary megaphone has always been our blog.
Knowing this, we’ve decided to re-tool the blog, creating a wider, more friendly, spacious feel. The body font has been enlarged to make it easier to skim articles, allow for easier reading, and make the blog more accessible for all. We’ve added connections to other blogs, and tried to clean up all the information so you can better traverse the newly updated “Fresh Thinking.”
We’re also making great efforts to post more frequently, so you’ll always know about important FreshBooks information, updates, travels, and general office tomfoolery. So please stay tuned in, and let us know what you think!
Toronto’s mesh conference is going into its third year, and today the dates were announced: May 20–22, 2008.
For those keeping track at home the event is now three days in length. The additional day should be of note to Fresh Thinking readers. In Mathew Ingram’s writeup, he described May 20 as meshU and said:
What we have in mind is a one-day event — which we’re tentatively calling meshU — that will be filled with small, focused workshops by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game; people who can talk knowledgeably about everything from interface design to using Amazon’s S3 distributed server network.
The team here at FreshBooks is going to be heavily involved in selecting and recruiting the content, and while I cannot comment on the specifics, I can tell you we’re aiming to make the speakers a great mix of imported rock stars and showcased local talent.
On a related note my good friend Stuart MacDonald finally pulled back the curtain on his latest startup — Tripharbour. Stuart is the founder of Expedia Canada, former CMO of Expedia.com and probably the business person I have learned the most from over the last 24 months. Trip Harbour is the place to go if you are looking to book a cruise and I’m betting this venture is going to be a great success and another win for Canada’s technology community.
There has been a lot of chit chat around the FBHQ (FreshBooks headquarters) about the U.S. presidential campaign. We don’t all agree on who we want to see win but we can all agree that driving in a bus from town to town shaking hands and kissing babies sounds like a blast!
So much so that we got to wondering out loud if we should pick someone in our office to run for president… but then we remembered that not only are we all from Canada, but only one or two of us are even old enough to run.
That being said we at FreshBooks are not quitters. Once we put our mind to something we pretty much run with it… so we have rented us a pretty sweet “large” RV and will be driving from the Future of Web Apps conference (February 29 – March 1, 2008) in Miami, Florida all the way to South by Southwest (March 7–11, 2008) in Austin, Texas with some very clear goals:
Meet as many users as we can, introduce the “south” to FreshBooks and what we offer, eat a Texas-sized donut, eat a country fried steak, get interviewed on a small town “morning show” (I am looking at you WPMI in Mobile, Alabama), pick up a hitchhiker, and of course, we want to be elected POTUS.
Keep checking the blog because in the coming weeks we will have more information on our trip! The tour is tentatively called “It’s Saul or Nothing” because I am trying to make everything in this office about me… but I have a feeling we may have a different name by the next blog post. So if you are going to be attending either show or you live somewhere along our route (which we will post soon), we would love to meet you, shake your hand and kiss your baby… if you have one… and if you say it is OK.
I don’t usually provide testimonials. I’m what you might call a difficult client; I build web applications myself, so I have high expectations. I don’t like when things don’t work the way I expect.
With FreshBooks, I’m enthusiastic about giving a testimonial. My business started to double every year at the point I started using it, and I’ve been able to expand my business more easily thanks to hooking up with FreshBooks in a serious way.
Flexible billing
My company has gone through several iterations. We started by charging flat rates, and the clients were killing us asking for extra features; we would end up working for next to nothing. So we switched to time-based billing, where we’d just work and work until the job was done.
When we made that switch, we came to realize many things we do are very valuable, but don’t take much time. We’ve built systems and tools for doing them more efficiently, so the real value of these features are much higher than the time they take to implement; we’re helping our clients make hundreds of thousands of dollars more annually. What we do is a big part of their bottom line.
So we’ve gone back to flat rates now. Our clients know they’re going to pay the same amount every month.
Flat-rate billing, time-based billing, recurring billing; there are a lot of different billing strategies in there. Any of them can be accomplished in FreshBooks with ease.
Globetrotter-friendly
For a while, I had a team split between Paris and Toronto, doing design and marketing for a big dance film in Vienna. I had anywhere from 3–6 people working for me; one in China, one in Iceland, and so on. You can imagine how hard it might have been to manage people’s hours. A full-time employee running after them, clients complaining about their bills, employees complaining about their paycheques; it would have required a lot of organizational infrastructure.
Instead, it all takes care of itself. I’ve got all my projects and tasks set up. If you want to get paid for something, you put it in FreshBooks. I can quickly look it over, put it into a detailed bill for the client, and send it off. It’s very easy to review and get it done.
With FreshBooks, I run an international company with ease. What used to take a full 12-hour day every month is now finished in two hours. That’s non-billable time; nobody’s paying me for that part. FreshBooks saves me a minimum of ten hours a month. That’s a lot of money.
Top-notch support
The application is absolutely fantastic, but what makes the difference is having such a fantastic and gifted support team available by telephone. It’s the best support team I’ve ever run into.
I spend so much of my time troubleshooting and filing bug reports for our clients that when I use an application, I don’t want to go through that process — I just want to use it. FreshBooks is self-explanatory most of the time, and when I run into trouble, there’s somebody there to help me immediately. Not only are they nice, but they understand the application, and how I want to use it.
Most companies only do e-mail support. I think the fact FreshBooks picks up the phone adds a whole lot of accountability to what they do. They have developers on the front lines, and they really know their stuff. They help every step of the way, which is a wonderful thing. It saves potential hours of frustration.
FreshBooks support is the best I’ve ever run into.
544.
As I sit down to pen this, that’s the number of comments DreamHost have received in the last seven hours on their post about “some billing inaccuracies” they encountered this morning.
Talk about the understatement of the year.
An hour and a half ago, they finally explained exactly what happened — they ran a simple little script to clean up past-due accounts.
Unfortunately, the biller was run for 2008 (December 31st, 2008 to be exact). This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking the havoc that we are so sorry you had to be put through.
Yikes. I feel tremendously sorry for these guys; one “little” mistake has resulted in, oh, a few million dollars of erroneous credit card charges, if I were to hazard a guess at their annual revenues.
Our condolences go to DreamHost in this tough time; it’s a brave decision to roll your own billing service, and this is an excellent, unfortunate demonstration of how it all can go terribly awry. A simple one-character typo has resulted in a multi-million dollar mistake; here’s hoping they manage to pull through this tough time.
You know that feeling when someone is talking and you don’t want them to stop? You are captivated, entertained and amused? That’s how I felt when I had to run out of our first interview with Saul to get a phone call — it sucked to have to leave. Fortunately he was good enough to come back for a second interview, then a trial-by-fire “build a plan in two hours and sell it to us” interview, and finally a fourth due-diligence interview with some trusted FreshBooks advisors. Apparently it’s no easy feat to get a job here at FreshBooks.
Luckily Saul Colt had the stamina and the character to endure all of that and join the FreshBooks team, and he’s been working hard behind the scenes with us since early December. You can learn more about Saul here, but a blurb that short doesn’t do Saul justice.
If you’re expecting someone loud and gregarious, don’t write him off. He’s the kind of guy you find on the wings at a cocktail party, and once you tune into his wit and creativity, you’ll want to hang out with him for the whole night.
I don’t have kids, but I can only imagine how hard it is to drop them off for that first day of school — you have to entrust your children to a teacher, someone to shape and mould them. That’s a little bit of the trepidation that crept in during our recent hire. We set out to find someone who could join our team and spend more time with our customers than we do. It’s not an easy role to hire for, but that’s what we felt we needed to do — enter Saul.
From a career standpoint, Saul is the man who brought Zipcar to Canada and made it their most successful international market entry, and during the process he re-wrote the book on how they enter markets and work core elements of their promotions. He’s also the man who built and sold his own comic book company. And he’s the man whose imagination is more active than a hummingbird’s wings.
As you can see, it’s not hard to talk about Saul. He’s a warm and genuine guy, and if you get a chance to meet him, whether virtually or out in the real world, I hope you’ll follow me in welcoming him to FreshBooks.
For as long as I can remember, I have been an entrepreneur; innovative, with fresh ideas and creative concepts.
I knew how to place myself and sell my intended product. I was one of those kids who didn’t bother with a lemonade stand, but went for the bigger picture, greater rewards, well-networked resources. I raised every penny and rehashed on every opportunity. I focused on building a loyal community and made a great return out of it.
I had dreams and I had goals; I was only 12 years old and I wanted an Infiniti Q30 and in no time (that’s months, not years) I had enough in my fish bowl to get me one, but of course I had no buying power for one.
As I grew older, I used my business sense and opportunistic sense for greater values. I not only raised money for myself, but for my community. For endangered species and for a better world, for poverty and for the human race. I learned to budget not only time but resources to commit toward the greater goal. At the same time, at the age of 15 I had my first job — I was a stock boy for a health store. It opened my eyes and my interest to the business world.
Growing up
Around that same age, I experienced my first Apple, an LC II. To this day, I still remember how they look. I remember how smart they were and enjoyed everything to do with them. Life was created out of them — it was really my life I was creating. I opened a one-man school newspaper to compete against the Tribune, the official school newspaper. I had weekly articles and initiatives, I was passionate in making something out of it. I had no public funding to make it happen, just the school resources — which eventually had to come to an end. I was shut down in a few months.
But my creativity wandered further. I wanted to work on projects — many of them. I enrolled in photography and film classes. I stayed late developing ideas and concepts, took pictures and gained interest in drawing. I was independent. I did not want to be part of group projects; I wanted full creative direction and control. I was young, and there was no teamwork in my vocabulary. I wanted to be unique and create my own works, my own results, my own appreciation — and no teacher could say otherwise.
Over time, my interests grew to be fully independent. I became part of the dot-com wave, with little to no respect for a 9–5 job. I just didn’t have the motivation to last, nor the patience to keep lasting. I wanted to work on many projects and I did. I wanted the flexibility to interact and I did. I wanted my time and I had it. I wanted a challenge and I got it. I knew, and was internally convinced, that I could never receive the same appreciation, passion and love from a nine-to-five job. So far, that’s been true — about half the time.
Looking back
Over two decades later, I look back today tell you this: my resume is 17 pages long. I have experienced literally 98% of the market industry. I have lived in and travelled to 16 countries. I have the appreciation for not just the artistic side of business, but the opportunistic side of it, too. And though there is nothing new under the sun lately, each day is a new day with a new challenge and a new opportunity that I would never have been able to find through my employer, if I had one. Each day I live through, I’d like to pass on that experience to the person I work with, to the specialist who has the same interest and passion as me.
As a specialist who runs his own agency, I am not in it for the money but for the lifestyle it provides me, for the love and for the community I work with. I love the fact that I am able to create my own challenges and exceed my own expectations uncapped by management. Simply because I am my own management, I am my own leader, I am a dreamer, a realist and a producer.
9–5 BAHHUMBAK!
About three months ago we set out to find ourselves another standout member for the FreshBooks team — someone who could start in support (like we all do) and then spread her wings over the long term.
As always, we invested heavily in the interviewing process, and our efforts have paid off in the hiring of Myleen Bacarra.
Recently arrived to Canada from the Philippines, Myleen is an honours graduate in computer science from Western Kentucky University, and a ten-year startup veteran. We’re confident Myleen can help us continue to manage our growth; she has twice helped organizations along from humble beginnings to teams of 50–400. We’re always careful to remember success is not measured by head count, but as we continue to get bigger (we went from five to 13 employees this year!), it’s really helpful to have solid performers on board to ensure our growth remains a smooth ride.
That’s where we’ll be leaning on Myleen: she has proven experience managing projects and teams, and is already beginning to move into such a role here at the office. We look forward to returning the favour by helping her continue to build her knowledge in application design, a passion she’s eager to continue pursuing.
Myleen, thanks for joining the family! Glad to have you here.
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