Archive for March, 2008
One of the things I am going to be writing about in the coming weeks and months is pending economic downturn, and what it means to the kinds of professionals we serve at FreshBooks, including things you can do to brace yourself and your business for stormy weather.
Looks like the LA Times beat me to the punch though in this article titled, “For small businesses, when the going gets tough, get tough on costs“.
Here is the excerpt that mentions FB:
Use technology efficiently
Consider online accounting software, videoconferencing and online processes for more efficient operations.
Entertainment lawyer Lindsay Spiller, who splits his time between his San Francisco office and Los Angeles, uses an online invoicing and time-tracking service to cut costs at his 4-year-old firm while maintaining a professional image.
The Web-based service from FreshBooks in Toronto gives small-business owners and freelancers a relatively inexpensive and easy way to bill clients from anywhere, he said.
“With the click of a button I can send an invoice to my client, and they receive a very nice-looking, professional-looking invoice that makes it also easy for them to pay,” Lindsay said.
Thanks for being our spokesperson Lindsay!
We often get asked for local references from the media. If you’d like to tell the press why you love FreshBooks, drop Saul a line and let him know where you are located why you’d be a good person to tell folks what’s great about FB.
This morning we deployed a new release: Version 4.4 which we’re calling “Footloose”. Why footloose? In honor of Daniel who broke his ankle a month ago and just got his cast removed.
What’s in this Release?
Better tracking of billed hours. Prior to this release, we relied on date ranges to figure out which of your timesheet hours were billed or unbilled. This caused problems if you logged hours the same day you created an invoice. Now we track exactly which hours appear on what invoices, making the process much more intelligent and user-friendly.
Sexy login pages. Your login pages now feature your system colors, and your company’s logo!
Complete list of currency codes. FreshBooks now includes all currency codes and symbols, and when you choose a currency, we’ll pre-populate the symbol.
Time Tracking Widgets. We recently launched our own Mac OS X widget for tracking time, and pointed out that Goran – a FreshBooks community member – has built a Windows desktop time tracker.
There are more details about the release inside the application. Be sure to click the “4.4” link at the bottom of your account for more information – especially as they pertain to how we are handling logged hours – past and on a go forward basis.
Happy Monday.
Hey everyone, just a last minute note that FreshBooks will be briefly unavailable tomorrow (Monday) morning while we perform an upgrade.
The skinny: The upgrade will take place Monday, March 31st, between 7 AM - 8 AM EDT. During this time, your FreshBooks account may be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.
More details to follow.
Everyone knows usability is important, but not everyone knows exactly how to go about determining if their software/web/hardware product is indeed usable. As a professional usability consultant, I would (ahem) advise that you seek the aid of an experienced usability consultant to help.
This isn’t always a practical option for lots of reasons though, so what I’d like to offer are some pointers and practical things to keep in mind when you’re developing a website or any other interactive product.
Know thy user
Above all else, always try to keep this mantra in mind when designing or developing — you are not your user. What’s obvious and simple to you may not be for the people who will be actually using your product.
By the way, you do know who you’re designing for, right? Do you know something about their skill level, geographical location, wants and needs as they relate to your product? If the answer is no, I’d suggest doing some research and asking some questions to find out.
Use established interaction standards to your benefit
If you have a choice between inventing a new, cooler way to sort tables and using the more well-known method of clicking on the column header, use the latter. Chances are that people will be familiar with this paradigm and less likely to become confused.
Now for a caveat — don’t let adherence to standards stifle your creativity and innovation. It might be the safer road, but it’s not always the best choice, so think of it like any other rule of law — sometimes it’s best to break the rules, just do so wisely!
Subscribe to usability-related RSS feeds
This is a great way to keep on top of what’s being discussed in the usability, interaction design and user experience realms. It’s also an easy way to learn and internalize what’s working and not working for others.
Some of my favorites:
Sanity-checking your design is not usability testing
Don’t get me wrong, grabbing someone next to you and asking “does this make sense to you?” is often a good idea. But just don’t let this turn into “yeah, I showed it to some people and they thought it worked okay.”
There are many reasons why this type of information-gathering could lead to bunk conclusions, but primarily it comes down to the first axiom I discussed — the person in the next cube, down the hall, etc. is most likely not your target user. If they’re a software developer like you are, and they think it’s easy to use, your user may beg to differ.
More usability guidelines
These pointers are just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re interested in learning more, there’s a lot out there but I’d suggest starting with (and referring to often) this site. It contains a ton of good info for those just starting to think about usability and seasoned professionals alike.
Again, these are just some quick pointers and guidelines. There’s a lot more to the multi-faceted study and practice of usability and user experience, but hopefully this can get you started in the right direction!
A side project that I am proud to be involved with is the mesh conference, and tickets for the event May 21-22 in Toronto went live Tuesday. mesh is a conference that tackles the question: “what’s next online?” for society, business, media and marketing. The event is going into its third year, and each of the last two it’s sold out the 400 tickets available. In just two days we’ve sold a quarter of the tickets, so…if you want to attend, visit and register.
That’s mesh, but I want to talk about meshU (for mesh “University”) – a one day event that’s new this year and something I’m guessing FreshThinking readers might be interested in. meshU is a one day workshop oriented conference for 150 designers, developers and project managers - people who are building things online. These workshops will be presented by people who have earned their stripes pushing the boundaries of the web, including Avi Bryant (founder and lead developer of DabbleDB), John Resig (lead developer of jQuery and standards evangelist at Mozilla), Leah Culver (founder and leader developer of Pownce) and Ryan Carson (Carsonified, makers of Dropsend, Amigo and the “Future of” conference series). Each of these individuals has a lot to offer and Mark, Mathew, Stuart, Rob and I are honored to have them contributing to the inaugural meshU and generally supporting us in an as yet unproduced event.
So, I hope you will drop over to the meshU site and see if it’s a fit for you. There will be a lot more information coming about the content over the next few weeks so stay tuned. If you want to submit a workshop proposal to present at meshU, you can do that there as well. That said, you might want to buy your ticket first as there are only 150 available, and we’ll reimburse you if your workshop is accepted.
When you are a founder it can be hard to imagine your business running the way you want it to once you grow past a certain team size — you fear the magic will be lost. We continue to be cautious and methodical about growth at FreshBooks for this reason, but a big piece of our next growth step fell into place this January, and for the first time we have confidence we can grow beyond a team of 15 without losing the magic. How you ask? Thanks to Mitch Solway.
Mitch is a marketing veteran. He started working on his marketing chops at Proctor and Gamble — arguably the best outfit in the world to learn management and traditional marketing acumen. But I’d say Mitch is a little restless at heart, and he needed to be somewhere more nimble and faster growing, so he left for Lavalife where he was employee number one in the marketing department. He stayed for nine years. He left as their VP marketing, managing a team of 27 with 6 direct reports, and in the process turned Lavalife into Canada’s household name for online dating — like Match.com or eHarmony in the USA.
What a business needs to grow are pillars to build on, and those pillars are people — more specifically great managers. After doing some consulting last year with us, we knew Mitch would be a great and timely fit for FreshBooks. He’s an ace demand generation marketer, a great people manager, and he’d done it before. Sadly he was committed to other projects, but by the end of the year we were able to convince him that FreshBooks was the place he could make a real impact, and as you can tell, we feel he has and he will continue to for a long time to come.
So… with that, please join me in welcoming Mitch to the team.
Going to conferences are a fun way to learn things and make friends, but they are still very much work… and when you are in marketing that means leaving people with a positive impression so they will remember you well after the event.
Normally, we would just smile and be friendly; however, there were 7500 people at SXSW Interactive! That’s a lot of hands to shake. So, we had a different plan of attack for SXSW Interactive. We opted to do some crazy stuff in order to get some positive attention. After all, SXSW is kind of like Burning Man, but with pants.
Please note, we thought it was so cool that others liked what we did enough to post photos on Flickr, all the photos come from other people’s Flickr accounts.
The ten fingers of FreshBooks
1. FreshBooks RoadBurn
We didn’t just fly down to Austin like some half-weights. Mike, Sunir, our film producer Eamonn O’Connor, and I rolled into Austin in style all the way from from Future of Web Apps (FOWA) in Miami in our FreshBooks RV, at the tail end of our epic RoadBurn road trip to meet and eat with customers.
2. Schwag Bags
Every person attending the conference receives one of the famous SXSWi “Big Bags” just chock full of magazines, postcards, fortune cookies, stickers, etc. We dropped a postcard in the bag to tell everyone that Ben and Mike were speaking on panels and gave them the wheres and the whens.
3. Panels
We spoke on not one but two big panels during the festival. Ben teamed up with some folks from Pownce, Defensio, Dabble DB, and some little company called Facebook to present on the topic of Developer-Friendly API’s and Mike (with me as a last minute addition) spoke about Stories of Failure: Surviving Common Start Up Mistakes. Both panels were very well received and was a great final touch for a lot of people.
4. Street Team
A large number of lucky people were welcomed to the convention center by the FreshBooks Street Team. All week long doors were held open for people coming in with the line “This door was held open by your friends at FreshBooks” and other fun good deeds were performed by the street team. The street team then handed them a phony invoice asking them to pay $1 or to just check out FreshBooks.com, just to prove that no good deed goes unbilled.
5. FreshForce Ones
We had custom Nike Air Force Ones made that we are calling the FreshForce Ones. These shoes are not only in the FreshBooks colors, but they also have FreshBooks written on the heel and the FreshBooks leaf on the bottom of the laces.
6. Hangover Kits
This is one of the things I am most proud of since it is a fun cool item that is so targeted to the spirit of SXSWi. Like ninjas we silently hung a hangover kit on every hotel room door in a few of the “official” hotels associated with SXSWi. This was the only way to get one… unless you bumped into Sunir or myself at one of the parties we attended on the last few nights. Inside these kits were common hangover relief stuff such as Advil, Blistex, Life Savers, Jolt Caffeine Gum, Band Aids, and antacid.
7. Canadian Pancake Breakfast
Growing up I was always told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. We teamed up with Microsoft Canada, Praized, Uni, and the Canadian Consulate Generals in Dallas and Los Angeles to host a pretty amazing pancake breakfast. We had the RV on hand and pancakes for a few hundred. People left full and fulfilled!
8. The FreshBooks RoadBurn RV
The RoadBurn RV was pretty important during that trip but also had an important roll once we reached our destination. For one the RV was an incredible rolling billboard but also acted as a cool way for us to shuttle some of the cool kids from one party to another.
9. Customer dinners
One of the main goals of our RoadBurn trip was to meet as many customers as possible. This goal didn’t end once we got to Austin so we hosted two amazingly fun customer dinners (one big one with 30+ at our table and one smaller one) where we got to chat, eat and drink all in the name of invoicing!
10. Parties
There are so many parties going on at the same time during SXSWi that there is no way to say what are the best ones, so you try to go to all of them. Sunir and I attended as many as 5 parties a night. Going to all these parties may sound like a lot of fun, but you have to remember it was still work. Incredibly fun work that involved trying to talk with every person in the room and getting them to know all about FreshBooks but it was still work 
11. Interweb Idols
I never did learn how to count. We have a new supersekret project called Interweb Idols we started working on at FOWA and SXSW.
Next year
If you want to borrow any of these ideas for yourself, feel free since we are already dreaming up new ideas for next year. After this post, we are certainly going to have to outdo ourselves at SXSW2009. We are thinking ice house!
My online journey to becoming a self-employed freelancer has been a story in the making, I guess. Seven months have passed since I got my first paying client, and I am now officially earning a full-time income from home as a freelance writer and pro blogger.
“I am now officially earning a full-time income from home as a freelance writer and pro blogger.”
Having been a professional chef of over 22 years it was rather scary to make the jump into self-employment, since I knew nothing else. It didn’t happen overnight.
It all started in April 2004, when I joined a network marketing opportunity. I had been very frustrated at work for some time and wasn’t happy in the hospitality industry anymore. This was mainly due to the very low pay and the constant stresses at work. Late nights and long hours at work, standing on my feet all day, and working in kitchens that didn’t have air conditioners (yep, most don’t!) wasn’t enough to keep me happy anymore, especially since I was getting older. I craved more freedom, and evenings at home.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I failed miserably in this first business. Today I know it was partially due to not having the red-hot passion we need to keep working the business when things are tough. There were also other reasons, but they go beyond the scope of this post.
“The only way I would ever be happy would be with something I was truly passionate about.”
When the realization kicked in that I wasn’t going to make it as a successful network marketer after two and a half years of giving it a lot of effort, hard work and a lifetime of savings, I knew I had to get out as long as I had some sanity left in me. So I quit! Cold turkey.
I’d had enough and couldn’t afford to waste one more dollar on a business that wasn’t me in the core of my being. So I took some time out, while going back to my “hated” job as a galley slave to help pay the bills. In that time of reflection, shame, anger and feeling sorry for myself, I suddenly realized that life had to go on. The only way I would ever be happy would be with something I was truly passionate about.
“My failed venture in network marketing made me realize how much I loved blogging and writing about Web marketing.”
As life moves in mysterious ways, I had learned a lot about the Internet, advertising, lead generation, domain registration, blogs and more while working my first business. That experience made me realize how much I actually loved blogging and writing about Web marketing.
Those were the first probing baby steps into what would soon become a journey of self-discovery and total happiness of being able to work from home, doing what I love.
Writing!
Once upon a time there was a disorganized web designer who worked from home and used Word to create his invoices. This web designer found he was spending too much of his valuable downtime wondering who owed him money and how much…it was a stress on him and a waste of energy.
Then came the day the web designer went to send an invoice to his client. In creating a new invoice (using an old invoice as the template) he forgot to rename the file and saved over the original invoice. Upon realizing what he had done he snapped saying, “I’ve had it – there has to be a better way”.
This fateful day happened in early January 2003, and the web designer spent all his spare time the rest of that month building a web application his clients could login to to view their invoices - something that looked professional and would tell him which clients had looked at their invoices so he could save time following up with people en route to collecting his money.
Today that service is called FreshBooks and in case you haven’t guessed it, that web designer was me. I’m pleased to report that FreshBooks is now publicly available and is used by over 300,000 people. We’ve built a business solving our own business problems, and the good news is, we’ve got more problems to solve.
That’s today’s FreshBooks history lesson. As an entrepreneur I find it’s good to recall your history from time to time to remember why you’ve chosen the road less traveled and to remind yourself that the way you see problems - because it’s a unique perspective - is hugely valuable. Thanks for reading.
Back in December we asked our customers, “who inspires you?” Armed with that information, we set out to ask those people a few questions.
Third in our series: Web accessibility expert Stephanie Sullivan.
What initially got you interested in the Web?
Honestly? It wasn’t the Web that interested me. It was code. I wanted to write C++ because, after doing some brain studies/testing, I arrived at the fact that my brain loves puzzles/research/detective work… and code seemed like it might be in that ballpark. My friend, Stuart Nealy, warned me away from C++ though — and told me I should check out HTML, the language of the Internet, instead. That’s what got me interested in the Web.
When I first started out, I had a lot of fun with graphics and design as well as code, since in my previous life I enjoyed drawing and painting. But in time, after dabbling in a bit of everything, I decided that the best way for me to be successful was to focus. And that focus ended up being in the area of client-side development.
I’ve read many references to your speaking style. How would you describe it?
Well, I’m a pretty high-energy person by nature — and I’m also a big goof with a quirky sense of humour. I get great feedback from my presentations and I try to keep things fun. But sometimes my passion for Web standards and for helping people really “get it” can make me seem a bit serious. And, well — that’s serious stuff!
What do you like most about speaking at conferences and other events?
That would definitely have to be connecting with other geeks. I really, really love getting an opportunity to converse with other people who do what I do. Sadly, I find that at home, most of my friends really don’t grok what I do. So if I start babbling on about something work-related, their eyes glaze over and I instantly lose them. At a conference, I love the opportunity to talk with such geeky people that I can be “lost” myself on occasion. The other reason for speaking is the enjoyment of the “aha moment” — helping people understand a core concept that perhaps never quite made sense before. That’s extremely rewarding.
You have inspired many people with your work, but who inspires you — either in the Web 2.0 world, or just in general?
Oh gosh — there have been many inspirations over the years (most of which are now friends)… everyone from Molly Holzschlag and Eric Meyer to Al Sparber, Mark Wubben and Ray West. It totally depends on the subject at hand. Anyone who’s doing something they’re passionate about is inspiring to me. And let’s face it — the Web is a wonderful melting pot. We share with each other, learn from each other and give back where we can — that helps the next “generation” of the Web get where they need to go as well. I just hope in time, we can attract some younger women — and help them realize this is a rockin’ cool job to have and way more fun than they thought. I mean, what’s better than workin’ and hangin’ with cool, smart people?
Since we are an online invoicing service I feel the need to ask: how do you bill for your services?
I usually bid by the project, but keep track of the hours. Meaning, I figure out the approximate number of hours I think it will take — and then double it so I might be closer to reality (though early on, I found tripling my estimate to be closer to the actual time it took), and that’s my bid. But I then keep track of scope and time so if it gets too far outside the realm of my bid, we can adjust.
I once had a program that recorded the time on each project. Only, I’m so freakin’ ADD, and I bounce around so much, it wasn’t very helpful. So I actually use either a text file (per project), or a notepad (yes, the kind you write on with a pen) and then do my billing from that. Not a very technical way I’m afraid.
Anything else our readers should know about you?
Sure. I love to meet people when I’m speaking so please come introduce yourself if you’re at an event I’m attending. Don’t be shy. (You can check my Web site for my schedule.) The book Greg Rewis and I have been writing for the past year, “Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3″, is finally going to be released in late March. It’s a project-based book that utilizes the CSS layouts I wrote for Adobe that are included in Dreamweaver CS3 (the book teaches DW and CSS together which is unusual). I’m also currently a developer for a company called Miskeeto, building Web sites for socially conscious companies that want to make a difference. And we’re green (though I guess I complicate that with all my travel!).
On a personal note, I love playing beach volleyball — but I only get to play when I’m in town and can drag myself away from the little people inside my computer. I’m not real great with that work/life balance thing and tend to work 24/7.
Thanks for having me, Saul!
Thanks for having us!
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