Archive for May, 2008
I spent the day Wednesday doing telephone support and here is an email someone sent to support@fb after speaking with me:
When the Founder answers the phone, that’s the kind of company I want to do business with.
Just FYI…
Good to speak with you Mike! Thanks for your time.
Thanks,
Kevin Downey
Daniel was good enough to shoot this ticket my way and I can’t tell you how many of these notes I’ve received over the years – but it’s not just me who gets them. Levi does, so do our development and marketing teams. Customers get excited when they know they are being served by people who can make an impact on the business. They feel engaged and so they should.
From the founder’s perspective and beyond the good vibes you get from a note like this, doing support benefits your business by keeping your in touch with customers. Constantly staying in touch with your customers will lead you to new insights and ideas for new ways you can enhance the value of your services. Those ideas will inevitably lead to new opportunities to revenue generating which may just be around improving customer service. Also, look at what an impact that might have on your team. They know you are rolling up your sleeves too when a note like this comes in, and as your organization grows, that egalitarian approach to work can do a lot to keep people aligned.
Now look at Craig Newmark, the founder of Craig’s List. He spends 40 hours a week on customer service and it’s one of his keys to success. Craig is not the CEO of Craig’s List, but he surely has an influence over the direction of the company. Here’s a feature length interview with Craig’s List CEO Jim Buckmaster where he explains how Craig’s List uses love letters from users as the only metric they use to measure success. Now that’s a metric, and I’m betting founder Craig had some influence choosing it.
Bar none, The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment is one of the best reads I’ve had this year (it’s a blog post).
If you don’t know Marc Andreessen of Ning and Netscape fame, his entrepreneurial insights are head and shoulders above just about anything you can find anywhere – check out his blog.
P.S. Marc…where’s part 2?
P.P.S. I’m aware I’m due for part 2 of this.
I am young, I am inexperienced – at least when compared with senior management at established companies. What I have going for me is that I know that and I accept it.
It’s great starting companies, but odds are you need help to do it successfully. On many occasions I have recommended advisors for entrepreneurs, but it’s not just leaders who need advice – your staff do too. Why? Because you can’t do all the hard work. When you are running a fast growing company your staff are wrestling with tough problems, and when they’re doing that they *deserve* help that you probably can’t give them.
Coaching and mentoring is an intimate relationship and ideally the apprentice should choose teacher, but you can suggest advisors you have recruited – who know you, your values, your style and your business. Being familiar with those subtleties of your business are less relevant for technical advice, but useful nonetheless. I think it’s much more relevant for HR and strategic initiatives as your culture and your vision will lend itself better to some opportunities than others.
In the past I’ve talked about why advisors matter, how to recruit them and how to make successful relationships with advisors. All those things apply to your staff as well, so get them connected.
We’ve had a fantastic response to our OSX Dashboard Widget, and are working hard to improve the functionality and vitality of all the 3rd party add-ons that have been popping up.
For those just joining the conversation, Widgets are like little mini-applications that run on your computer. The first widget-like things were probably the Desk Accessories (initially known as desk ornaments) introduced with the very first Macintosh computers. In the modern incarnation, they are little chunks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and they provide such things as the current weather, sports scores, flight status, and movie listings. All widgets run under a program such as Dashboard, Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator), Google Desktop Gadgets, Windows Vista Sidebar, and gDesklets. Usually a widget has to be written for a specific widget system; you can’t run a gDesklet in the Windows Vista Sidebar, for example.
FreshBooks recently released a Time Tracker Widget for OSX, allowing you to track time in your FreshBooks account, without having to open your browser and log in. It’s handy to have the widget a keypress or mouse gesture away. But for some people, out of sight is out of mind, and asked if we might provide something for the desktop. Well, the other day we had someone mention a way to pull a Dashboard widget out of the Dashboard! While not for the faint-of-Terminal-heart, it’s a really cool hack that many people may find useful.
Poof! Your Dashboard vanishes, but the widget’s still visible. Move it to where-ever you want on your screen and it’s there, running, fully functional, without the rest of Dashboard around!
I’m personally fond of keeping my widgets out of sight, as it keeps the clutter away but accessible, but I know that some people find it annoying. Now we have an answer for you!
Just a quick announcement for anyone who may be trying to reach us in the office today: the office is closed for Victoria Day Monday, and we’ll be back at it Tuesday.
If you are interested in the history surrounding this May holiday, Daniel wrote about it here.
When I was a kid, my dad would occasionally travel for work. When he did he would sometimes bring me home sand in a bottle, or once he brought me home what looked like an empty bottle, but it was actually full of warm, sun-soaked air from wherever he was returning from. He would explain that he was trying to bottle some of the things he saw and experienced so I could share them with him.
The concept of bottling experiences and excitement has always fascinated me, and I think that is why I am so drawn to the personality of Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary, for those of you who don’t know, is the man behind Wine Library TV, as well as the new book Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World, and can only be described as the most passionate “everyman” in the wine business.
I have been very fortunate to meet Gary on a few occasions, and he is a true inspiration on how to succeed in business. I only wish I could figure out a way to bottle his drive and enthusiasm for life.
Gary is a National Treasure, and not in that Nicolas Cage “I am going to steal the constitution” kind of way!
So now that I have finished my very long-winded introduction, I would love you to direct your attention to an interview we did with Gary a few months ago at SXSWi, and you will see how this guy is bringing the THUNDER!
The FreshBooks add-on family is growing bigger all the time! We’d like to celebrate the latest addition to the fold.
Easy Time Tracking gives FreshBooks users a way to access all of FreshBooks functionality from their Windows desktop, whether they are online or offline. Never again get stuck when you’re on the the road without Internet access.
Easy Time Tracking features an elegant timer application that sits in your system tray, and provides full two-way synchronization with FreshBooks. Import customers, projects, and tasks from FreshBooks. Export time logs to FreshBooks. Track Expenses.
Better yet, Easy Time Tracking makes it easy to backup your FreshBooks data onto your own computer, and you can work from a USB Flash drive.
Easy Time Tracking has been on a market since 2005 and has won multiple awards. It was developed by Logic Software Inc, whose products are used in 27 countries by of thousands of customers at some of the world’s most well-known organizations like General Electric, Heinz, and the United Way.
Early this morning we pushed out a new release affectionately dubbed “Animal House”. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new:
Tax management for your expenses
Now you have the ability to add taxes to your expense categories. The benefit of this is that once you set the taxes you want to associate with a given category, all you need to do is enter an expense total and we will backwards calculate the amount of tax on the expense for you. This will come in handy at tax time – especially for UK and Canadian based companies.
Staff time-tracking via the API
When we first released our Mac OS X time tracking widget, only admin accounts were supported. Now your staff can join the party with their very own API token. Here are the steps they’ll need to retrieve their token and get rolling:
- Login.
- Go to the “Profile” link in the top right hand corner.
- At the bottom of the page, collect your URL and token.
- Input these values into the widget.
Note: You (as the administrator) must have enabled the API in your account and agreed to the API terms of service before your staff can retrieve their token. But if you are already using the widget or another FreshBooks add-on, you’re good to go already.
There are other additions to the API relating to projects, credits and some other goodies. Check the developer blog for those details a little later today.
Improved “Assign Client” page
We’ve made the “Assign Client” page easier to use, which is great news for accounts juggling permissions between clients and staff.
More e-mail customizations
In this release we also added the ability to further customize your emails. You can now include invoice/estimate numbers and amounts in the body of emails sent to your clients.
So, that wraps things up.
Hey folks, just a quick note that FreshBooks will be briefly unavailable this Thursday morning while we perform an upgrade.
When will FreshBooks be unavailable?
The upgrade takes place Thursday, May 15th at 11:30 AM GMT (that’s 4:30 AM PT, 7:30 AM ET, et cetera). It’s expected to take half an hour. During this time there will be periods when you will be unable to access your FreshBooks account.
Once the upgrade is complete, watch our blog and your e-mail inbox to find out what’s new!
As a founder of the mesh conference (which sold out today), it’s brought me great energy to release something new this year: meshU, a one day event for people who build things online.
meshU is happening next Tuesday, and there are still some tickets remaining. The conference is in Toronto, and I’d say it’s worth traveling for and it will be a great place to meet FreshBooks team members as most of us will be there.
Here is the schedule and this is a snapshot of the extraordinarily strong speakers and their workshops.
Design
Daniel Burka
Digg, Pownce
Iterative Design Strategies
Jon Lax
Teehan+Lax
8 rules for Getting Clients Through a Design Process
Kevin Hale
Infinity Box Inc, Wufoo
How to Design for Love
John Resig
jQuery, Mozilla
Building Interactive Prototypes with jQuery
Development
Avi Bryant
Dabble DB
Turning the Tables: Moving Beyond Relational Storage
Leah Culver
Pownce
Implementing OAuth
Marc André Cournoyer
Standout Jobs
Thin & Rack
Reuven Cohen
Enomaly Inc.
An Introduction to Cloud Computing (CloudCamp)
Management
Ryan Carson
Carsonified
How to Start Your Own Start-up
Alistair Croll
Bitcurrent
“Watch It” – How to Monitor Web Applications
Reg Braithwaite
Mobile Commons
Building and Managing Great Software Teams
David Crow & Leila Boujnane
Microsoft(David), Idée(Leila)
How to Demo Like a Demon
Did I mention tickets are only $239? Get yours here.
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