A recent story at Google Apps shows once again that software as a service is harder than most people think.
A customer using Google Apps for their intranet had paid for their own domain through Google and their partner eNom. While their account in Google showed their domain was paid for until 2010, on their anniversary date eNom went ahead and expired the domain. eNom put up a parking page and are now receiving confidential company emails.
Obviously, expiring a domain on a customer and throwing up a spam page is not exactly good customer service. What’s worse is that Google considers this a known issue. Ouch.
Given no options to resolve the issue, the customer had to contact support. The only channel to contact Google is through email, and that has a 24 hour turn around. Double ouch.
When a company fails to deliver this badly, it’s important to make it easy for customers to get ahold of you. For tough problems, I often tell people my name, email address, and phone number so they can “wring my neck” if the problem is not resolved.
I wouldn’t pick on Google if this was a one time issue, but if it is a known issue they definitely deserve some criticism for not helping customers more pro-actively. Once again, I am reminded that the hard part of software-as-a-service is not building the software. 15000 engineers can bang out a lot of code. The hard part is the service. That’s what people are paying you for month after month.
SaaS is not just a new distribution method for software with a lovely revenue stream. It’s a new social contract with the customer that we all have to live up to, whether we’re companies big or small.
Earlier this month Saul and I had the fortune of attending The Crunchies while we were in San Francisco. Love or hate TechCrunch, they have shown an awesome level of commitment to building up startup culture both in Silicon Valley and in the wider world as well.
Today, Michael Arrington announced he is stepping back from TechCrunch after a nasty incident in Germany. A random person walked up to Arrington and literally spat in his face. That was the last straw for Michael, after a year of hostile experiences including a period in the summer where he felt the need to hire personal security to protect his family.
I sympathize with him, and I believe him. Amongst the people I know in the industry, TechCrunch’s reputation has changed over the years. They are no longer seen as the great chronicler and supporter of startup culture, but as the ultimate arbiter of success.
I met a woman at Gnomedex this year who was recently hired to be the head of marketing for a service with 5 million customers. She was charged with expanding that to 6 million. I asked her what her strategy was, and she was adamant that all she needed was a single post on TechCrunch. She was willing to spend a million dollars to razzle and dazzle TechCrunch. I asked her why not spend that money with your existing customers, and she looked at me like I was stupid.
TechCrunch is not a marketing plan. You need to be out in the world, going after your own customers, treating them well, earning their admiration and recommendations, and continuing to build your business for the future.
A post on TechCrunch will not make or break your company. It’s important to remember the audience there are entrepreneurs like you, not your customers. A post on TechCrunch is more like a high five from your fellow entrepreneurs. Very, very nice, but not the same as a new customer.
Yes, TechCrunch is important, and it’s there to support you. Be thankful for what they are doing every day to build up the industry to make your life easier, rather than bitter that today you’ll just have to pick up the phone and win a customer on your own.
Today we are pleased to announce that FreshBooks now supports Google Checkout. Google Checkout integration is something people have been asking for for a long time, and it gives us great pleasure to roll it out today.
Google Checkout is a payment gateway like PayPal or Authorize.Net, and you can use it to collect online payments from your clients when you send them a FreshBooks invoice. The cost to use Google Checkout is 2% + $0.20 per transaction for businesses who do not use Google Adwords. For those business that have Google Adwords accounts, Google Checkout is free on sales of up to 10 times your monthly AdWords spend.
To enable Google Checkout in your FreshBooks account:
1. Log in to your account.
2. Click “Settings” in the top right hand corner.
3. Click “Enable Online Payment” from the 3rd Party Services Section
4. Scroll down to Google Checkout, enter your merchant ID and key, check off enabled and save the page.
It’s very important that you read the set up instructions carefully – you must enter the postback url in your seller account or nothing will work. Also you should know, Google gives purchasers a 15 minute window to cancel their purchases, and therefore payments will take at least 15 minutes to clear. We handle this in your account with invoice statuses – the “pending” status indicates we’re waiting for a response from Google.
Once you have done all that your invoices will provide the option to receive payment by via Google Checkout. If you want to accept payment via Google Checkout for invoices you have created previously, you’ll have to edit each one and check the “Google Checkout” box.
Please note Google Checkout is only available in the US and the UK (Canada, you’ve been shafted again) and you will not even see Google Checkout as a payment gateway option unless your FreshBooks account currency is USD or GBP. Please also note, you cannot do recurring billing (where your client’s credit cards are automatically charged at intervals of your choosing) with Google Checkout. You can do recurring billing with these gateways: Authorize.Net, Landmark, iTransact, Linkpoint and PsiGate. FreshBooks also supports the following non-recurring billing capable gateways: PayPal Payflow Pro, PayPal Website Payments Pro, PayPal and 2Checkout.
Update:
We’ve updated the Google Checkout integration to mark all payments coming from FreshBooks as digital content. As a result there is no longer shipping information during the checkout. This allows transactions to clear much faster (i.e. less than a minute in most cases).
It’s always a strain on your client relationships when you have knock on their door and ask to be paid. But during tough economic times, collecting from your clients is even harder than usual.
For anyone looking for some guidance navigating collections, Simona Covel and Kelly K. Spors have penned a great article in the Wall Street Journal with some examples of how to do it right:
Marc Levine, chief executive of the company, which has 350 employees and $40 million in revenue, began personally calling customers who were more than 30 days past due. He says he explained that he needed to be paid because his business was suffering, too.
“I made sure I told them how much we loved them,” he says, “but in order to do a fine job in serving them, I needed them to accelerate payment and return my cash flow to where it was in summer ‘08 and prior.”
Notice how Mr. Levine uses these tough times to increase communication and personalize the collections process. These themes were consistent with other examples in the article.
At FreshBooks, we believe the currency of our business is relationships. We’ve also seen in the past that top performers from the FreshBooks community are client centric professionals – businesses who maintain strong relationships with their clients. So there was little surprise when we discovered that FreshBooks users as a whole actually collected their money faster in Q4 2008 versus Q4 2007 (on average 14 days, down from 15 days) despite economic trends being reported throughout the media (source: FreshBooks’ quarterly benchmarking service). Kudos to the FreshBooks community!
If you know anyone who works hard to maintain their client relationships and is looking to get paid faster in 2009, you may want to recommend they start using FreshBooks. If that sounds like you, sign up and get started with FreshBooks for free.
It’s that time of year again. No, not the time to buy a gym membership to fulfill a hopeless New Year’s Resolution. Save that money, and instead buy a ticket to Future of Web Apps which will once again be in Miami from February 23-24.
The Future of Web Apps brings together the best of the web applications industry to teach what they know. For any web developer, designer, or burgeoning web entrepreneur working on the next great web app, this is the best two days to spend to get a hold on what’s next, what’s working now, and what you can do about it.
This year has a special treat. We’re shipping Mike McDerment down, our intrepid CEO, to do a three hour workshop on how to build a successful web app business. Pick his brain on everything from how to fund your next greatest idea, how to market it, and how to deliver a solid product that customers love and love to talk about. Make sure to sign up for a workshop pass before it sells out!
And don’t forget to attend Barcamp Miami the day before FOWA, on Sunday, February 22. It’s free to attend, and Barcamps are awesome.
Do you know who your biggest competitor is? It might not be as straight forward as you think. Let’s use FreshBooks as an example. You probably think QuickBooks is our greatest competition. They’re not. Our greatest competition is obscurity.
Despite our success over the last 5 years, virtually no one knows they need online invoicing because it’s a new concept, and the truth is pretty much no one on this planet has ever heard of FreshBooks. The lesson here is that when you are a small company doing innovative things, don’t spend time thinking about your competition – focus on getting the word out. Eric Karjaluto writes a great post about why startups fail. It’s not because of the incumbants, it’s because they don’t get the mind share and attention they need to survive.
The bottom line is that you need to fight to be heard. You don’t need to focus your energy on the 800 pound gorilla, though many startups make that mistake. If there is an 800 pound gorilla, then they’ve proven there is enough market to go around, and its not them who you are losing to. And if that’s true, it’s the fact that no one knows about you that’s standing between you and success.
So get out your fog horn and make sure the world knows all about you, and while you’re at it, feel free to mention FreshBooks – we’ll take all the help we can get.
Oprius CRM makes managing your sales easy as a solopreneur.
For freelancers and solopreneurs, it’s critical to be efficient at sales. Not only do you need to be better at making sales, but you also need to manage time efficiently so you have time to do the actual work.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are the best way of staying on top of potential and actual customers. They organize every communication and help you keep track of what’s left to do. A really good CRM for freelancers and solopreneurs is Oprius, and now they have announced an integration with FreshBooks.
Oprius helps entrepreneurs simplify and automate their sales program, resulting in more revenue. Their whole game is making sure your prospects never fall through the cracks. Oprius actually steps you through automated sales plans to get from prospect to paying customers. Step from a new lead, to a first email, to a phone call, to the contract, and finally to a FreshBooks invoice and payment. That’s pretty cool, in my opinion.
If you’re curious, check out their excellent screencast to see how it works.
To celebrate the integration, Oprius has graciously offered a $20 credit on new Oprius accounts. Just email freshbooks@oprius.com with “freshuser” in the subject line. (The offer is valid until June 30, 2009.)
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
The shelf wars are over. Thanks to the Web, software distribution has changed. It used to be that to sell your software, you had to get space on the shelf at Best Buy or Staples. Those days are over.
Now users shop for software online – and increasingly they shop for web based services to meet their needs because it is easier than going to a store, and they don’t have to deal with the headaches of packaged software like installation updates, system and compatibility issues, data back up, etc.
What this means is the bottom is falling out for incumbents. Companies like Intuit achieved 87% market share by winning the shelf war. Today companies like FreshBooks go direct to consumers using the web. Perhaps it is by selling to them via advertising online, or – as in the case of FreshBooks – by benefiting from the increased efficiency of word of mouth that the web makes possible. Whichever it is, it’s not by owning the shelf.
Since change begets opportunity, you have to ask: who benefits from these new realities of distribution and who gets hurt? Clearly, it helps us little guys because the big guys can’t muscle you off the shelf in the big box stores like they used to. Who does it unsettle? Anyone who has built massive market share and counts on it to sustain their market cap. I’m thinking of Inuit and Microsoft primarily.
IAC-EZ balances your books based on business data imported from FreshBooks
Ever wanted to balance your books using FreshBooks? With IAC-EZ, now you can.
When we first heard that long time FreshBooks customers, Heather Villa and Cory Becker, had teamed up to work on a secret project, we were very intrigued and excited. Well after months of feverish work, they have just released their new creation into the world and it brings a new kind of awesome to FreshBooks.
IAC-EZ is their just released online bookkeeping web application built for small business owners like most of the FreshBooks community. It makes balancing the books simple by boiling it down to the familiar daily business transactions like invoices, expenses, and payments. No double entry here!
Once you have your business data in IAC-EZ, you can quickly get useful information like your profit and loss statement, an estimate of your taxes, and your Chart of Accounts.
In fact, IAC-EZ already automatically imports your business data from FreshBooks, so you can continue to manage your daily business in one place. Use IAC-EZ as your accountant-friendly view on top of FreshBooks. Check out the screencast to see how it works.
You can be sure it makes sense for you because Heather built it with you in mind. Many FreshBooks customers already use Heather as their accountant, and IAC-EZ emerged from her desire to make their lives easier. Give it a whirl, and let us know how it goes!
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
It’s been hard to build iPhone applications. If you don’t know Objective-C, and you don’t know the iPhone SDK, there is a steep learning curve. I’ve talked to a lot of FreshBooks customers over the past year that want to build iPhone applications, and many of them have gotten stuck because few companies have shared their code.
That kind of sucks.
We decided to give something back to our customers by sharing what we’ve learnt. We want to support our customers that want to make the leap to becoming iPhone developers.
A solid thank you to FreshBooks customer and awesome iPhone developer Dave Grijalva whom we hired to build the iPhone application for us.
It’s about building a community
We hope that our little gift will spur others to follow suit. A healthy development community thrives on sharing code.
However, very few other projects have followed suit. Without a healthy development community sharing code, it’s more likely that future applications will be built as web applications, a new distribution method as of iPhone OS 2.1.
And while frankly that is probably easier for developers, it does mean that users will be able to download iPhone applications from anywhere on the Web. That means that the market of iPhone applications is at risk of being fractured. If it’s really hard to find an application, it will be harder to sell them, and therefore harder to encourage developers to make them.
I know Apple is building a web apps directory in a similar style to Built for Blackberry. Maybe they will integrate that directory into the App Store in the future, but they haven’t done so yet.
And even if they do, web apps cannot access iPhone native services, like the GPS or the camera or the contacts or OpenGL. Some of the most truly dazzling applications still require Objective-C. And so sharing more iPhone Objective-C is still a good thing.
So, as the iPhone application ecosystem continues to evolve, we hope that our little gift will encourage others to give a little more. And please stay tuned to our developers blog. We’ll be publishing a more about what we’ve learnt about the iPhone shortly.
Meet us at MacWorld
FreshBooks is going to MacWorld Expo 2009 in force. Look for us throughout the week, including at the Mac Meet and Mingle party the evening of Thursday, January 8.
If you’re at MacWorld and would like to meet to discuss iPhone development or online invoicing, please drop me a line at sunir splat freshbooks.com.
FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that helps professionals in over 100 countries save time, get paid faster, look professional and focus on what they love to do — their work. Read our customer survey results — 99% recommend FreshBooks. FreshBooks users are served by a tight-knit team of 31 dedicated individuals based in Toronto, Canada who've been at this since 2003.
Today we are pleased to announce that FreshBooks now supports 
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