One of the things I have always underestimated in building our business is the importance of our story. I’m a pretty rational guy, so when I ask myself, “how important can a story be anyway?” I usually tell myself, “well…not all that important”. Turns out I’ve been wrong all these years.
I learned my lesson a few years back when we were working with a consultant. We were toying with the idea of raising money, and whether we did or not, we wanted to put ourselves through the paces and explore the business through the eyes of a third party. There are a whole bunch of reasons why it’s a great idea to act as if you are raising money (ie it makes you think things through, kill sacred cows, etc) even if you don’t choose to do so.
Long story short, we brought in a consultant who had raised lots of capital and had a ton of relevant operating experience. He took us through a series of exercises, the first of which was asking Levi and I to tell our respective stories from the beginning – before there was a FreshBooks.
Part of my story revolved around the design/consulting business I built FreshBooks for (yes, I built an online invoicing service to make it easier to collect from my own customers!). The consultant got fixated on this business, and specifically the way I built that business. I never marketed it and we had no sales people, yet we were constantly turning down business. Why? We took great care of our customers and we over-delivered with the results.
Prior to working with this consultant, I did not make the connection between my earlier business was the genesis for our culture here are FreshBooks. At FreshBooks we believe that we are a service, not a technology, and we try to Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday (4E). Someone else could build the identical product, but the business would be totally different. Why? Because our approach to running the business is so different, and that approach makes all the difference and comes from our earliest days…the ones before there even was a FreshBooks.
We’ve got a saying around the office, and it goes something like this: “It’s Friday, you know what that means…it’s Hack Off time again!”
What’s a hack off you ask? In a nutshell it’s a day of unstructured time for our developers where they can work on anything they like. It’s kind of like Google’s fabled 20% time dedicated to side projects, except that at FreshBooks we try to do this once every 2 weeks so it’s about 10% of your time. Still, not too shabby.
The way it works is our developers work throughout the day on whatever they like. Sometimes it’s improvements to the product – things nagging customers but that we just haven’t gotten to, sometimes it things nagging the developers that they just want to fix and no one else will see, and other times it’s a proof of concept of some new technology. The only guiding rule about what to work on is you should be able to finish it in a day.
Whatever they are working on throughout the day, at 4:30 they stop – that’s beer o’clock here at FreshBooks HQ (something we practice every Friday). At that point the entire company – refreshments in hand – moves through the office from screen to screen and gets demos from each developer on the stuff they’ve created. Once all the demos are done, there is a voting process – usually done by loudest cheers – to decide the “winner”. Beyond peer recognition, we usually bestow movie tickets or Raptors tickets upon the fan favourite.
I love Hack Off days, in fact as a founder and product kind of guy, Hack Offs and release days are probably my favourite days at the office. Having a chance to see the creativity of our dev team is a very special treat. Can’t wait for beer o’clock!
This morning we’ve released one of our largest changes in some time; a huge overhaul of our Settings area. Here’s a summary of what’s changed:
New look and feel
Thanks to the J-Team (that would be Jaco and Jeff), the Settings area is rocking a fresh new design. Navigation links are clearer, with easy to click target areas. Form elements are neatly aligned, with slightly larger input areas, and helpful explanations below.
Priorities, priorities
Everybody needs to edit their tax settings. So why did we bury that 3 clicks deep? No matter – taxes are now their own tab, so you can get there right away.
Introducing “My Account”
We’ve moved account-related pages into a whole new area called “My Account”. Here you’ll find your current billing package with FreshBooks, the administrator account, API token, and Basecamp account details. Getting there is easy; just click the “My Account” link on the top-right.
Redesigned payment gateway page
Most folks only have one payment gateway enabled, and having to scroll through a giant list of gateways you don’t use was a bit of a pain. So now we’re emphasizing your enabled gateways, and hiding the rest.
Colors and logos become one
Behold the colors and logos page, which holds … your color and logo settings. We’ve replaced our aging color picker with something more in keeping with the times (can you say saturation-slider?), and added big, sharp images that show you where your logos go.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, really; we’ve made a ton of small changes throughout the Settings area. Login to your account and take a look, and as always, your feedback is both welcome and encouraged.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, created to mark the birth of software development and to commemorate the extraordinary woman who started us all on this path.
165 years ago, Ada Lovelace wrote the very first computer program in the notes to her translation of Luigi Menebrea’s article on the Analytical Engine — a theoretical machine proposed by Charles Babbage. The program would have calculated Bernoulli numbers, but Babbage was never able to build the machine, so I guess you could say she never shipped.
It’s amazing when you consider how she wrote a program without many of the tools we take for granted today. She wrote the first program without a text editor nor a working version of the machine it was to run on: No hard drive, no graphics co-processor, no APIs, not even a compiler. She wrote that code by hand – truly by hand. She didn’t even have a typewriter.
It’s amazing to think of the journey Lovelace started in not only software, but also hardware. From calculating machines the size of houses, to cryptographic crackers the size of rooms, to telephone traffic managers the size of desks, to accounts receivable controllers the size of briefcases, to presentation designers the size of books to communication devices the size of hands, Ada started it all.
Late last month I presented at the Future of Web Apps in Miami. While there I agreed to be interviewed by a PhD student working on his dissertation. The research revolved around the genesis of companies and he was trying to answer the question, “where does product innovation come from?” Over the course of an hour I was asked probably 50 questions, all of them about the earliest days of building our company. The researcher was fixated with the exact moment we got our idea and decided to commercialize it.
I’d be lying to you if I told you that FreshBooks was born out of highly strategic beginnings. There are entrepreneurs that actively seek out a problem to solve, make sure the market is large enough, construct a story and a team, raise some money and go after it.
That wasn’t me. I built FreshBooks to bill my own customers, and my co-founder Joe took an interest in the product. It was literally months before we realized that businesses other than our own would be interested in an online invoicing service.
I learned a great deal about myself, FreshBooks and the web app market by participating in this interview. First and foremost, I learned that Joe and I were true pioneers. We started in January 2003. Back then, about the only successful web app going was Hotmail, though I think Salesforce had gotten it’s ball rolling. Popular frameworks for web development like Ruby on Rails, Django, Zend were not widely used, so we built our own. We also had no idea how to approach marketing, product management, or how to measure the success of our business.
Today there are countless resources to help answer these questions – specifically when building web apps. One of the best examples I can think of is Getting Real. That eBook by 37Signals contains countless lessons we had to learn on our own, and I credit the guys at 37Signals for taking the time to write the book and for writing it so well. If you are building a web app, it’s a must read.
In thinking about all this, I’ve learned something else…that there’s never been a better time than right now to build a web app business. Why? You can do it so much faster and more easily than ever before thanks to things like frameworks, Getting Real, and the countless blog posts that are instructive and inspirational.
We started FreshBooks just after the original web bubble burst in 2001 – it was a downturn in the technology market more than anything. Downturns are a great time to start because you’ve got to learn how to bootstrap since raising capital is as hard as hell. So what’s stopping you? Get out there and build a web app; there has never been a better time than now.
When folks talk about the “Software Development Process”, there’s usually a lot of talk about gathering requirements, or tracking issues, or verifying business logic, and so on. Whether waterfall or agile, the discussions on development processes almost always focuses on tools and concepts. Methodologies.
Over the years I’ve grown suspicious of any and all promises attributed to methodologies. If there was a single best way to develop software, we’d have all settled on it years ago and everybody would build this stuff the same way and nobody would be making thousands of dollars selling books on “The NEW Software Development Methodology” or running enormous conferences to explain their NEW Software Development Methodology.
But to be honest, I’ve found the biggest gains in productivity and general developer happiness rarely come from methodologies or tools. Bug trackers are all basically the same. Each developer has their favourite IDE that they’re most comfortable using.
The biggest gains I’ve ever found come from PHYSICAL improvements. I blogged on my own blog about the value of a couch when I was project managing. I remember when a shop I was working at brought in some consultants who relied on sticky notes for virtually everything, and what a tremendous value that was. I’ve also blogged about the design of the whiteboard and why it’s so important in collaborative design work.
FreshBooks just moved into a shiny new office. It’s a beautiful place, high-ceilinged and open, with lots of meeting space and all that. We’re very happy, even if construction is still ongoing around us and gets a little (a lot!) noisy at times. But it was a chance to design an office just the way we wanted it, which meant:
Lots of whiteboards! They’re not all properly mounted on the walls yet, but we have nearly a 1:1 ratio of developers to whiteboards. Massively useful tools, even if it’s just for posting silly cartoons on. The ability to just say, “Look, here’s what I’m thinking,” and draw out a diagram or a couple of circles or whatever is huge and it’s easy to think you don’t need it. There’s simply no such thing as too many whiteboards.
Meeting spaces. We were kind of hurting for meeting room space in our old office, but the new one gives us a lot of options. There are quiet nooks where a couple of folks can gather and a few proper meeting rooms of different sizes for intense sessions where you need everyone to focus (and whiteboard!). My estimation is that you need at least one meeting room per ten employees.
Open spaces. The office is a wide-open room, which I know some folks don’t like (Hi Joel!), but at FreshBooks we’re all chipping in on handling phone calls, or helping out vetting one of Saul’s crazy ideas, so it’s important to us that everyone’s available all the time. There’s an unexpected side effect of this: if you hold a meeting of some type in such an open space, EVERYONE can see it happening. We do a daily stand-up with all the developers every day at 10:30 — just a quick go-round of what everyone is doing today. Back in our old office the development team was separated in different rooms so not everyone could tell at a glance that the stand-up was happening so there was always some rigamarole around getting everyone organized. In our new space, folks can SEE the meeting happening and they jump up to get in on things. It’s natural and automatic and makes us all more productive.
Getaway space. There’s also a big lounge/kitchen area away from everyone’s desks where you can just get away and kick a ball around, grab something to drink or take a nap on a comfy couch. The kitchen is big and spacious, so lots of folks can get to putting meals together without clonking into each other. Interesting conversations happen here — there’s an ongoing plan to become international jewel thieves that we flesh out a little more each week — and it’s important to have space that facilitates pointless encounters because you never know where inspiration will strike.
Space is SO important. There are so many fantastic ways to improve a team’s productivity that don’t involve purchasing expensive software licenses or hiring high-priced consultants. A $500 couch or a $200 whiteboard or even just a $5 pack of sticky notes can do more for your team if you implement it properly.
Anyone else got stories about low-tech solutions for high-tech problems?
Budget for your time in Tick, then bill for it in FreshBooks.
At FreshBooks, we work very hard to fit the way small businesses and freelancers like to work. Many companies swear by Tick to budget and track time on client projects. And for good reason. Tick has put a lot of effort in designing an elegant and pleasurable tool to make time budgeting and tracking fast and easy.
But you know that old adage: Time is money. That’s why FreshBooks has integrated our online invoicing service with Tick. Now it’s just as fast and easy to bill for your time in Tick as it was to enter it.
Try the FreshBooks and Tick integration yourself and you’ll see how easy it is. All you need is your Tick log in details to get started.
If you liked this, check out our other add-ons. We’re always looking for better ways to fit into your world.
FreshBooks may be unavailable for a few minutes around 10:00 pm EDT this Sunday night (March 15, 2009), while we make sure our redundant servers are indeed redundant.
(That’s 2:00 AM Monday, March 15 in GMT, for those of you not in our little band of longitude.)
This may seem like a weird story but Sunir, Rayanne and I were sitting around a few weeks back listening to records when the Village People song GO WEST came on and almost immediately we all jumped up and said I WANT TO BE THE COWBOY!
You would think this would have been uncomfortable but this happens more than you would think here at FreshBooks.
So anyway, inspired partly by our Cowboy confession and the Village People we chose right then to attend South by SouthWest Interactive, and like last year we have a ridiculous amount of fun and cool stuff planned like dinners, magicians, clowns, a speaking panel on building brands using Web 2.0 tools, the best looking schwag, and anytime you see folks from FreshBooks make sure ask for a couple packs of our exclusive Internet All Star Baseball Cards!
Please follow us on Twitter (@FreshBooks, @rlangdon, @Sunir and @saulcolt) to meet up, follow the fun or to just be embarassed for Saul (me) since I apparently have no shame.
Tactile CRM tells you which clients have paid their FreshBooks invoices when you’re on the phone.
Sales seems to be a theme this year. Well, let’s face it. If you’re in business and sales is not your theme this year, you may not be in business next year. Personally, I think that’s a good thing. It’s amazing what you can achieve if you put a little attention on sales and marketing.
That’s why I’m happy to say Tactile CRM has integrated with FreshBooks. For those who aren’t yet using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, this may be a good excuse to start. You’ll be able to stay on top of your sales by recording every deal, email, telephone call, note, activity, meeting, and now invoices in TactileCRM.
The key is quickly seeing what’s going on with your clients and prospects so you can close more sales. Tactile CRM now can import clients and their invoice history from FreshBooks, so you will have all the important information on hand before you call customers on the phone.
To celebrate the integration, if you sign up to Tactile CRM using the code FRESHBOOKS before June 1, 2009, they will give you an extra month for free when you upgrade to a paying plan.
FreshBooks is an online invoicing, time tracking and expense management service that helps people save time, get paid faster, look professional and focus on what they love to do - their work.
sends more invoices than there are 
