FreshBooks will be undergoing maintenance this coming Sunday, August 30th, 2009. There will be several minutes of unavailability at 8PM EDT, followed again by several minutes at approximately Midnight EDT.
Update:Once again Rich demonstrates that he can’t convert between timezones, and the brief 8PM downtime was inadvertently rescheduled to 7PM. We’re confident he can figure out “midnight”, though.
Another update: The midnight maintenance (and all of the maintenance, for that matter) is now complete.
SXSW Interactive is the biggest party of the year for the Web industry. Every year, they open up the conference to talks from the attendees and we have a few in the running for 2010.
We want you to come heckle us at our panels. We’ll give out cool stuff to the best hecklers!
Check out the panels we’ve submitted and if you like what you see, click on the little thumbs up icon:
We Are Family: Web Applications Band Together Now!
Face it. We’re all in it together. To grow, we must work together to build the overall market for web applications. Last SXSW, like-minded software companies banded together into the Small Business Web. We’ll talk candidly about what happened, what we’ve learnt, and why you must join the movement.
Software as a Service is more about service than software. Great software companies today have great customer support. If you want to succeed in this industry, learn how to do it right from these customer support rock stars.
Experimental Design: Your User Interface Is Your Laboratory
We all know that great designs can only come from the genius of great designers. Except that is complete crap. Great designs come from extensive user testing and making tons of iterations. Learn how the best-designed web apps extensively iterate and test their user interfaces to find what truly works.
If you’ve recently experienced difficulties with PayPal payments in your FreshBooks account, PayPal has just completed some scheduled enhancements as of this morning. Between late yesterday and early today some PayPal users may have experienced notifiation errors or delays. PayPal has posted that the notification backlog has been cleared and that the service should be back to normal.
Do you like cotton candy? Ever wanted to see yourself as a caricature? Always fantasized about being tied-up with your friends?
Well, FreshBooks turned five years old this year! And we’re throwing the best birthday party a five year old could hope for—loot bags included! It wouldn’t be a party without all of you, so be sure to RSVP for a great afternoon together of games, prizes and surprises you won’t want to miss!
When
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Anybody who knows anything about FreshBooks knows that we we strive for extraordinarilyawesome support for all our customers. You may have also heard that everyone who starts working at FreshBooks spends their first couple months doing support to get to know both our product and our customers (and if you haven’t heard, now you have!).
In the past few months, there have been a number of new hires at FreshBooks in many different departments. As a Support Rockstar here at FreshBooks, it’s one of my responsibilities to ensure that these newbies are geared up to answer all your questions. In the year I’ve been here, we’ve really evolved this process and it will probably continue to develop as more people come on board.
Here’s a little more insight into our Support Rockstar Training Program:
Everyone who starts is assigned a FreshBuddy from our core Support Team (either Randy, Tim or me). The first thing we do on a newbie’s first day is take them out for coffee for a couple hours, get to know them on a more personal level, explain the culture of FreshBooks and make sure they understand the importance of providing outstanding support.
They spend the next two weeks learning the application, the tools we use in house and having individual shadowing sessions with everyone on the Support Team. On their third week, they are officially added to our support rotation schedule several times per week. They continue to help customers and answer questions until their FreshBuddy and the rest of the Support Team all decide that the new hire is ready to graduate from our Support Training Program and start doing what they were hired to do full time.
Now, we’ve recently started making a big deal out of these graduations. It’s usually a surprise ceremony where everyone in the company stops what they are doing for 15-20 minutes to celebrate. I could say more, but I’ll let these pictures/videos speak for themselves:
And battle begins!
Needless to say, these support graduations have been both amazingly fun and HIL-AIR-EE-US!
Now, I know what you’re thinking and the answer is a resounding “YES! We are still hiring!”. Check out what awesome positions are available on our Careers page.
In March of this year, FreshBooks made a huge leap – 50 feet down the road to our new offices. We were greeted by a beautifully roomy space, complete with 20-ft high ceilings, large kitchen, and untouched white walls. Lots of of them.
The challenge was clear: how could we fill up these white walls, and make this space our own? And since we’re a bunch of misers, how could we do it on the cheap?
Save those marketing materials!
Last year our marketing folks flew to Boston’s HOW Design Conference and built our very first trade booth. It was decorated over the course of the weekend by a local artist (who is also a FreshBooks customer), and turned out stunning. Luckily, we were smart enough to hang on to the results; two big canvasses worth. After sitting in storage for 10 months, they’re now hanging prominently inside our office.
Relive your college dorm with posters
Little known fact about FreshBooks – we name all of our feature releases after Hollywood movies. This past week’s release, which introduced recurring expenses? Groundhog Day. Before that? The Prestige. The movies we pick don’t always make sense, but it’s our small tradition, and we’ve kept it up for 2+ years.
To pay tribute to our Hollywood-inspired development history, we ordered a bunch of corresponding movie posters from movieposter.com. The cost? $10-20 for each poster, $15-30 for each frame (Ikea), and a few extra dollars for the small placards you see placed next to each one. They occupy a small stretch of wall near our desks and make an interesting art piece.
Printed comments from Twitter
We’re lucky to have a lot of people say nice things about us on Twitter. So, we thought we’d bring the love home. Plastered around the office are dozens of full-color printed tweets from our customers. They’re huge self-esteem boosters, and look great!
Whiteboards a plenty
Total number of whiteboards at FreshBooks between 2004-2008: two. Total number of whiteboards today? 11. You could say we’ve begun a love affair with whiteboards, whether they’re big, tall, and/or magnetic. They might not be as aesthetically pleasing as some of the other mentions on this list, but they’re every bit as fun.
That about sums things up. The best part is – we’re not done yet. Our kitchen in particular is dying for some love. Got some ideas? Please pitch in!
Today, The Globe and Mail – Cananda’s largest National Newspaper – did a feature on FreshBooks, profiling us as “The Next Big Thing“. That seems like a rather bold statement to every nerve in our (mostly) Canadian bodies, but we’ll take it!
The article tells the story of our metamorphasis from a company who thought it had to pretend it was bigger than it was (we were working in my parents basement at the time!), to a company that is comfortable in it’s own skin. There is also a video where I share some of our story and our approach to the market – check out the video.
Thanks to Diane Jermyn and Rosa Park who were great to work with and did a very nice job with the piece. Thanks also to the editors at The Globe for profiling an emerging Canadian company. Start ups need help getting their stories out there, and it’s great to see Canadian media covering a company emerging North of the 49th.
In 2007, we released the public FreshBooks API to give our customers a richer experience with their own data. We are extremely fortunate that many talented developers are FreshBooks customers and partners, some of whom have volunteered to build and maintain open source projects built on our API. The very least we can do is give them a hat tip to thank them, for no other reason than it is long overdue.
If you’re interested in working with the FreshBooks API, you may be interested in looking into some of these fantastic projects.
NOTE: For most frameworks, you can use one of the API wrappers listed above. For instance, use freshbooks.rb for Ruby on Rails or freshbooks.py for Django and Pylons.
FreshCSV (PHP) which exports your FreshBooks data as denormalized CSV
apitester.php (PHP) Allows you to send XML to FreshBooks through an HTML form
csv2item.zip (PHP) Allows you to import items into FreshBooks through comma separated text
invoicePaymentGraphs.zip (PHP) Allows you to view a graph with your invoices and collected revenue
If you ever forget where to find these, we will continue to maintain this as part of the list of Sample Code which you can find on the FreshBooks Developers website.
If I missed anyone, please let me know and I will update the list.
Hey everyone, good news – we’ve dramatically improved the “Expenses” tab by introducing recurring expenses, vendors, inline editing, and a whole new look. I’m going to take you through these changes one a time, and give you an idea of what’s new.
A whole new look
Now you can add expenses directly from the “List of Expenses” page. New expenses are added inline to the list below, and you can edit them in place as well. We’re hoping this quicker interface will reduce the tedium of inputting expenses manually.
Vendoriffic
You’ll also notice the new “Vendor” column in the screenshot above. This means you can track exactly where you spent your cash, whether it’s the local hardware store, contractor, or commercial real estate conglomerate. Vendors are also searchable and appear in your expense reports.
At last, recurring expenses
Finally, we’ve introduced an easy means of inputting repeating expenses like rent, car leases, and hosting costs. It’s simple – when entering the first such expense, you can specify a schedule whereby that expense repeats, be it weekly, monthly, yearly, or something else. Then on the appropriate date, the expense will be re-created with the same details, right on cue.
That’s just a quick summary of some of the changes we’ve made. To see the whole thing, log into your account and have a look. As always, your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated.
The reality is that most of the emails we get from businesses are lame. And, if you are sending out emails yourself you may have already resigned to the fact that you get a low response rate. It’s just the nature of email, right?
No.
The reason we can accept poor response rates from email marketing is because we are lazy. Creating and sending an email is just too easy these days. So, type away, drop it into a nice template, fire it off and see what happens.
No wonder response is weak. You’ve earned it.
Want to get some killer results? Read on.
To get the big numbers, you are going to have to do a bit of work. For an email to be super effective it must achieve three things (please note that I am going to avoid all the technical stuff about deliver-ability and getting through spam filters and just focus on your campaign):
The email must be opened (attraction)
The email must be read to some extent (engagement)
The email must inspire action from the reader (response)
So let’s go through each stage and see what is needed.
Getting Your List To Open Your Email
Getting your list to open your email is often the biggest challenge. Many experts say that a provocative subject line is the best way to get your prospects to open your emails. I agree to some extent. Hey, if you have a great subject line then use it. But if that’s all you have and the content of your email does not match the excitement or anticipation created by your subject line then you will only fool them once.
And this leads to my first insight into email marketing. The key to getting people to open your email is to create the condition that they will want to open it—before they even get it.
Yes, before.
How is this possible? It is possible because all of your previous emails have offered them some great value.
You see, too often we write emails from our own selfish needs. Perhaps you want to up-sell customers to another program, or simply want to sell them something. Now there is nothing wrong with that but what is in it for them?
In every instance you emails must offer your prospect some value. This can range from some good information, insights into their business or even some good entertainment value.
A good example is the email we launched at FreshBooks back in January 2008. At FreshBooks the currency of our business is our relationships with our customers. It’s our lifeblood. Now we’d done a great job at connecting with them through our phone, email and forum support channels and also had a growing blog readership, but no newsletter.
What we did know was that our customers were always interested in what we were up to and how we worked. The blog revealed that to some extent but we thought that a more “intimate” and personal view might be a good idea for a newsletter. One of the things we do at FreshBooks is take our customers out for dinner whenever we are in their town. It’s a wonderful and intimate environment to really get to know our customers and them to get to know us. So we thought we could extend that experience to a newsletter and voila, the Supper Club newsletter was born.
FreshBooks Supper Club from July, 2009
Getting Your List To Read and Respond To Your Email
Now, the Supper Club is not opened by everyone, which is just fine because it was expressly designed for the group of customers that were interested in the goings on at FreshBooks. What we do have is a very loyal and consistent readership month after month. And we continue to get accolades from our customers about how much they enjoy it and look forward to it every month. We feed them the exact stories that reveal the goings on inside FreshBooks with photos, fun stuff and a very casual and fun writing style.
Importantly, pretty much every Supper Club includes an interactive element where we ask them to vote on something, participate in a fun contest or even volunteer for stuff. Heck, these are folks that want to take their relationship with FreshBooks to the next level, so we do our best to serve that up and get them participating.
Their response tells us that we’ve delivered what they were seeking. And that’s what we are after.
Can you do that? Yes.
You just need to think from the perspective of your prospect, not from your own selfish needs. What email can you send them that would add value for them? They may not buy anything with the first email, or even the second or the fifth, but over time, if they continue to open your emails and get good value from you they will come calling whether it’s to buy something or share their great experiences with your brand to someone else, or just be really happy they found you in the first place.
Feel free to read through all the Supper Club Newsletters to get some ideas on how we engage our audience every month.
Stay tuned for part 2 where I am going to share with you my very first email where I managed to get a—wait for it—98 percent open rate.
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.
FreshBooks will be undergoing maintenance this coming Sunday, August 30th, 2009. There will be several minutes of unavailability at 8PM EDT, followed again by several minutes at approximately Midnight EDT.
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