Ted Rogers, indisputably one of Canada’s most legendary business figures, died yesterday at home, surrounded by loved ones.
Successful, pioneering and visionary, Ted built a media empire by making big bets. There were times when no one believed Rogers would crawl out from under all the debt he took on, but counting on recurring revenue from Cable TV, and his legal mastery of the government regulation of telecommunications, Ted and his company Rogers survived and prospered.
Our condolences go out to Ted’s family and friends. CBC coverage can be found here.
If you have never heard of a sparkline, they are what Edward Tufte describes as “word sized graphics.” Said another way, they are little charts that you can use in the middle of a paragraph. Said yet another way, they are really cool.
Colin Ramsay, who runs Plastiscenic, and is a customer of ours, has created a really fun little application on our API. It displays a sparkline of revenue by month.
It’s a pretty compact way of seeing whether you are on track in your business or not. I’ll let Colin explain what it all means:
Ones in which invoice totals exceed the specified upper threshold are marked in green, and ones which are lower than the lower threshold are red. Everything else is black. To the side of the graph, there’s a numerical readout of the invoice totals from this month and the previous month, again coloured accordingly.
If you’re interested in using it for yourself, Colin has provided the source.
Even though FreshBooks is based out of Canada and our Thanksgiving took place last month, we thought we would share with you today some of the things that make us thankful, besides our wonderful FreshBooks users of course.
Problem
A couple weeks ago we had a problem: we wanted to collect testimonials for a new version of our homepage. Collecting testimonials can be a real pain. First you need to decide who to ask and then sort out how to ask (phone, email, forum, blog, etc). Then you need to compose some kind of message (email, post, etc), send it and wait. All of this takes time and potentially interrupts people who don’t want to be interrupted.
Results
In less than 10 minutes we had 9 testimonials, and Jaco got a selection of those onto the new home page that same day. So a project that could have taken 4-8 hours – maybe more – took about half an hour. That’s a huge time savings, all thanks to Twitter.
Watch how you can now generate FreshBooks invoices in TSheets, a time tracking tool built for the mobile workforce.
Today we’re happy to announce that TSheets, a time tracking service built for the mobile workforce, has made it easy to generate FreshBooks invoices from inside their application.
FreshBooks has many customers that work in the field, such as those in the building and construction trades. We’re always looking for ways to better fit their work flow. We think many of our customers will find TSheets beneficial.
TSheets provides a lot of flexibility when managing agents constantly on the move. Using TSheets, your workforce can clock in/out with SMS text messages from any cellphone. More advanced users can use iPhone, Android, or mobile web time tracking interfaces. They also have cool voice time tracking through an integration with Jott.
TSheets also has a very flexible system for organizing tracked time. With their hierarchical job code system, you can do more than track projects and tasks. You can organize your time and your team any way you want.
While TSheets does work well for sole agents, they really help larger companies with a team of field agents. They provide customizable time reports to make it easy to keep track of what’s going on out in the field. The reports even roll up into QuickBooks ready for payroll.
Overall, pretty sweet. Our thanks to TSheets for making this happen.
I’ve been watching a few threads in our forums sparked by customers who want to gain visibility into our product roadmap. This is an important and sensitive issue, both inside and outside our company. We really value all the input we get from our users, and work hard to translate the thousands and thousands of requests into good decisions for everyone.
That said, after a few years of not knowing how to handle questions around what we’re doing next, we’ve settled on a practice of not telling anyone what we’re doing until it’s released. In a nutshell we won’t be sharing our product roadmap, and here are 5 reasons why:
Commitments weigh you down
Once you say you are going to do something, you really ought to do it. If you don’t follow through you are going to let people down. If you change your mind once or twice, you can probably get away with it. But if you make it a habit of going back on your word, you will lose credibility.
But credibility is just an internal problem – a bigger problem is it costs our customers when we mislead them. The problem for them isn’t that we blew our credibility; it’s that they made business decisions based on our commitments and when we don’t meet them, they suffer real business consequences.
I’ve killed the release of new features the night before they were scheduled to be rolled out. Why? They were not up to standard. Fortunately we hadn’t told anyone these features were on their way, and no harm was done. Releasing on a specific date what you said you would is a packaged software thing, and on the web you don’t need to subject yourself to this weight. Commitments make you heavy and less nimble, so avoid them every step of the way.
Keep Your competition guessing
Are your competitors watching you? There’s nothing like giving away your roadmap to inform your competition and make it easy for them to head you off at the pass. Keep your plans to yourself and you’ll always have your competitors guessing – which is right where you want them.
Purchase decisions get delayed
Here’s a scenario: I’m on the phone showing someone FreshBooks and I can tell they are as good as sold. And then I make the mistake of telling them what we are doing next and the conversation goes 180 degrees and they say, “that’s great – get in touch with me when it’s ready!” Not only did I lose a sale, now I have to follow up with someone in the future so I’ve created work for myself! Talk about putting salt in a wound.
People delay purchase decisions if you tell them “what’s coming”. I’ve seen this countless times. Early adopters might be different, but once you reach a certain level of maturity in the market, your product should sell itself as it is today. If it doesn’t, what are you saying about the people who pay for it now?
Don’t set expectations too high
Despite what people in Silicon Valley might tell you, you don’t need to tell everyone about your big vision to be successful. Instead, play your cards close and focus on doing a good job of telling people what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do. People want to believe in you, and there’s nothing like a track record of delivery to ensure their aspirations are well founded.
You can bank on surprise and delight
Finally, and most importantly, surprise and delight are hugely valuable. At FreshBooks we work hard to execute on extraordinary experiences every day. To be extraordinary you have to exceed expectations, and the best way to do that is to do something your user is not expecting … like releasing a feature they’ve been dying to have but figured you’d never implement.
Use Skydeck with FreshBooks to turn cell phone calls from your clients into billable hours.
Mobile warriors, we got your back.
Some clients require better customer service than others. That’s why many FreshBooks customers give out their cell phone numbers. Of course, in return for always being on call, you should expect to be compensated. In an ideal world, billing your clients when they call should be easy, and now, it is.
Introducing Skydeck
When I heard of Skydeck, a new service that keeps track of your cell phone calls, I knew it was gold. They automatically gather your cell phone records from your cell phone carrier. It didn’t take much to turn that information into money for you.
Look forward to hearing from your clients!
Now, you can quickly and easily convert cell phone calls into time tracking entries in FreshBooks. Our new Skydeck to FreshBooks importer matches up your clients’ phone numbers in FreshBooks to cell phone calls logged in Skydeck. It’s only a couple clicks to import them into FreshBooks. From there, they are ready to be invoiced to your clients.
Hat tip
Thanks goes out to FreshBooks customers Chris Moyer and Derek Herman who put this app together for us.
Note: Skydeck is only currently available in the United States.
Here at FreshBooks we’re having our annual Halloween costume contest. Ok, this is actually the first year of the contest and hey, we are all pretty psyched about it. We were going to decide the winner by an internal staff vote at first but then we decided to open it up to the public. So in the words of GaNgSta Grace, time to get your vote on by letting us know who has the illest costume in this shizzle. Simply add a comment below. Don’t be shy, every vote counts.
Hey folks. Well, it’s not quite Hallowe’en yet, but here at the FreshBooks World Headquarters, we’re getting a jump on the holiday and we thought you’d get a kick out of this. Taavi and I came in on the weekend with a can of spray paint and a defenseless Bondi iMac and today the FreshBooks office is now properly festive for Hallowe’en with our new iMac-O-Lantern!
Boo!
We got the idea from this awesome Instructables article. Today somebody went and added a FreshBooks leaf to our newest little orange friend, so he’s properly branded.
The face changes every twenty minutes (I made them with OmniGraffle), using the JPEGView application described in the Instructables article. Here are some shots of the process:
Primed and Ready to Go!
Painting the iMac's bottom. He does look pretty helpless, doesn't he? Poor little guy.
Just awaiting the peeling of the tape -- the most exciting part of the whole process!
And there you have it! Unfortunately, the iMac is kind of noisy — it emits a peculiar sort of high-pitched whine — and it’s right beside poor Rich’s head, so either Rich is going to go insane or we’ll have to move it. We still haven’t decided which will be more fun.
How are you dressing up your office for Hallowe’en?
If you are a product company, and you have users, feature requests can become overwhelming. Folks write on our forums all the time, coming up with great suggestions for how to improve FreshBooks. It’s a key part of our business to have this sort of consistent ongoing feedback from our customers.
But as we’ve grown, the pace of incoming requests has far outstripped our ability to execute on them, and so folks are being presented again and again with the standard reply: “We’ll pass that on to our developers.”
I know that sounds like, “Shut up and go away,” but when Grace or Randy or whoever say that to you, they’re actually doing what they say, and I thought you’d appreciate seeing how that works.
We’ve built a custom tool to help us manage feature reqeusts, which is kind of weird since it’s a problem virtually every software company runs into, but nobody has a tool that does just what we wanted done.
What we wanted done was to track incoming requests and be able to accurately assess how many people are asking for them through ALL our communication channels. This is where a lot of “crowd-sourcing” tools fall down — they focus on just one channel. But we wanted to be able to track phone calls, forum posts and emails, as well as our own staff votes for particular items. So now we have such a tool. I’m not always super-imaginative about this sort of stuff and it was my project, so I’ve called it The Big List.
The Big List is just what it sounds like — an enormous list of feature requests, prioritized by two things: how many people ask for them and by how important we think they are. We only implemented the big list a few weeks ago and it’s pretty cool. Here’s a peek at a typical feature: a request to manage partial payments on FreshBooks invoices:
You can see on the right hand side that this entry records nine forum posts about this issue (I know there’s more out there; we haven’t finished entering all the information for this entry yet), no phone calls and thirteen “RT” tickets (yeah, presently we use RT for support issue tracking), and that no staff members have yet voted for it yet. Nine plus none plus thirteen plus none equals twenty-two, which is what the big number twenty-two on the other side of the screen means.
You can also see Myleen added a helpful comment — it tells us that this request is being worked on and that link goes to our work tracking system. (NOTE: we actually rolled this out last week) So if somebody wants to check in with the developer who’s working on this item, they can just follow that link and see the progress. Myleen’s helpful; that’s just one reason we love her so much.
Up in the top right you can see a cheerful button that says “Bump!” — folks can use that to arbitrarily adjust the priority value (currently 22) for the entry. Sometimes we know the priority for a request is high but we don’t have the time to comb through the forums and emails to find references, so this lets us pop something up quickly.
You can see the actual content here is pretty simple; this is a record of stuff folks are asking for, not a complete development spec. If we decide to implement this, there’s a ton of design work we’ll have to do, but we’re not worrying about that now. We don’t need that much detail to know how to prioritize this, and that’s what this stage of the game is all about.
I hope that makes it a little easier to hear “We’ll pass that on to our developers,” and I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse “behind the curtain” to see how we get things done here at FreshBooks.
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.
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