During our RV driving Roadburn adventures, we were able to meet all kinds of interesting people. Below is an interview with Leah Culver, lead developer of Pownce.

Leah’s a developer turned entrepreneur, which adds to the value of the interview. She’s clearly a product first kind of person, and product is what matters in the early days of a startup. The interview starts off with softballs, but stick around if you want to see the passion that fuels web app development:

There is a great thread going in the forum about “if, how and when does FreshBooks replace accounting software?”, and vice versa.

Tinugal asks:

I own a small art gallery and thinking about becoming a customer. I was wondering if I could use Freshbooks for invoicing customers and tracking our business expenses and thereby not have to use [accounting software] at all, or is it not really suited for that purpose?

The answer is “it depends”. The thread that ensues does a good job of describing when it’s time to move to accounting software, and how to operate without it. Thanks to Heather for chiming in with me and adding her expert advice.

If you have spent anytime getting to know us here at FreshBooks you would know that we like to do things a little differently.

Not different just to be different but different because different is interesting (I tried to add one more “different” but couldn’t make it fit…oh I guess I just did).

A great example of this took place last week at the How Design Conference.

You see we decided to exhibit at this conference and after we registered we realized that we didn’t have one of those super slick and fancy Trade Show Booths that make lasting impressions to all that see them.

This was a problem since having a poor Trade Show booth is probably worse then not having one at all.

So putting our “Fresh” glasses on we came up with a cool solution…we basically did the one thing no one expected to see at a design conference!

Instead of having a fancy booth made for us we decided to get two 8 Foot x 8 Foot Canvases. Jazz Martin - an artist who is also a FreshBooks user - took some glue and paint and created a living breathing (always changing) art installation that started at the first moment that the conference began and was worked on until the last moment of the event.

This accomplished a bunch of cool things for us:

• People liked it
• People talked about it
• People kept coming back to see the progress

We were so pleased with how this turned out and proved to ourselves once again that when you replace ordinary and boring with extraordinary, you can never really go wrong!

Some of you may recall TQM (Total Quality Management) from 80’s auto industry management philosophy mania. While TQM was the management buzzword of its age, there was indeed something to it - it articulated an ideal for people within an organization to align themselves around.

In this respect I have a similar acronym here at FreshBooks. It’s “4E” and it stands for “Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday”. Let me break it down for you.

“Execute” underscores the importance of getting things done. FreshBooks is an idea factory. Everyone here is creative and full of ideas about how to continually improve the business (for ourselves, for our customers, and for our partners). Ideas are great, but execution is everything.

“Extraordinary” means exceeding expectations, and this can be more easily achieved than you might think. For example, you don’t “expect” to get a live person on the phone when you call a website - therefore it’s extraordinary. How about getting a call from the CEO of your invoicing service to go out for dinner – were you expecting that? Probably not.

“Experience” delivery is the business we are in at FreshBooks. You thought we were in invoicing? We earn money because we provide extraordinary experiences to the people who use our service. This manifests itself in our application design, and the overall user experience when people interact with FreshBooks (both online and off). It also applies to how we treat people we work with, and the sorts of people we hire. Why? Because if your workday is an extraordinary experience, that will rub off on your work and the customers your serve.

“Everyday” is a cautionary reminder to ensure that every experiences our customers enjoy is extraordinarily executed, and that means doing it everyday. If someone calls us and encounters impatience when they need customer care - that shatters their extraordinary experience. When they encounter a bug in the application, again – experience shattered. Therefore, we strive for unrelenting execution, everyday.

“4E” describes the approach we take to everything here at FB, and I think it’s a great philosophy for any service oriented business. If you ever have an experience with us that does not measure up, please contact me directly at mike@fb.

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!