I' ve often said, were it not for Joe and Levi, I would have run this company into the ground long ago . The fact is, truer words were seldom spoken. Here' s a list of ways that I' ve almost killed FreshBooks over the years: 1. Thinking we had to move faster than we did I remember back in 2005 [...]

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So I' m off to Joel Splosky' s Business Of Software conference in Boston the first week of September, and I' m attending a table session on Should you outsource customer care? What sort of person is going to say Yes, to that question? The very idea that getting other people to look after your customer is so alien to [...]

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One of the things that' s great about being your own boss is that you really have no one to answer to but yourself. I' m an individual who likes to be outdoors; some of my favorite clothes have rips in them. At any given time and for no good reason I might grow [...]

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I woke up this morning and wandered over to 37signals most inspiring blog, Signal vs. Noise, to read Sarah Hatter pointedly asking How can anyone ever ask us why we don’t offer phone support? At FreshBooks, we have a commitment that if you call us any time at 1-866-303-6061 from 9am to 6pm EDT Monday to [...]

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Early this morning we released version 4.6 which includes some new features we hope you will enjoy. What’s new in this release? A Redesigned Generate Invoice Page Your generate invoice page has been redesigned to be even easier to use. In addition, you can now choose which details you wish to display or omit when generating invoices [...]

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FreshBooks is in the experience business. If you are in the experience business (and I' d argue everyone is), you need to design great experiences for each axis of interaction that exists between people and your business. Where to start? Consider strategies for each of the five pillars of experience. User experience Whether you build [...]

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While our dev team is busily working on our next big release, we’ve decided to release some new functionality that you can enjoy in the mean time. This morning we added a new vCard import tool which allows you to import client records from vCards into your FreshBooks account. vCards can be exported from [...]

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Entrepreneurs are artists — their business is the canvas. Here are seven reasons: Entrepreneurs create something out of nothing That' s what entrepreneurs do. Instead of using canvas and paints as resources, entrepreneurs take people and capital and create product and culture. Their is no doubt their fingerprints are all over the output. Jeff [...]

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Ok hockey fans, the story around the Hockey Night in Canada theme song has been all over the headlines this past couple of days, and like me, most of you have been stunned, mad and/or confused over the whole thing. I was a bit upset to find out that CBC will no longer continue to use [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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FreshBooks is all about helping the little guys. Usually that means helping people who are just starting out in business, but in one case we are helping people who are starting over in life. Mistakes are easy 26 years ago, Del Hendrixson made a mistake that cost her a year and changed her life forever. She made [...]

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Back in February, FreshBooks had the honour of speaking at Third Tuesday hosted by Joseph Thornley of Thornley Fallis. Pretty early in the presentation I think Mike and I we could tell that this was going to be a special night because the crowd was incredible, the questions were really thoughtful and there was [...]

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Recently the Silicon Valley Insider reported Blaine Cook, Lead Architect of Twitter has left Twitter. I interviewed Blaine at FOWA 2008 (as well as Leah Culver, Matt Mullenweg and the guys from Wufoo, amongst others) and I was taken aback by what a nice, down-to-earth guy Blaine is. There is a bit of a brushfire [...]

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Alistair Croll just wrote a post over at GigaOM talking about the increasing irrelevance of source code: For a long time, source code was viewed as a software company’s crown jewels, protected by dongles and complex encryption schemes to prevent copying and theft. In the software-as-a-service world, however, source code becomes irrelevant If 37 Signals gave me [...]

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Since the earliest days we' ve reached out by phone to survey FreshBooks customers and understand the benefits our service delivers. One of the first things people told us was FreshBooks has changed my behavior . To this day this comment scares me - bad software changes behavior. Inevitably though, the next thing they' d say [...]

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FreshBooks is in the market for a couple of crack web developers, and if you connect us with a winning candidate, we’ll write you a cheque for a $1000 CDN (we figure it’s better to reach out to you folks than recruiters, and we’re thinking giving you some incentive to BCC your entire address book [...]

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Designing for flow is something we strive for here at FreshBooks, and every time we roll out a release, we get a little closer to achieving our design ideals with respect to designing for flow - it' s a never ending project. In the last release we were able to kill off our “default terms” preference for [...]

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One thing I hear occasionally from our users, especially Web professionals, is that running a bunch of browser-based apps at once can be a particular pain when the browser decides to misbehave. OS X users have our time-tracking widget to take care of one task, but that leaves out some popular operating systems and [...]

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With Macs now controlling 14% of the US market share (up from 9% in 2006), it’s clear that the world is slowly going Mac. This is especially evident here at FreshBooks. When I joined last year, we were a strictly PC/Windows shop. Since then, we’ve added 6 iMacs to the grid — and more are [...]

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