Some great learnings about running a web start up

Mike over at Freshbooks has been humble enough to admit that he’s made mistakes and kind enough to share his learning with the rest of us in his post “7 ways I’ve almost killed Freshbooks”.

All of the points are extremely valid and important but my favourite is:

5. Underestimating word of mouth
This one is sort of tied to number one. It takes *years* to generate word of mouth – it’s a slow build, but slow burning fires burn the hottest. So be patient and do your best to take care of your customers/users even if you can’t find a way to measure the ROI.

The secret to making money online

This is an excellent presentation; David Heinemeier’s talk at start up school 08.

David gives a great presentation about how to keep it real and simple and get a web application out to market with out sinking too much cash in up front to get things going.

Click here to watch David’s presentation

Do you know any good web designers

I’ve spent some time looking for a good web designer that would be good at assisting in the design of web applications. I have worked with a few including family and mates to design agencies such as Canvas and Onque. I can say that they have all done some really good work for us here at kmsystems. For software development shops like us lets face it design is an area that we can do with some help (probably a lot of help), hey you can’t be good at everything right. So I am always interested to find out who others use for their design. Michael from Zendesk told me about these guys Cuban Council and would have to say I love their site and will definitely ask them to do some design work on my next project.

Let me know if you know or have used any web designers that you thought were exceptional.

Nice site design WhoDoes2.0

I really like the masthead graphic on the gotthingsdone site. They have built a pretty nice and clean application called whodoes2.0, which looks very similar to 37 signals basecamp (I currently use it everyday), not a surprise since they have built the application using ruby on rails. They also have a few other apps called whatAli.st and (xy) write it, I like the concept of what a list and think it could be fairly useful as part of a larger data management application.

Simple easy to use accounting software

I’ve been running my own business for 7 years now and for 7 years I’ve hated using MYOB as it is complex and bloated. Unfortunately at the time it was probably the easiest package on the market and so many times I have cursed it declaring to build my own better simple accounting application. I never actually got around to it but as an alternative we pretty much double enter all of our expenses and sales into Excel so I can get a balanced scorecard style overview of the health of my business.

I read that Jakob Nielsen had posted the 10 best-designed application user interfaces. I agree with his rating of Wufoo, their web service is fantastic if you just want to run a basic data capture form on the web. The application really which caught my interest is Xero, an on line SIMPLE accounting application. I checked out the site and the demo and think it is great. The thought of dropping the clunky bloated MYOB for the clean simple Xero interface definitely got me excited. Which is a sad thing given that we are talking about accounting software but this is how desperate I think we have become for a decent application to help small to medium enterprises run their business. Unfortunately Xero is only available to New Zealand and the UK, their site says they are planning to roll out an Aussie version soon. So I will be keeping an eye on them.

The best thing about Xero is that it allows complete collaboration. You can easily give your accountant, payroll manager and even book keeper all access to your file and you can all use them in real time together. For assistance and support this makes a huge difference, no more emailing your company file over to the accountant or book keeper and having to wait for them to send it back before you can continue using the file again.

We are all monkeys

Over the weekend I read Seth Godins book called “The Big Red Fez: How To Make Any Web Site Better”. In his book Seth explains that people who are browsing the web aren’t smart, web savvy, patient with lots of time on their hand people. They wont read all of the content we write and then take time to make the correct decision on what to do next. They are basically monkeys, time poor and just want to get to what they want in the fastest possible way. Which in most cases involves clicking on the first thing that catches their attention within 5 seconds from the time the page was displayed. Just like a monkey if you want it to do something or go somewhere then all you need to do is offer it a banana and off he goes. Seth’s motto is one page one banana.

This got me thinking, its not only people browsing the web that are monkeys its everyone using software whether its an email client, spreadsheet, basecamp whatever all we want to do is get the task done in the quickest possible way. So show me the banana, how do I get from point A to point B get the job done and get out of there. No one really wishes that they could spend more time just navigating around an application trying to figure out what to do next to finish their task.

From now on I’m going to put bananas into the applications I build to help people get the task done. This means where possible simplifying each page/section down to one banana. Let the user do what they need to do and get out of their way.

Let me know what you think?

Excellent site design

Another really nice web 2.0 site design I like is the Zendesk. I actually use zendesk as my companies on line help desk and they are great. Super easy to set up and even easy to use. Once again I really like the horizontal layers of their site. Everything on the one page too easy.

Cool site – GoodBarry

I really like the design of the GoodBarry site, they have really used the web 2.0 horizontal format very well. Everything you need to know is here on one page.

Nice wordpress themes

Found this site called “Woothemes” http://www.woothemes.com/ they make some really nice wordpress themes. I really like the vibrantCMS and Livewire. If only wordpress.com would have some nice themes like these or would at least let you buy them and uploaded them.