Do you ever get sick of those calls that start “Did you get my invoice?” or perhaps you’ve had to make those calls? Either way, chasing up invoices is painful and takes time out of everyone’s day.  The beauty of using an electronic invoice is that the computer can do that work for you.

Today we’re rolling out Invoice Tracking for the billFLO platform.  Invoice Tracking enables customers to give their suppliers a real-time, summary view of where invoices are in the accounts payable process.  Check out the video below to see how it works and see the other goodies invoice tracking provides. Oh, and we’re rolling this new feature out to desktop and online versions of billFLO as of today!

Well, whadya think? Should you stalk customers?

For many years, Intuit has had a program where they follow users home and watch them use QuickBooks and Quicken in their homes. If that’s not stalking, I dont know what is! (Ok..our lawyer says I have to clarify that Intuit actually pays their customers for their time so it’s all above board!). Our friends at Freshbooks stalk their customers in a different way – they follow them to dinner (Whats that? Oh, right. My legal eagle says I should point out the fine folks at Freshbooks actually buy their customers dinner and drinks too!).  You get the point though, customer stalking is important and worth paying for. About 3 months ago, I was reminded of the value of “customer stalking” when I spent a morning with a customer of ours.

Actually, hold on for a second.  That catholic, Irish guilt is getting to me. I have to come clean (clears throat…) The customer stalking title was just to get you to read my post. There, I said it.  The real point is a little less exciting but way more important if you want to build a succesful product. So lets get to it.

The particular customer I was visiting really feels the pain that billFLO eliminates. So I was looking forward to watching them use billFLO and compliment us on how great it is. I watched as the customer spent a couple of minutes copying 10 or so billFLO invoices to billFLO buyer from their email client. Great, I thought, now we’re ready to start the billFLO show. These folks will be blown away. A couple of questions, followed by a couple of clicks and all the billFLO invoices are imported. That was quick and easy, I’m thinking.

Me: “So, what do you think?”

Cusomer: “I like not having all the paper”

Me: Good, I think. ”Anything else”

Customer: “Well, its not that much quicker than the way I normally do it”

Me: WHOA. Hang-on. What are you talking about you fool? A couple of clicks and you were done. Pause… Mmm, lets stay calm here, and try to work this out. “Tell me some more”

Cusomer: “Well, copying the invoices from my email takes a while”

Me: WHAT? just because you use a crappy email client that doesnt copy multiple files at once, you think billFLO is slow? What are you smoking? “Oh, I see”.

I left soon after and to be honest, I was pissed-off. It wasnt quite the self-congratulary buzz I had hoped for. What I did learn though, is customers define the user-experience, not us. We’ve since launched a new version of billFLO that streamlines this process significantly for the user. 

LESSON? Deliver the best experience as defined by your customer (and stalk them ethically!)

Wouldn’t it be rewarding to be able to make a living helping your local community? There’s a shining example of a business that does just that – your local hardware store. Here’s a place where customers can buy that lamp for the christmas tree lights, get advice on their next DIY project and even get special stuff ordered in for them (try that at Home Depot!).

What’s probably not apparent though, is that in the back office the hardware store owner is struggling under mounds of paper invoices. Every hammer, trash can and piece of timber ordered results in an invoice! In some cases a mom-and-pop store will have a full time bookkeeper just to deal with the invoices.

So, we’re extra happy to announce today that we’ve got something to make hardware store owners life easier. We’re expanding the billFLO invoice network to enable Do it Best store owners receive their invoices electronically with the billFLO buyer service. That’s right, the network of 4,100 independently owned Do it Best stores can now receive all their Do it Best invoices in billFLO format, straight to their PC. Enjoy!

Since our last big launch we’ve been inundated with requests from eager Accounting System Vendors looking to add billFLO functionality to their offerings. So, I’m happy to announce, that today we’re making billFLO machine readable invoices available to every small business with the launch of our billFLO seller API!

Our launch partner for the API, Clarity Accounting, deployed billFLO in just a few hours for their customers. So, start lobbying your accounting system provider to get you billFLO invoices!

Find out more at www.billflo.com/developer.php

billFLO Ian

Today marks exactly one year since we launched the very first version of billFLO.  So, its time to take stock again and see what we’ve learned.

In preparation for this post I looked back at the post I made 42 days after our first launch . Suprisingly, the 4 points I made back then are all still valid, albeit I have a much deeper understanding of each. To the original lessons, here are a couple more things I’ve learned running a startup for a year.

1. Customers don’t tell you what they want

With all the metrics, real time data and customer discussions you would think it would be easy to know what people want. Its not.  It doesnt matter if you’re talking to a supplier, an investor or a customer; people just dont say what they really want. Its mainly because they arent quite sure. I now realise the converstation is the first step in a long process of working out what people want. Step 2 is ruminating, digesting, analyzing the information I’m hearing and Step 3 is deciding what you *think* you’re being told.

I dont think there is any fix for this, other than understanding this is the way it works.

2. Remember your company values

This one really suprised me. At the very start of billFLO we sat down and spent some time discussing how we wanted to run our own business. A lot of it was around culture and treating customers right. I honestly felt it wasn’t worth starting the business if we weren’t going to do our damndest to have happy customers.

However, in the heat of the battle I’ve seen us slip, trip and stumble in this regard. It usually happens late at night around some feature and goes like this “Oh, that’ll be a pain to develop and we dont have time to test it. How many people will have this problem anyway? Lets put it in the next build”. The problem is the discussion is from our perspective rather than our customer’s.

There isn’t a quick fix for this. In the cauldron of rapid innovation some things cant be completed to the exacting standards we want.  But, I’ve resolved to make sure we get better at this.  The fix is probably somewhere inside of process and re-inforcing our customer focused culture. Stay tuned to see how we get better at this!

3. Startups are a f*cking roller coaster

I had definetly been told this and read it many times before. What I didn’t really understand is the extent to which it is an emotional, physical and mental roller-coaster. It’s compounded by the fact that you are so close to the details that its hard to get perspective.

The best way I can describe it is through my love of racing. My dad raced before me and many of my closest friends are car racers, so its something I understand intimately.   Strapped to a hulk of speeding metal and fibreglass, a single lap contains the range of emotions from real fear for your life when something goes wrong, to self-recrimination at not doing a corner well, to anger over another competitors actions, to pure joy at winning. All of this happens in a minute or two and when its over its hard to rationalize it. Startups have that same density of emotions and it’s tough to deal with.

The fix (or at least a salve) for this one is simple - have a group of peers in the same role as you. For me, I have group of CEOs I can call or meet up with at a moments notice when I need support. I think of it as my entrepreneurs anonymous group!

(P.S. for more on this topic, check out this great post by Mark Dowds, CEO of Brainpark)

4. Biases are dangerous

When you’re a small operation, you dont get the luxury of being a specialist. This means there is no chance to indulge a bias towards spreadsheets, copy-writing, usability-testing, customer visits or whatever it is you enjoy most.

The good news is that there is a long list of things to do and your favorite activity is on there. The bad news is you will gravitate to these activities and the scary stuff will get deferred. This becomes really dangerous in the context of strategic activities. As an exagerated example, not many of us like direct sales.  If your bias is to avoid having to do direct sales, you could convince yourself the business can achieve its objectives through online advertising. Its sounds silly I know, but it happens.

I’ve also seen this play out in terms of what people are comfortable with. It can play out as always wanting to do things a certain way or always leaning towards a particular technology or even favoring a particular individual.

The fix: Know your own and your team’s biases. Then watch for them showing up in the decision making process.

(P.S. Ironically I’m reading a book about this very subject right now: The E-Myth by Michael Gerber )

To wrap-up, I hope all the lessons above prove helpful to other entrepreneurs starting out. Please remember though, these are the things *I* think will ultimately drive our success. I could be very wrong.

In the meantime, I invite you to follow along with us and find out!

Your thoughts?

billFLO Ian

Before I tell you about our cool news I wanted to mention Oaklandish which is ”.. a hybrid enterprise offering fresh apparel & custom goods that celebrate ‘local love & original Oakland charm”.  If you have any friends in Oakland (California) ask them about this cool, locally grown brand that seems to have grown out of nothing.  Of course, it hasn’t grown out of nothing. It’s grown out of someone’s hard work. Their logo, on the left, reminds me of that. The tree that we can see is actually supported by a root system as big as the tree itself. No roots – no tree!

And, its the roots of the billFLO tree (the businesses that use billFLO) that deserve the congratulations for some very cool news. We saved our first tree! Thats right, our users have sent as many electronic invoices as there are pieces of paper in a tree (about 9,000). How cool is that! It makes me feel really good that we’ve built a product that is getting businesses paid quicker and is actually helping the environment. So, thanks to all the billFLO seller users who have saved our first tree!

Stretching the tree root analogy just a little bit further, we at billFLO are growing more roots to grow the billFLO tree even bigger. Like I mentioned in our annual report post, we have big plans for 2009 and I’m happy to say that we’re “bang-on-target” to acheive those goals. I can’t wait to tell you more, so please stay tuned!

Oh yeah, we’re finally on twitter and planning to make it a big part of billFLO for 2009! Follow us on @billflo

billFLO Ian

It’s exactly 8 weeks or 42 days since we launched billFLO Beta to the public. What have we learned in that time?

1. Customers are great…but tough

billFLO Beta is a free app so we always thought that customers would cut us a little slack as result…boy, were we wrong! Some of the feedback has been blunt to say the least. One gentleman guy used some pretty graphic language to tell us how we were pencil pushers and needed to get out in the real world to build the product he wanted. After shouting back at the screen with my own vocabularly of foul language it slowly dawned that the guy was making a point and I needed to listen. It was tough to listen, but we did and made a change. Lesson learned: customers arent always going to be nice in their delivery but they are taking the time to give you valuable feedback, so listen

P.S. My gold-standard for how to treat customers is Freshbooks. Even though they are sort of competition for us, I can admit those guys and gals have done a phenomenal job of engaging with their customers. When we have a customer challenge I think to myself, mmm, what would the Freshbooks folks do?

2. We need to sleep!

A long time ago, a friend of mine (a co-founder at Retrevo) told me they try as much as possible to work normal hours. I was skeptical that could be effective in a startup.

Jump forward to Anoowa; Alec and I have been working flat out for a long, long time. More recently Greg has joined us part-time and its been great to have extra help. But, the list of things to do is just endless and we could work 25 hours a day and still not get everything done. This non-stop work takes its toll. In the last couple of weeks, I think we’re learning to listen to our minds and bodies a little better and we’re actually taking breaks. The breaks help reduce the stress and put things in perspective. This perspective helps us makes the right decisions for Anoowa. Lesson learned: Listen to your body and mind and take time off to watch the olympics / play with the kids / have a drink. The business will benefit.

3. Innovation is not everything

Lots of people ask me where did I get the idea for billFLO? I dont really like the question because in my moments of rationale thought I realise that an idea is just an idea.  As a sociey we have great admiration for ideas so, its often easy to think problems can be innovated around. Running a startup with two and half (2 full time,  1 part time) people is a sure way to learn that jumping onto the next idea is not the way to go. As an ideas guy, this has been very hard for me to put into practice. Lesson learned: Innovation isnt everything, there isnt a silver bullet for every problem. 

4. Enjoy the ride

I spent over a year getting myself into the position of being able to leave my full-time job to start Anoowa and launch billFLO. It has been the most exciting phase in my professional career. But, the next couple of months will make or break Anoowa. Statistically, there is a high probability that we’ll go down in flames and I will need to go back to working for someone else.  When I sit down and think about the mortgage, #2 kid on the way and everything else thats going on it can get pretty stressful. But, when I look back at the last 42 days, its all been worthwhile! Lesson learned: Not everyone gets to take this ride, enjoy it .

Thanks to the over 1,000 companies that have downloaded billFLO Beta so far. Please keep the expletive rich feedback coming!

That’s it for me!

billFLO Ian

We estimate 40 billions pieces of paper are wasted in the US every year on invoicing! Can you believe that? Our goal is to reduce that number and save businesses of all sizes money while enabling them to send electronic invoices. That’s why billFLO.

Alec and I are very excited about what billFLO is already doing and where it is going. In two short weeks since the launch we have had hundreds (yes hundreds!) of people download billFLO Beta. Thats very rewarding for us as we’ve spent countless hours working on our baby! More exciting is the thought that our vision is becoming reality and we’re all doing our bit to reduce the ridiculous waste of paper and energy that invoicing causes.

We’re also transitioning from having total control of billFLO to being led and informed by our customers. Suprisingly this isnt even slightly scary for us, we’re really excited and appreciate the wonderful feedback people have been giving us. Already, we’ve fixed quite a few small bugs that were easy for us to fix but a real pain for the user. That’s the type of feedback that is invaluable and we’re so thankful to get.

Lastly, coming very soon is a stand-alone version of billFLO to augment billFLO Beta for QuickBooks. Stay tuned to the forum for the latest news on that front.

That’s it for me – slán (that’s irish for bye!)

billFLO Ian