Do you ever look at something and think “Why do we do it this way?”

Take plastic bags for example. When we go to the supermarket we buy all this stuff and get handed free plastic bags. Raise your hand if you dont already have at least one bag at home that you could have brought with you? Raise your hand if you’ve never seen a plastic blag blowing down the street? The cost to the environment and society are scary.  Why do we continue to use disposable bags? Simple, we haven’t honestly thought about changing our behavior.

In 2002, Ireland introduced a Plastic Bag Tax (PlasTax) equivalant to US$0.20 per bag, with the result that consumption of plastic bags has reduced 90%. Anecdotally, I can tell you the change in behavior was rapid, to the point that it’s almost socially unacceptable to use disposable plastic bags in Ireland.

So, what have plastic bags and paper invoices got in common? They are both in wide spread use, they are both a complete waste of resources and there are ways to replace both of them. What’s needed to reduce the estimated 80 Billion pieces of paper wasted on paper invoices in the US and EU? Two things, the impetus to change business behavior away from paper and substitutes for the paper invoice that are effective. At billFLO we are working on the technical solution, but bigger players than us need to affect the change to behavior. The US has a neutral stance on electronic invoicing (paperless invoicing) from a regulatory perspective. The EU on the other hand has differing regulations across member states. Harmonizing those regulations would be a great step (this is in motion apparantly), but really doesn’t address the behavior change needed. Can you imagine if there was a Paper Invoice Tax? Imagine a 90% reduction in the paper and energy used in creating and transporting paper invoices! The productivity gains and cost reductions of having all our commercial transaction carried out electronically would surely contribute to turning around the recessions and slow-downs many of us are experiencing. It’s a no-brainer to me!

I’m proud that Ireland was the first country in the world to introduce the PlasTax and as an Irish guy, I’ll be very proud if billFLO can contribute to the same type of sea change against paper invoices!

billFLO Ian

Update: This hadn’t occured to me until I just read a post on Techcrunch, but there are parallels between paper invoices and the business cards. Both are a legacy of times and constraints we no longer have. However, moving in any meaningful way to digital business cards will require a really big change in behavior, especially in societies where the business card is part of business culture.

Business services for very-small-businesses is a fast growing industry. I’ve talked about my admiration for FreshBooks before and they really are a poster-child for this burgeoning industry. If my memory serves me correctly, they’ve grown from 0 to 400,000 users in 4 years. Compare that to Microsoft who have been playing in this space since ’94 when they tried to acquire Intuit. I have never been able find any good numbers, but I doubt very much that MS Small Biz Accounting has anything close to 400k users. Freshbooks (and many others like Harvest, Zoho and Xero) are eating Intuit, Sage and Microsoft’s lunch right under their noses! What’s more, as scalable businesses, some of these companies are achieving growth without relying on external investment which means not only are the big companies missing the wave, so are the VCs!

So, you can imagine my excitement when I read on Ben Kepes’ blog, of the upcoming Accounting 2.0 panel he is chairing at Office 2.0 in San Fran. Hopefully he’ll give the Mint.com, Freshbooks, Wesabe and bill.com representatives a good grilling so we can find out what’s the next big wave the big guys are going to let sail by!

I’ll be there!

billFLO Ian

P.S. there’s lots of other cool stuff to check out at Office 2.0 conference: www.O2con.com

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