I wrote a guest post about why free plans don’t work for most non-funded startups. This post went live earlier today on SoftwareByRob.com:

http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-work/

It’s based off my personal experience with a free plan, publicly available stats, and a few short interviews I conducted. Check it out and leave a comment. Thanks!

As of today, you won’t have to wonder whether your client has taken a look at your proposal or not. That’s because as soon as your client takes a peek, you’ll get notified via email. Yep, one click is all it takes.

Not just that but you now have the ability to customize the email template for those outgoing proposal emails.

Of course, all of this customizing and configuring means there’s a new Account Settings page:

Here’s what you can do on that page:

• Customize the default email template for clients.
• Set email notifications for when a client views their proposal (first time only).
• Pick your default currency format — this can still be customized on a per-proposal basis.
• You can allow decimals to be shown for proposal fees.

Proposal Fees/Sections Autocomplete

Moving on, there was a minor usability issue with the new autocomplete field on proposal fees/sections that was released a couple of weeks ago. You had to double-click on the input field to get a full list of all your sections or fees. Not very intuitive.

To remedy that, I’ve added something that makes it work more like a dropdown when you want it to:

Custom Design

Another thing that I noticed following the big update a couple of weeks ago was that lots of people were customizing the crap out of the new design. Some people had trouble with the active tab link (in the header) not being visible using certain color schemes, so I’ve opened that up for customization.

Multiple User Support

Having multiple users editing the same proposal can get tricky; that’s why I’ve added extra validation on save that prevents someone from overwriting your changes.

That’s about it for this release. Feel free to vote for your favorite features on the Bidsketch UserVoice forum. Thanks!

I’m extremely excited to announce that the much talked about Bidsketch design is now live!

Here’s a high level look of what’s included:

• A hot new design (yep, it’s spiffy)
• Faster editing of proposals
• Customize the entire look and feel of Bidsketch
• Additional proposal statuses (is that even a word?)
• Flexible naming of proposal sections and fees

So I’ll jump right into it and talk about the features. This way you’ll get to see some screenshots of the new design at the same time.

First up, I mentioned faster editing of proposals as one of the enhancements. I’m specifically talking about the creating and editing of proposal sections. The opening/closing sections page has been completely rewritten to load faster.

Basically, instead of loading a bunch of WYSIWYG editor instances on this page, you’ll get a preview of the content in HTML. If you want to edit, just mouse over the section and click on edit.

Editing a section will show the next feature which now allows you to change the name of a section (or fee) and only affect the specific proposal you’re working on.

Another neat thing that you can do now is that you’ll have the option to replace the Bidsketch logo and completely change the look and feel to work with your brand.

Also, your proposals can now have several states besides active and pending. A client can postpone your proposal, or decline it (let’s hope not!).

Update: Stephanie was nice enough to remind me of another important status only viewable to you (not clients) called viewed. The pending status transparently changes to viewed as soon as your client views it online.

To do this, they’ll have a sweet little slider they can trigger on their newly redesigned landing page.

Last, but definitely not least, I really need to thank Ryan Scherf for helping me work out some of the trickier parts. He’s the reason why the design looks so nice. Thanks Ryan!

There are plenty of other smaller improvements that you’ll come across when using Bidsketch; just log in to your account and check out the update first hand, or peep at the new tour page and sign up if you don’t have an account.

Bidsketch has been live for about 8 months now and I continue to be surprised by how much great insight can be gained by talking to my users.

I’m lucky in that Bidsketch is made for designers. Talking and interacting with designers is just plain fun. Things go a lot smoother when the person on the other end of your conversation can understand the terms you’re using. A major benefit to this is that I’m able to get some great feedback about how to make Bidsketch better.

Still, a few months ago I was struggling with getting feedback from an important subset of users: the ones that cancel.

I don’t know if you ‘ve tried to do it before, but getting feedback from users that cancel isn’t easy. It’s downright impossible sometimes. I know; I tried everything.

Well, I thought I did. It turns out there’s an extremely effective way to get this type of feedback if you just have the guts to ask.

What do I mean by asking? I don’t mean sending surveys after the fact, or even sending personal hand-crafted emails asking for feedback (I tried both). When you do that, you’re only half-asking.

What I’m talking about involves taking a risk that some people might get pissed off. I’m sure there different ways of doing this, but I found a way to increase the percentage of useful feedback from 20% to 80%.

And here it is:

Yep, it’s a mandatory comment field when an account is canceled. Putting that on my cancellation page was hard for me. I want to make it as easy as possible for anyone to stop using Bidsketch if they really want to. On the other hand, I need to know how to get better.

This simple comment box taught me two things:

• People are more than happy to give you useful feedback as long as you’re serious about getting better.
• Assuming you know what your users are going to think without validating it is a big mistake.

Another neat thing that I found was that a surprising amount of users are only temporarily stopping (because of a job change, etc.) and plan on signing back up.

If you offer a service of any kind, think about what you can do to truly ask how you can get better. Trust me, it pays off.

I’m still hard at work finalizing the new Bidsketch design and adding some great new features. In the meantime I’ll be showing a preview of a feature that lets you change the look and feel of Bidsketch to match your brand.

Here’s where the magic happens:

David Bullock  (www.davidbullock.com) would be able to change the design like this:

This one shows an example of something Chris at c3mdigital.com might do:

And Daniel at axialdev.com might go with something like this:

Of course, these are quick examples that I put together myself. I’m sure David, Chris, and Daniel can do much better with this new feature; the point was to give an idea of the level of customization that will be possible. Hopefully, I’ve met my goal.

And now, as I get back to work, I leave you with one final screenshot for something you haven’t seen yet:

Work (lots of it) is taking place to give Bidsketch a brand new look. Not just that, but once the new design is live, you’ll find a couple of pleasant surprises which I’ll talk about in a few days.

The best way to describe it would be to say that it’s a bit of a usability + design enhancement for Bidsketch.

So I just wanted to give a quick preview of what the design is going to look like. Here’s a screenshot of the new “clients” page:

As for the design itself, it’s from the very talented Ryan Scherf who originally designed it to go hand in hand with the sales site. For a look at some impressive design, check out his stuff.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be posting more screenshots as I get closer to unveiling the new design. Stay tuned for more screenshots!

I’ve just released of a couple of very exciting new Bidsketch features this week.

Feature #1: Custom Domains

The first feature lets you use your own custom domain instead of relying on a Bidsketch subdomain.

The real value here (besides it being just plain cool) is your clients will only see the domain you want them to see which keeps them focused on your own brand.

This is a big deal. Please take advantage of it!

Ok, so where do you set this up? Just go into your “Account Settings” tab and you’ll see a new link called “Customize”:

Once there you’ll be taken to a form that’ll ask for your custom domain:

The next step in the process calls for you to set up DNS and then verify that everything has been set up properly and that the changes have taken effect already.

Once you’ve verified you’ll be taken to a screen that confirms what the new custom domain is and allows you to remove it if you ever want to change it.

And you’re done! You and your clients will then be able to access Bidsketch from that URL. Also, the proposal email alerts that your clients get will reflect that new URL like so:

Feature #2: Proposal Copy

As you might have guessed, this feature will let you create a copy of a new proposal. To do this you’ll need to go into the details for the proposal you want to copy:

Clicking on that will give you a nice modal which will prompt you for the name and description of your new proposal.

That’s all there is to it! Pretty easy, huh? Hopefully it’ll help save some time when creating similar proposals.

There’s still plenty of good stuff coming your way soon. Be on the lookout for the next big enhancements coming to you in a few weeks!

Twitter’s usefulness has been argued many times before. I have to admit, I’ve often wondered how useful it truly is considering the amount of time I spend on Twitter.

If you ask someone how Twitter helps their business, chances are you’ll hear some of the following:

• It’s a great way to engage with my users.
• I use it to monitor my company/product mentions to get feedback from users.
• It helps with support since users often mention issues they’re having with a specific company.
• It helps with my brand building effort.
• It’s a qualified list of potential customers/clients.

While some of these may or may not be true, it’s certainly tough to try and measure the impact it truly has in most of these areas.

Hiring Through Twitter

Well, I recently just so happen to stumble into a Twitter use case that was many times
more effective than a paid service that cost me over $300.

A few weeks ago I was in need to hire a ColdFusion developer for a short two month contract. Instead of doing a resume search on Monster I decided to post the contract on the Joel on Software job board. It’s just over $300 (relatively cheap) and offers a money back guarantee if you don’t end up filling the position with someone that responded through the job board. Pretty nice money back guarantee; which is why I decided to try it out.

A couple of weeks into the posting and not a single resume came in. To be fair, I don’t blame the Joel on Software job board for this. My previous posting was for a Java developer and I received several qualified resumes. I think this was tougher because of the short time frame and because ColdFusion isn’t exactly a mainstream language like Java or C#.

Expecting a lack of people on the ColdFusion side of things, I even specified that they could work through the entire contract remotely. No need to ever show up to the office.

Still, nothing.

I was working on a project with a tight deadline so I was starting to get desperate. I was just about to call up a couple of recruiters when I thought to myself “Hell, why don’t I ask on Twitter?” And with that, I posted a quick tweet asking if anyone knew any good ColdFusion developers.

A couple of hours later I log in to check if by some stroke of luck someone had actually replied back. Nope, not one reply, but several!

Wow. I was blown away. But surely, these guys can’t be any good if they’re responding on Twitter. Wrong again; these were some of the most qualified ColdFusion developers I’ve ever interviewed.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Twitter Still Loses (kinda)

In the end, I got a couple of very late responses through the Joel on Software job boards, and ended up hiring one of those guys.

What about the ColdFusion developers I found through Twitter? Well, they were either in too high demand (took other gigs), or the timing wasn’t right.

While it didn’t help me find a developer for the project, it was much more effective at bringing qualified people to my attention. Not just that, but it was ridiculously fast. All in all, I was very impressed with the whole interaction.

Next time you need a designer or developer to help you out on a project, give Twitter a try, you might be pleasantly surprised.

In about two weeks I’ll be heading out to Atlanta to hear some ridiculously great entrepreneurs speak at LessConf.

Some of my very favorite people will be there. These are guys that have heavily influenced how I approach product development and customer service. Guys like Peldi from Balsamiq, and Jason Fried + DHH from 37signals.

If you haven’t gotten your tickets, there’s till time! At $400 it’s a great deal.

And if you’re going to the conference drop me an email, I’d love to meet up: ruben@bidsketch.com

In the next few weeks you’ll start seeing some pretty exciting stuff being released. They’ll be focused on the most requested features, so make sure to visit the Bidsketch feedback forum to vote!

This week I’ve got a completely redesigned content template page which lets you reorder Sections within the template — just drag and drop to set the order.

You’ll also see a couple of new items on the dashboard. There’s an “options” link to the right of Recent Proposals which will let you easily filter your proposal list. And within your list you’ll notice that proposals can now be tagged for easier organization.

Clicking on the “edit tags” link will give you a pretty modal that lets you specify which tags are associated with your proposal by entering a comma separated list of words or phrases.

But wait, there’s more!

Yep,  some other key changes you’ll see with this update:

• Quick navigation within a proposal on the top right hand column called “Jump To” has been added.
• Custom logo recommended size is now displayed next to the upload feature.
• New custom variables for client address info, proposal pricing without recurring fees, and proposal pricing grand total. (Make sure to download the new sample templates for details.)
• Click on any proposal tag to get a list of proposals by tag.
• Tags are are included in the proposal search feature.
• New support button near the top right of the main site navigation for easy submission of support issues.

In the works…

The very next feature update will include: Custom Domains!

Be on the lookout for it in the next few weeks.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank everyone that gave feedback to make these enhancements possible. More good stuff coming soon!