User experience
Whether you build consumer goods (like iPods, cars, air conditioners) or web apps like FreshBooks, people use your products without you around. When you’re not close by to help them understand a confusing interface, or explain why your keypad’s buttons are too small for their arthritic fingers, they are judging you based on the experience they have using your product. Great design will ensure the people who use your products have a great experience.

Support experience
What happens when things do go wrong? You need to be there for your users. Customer service/support is about extending the user experience beyond physical interaction with your product and being there for your customers when they are at their most vulnerable (and sometimes volatile). If your customers need help, be there. We find at FreshBooks that we get a lot of calls that have nothing to do with our service, but we’re there for our customers nonetheless because they reached out. We consider ourselves lucky that people reach out to us in their time of need and we try to honor their trust and respect by giving it back to them ten fold.

Marketing Experience
They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Marketing experience is all about making first impressions. Have you ever been excited about a product before you held it in your hand? Have you ever heard about a *company* before you knew what they did and got excited about that company? Being extraordinary is a big part of a key ingredient to delivering a great marketing experience.

Catastrophe experience
Given enough time, *everything* fails. The ironic thing is it’s not the fact that you fail that matters - human beings are understanding of failure - it’s how you handle yourself and treat your customers when your fail that matters.

Community experience
If you continue to execute on the other axes of experience, in time a community of people will form around your company and products. These people will be your greatest spokespeople and your nonsalaried sales force. Your community will be responsible for many first impressions, and will also be the medium through which you engage your best customers (evangelists). Spend time in your community and lead by example.

Great experiences are a scarce resource and they will never go out of style. Great businesses are built on these pillars, though the emphasis on the respective pillars shifts from one to the next. Find your mix and invest in the pillars - it’s a surefire way to build a successful business over the long run.

Very Inspiring!

So in honor of President Whitmore and all the presidents before him I would like to present you with a video of social media folks explaining to the US government how and why they should embrace online communications.

Oh and for those scratching their heads about who President Whitmore, he was the President played by Bill Paxton in the movie Independence Day.

To try out the new vCard import tool:

1. Login to your FreshBooks account.
2. Click on your white “Settings” link on the top right corner.
3. Click on your blue “Import/Export” link under “Step 3″.
4. Click on your blue “vCard (e.g. Mac OSX Address Book)” link.
5. Select the vCard and click your Upload button.
6. Review your data and click on your Import button when finished.

A few of us FreshBookers attended Mozilla’s FireFox 3 Launch Party on Tuesday at Toronto’s Mozilla office. It was an honor for us to attend while Mozilla team aimed to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. More than 8 million downloads in 24 hours, a cumulative total of over 12 million and counting to date. In fact it’s gone from 10 to 12 million since I started writing this post earlier today!

Congratulations to Mozilla team on a successful release, it was our pleasure to attend the release party. Without Mosaic, Netscape, FireFox, a lot of us web developers will not be where we are today.

Here’s a photo of Toronto Mozilla office with a live counter of total downloads per minute:

Here you can see Ben, Zoe and I putting on our sad faces and reminding you that hurting the web hurts us:

Jonathan is running one of the world’s most successful private equity firms — #6 on the Fortune private equity power list. Now, I don’t care much for private equity firms, but I’m intrigued by Jonathan and the firm he’s built. Why? He’s done it sleepy Providence Rhode Island instead of on Wall Street. Also, he approaches business knowing that relationships matter, and knowing it’s not just the money that talks. He’s portrayed as low-key, which is uncommon amongst private equity superstars (at least those heralded by the media).

In the Fortune article, Jonathon was being credited with the biggest private equity deal ever — the $51 billion buyout of BCE — Canada’s largest, yet beleaguered telco. While it looks like the BCE deal may not go through after all (the Canadian Supreme court is deciding today), a failed deal won’t take the shine off of Jonathan’s portrayal in my books. Why? He’s still the same man — even if the deal doesn’t go through.

Freshbooks.com can help businesses simplify their bookkeeping. The online program lets you set up clients and create estimates and invoices, while managing and tracking projects and tasks…While not a full accounting program (it isn’t going to file your taxes for you), the system can help keep track of clients, payments, and expenses. It could be a welcome change from the more traditional spreadsheets and word processor templates used by many small businesses.

My thanks to Danny Bradbury who made the interview fun with his knowledge of and passion for web applications.

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 Bezos at Amazon is customer focused; Amazon has great service. Steve Jobs is a design tyrant; Apple products beautiful products. See a trend here?

Iteration is a key to success
Often businesses start with no clear business model, or wind up backing into a business model they never expected. Look at Google. They were into search, and wound up a lead generation machine connecting businesses with the people searching for their wares. But how did they get there? They started out in one direction and they iterated their way into what they do today. The path may not be clear, but entrepreneurs move on and figure things out along the way — much as a sculptor takes a block and chips away at it bit by bit.

Focus is a key to success
How many artists are great in multiple mediums? A musician, an actor and a painter? Yes… there are exceptions to every rule, but mostly artists are only great at one medium. Perhaps the best advice I ever got was, “there’s a four letter word in business… FOCUS.” Entrepreneurs are creative, many have a million ideas a minute and see opportunity everywhere. But without focus and discipline that leads to execution and results, it’s all for naught.

Be true to your vision
Successful artists stay true to their vision. There are lots of people who want to tell you how to do something, but what they know is their way — not your way. Your way matters. Artists learn the principles of great design from those that have come before them — often by imitation — just like entrepreneurs learn business management concepts and financial metrics. At the end of the day, both artists and entrepreneurs must take these best practices — they’re only a tool set — and use them to realize their vision.

There’s no one way to do it
Speaking of vision, your perspective is everything — there is no one way to get where you are heading and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Sure there are doubts, but you must overcome them — like an artist — to succeed.

Starving artists…
Well, you can see where this one is going. Ever heard of an entrepreneur living out of their parent’s basement, putting all their expenses on their credit card? Might have happened once or twice before…

Style of their own
Ever hear a song for the first time and know the artist? Ever see a painting and know the painter? Ever notice a change in the feel of working with a business? Improved service, worsening service? A product that gets better over time, perhaps worse? Over time an artist develops a style that becomes her own. The same is true of entrepreneurs and whether you know it or not, you can feel the difference.

FreshBooks was recently featured alongside Adobe, Microsoft and resident Toronto design genius Jon Lax in an article about Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Above is a photo of the FB team doing a usability test with local designer and prospective customer Andrés Aquino of The Creation Process.

In unrelated news, note the heavy sweaters in the photo…this was taken in January. It was probably -20 C that day. It’s 30 C in Toronto today and we’re in shorts, which has got me thinking about the impact of heavy clothing on the FreshBooks user experience, but I digress…

My name is Jeffrey Nichols, and I’m an independent SEO/SEM developer based in Atlanta, Georgia.

“FreshBooks is one of the most well programmed, nicest looking web-based applications I’ve ever used.”

I have a client that requires me to bill my hours with specific job codes for each project that I work on. I totally understand this because they must then bill this time back to their clients. It makes sense. But it’s a rather time consuming task. I was trying to keep track of all this using a spreadsheet in Google Docs but it was too overwhelming. So I set out to find something better.

I needed something that was Web-based so I could access it anywhere. I wanted something with a Web 2.0 look and feel, because I’m spoiled and I knew I could find it. I wanted something that would allow me to track the job codes that this client needed me to use. And finally, I needed something that could generate PDF invoices that I could send to the client in order to continue the same procedure we already had in place.

Enter FreshBooks. FreshBooks is one of the most well programmed, nicest looking web-based applications I’ve ever used. It’s super fast, super clean and you can tell that the people who wrote it actually use it. There are things that happen when you’re using it that make you say out loud “that’s what I was getting ready to look for” and FreshBooks has already taken you there.

If you bill your clients by the hour and managing it in a spreadsheet has gotten out of control, give this a try. You’ll love it, I promise.

I ask each person to describe the single most important responsibility of any manager. The incredibly diverse responses always have one thing in common. All are downward looking. Management inevitably has to do with exercise of authority — with selecting employees, motivating them, training them, appraising them, organizing them, directing them, controlling them. That perception is mistaken.

The first and paramount responsibility of anyone who purports to manage is to manage self, one’s own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts. It is a complex, never-ending, incredibly difficult, oft-shunned task. Management of self is something at which we spend little time and rarely excel precisely because it is so much more difficult than prescribing and controlling the behavior of others. Without management of self, no one is fit for authority, no matter how much they acquire. The more authority they acquire the more dangerous they become. It is the management of self that should have half of our time and the best of our ability. And when we do, the ethical, moral, and spiritual elements of managing self are inescapable.

Asked to identify the second responsibility of any manager, again people produce a bewildering variety of opinions, again downward-looking. Another mistake. The second responsibility is to manage those who have authority over us: bosses, supervisors, directors, regulators, ad infinitum. In an organized world, there are always people with authority over us. Without their consent and support, how can we follow conviction, exercise judgment, use creative ability, achieve constructive results, or create conditions by which others can do the same? Managing superiors is essential. Devoting a quarter of our time and ability to that effort is not too much.

Asked for the third responsibility, people become a bit uneasy and uncertain. Yet, their thoughts remain on subordinates. Mistaken again. The third responsibility is to manage one’s peers — those over whom we have no authority and who have no authority over us — associates, competitors, suppliers, customers — the entire environment, if you will. Without their support, respect, and confidence, little or nothing can be accomplished. Peers can make a small heaven or hell of our life. Is it not wise to devote at least a fifth of our time, energy, and ingenuity to managing peers?

Asked for the fourth responsibility, people have difficulty coming up with an answer, for they are now troubled by thinking downward. However, if one has attended to self, superiors, and peers, there is little else left. The fourth responsibility is to manage those over whom we have authority.

The common response is that all one’s time will be consumed managing self, superiors, and peers. There will be no time to manage subordinates. Exactly! One need only select decent people, introduce them to the concept, induce them to practice it, and enjoy the process. If those over whom we have authority properly manage themselves, manage us, manage their peers, and replicate the process with those they employ, what is there to do but see they are properly recognized, rewarded, and stay out of their way? It is not making better people of others that management is about. It’s about making a better person of self. Income, power, and titles have nothing to do with that.

I not could agree more. Focus and priority are paramount for everyone in an organization; Dee’s insights are a great guide should you ever lose your way.

Hat tip to Corey.