Archive for October 2007

How to Answer Tough Questions

October 31, 2007

Something we noticed when visiting small businesses was that their billing information often lived in multiple places.  Invoices might be word docs saved in a folder on the desktop.  Payments might be tracked in a spreadsheet.  Unpaid invoices might be printed out, and living in a manila folder labeled “Not Paid”.  Lots of good information.  [...]

Getting (a little) Attention

October 22, 2007

These are still the very early days of Billing Manager.  We haven’t been making any noise with press and so on…yet.  We’re laying low, working on the product and engaging with our new customers.  That being said, we do need people to find us.  So, we blogged about ourselves over on Intuit’s innovation blog.  And [...]

Products are laboratories

October 16, 2007

The first release of a product always involved guessing. Not just whether people will like it and use it. But who will use it? And why? And how? We’ve put some experimental features into Billing Manager. How many of our users find them useful? And how will those who do use them? One example of [...]

Squeaky Brakes and Happy Customers

October 10, 2007

The team’s been busy working on new stuff (can’t wait to share!) and thinking about what we want to do next week, next month, next year. Should we fix bugs? Should we improve the stuff we’ve already built?  Should we build new stuff?  These are questions I love because it’s more art than science.  At the end of [...]

4 Ways to Create an Invoice

October 4, 2007

We spend a lot of time visiting small businesses. It helps us understand a lot – we watch what they do, we watch for what makes people cringe, smile and more.  A lot of the decisions we made in building this product were based on these observations.  One thing we noticed was that people start from many different “places” when they [...]