CurdBee gets Imports and Other Improvements
We are glad to inform you that we’ve made some cool new updates to CurdBee. Out of them, the major feature is no doubt the ability to import clients and items to CurdBee. We know a lot of you have been awaiting for this feature and hope this will also make life easier for many users who wants to switch to CurdBee from their legacy billing systems.
Importing Clients and Items
You can now import clients and items in CSV or XML format. All you need to do is save your existing data in one of these formats and upload to CurdBee. Also, to help you to prepare the data files we have released sample files in both formats.
The XML format will be particularly useful if you are trying to import data from an existing web app such as Basecamp, Freshbooks or Blinksale which allows XML responses via API. If you’d like to learn more, please refer our support articles on how to import clients and items.
Shorter/Prettier URLs for Invoices and Estimates
Some of you felt that the Invoice or Estimate URL generated by CurdBee looked long and messy. We heard you and decided to make the URLs shorter and more consistent. Of course, this doesn’t mean they’re guessable! The same level of security is still involved when generating a unique hash code for the invoice. If you still have old invoices lying around though, don’t worry, because old URLs will continue to work fine as well.
The new URL format is as follows:
http://example.curdbee.com/inv/4Z5IegcG
http://example.curdbee.com/est/QfRlUMHn
Standardised fields for Clients Addresses
This was actually a design mistake we made during the early stages of the application. Now, we’re fixing it for good. Formerly, we provided a single big text field for entering the address, which allowed you to use any format you liked. However, we later felt it would be good practice to standardise these address fields in the event that we ever wanted to do cool stuff like integrate data with external applications. As you can see, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to extensibility. With the address fields now standardised, we can work on giving you the option of doing more great things with your data!
Well, that’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy using these new features. As always, our support section is open 24/7, and we’d love to hear from you if you have comments, complaints or suggestions. Thank you once again for using CurdBee, and see you soon with more good news!
Localize CurdBee Invoices for your audience
Are you a CurdBee user with Non-English speaking customers? Does it prevent you from using CurdBee to invoice your clients? With our new localization option, we now let you to translate the key words of your invoices and estimates into your own language, so your clients will be more comfortable reading them. See here for details.
Use your own domains with CurdBee!
Since our launch, one of the most frequent feature requests we received was on using your own domain name for outgoing invoices and estimates. After spending a bit of time to figure out the best way to offer this feature, with the latest release we have finally rolled out the facility of using custom domain names to all CurdBee PRO users.
This means that you can now send invoices to your clients from your own URL, like billing.mycompany.com. This would no doubt make your invoices look even more professional. Of course, if you are happy using the default subdomain with curdbee.com for your invoices, you can continue to use it as you have been doing so far.
Getting Started
The process of configuring your own domain (or subdomain) with CurdBee is simple. First, you will need to create a new CNAME record entry for your domain, which should be a subdomain like section.example.com .
To add a new CNAME Record for your domain, use the DNS panel of your domain registrar. There, enter the subdomain you wish to use as the Name. For example, if you want to use www.example.com then enter ‘www’ as the name. Then enter your current CurdBee subdomain (i.e. example.curdbee.com) as the corresponding value to your CNAME (some DNS interfaces may label it as Host Name or Data).
Next, you will need to update your CurdBee settings. Login to your CurdBee account, and go to Settings > Company Profile. There, scroll down to the section called Custom Domain and specify the full domain name you want to assign to your CurdBee account (for example section.example.com). Click Save Changes and you’re ready to go!
You can now create and send a test invoice to verify whether the URL change has been successfully applied.
Please Note
It may take up to 48 hours for your DNS changes to propagate throughout the Internet. During this period your custom URL may not be accessible from all geographical regions. Please verify that your new URL is reachable before sending out invoices.
Also please note that custom domains will be used only on your external invoices and estimates (which are sent to the clients). To access the CurdBee app, you will still need to use your CurdBee subdomain.
If you run into any issues when configuring this feature, feel free to contact us.
Inbound Marketing
Firstly, Happy New Year from everyone here at Vesess! 2009 was a tough one for small businesses, but we got through it with your help, and are raring to go in 2010. To start the year off with a bang we’ve got an interview with someone who really knows his SMEs.
John Joyce is the one man band that runs The Small BizNest, an outfit that specialises in developing marketing plans for small businesses. When John came to us to have his company’s web presence developed, we had no idea what kind of experience we were in for.
As we put together the The Small BizNest site, we slowly realised that we were working with one of the best marketers in the field. Today, we hope to share that experience with you via an interview we recently conducted with him.
On your website, you say that The Small BizNest develops ‘online marketing eco-systems’. That’s an interesting concept – could you tell us what it means?
The days of outbound marketing are over and, for any business to attract new customers, they must embrace the concept of inbound marketing. Many people mistakenly believe that simply building a website will instantly attract new customers or that just signing up for a Twitter account will generate new business. The truth of the matter is that you have to establish your messaging and then build an entire ecosystem (website, blogging, SEO/SEM, social media, networking, list building, etc.) that will consistently deliver your message to the largest number of “qualified” prospective customers.
You’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the business. What made you choose SMEs as your field of choice?
After a long career working with large corporations, l decided it was time for a change. I was fortunate enough to join GotVMail (now Grasshopper) when they were a small company (less than ten employees) and that experience sparked my passion for empowering small businesses.
How is marketing for SMEs different from marketing for bigger companies?
In most cases, the SME doesn’t have the financial or human capital to effectively and consistently market their business. SMEs need to be educated on low cost, no cost marketing solutions as well as solutions that are as automated as possible so they can focus on their core business.
What do you like most about the work you do? If there is one thing you could change about how the game is played, what would it be?
The most rewarding aspect of the work I do is being able to quickly see results and share in the success of my clients. The greatest challenge is the speed at which technology like search engine algorithms change. Your goals don’t change but your strategy and tactics are always a moving target.
There are tons of publicity firms out there. Why should SMEs come to you?
Marketing, advertising and publicity are all beginning to merge. They are all components of an online marketing ecosystem. I don’t just offer hype or buzz – I build a strategic vision that encompasses all aspects of attracting new customers and building brand equity.
‘Internet marketing’ is a term that’s bandied about a lot these days. What similarities and differences does it share with traditional marketing, and how does The Small BizNest take these into account when creating strategies?
I equate traditional marketing with outbound marketing and, although there are outbound components of internet marketing such as email, it’s no longer an effective strategy. The days of blasting your message to the disinterested masses are behind us and businesses now need to engage in ‘inbound marketing’. We develop strategies that help clients identify (1) who their target customers are, (2) what their needs are and (3) where they can be engaged. The resulting tactics can be a mixture of inbound/outbound and online/offline components but inbound online efforts currently offer the best ROI.
Which Internet technologies have affected online marketing the most, and why?
Search engines, most importantly Google, have really leveled the playing field. More than 80% of consumers use a search engine to research a product or service they are planning to purchase. SMEs are able to create a comprehensive business profile on all of these search engines for free.
I also think SaaS, cloud computing and open source paved the way for the huge number of powerful yet affordable solutions available to SMEs today.
As someone who has a passion for SMEs, what are your resources of choice for keeping up with the latest developments in the sphere? What should new SME owners be reading these days?
Books:
- The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – Michael E. Gerber
- Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) – Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah
- Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion – Gary Vaynerchuk
- Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust – Chris Brogan, Julien Smith
- Web Analytics: An Hour A Day – Avinash Kaushik
Online Reading:
- Guy Kawasaki
- Chris Brogan
- Smallbiztrends
- Duct Tape Marketing
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- Tim Berry
- Seth Godin
- Bizsugar
- The barriers to entry (for starting an online business) are extremely low so there’s a greater likelihood that there will be a steady stream of new competitors.
- There is an extremely steep learning curve when it comes to online marketing due to the complexity of the solutions and the speed at which they change.
- Although there are many free marketing products/services available to SMEs, many of them require a serious time commitment to make sure there is plenty of care and feeding while you grow your ecosystem.
- Sign up, Upgrade and Extend are not links, yet visitors click them more often. Why? Do they look like links?
- Visitors haven’t paid much attention to the screenshots in the highlights section. Didn’t they realize they are clickable and that they can view the full image?
- The main call to action via the “Sign-up Now” button at the bottom of the features list hasn’t had much clicks on it either. Wasn’t it visible enough, especially since it was placed towards bottom of the page where users would have had to scroll down?
On a related note, what has changed the most about the SME game in this post-Internet era? What are some of the new challenges a new SME
has to face today?
Social media is a relatively new concept, especially to firms outside North America and Europe. What advice do you have on getting the most out of it, especially for firms that are just entering the fray?
At the risk of being self-promoting, the best way to impact your business using social media is to hire someone with social media expertise. Learning the right way to implement and manage these solutions as a part of your overall marketing strategy will save your business a great deal of time and money in the long run.
Big Seasonal Savings with Bundles
It’s been a long, difficult year for everyone, but freelancers and small businesses in particular have borne the brunt of the recession. Economic instability means less work and less work means less pay, and less pay means, well, less money to spend on growth. Yet, as we’ve said before, we firmly believe that if there is a group that can make it out of this downturn and do it in style it’s SMEs freelancers.
As a SME ourselves, we’re well aware that price is a big issue when putting together our workspaces. However, we also strongly believe that for small companies to work well they need to have the best tools for the job. In fact, with that in mind, we’ve been working on something that we’re now finally ready to reveal!
With the year drawing to a close and CurdBee doing great, we’re excited to be able to give our loyal userbase a little something for the holidays. That’s right, after a good run in 2009 thanks to your constant feedback and encouragement, CurdBee is here and handing out the good stuff in the form of Bundles, a unique new promotion from your favourite online invoicing service.
Cool, right? While you’re at it though, be sure to look inside. This isn’t just $25/mo value for $10. This is the chance to get online invoicing forever for just a fraction of what you’d usually pay. While a PRO account usually costs $5/mo, now you get a chance to get everything we have to offer for just double that, a figure that will remain unchanged through future price revisions. As your invoicing needs grow, and we develop more modules, you can of course continue to add to your CurdBee package. The features you purchase with this Bundle however, will always be priced at $10/mo, no matter how long you stay with us.
If you’re think about expansion and growth, and want to be sure that your invoicing package grows with you, now’s the time to plan ahead and get the features you know you will need in the months to come. So think about it, but don’t think too much – there are only 200 hundred of these offers available and if our initial research is anything to go by, they’ll be going like hotcakes.
It’s the end of the year, and as you plan for the next, remember that despite the economy, we’re all going to grow together. So plot, plan, and consider a Bundle. It may be just what your small business needs right now!
UPDATE: This offer is no longer available. If you like to get notified on similar offers in future, please subscribe to CurdBee Newsletter
CurdBee billing system is up again
Finally CurdBee is ready to accept more Pro users and allow existing bee lovers to add more modules. We know you’ve been waiting for this since we launched our new website with several upgrades early this month.
We wrote our billing system from scratch, since we wanted more flexibility with yearly billing option, PayPal payments and especially to allow easy billing capabilities for more great ideas we have in our white boards for CurdBee users in the time to come. However the implementations are never easy as on paper and we had to take little more time to tweak some of the processes and do the account migration from our old system.
So now you can start upgrading your accounts to Pro, add modules and view billing history.
CurdBee Subscription features are temproarily down
Sorry, due to an unprecedented issue occurred during the migration to new server we had to temporarily disable “Upgrade & Extend” & “Payments & Billing” sections in CurdBee. During this period you will not be able to upgrade or downgrade your CurdBee version (Pro & Standard) or enable/disable add-on modules.
We are working hard on restoring these features and will keep you updated on the progress here. Hopefully we should be able to restore these features within next couple of days (2nd week of November 2009).
Good Things Come in Threes
A Brand New Look
It all started a few months back when we conducted our first set of in-depth analyses on the CurdBee website. Since going live last May to mark the launch of CurdBee Pro Edition, we got some excellent feedback from our users and also got featured on a number of prominent design/CSS galleries.
A few weeks passed, and as we tracked our visitors we noticed that the site’s bounce rates were pretty high (averaging 41%) and that our primary goal conversion (new visitor to free account sign up) was averaging at 4.2%. Our single page website (V1) was doing much better than this in terms of conversions and the bounce rate there was significantly lower as well.
With a revamp, sometimes it takes a couple of weeks for things to settle down and show some regular patterns. Yet, this was not the case with CurdBee V2, and we thus went back to the drawing board to think of possible solutions.
Conducting a few tests and interviewing some users during the next few weeks, where we were able to capture some interesting thoughts,
“I don’t know whether it’s only me, but I like your previous site. It was simple and clean. ”
“The site looks nice, but the header and footer are bit too dark, more white could have been nicer.”
Now that information was really valuable to us. We needed a little more proof before deciding what we would do though, and for hard data we turned to Crazy Egg, for some heatmap analysis.
After running these tests for a while in two separate instances, we were able to spot some of the main issues affecting the numbers.
The problems were clear enough and we started looking for solutions. The result? CurdBee V3!
Is that all? Nope. We have more upgrades and updates, many of which have been requested again and again by our users.
Pay CurdBee with Amex and PayPal
To date we were only able to accept payments with Master and Visa credit cards, and we’ve been getting a lot of requests asking the same questions over and over again – Do you accept PayPal?, Can I pay with Amex?.
So, we thought hey, why not make life easier for CurdBee users? As of today, both these options are now available. As far as I know, CurdBee is one of the few online billing apps to accept PayPal and we are hopeful to see a 14% increase in sales – at least, that’s what PayPal advertises on their website. 
New Billing System with Yearly Payments
Yes, you heard it right. We have enabled a Yearly Subscription option for those who would like to pay upfront and enjoy a year’s worth of billing without needing to think about monthly payments. Also, with the yearly subscription, you will be only paying for 10 months (saving 17%), whether you go for the Pro Edition or for module upgrades. Check our pricing page for more details on this.
Processing payments on a daily basis and then seeing which ones go through, which cards fail, and then notifying users – that’s quite a lot of work and we need at least couple of hours to monitor all that on a daily basis.
“What if we make our billing date to 01st of every month?” I asked Laskshan. We were analysing all the pros and cons and noticed that making CurdBee bill on a single day could be more beneficial in the long run, and that’s what we’ll be doing from now on.
Improved Support Section
At Vesess, we’ve always been passionate about providing our users with good support. With the launch of this new CurdBee site however, we’re taking our help desk experience to a whole new level. The main changes that our users will notice to the support section of CurdBee are the inclusion of a discussion forum and the introduction of a searchable knowledgebase.
The Discussions portion of the Support Section will allow users to create and reply to conversation threads. From problems to bugs and feature requests, this is where you want to end up if you want to connect with the CurdBee team as well as fellow users. We hope that the discussions space will grow quickly to become a place where CurdBee users can come to find quick, reliable help, and we’ll be doing everything in our power to make sure that this space remains productive for all involved.
Next, our new Articles section will function as an archive of tips, tricks and guides related to CurdBee. As a somewhat extensive Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, this part of the Support Section will be particularly useful for new users, since we plan on documenting all of CurdBee’s basic functions here using an easy to navigate format.
New Demo Feature – Touch and feel the difference
Finally, and this is one of the updates we’re most excited about, you can now try CurdBee PRO for free, with all features enabled. While we hope this will encourage more of you to upgrade to PRO, you can try the full version and then go back to using the Standard Edition if you feel it’s sufficient for you.
So, why did we decide to add this feature? Going through our access logs in the run up to releasing this version of the site, we saw that a lot of users tended to make two accounts with us. First, they would create a test account to try it out and then create a legitimate one to use on a daily basis. We thought that allowing them to try PRO would limit the need for this, and that’s exactly what we implemented.
While screenshots and videos are nice, we want you to really experience the power of CurdBee PRO before you decide for or against it. We’re confident that in most cases, our full version will benefit you in more than one way and that you will definitely decide to keep using it. Don’t take our word for it though, go ahead and see for yourself.
These updates have taken a while, but we’re pretty happy with the end result. We hope you enjoy them too, and that you’ll continue to use CurdBee and introduce/recommend CurdBee to your colleagues, customers and friends who are looking for a simple and efficient online invoicing solution. While you check out these updates though, we’re off to the drawing board again to begin planning the Bee’s next iteration. As always, if you’ve got questions, comments and criticism, we’d love to hear from you, so do drop us a line. Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to deliver the best billing experience in the months and years to come!
PS. If you’d like to see CurdBee previous home pages, here they are.
CurdBee PDF invoices just got a whole lot better!
CurdBee PRO users have had the option of exporting invoices as PDF files for some time now. However, the initial implementation of this feature was pretty barebone and had several formatting issues. So last week, we took the time to do a revamp of our PDF machinery. The result? Kinda awesome, even if we do say so ourselves.
Our new PDF generation process is powered by WKHTMLTOPDF, which is a shell utility tool based on the webkit rendering engine and qt. It can seamlessly convert any HTML page to PDF while preserving all CSS styling and formatting, and well, that’s exactly what we wanted. The integration of this tool in to our Rails app was a cinch thanks to this plugin called WickedPDF.
We also redesigned the app’s Printer-friendly view to align with the new PDF view, and as some of you requested, now both the PDF and Printer-friendly versions of each invoice will show your custom logo.
Here is a sample PDF generated through CurdBee. If you’d also like to send easy and awesome PDF invoices like this, consider upgrading to CurdBee PRO today!
Evolution of Rails
Here are the slides of the talk I gave at the Sri Lankan Ruby user group’s meetup.
(It was picked by Slideshare editorial team as a featured presentation on 1st October 2009)
