It’s no secret that CurdBee’s business model is freemium. Allowing unlimited invoices and clients, our free version lets your business grow as fast as you want it to. Then, when you’re ready to add more advanced features like PDF invoices, Estimates and Recurring Profiles, you can upgrade to CurdBee PRO. Last year, we gave a few lucky people the chance to get CurdBee BIG, our all inclusive offering.

Starting soon, you can Go BIG as well and get Invoicing, Estimates, Recurring Profiles, Time Tracking and Expenses for just $149/year. That comes to just $12.50/month. How about that? A complete invoicing and time/expense tracking solution for the price of a large pizza!

CurdBee BIG debuts today!

BIG is self explanatory. For $149/year you get anything and everything CurdBee. CurdBee PRO is our pay as you go solution, allowing you to pick and choose from a selection of modules that offer different functionalities. CurdBee FREE, as always, will give you free unlimited invoices and clients, forever.

This new pricing structure will launch with Time and Expense Tracking later this week, so mark your calendars and get ready to make some serious savings.

These changes also mean that CurdBee paid modules are now available to users who do not have CurdBee PRO Plus module (more on that later). Thus, if you want to only add Time Tracking, you can do so for just $5/month. If you want Expenses, that’s just $5/month again. To top it all, we’re also offering the Authorize.net and 2Checkout modules for just $2/month now.

As you can see, CurdBee is now more modular, and that benefits FREE users as well. While you previously needed to upgrade to CurdBee Plus to take advantage of our modules, even CurdBee FREE users can now add free modules like the CurdBee Push Notifications module.

Have questions? We’re sure you do. Here are some FAQs for you to look through.

I use CurdBee PRO now. What will happen to me?
You’ll keep enjoying the same great billing service you always have! These pricing changes are purely optional. The only difference is that CurdBee PRO now refers to all CurdBee premium features. CurdBee’s advanced invoicing features such as PDF export and custom invoice notifications now come under a module known as CurdBee Plus. All former CurdBee PRO users will have this enabled by default.

So, if I want use a custom domain, do I need to upgrade to CurdBee Plus?
Yes. All the features that were formerly branded as CurdBee PRO now fall under the CurdBee Plus upgrade.

And if I have a CurdBee Plus or any other module, I’m a CurdBee PRO user?
That’s correct. Any user who uses a paid CurdBee module is a PRO user.

I only want time tracking. How much will it cost me?
Just $5/month! Thanks to this new module and pricing structure, you no longer need to enable CurdBee Plus to add other modules.

I use CurdBee Standard Edition. What happens to me?
You’re now a CurdBee FREE user, and you have access to free CurdBee modules such as our Push Notifications module. We felt that FREE better described what this tier of service was.

I spend $15 a month on CurdBee Plus and two modules. Is it cheaper to go BIG?
Yes, it is. If you upgrade to BIG right now, you get CurdBee Plus and all other CurdBee modules (6 premium + 4 free, as of now) for just $149/year. That’s less than $12.50 a month!

Are all CurdBee modules and extensions $5 each?
No. Some modules, such as the Authorize.net and 2Checkout gateway modules are $2 each. Others, like the CurdBee Snail Mail module and the CurdBee Push Notifications module are totally free. Visit your account’s Upgrade & Extend page to find out more.

Sweetness! How can I get CurdBee BIG?
This new pricing plan will go live along with the release of Time and Expense Tracking later this week. As soon as that happens, you can upgrade to BIG from your account’s Upgrade & Extend page.

Still have something you’d like clarified? Sure! Post your question below, contact us on twitter or visit our support section.

After weeks of doing everything from looking for paper and chasing printers to packing bags and shipping containers, we’re finally glad to announce that our LessConf swag is safely at the conference. A conference for web startups, LessConf is a run by the fine folks over at Less Everything, and we were delighted when they contacted us a few months back asking if we’d like to give away some swag to attendees.

Having agreed to ship them something to put in the goodie bags they were giving away for the first 100 hotel room bookings, we set about printing and packaging. We didn’t know the process would take us all over Colombo, we didn’t know it would involve everyone at Vesess and we really, really didn’t know how to make a bag by hand.

Now, we do. Thanks to the impending Sinhala and Tamil New Year, many local organisations were winding down this week and we thus ended up doing many of the little things ourselves. From folding and gluing bags to packing and labeling, the entire team got in on the fun, and leaving our laptops aside we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.

Here are some shots of the process.

Already at the conference? If you were a part of the lucky few to book the first 100 rooms at the Artmore Hotel, you’ll get something fun from CurdBee free of charge.

Happy LessConf!

Social Media Marketing is a recent addition to organizations’ integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. (Wikipedia)

LOL.

Social Media Marketing is the new SEO. Everyone does it, but very few do it right. You see it everywhere, from twitter to the mainstream media, it spawns thousands of experts every day and we now get spam that promises to teach us how to help us leverage Social Media to expand our product’s reach.

Hahaha! Leverage.

Social Media Marketing is a misnomer. If, as a small business, you approach Twitter as a marketing tool, you have failed already. If you refer to your customers as a market, the battle is already lost. They’re people. If you’re approaching social media as an integrated marketing environment, your semantics have already cost you.

People don’t like marketing, especially in a medium that is supposed to be about conversation People hate the dickbar because it disrupts the flow of tweets with marketing. It’s like a door-to-door salesman turning up at your party and asking if you’d like to try out new cleaning gloves.

We’re a small business. We don’t build loyalty and increased engagement through ongoing conversation and brand experience. We don’t synergise. We don’t leverage. We don’t drive advocacy.

We talk to our users.

We don’t have a social media expert here at Vesess. We have a product, we have users and we like to be the in-between. We all watch our Twitter stream. Everyone gets support emails. We reply every request, talk to every user like they are a person, and if some idiot with Social Media in his Twitter profile wants to call that engaging in conversations, then so be it. We don’t however, call it marketing.

It’s support, a company looking out for its customers, accepting their criticism and responding to it in an open, public environment. We want to be accountable to our users. We want to treat them like people. This has always be a top priority for us, and we’re not about to call them influencers.

So, what’s our Social Media Marketing Strategy? We don’t really have one.

If you’re a small business or freelancer, we’d love to know – what’s yours?

There’s a pharmacy I go to at the bottom of my road. I buy everything from aspirin to biscuits there. When I go in, the owner usually asks me how I am and we talk about the weather, the neighbourhood, you know, the usual. The thing is, the guy had business acumen. In difficult times, he kept that place going. Other shops around him closed down. He didn’t. He has more customers now and often we don’t get to talk. When I’m the only customer on a Saturday afternoon though, what does he do? He asks me how I am. We talk. That right there, is good business. It’s good small business.

Now, try calling a large company. You get customer support. If you are lucky, after a few minutes, you get to talk to a real person. If you are really, really lucky, he or she talks to you with minimal canned phrases. If you are really, really, really, lucky, you walk away from the conversation feeling like a human being. But most often, you don’t.

A small business treats its customers like people. That’s what keeps a business small. It’s not the size of an office or the number of employees that tells you if a business is small. Small is an attitude, an outlook, a worldview.

Small is small.

Our friends at 37 signals recently got some flack for revealing a new design for a race car sponsored by them. One allegation made in the thread was that they had left their SME audience behind by diving into the high profile world of motor racing.

Thread participants mistook Jamie for Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).

Now, it’s no secret that we’re massive 37 Signals fans. We’ve never tried to hide it – as a startup, we learnt a lot from them, and we develop with Rails because of them. We think they are a great company. This, however, is not just blind fanboyism. As a small business ourselves, we’re going to show everyone in that thread why Staying Small is a mindset and why 37 Signals is still right on the money.

Also, we are a small independent business. We are headquartered in Chicago. We employ 26 people. We are profitable. It isn’t like we have 400+ employees and we’re still trying to figure out how to make a profit. We have 26 people. I consider that to be a small business.

We haven’t taken loads of VC cash. We’re not looking for an exit to sell to Yahoo or Google so they can screw Basecamp up with whatever genius management those companies employ. We’re a small independent business that’s in it for the long haul.

We try to be successful so that our customers can be successful. I hope that gives you some confidence that our business isn’t about to fail or go kaput.

This is solely my perspective. I don’t mean to speak for Jason David, or the rest of the team at 37signals. However, I’m sure they would agree with my points here.

Jamie makes a good, logical argument here, but I don’t think any of these facts really matter. The proof is in the pudding – a guy who just designed a bloody racecar is taking the time to talk to a client who said he’s moving away.

One client. One person on the Internets who is mad.

He doesn’t have to justify a business decision to one customer. In fact, he probably doesn’t have the time for it, but he does anyway, and he follows up, even accepting the client’s decision and inviting him over for coffee if he is in Chicago.

We’re a small business with an online invoicing app. We don’t sponsor a race car, but we’re doing OK. We treat every customer like a person, and for as long as 37 Signals does the same, we’ll respect them like we always have. Saying they are no longer a small business because they are successful enough to invest outside their core business area is ridiculous. Don’t prosperity tax them, because they don’t prosperity tax you.

Kudos on the race car, guys.

When we get big enough we’re buying a boat. And we’re going to sing.

Rock on. Stay small.

One of the most common pitfalls for startups is to focus solely on technical superiority of their solution forgetting the requirements and changing nature of the customer. The following case study of Iridium confirms exactly this point with a mammoth price tag to the lose.

At $5.2-billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. Conceived in 1987 by Motorola and spun out in 1990 as a separate company, Iridium planned to build a mobile telephone system that would work anywhere on earth.

But nine months after the first call was made in 1998, Iridium was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It crashed back down to earth as one of the largest startup failures on record. What went wrong?

No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer – The 5.2 billion dollar mistake.

Three seemingly simple but important advices for Startups.

Ask yourself: if you started over today, would you build the same product? If not, consider significant changes to what you are building. The popular word for this today is “pivoting” and I think it is apropos. You aren’t throwing away what you’ve learned or the good things you’ve built. You are keeping your strong leg grounded and adjusting your weak leg to move in a new direction.

Why Joost Failed, How Foursquare Surpassed the Competition, and Other Lessons for Startups

The CurdBee Partner Program is out, and that means that now, apart from managing all your all invoice matters with CurdBee, you can also use it to pad your wallet. How?

Currently in private beta, the CBPP is CurdBee’s affiliate programmes with a difference. Unlike other partnership schemes, the revenue you can earn from our new venture is not limited to a one time referral fee. Instead, we pay you as long as we earn from your referrals.

Link, Refer and Earn Forever
It’s that simple! After creating a CurdBee affiliate account, visit our Materials section, copy one of the HTML excerpts given with a banner, and paste it into your blog or community page. Now, any CurdBee user registering through your banner link will be registered as a referral from you and you will earn from him as long as he or she remains with us. For example, if the user subscribes to the CurdBee Pro monthly upgrade, you will earn 20% of what we make from that subscriber every month!

CurdBee Partner Banners

Don’t have a blog? Not a problem. You can still be a CurdBee affiliate! If you use Twitter, the Retweet link at the top of Materials section is for you. Clicking on the Retweet button will prompt you to enter your twitter logins and the CurdBee affiliate link will be copied to your Twitter account. Of course, this affiliate link can also be used anywhere from email and forum signatures to chat status messages.

CurdBee Partner Retweet

Add Your Own touch
One of CBPP’s newest features is the Custom Banner section which you can find under the Materials page. Here, we provide editable PNGs of CurdBee materials which you can use to create your own banners and start your own CurdBee referral campaign.

Customisable Banners

After designing your own banner, follow these steps to get it setup with CBPP.

1. Upload the banner you created to some online storage space (Flickr, Imageshack, personal webspace).
2. Copy one of the default CurdBee excerpts from the Materials section.
3. Replace the src field of the IMG tag of the default banner with the link of your new custom banner.

Say It Your Way
Here at Curdbee we all speak a language other than English, and we know many of you would probably like to promote CurdBee in your own language. To get going, all you have to do is to change the ALT tag text in the default banner HTML excerpt. For example, if you want to use Spanish, change the ALT tag to “Me encanta la facturación con CurdBee” from the default which is “I love invoicing with CurdBee”.

Share and Win Curdbee Pro!
Seriously? Yes! All you have to do is to send your custom designed CurdBee banner to partners@curdbee.com. We will select the best CurdBee banner design and will award a one year CurdBee Pro account to the winner. Whose will it be? You decide.

So, you’ve been using CurdBee for some time now, and you’re happy with it. We’re glad! In fact, we’re so glad that we’re going to help you get cool stuff by getting your friends involved as well. With our new Partner Program, you earn when we earn!

So, how does it work?
Basically, you refer a friend to CurdBee. If she or he becomes a CurdBee PRO user, you get 20% of the revenue we earn from that person, forever. Yes, you heard us right. For as long as your friend stays with CurdBee, you’ll get 1/5th of what they pay us.

Are you serious?
Yes, totally, totally serious. We even put together a whole new application for it! In fact, even though it was originally written to scratch an itch, we think we just might release it in the near future. Although we did do some research when we were brainstorming our partner program, many of the existing solutions were limited in terms of functionality and didn’t have some of the specific features we required such as the ability to track referrals for free signups and have their details update automatically when they upgraded to Pro or added modules to their accounts.

In particular, many applications didn’t have the option of tracking and rewarding a referring partner throughout the lifespan of the customers they brought us. This was a deal breaker for us, and we thought it would be best to put together our own software.

Keep track of all your referrals.

And how much you’re making.

So, how would I get people to sign up?
That’s totally up to you. From email to twitter, banner ads to instant messages, you’re free to use any means you like to get people to sign up for CurdBee. In fact, our referral application has promotional tools built right into it.

Choose how you’d like to spread the word.

Wow! When is this going live?
Now! Yeah, from this moment – we’re currently in the process of sending out beta invites, so if you haven’t been checking your inbox, you should definitely start hitting that refresh button. If you missed the CurdBee newsletter and would still like to try this out, you can opt in for the beta anyway. How cool is that?

Developers and those interested in the functionality of our affiliate application itself will also be pleased to note that we hope to eventually make it available as a service to more small teams with similar needs to ours. But, all in good time. For now we’re just focusing on making it work for the Bee.

That about wraps it up for this update. To all our loyal users – thanks! We’re truly grateful for your continued support of CurdBee, and hope that you’ll use the Partner Program to reap some rewards for your advocacy.

Despite the global recession, it seems one economy was doing really well over the last year. But quite interesting fact is, that economy doesn’t come under the radar of Word Bank, IMF or ADB, those who keep their eyes open all the time. Know where it happened? At Second Life.

Believe it or not, the virtual economy of Second Life, a popular online computer game that lets users create a new reality for themselves, doubled in size last year. Users spent more than a billion dollars on virtual goods over the last year, compared to $360 million for the year before. Second Life’s economy is now larger than the economies of nations such as East Timor, Samoa and Dijibouti.

Read the full post here

Google released the Google Checkout store gadget which will be a easy to use add-on to small business owners. It allows you to use Google Checkout and Google Docs to to create your own online store in a matter of minutes.

To install the gadget on your site or blog, Google outlines just three easy steps,

1. Sign up for a Google Checkout seller account.
   Checkout will process your orders and help you attract new leads, convert more sales, and enjoy advanced fraud protection.
2. List the products you want to sell in a Google Docs spreadsheet.
   You’ll just need to create a copy of our template spreadsheet, and then replace the sample inventory with your own.
3. Place the Google Checkout store gadget on your website.
   You can embed your online store anywhere you’d like — on Google Sites, Blogger, or your personal website.

Start selling online with the Google Checkout store gadget