It is time for another 5 question interview. Today we are speaking with Sunir Shah, Marketing and Development of FreshBooks.
Q1: What would you tell someone that is skeptical of online bookkeeping services? I know you have been business for many years, but there are a lot of business people that are still “old school”. What would you say to them to convince them to use your service?
Well, they’re not “old school”, but in the Internet age they are taking an unnecessary and massive risk. So many of our customers have come to us after their hard drives have crashed and they have lost an entire quarter’s worth of invoices, it kind of hurts to hear that story one more time. When you use FreshBooks, you know that your data is backed up in several locations. More than that, your data is encrypted and protected, and your customers’ credit cards are secure. What kind of exposure do you expose your customers to if your office computer (or laptop) gets stolen? FreshBooks spend all day long, every day ensuring that your data is safe, secure, and reliably there whenever you need it.
However, online invoicing is not just about reducing risk. There is now a “new school” in town, and the bar has been raised on acceptable customer service. Think of when you’re on the customer end, receiving an invoice. When you buy services from other firms, from the phone company to your accountant to your mechanic, how does it impact your life when they have “old school” invoicing?
* Do you get annoyed when invoices come long after the work is done?
* Ever try to dispute an invoice long after everyone has forgotten what has happened?
* Do you sometimes forget to mail a cheque until after the due date and get a penalty?
* Have you ever played the “check is in the mail” game when you haven’t mailed a check?
* Or worse, have you ever lied that you never received in invoice when you have?
* Don’t you wish you had a payment history come tax time?
* And how unimpressed would you be if the hard drive with all their invoices crashed, and they had to come groveling to you to negotiate payment?
When you use FreshBooks, you send invoices as soon as your work is done (by email or ground mail), and you can get paid as soon as your customer reads your email. You can track when the customer reads their email, and they can keep track of their payment history all in one place. All because FreshBooks is online.
How distracting is your billing and collections today? How much happier would you be if you just got paid for doing the work that you love? FreshBooks happy, that’s how much.
Q2: Did your service gain traction quickly or did it build slowly? What were the early days of FreshBooks like?
FreshBooks has gained over 170,000 users since launching – we’ve grown over 4000% in the last 30 months. Any one of our customers can tell you what an incredible achievement that is, as they are small businesses like ourselves. We were very fortunate to have hit upon a good idea at the right time, and we are so blessed to have such fantastic customers that keep referring us over and over again. Our not-so-secret has been same since day one: we serve our customers in a very personable, direct way and then take their feedback to improve our service.
Q3: Are there any new services about to be released soon for the users of your service? Is there something that you can maybe give a hint about or a short overview?
FreshBooks releases a new version every few weeks. In a matter of days, we will be adding estimates to our time tracking and invoicing services. Beyond that we can’t go over our product roadmap, but stay tuned and you will continue to be pleasantly surprised.
Q4: Why did you decide that online bookkeeping was the way to go? Do you still believe in what prompted you to start FreshBooks and is your vision still clearly seen by the company today?
People, especially our customers, run their businesses to do what they love. They just need money to keep doing it, yet bringing that money in is a huge distraction from *doing what you love*. We have this perhaps silly belief that w can do a lot of good just by helping people do what they love and not worry about paying next month’s rent. It’s motivating whenever you hear a customer tell you we freed them up to follow their passion.
We know how it is. FreshBooks was just like our customers when we started out. We built FreshBooks for ourselves. We were tired of using Word for invoicing. Word not only doesn’t do invoicing, using Word for invoicing costs too much time, money (through lost receivables), and positive energy. Jumping all the way up to full blown, heavy weight accounting software like QuickBooks wouldn’t have saved us any of that time, money, and positive energy. We needed something that just got the bills paid on time so we could focus on what we wanted to be doing.
Q5: What is the biggest challenge(s) you face in your day to day operations of FreshBooks? Also, if you have any final thoughts or want to cover something not covered above, please tell the readers now.
As we said, our “noble purpose” was to remove all the road blocks keeping people from starting businesses to do what they love. The world would be a much better place if that were the case.
As part of that, FreshBooks has a core principle of outstanding customer support. We try very hard to reply to emails within 2 business hours. We publish our phone number, big and huge because we want our customers to call us. We ask for feedback at every stage. We work hard to ensure our customers really do have painless billing. However, that isn’t really enough support. We deal mostly with solving problems, but we aren’t doing enough to invest in our customers to help them past the next hurdle after invoicing and time tracking.
The biggest challenge we face is really understanding the day to day lives of our customers from different businesses than the one we started in (web consulting). In fact, my job here is now to build strong relationships with our customers and invest in building resources to help them.
What I need from our customers, existing and potential, are their stories. If you’re a small business, and you’re finding yourself spending too much time doing business instead of doing what you love, please contact me at sunir [at] freshbooks [dot] com. I’m committed to helping you follow your dream, one way or another.
Technically Speaking, I would like to thank my contact Alison McNeill of Future-Works for making this interview with Sunir Shah possible.
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