Last year was a good year. A lot happened, we had a baby, we grew in revenue by 133%, we launched another startup, but also had a lot of projects fail. Here's what I learnt in 2012...

I enjoyed 2012. It was a very good year with many blessings. Firstly and most importantly we had a baby girl, Imogen, who is an utter delight. She sets the path for a lot of what I do now in my work and affects a lot of decisions. That's why she deserves a mention here.

So here are a few key things that happened last year, and what I learnt.

Project Bubble Revenue Grew by 133%

We started out with a decent revenue last year which was enough to pay for hardware, cloud services (e.g. Recurly), and our salaries. I wanted to get to the place where I could work full time for Project Bubble by the end 2011 and we achieved it in November, which was a major milestone. So when 2012 began I had the luxury of being able to work full time, which was fun.

My main goal as the year began was to work in marketing, so we could grow the revenue even more. I wanted to hire a support manager, get better hardware, plus have someone helping out with the development by the end of the year. So we needed to grow our revenue significantly.

It was a hard task, but by May I had learnt a lot about increasing conversion rates and managed to do this successfully over the summer. I'd also learnt a lot about content marketing and offering amazing support. All of these factors helped grow our customer base, reduced churn and increased the amount of free trial users to paid subscribers.

By the end of the year our revenue had increased by 133% and enabled us to pay for much better hardware, a customer service manager, a content marketer, another developer, marketing and a small increase to our salaries. Awesomeness.

By the end of 2013, I want to grow the team even more and have at least two full time developers working for Project Bubble. So the revenue needs to grow even more. That means a lot more hard work is in store.

Customer Service is King

I used to manage all of the customer support tickets, which was not great for our customers. They would sometimes get short, sharp replies (mostly because I didn't have much time to handle their queries) and this was costing the business. Customers weren't really being treated in the best way, and they weren't getting their questions answered.

Not only does this affect your brand and what people think of your service, but it affects business too because people will not pay to use your service if they have too many questions, or feel that you don't care. I had to do something about this.

In the summer I hired a virtual assistant who saved me from a support nightmare. She is fantastic for various reasons. Mostly because she does a great job of taking care of customer's support queries, but also because she takes initiative and goes beyond what I ask her to do. For example, recently she's been proactively emailing customers who's trials have expired and asking if they want to renew. She also only charges me for the hours she works, so I don't have to pay out a full time wage, just yet.

This has meant better customer service, and happier customers, which is what you want. It has also freed up my time so that I can spend it doing 'CEO things' and development.

I've learnt to never take the service out of customer service and treat your customers as royalty. They are after all, the life-line of your business.

SEO is Very Important

Over the summer we had a dip in business, which was horrible. The growth went down to about 10%, so our revenue flat-lined. I wrote a post about how this got me working harder than ever because I thought a lot of it was to do with a general 'summer slowdown' which most businesses experience. However, my friends at Wistia told me this wasn't the case, for them anyway.

I soon realised that the reason our business was slowing down was to do with the recent Google updates which had bumped our position for certain keywords down by a page. This was hitting us really hard and meant we were getting less customers.

My response was to hire a better SEO company, and to focus more on content marketing (which I'll do a separate blog post about some time). We built up a resource on our blog which included many useful articles relating to project management and productivity, we redesigned the website and spent time focusing on the content of each page, plus we tried PPC (pay per click advertising) and Re-targeting.

PPC and Re-targeting did not work out well for us. The amount we were spending on advertising through these channels was not bringing in a return on the investment. This was due to the fact that the project management market is saturated with other apps and is basically very expensive to advertise in. We were offering a fairly low cost, simple project management solution, not an enterprise solution with yearly contracts. I pulled the plug on these channels after trying them out for a couple of months.

We get very good ROI for the money we spend on SEO, so that's a big focus for 2013. We need to stay on top for our keywords, at least until we build a better brand and people talk about us more. SEO is important for us.

Work Closely With Your Developers

I mentioned earlier that one of my goals for the year was to have another developer helping out. Well financially this was possible by about October, at least for some part time work. So I looked on oDesk for a CodeIgniter developer who was in the US and wasn't too costly. I found one with good reviews and set up a contract to work 15 hours a week, which was enough to help out with a bit of development and general maintenance.

My thinking was that he could work two days a week developing new features off the roadmap, whilst being available for anything else during the week, such as bugs or server maintenance, should I need him. That would take the pressure off of me and allow the service to continue regardless of whether I was available or not. It was a good idea.

The reality unfortunately was not quite what I had hoped for. He was in the US, so was in a different timezone, but added to that was the difficulty that he worked in the evenings. So we basically never spoke, unless it was a pre-arranged Skype call. That meant that he would sometimes drift away from my requirements, or would not fully understand what I wanted him to do. After a few months of trying it out, and spending a lot of money for not a huge amount of development, I ended the contract. It was a lesson learned.

I think that you need to always work closely with developers. In the future I'm only going to hire developers who I can physically walk over to and chat to. I need to be able to see what they are working on and discuss the work with them there and then, throughout the day. Especially if I'm paying $250-$300 per day.

Hardware is Everything

In November, things were going ok. We'd just about sorted the SEO crisis, and business was picking up again. The growth was going back up and we were able to start thinking about what we could spend the extra revenue on (as opposed to the autumn when we were worried we'd have to cut back!), which was nice.

My thoughts were to invest in better hardware for 2013, and in the meantime save the extra cash and put it towards development. So the plan was to do upgrades in the spring of 2013, not before.

Unfortunately our old server started having issues and getting frail. The amount of users using our service for their project management had increased massively since when we first specked out the hardware in 2010, therefore the load on the DB was getting intense. Also our API was getting used more and more by features like the calendar synchronisation. This meant our Pingdom reports were showing outages every morning whenever the backup ran, and was causing the server to sometimes lock up because we didn't have enough RAM.

I tried to put out the fires by totally re-building the codebase, getting rid of inefficient SQL queries which were taking up a lot of resources. This was a good thing to do anyway, because it sped up the load times of some pages by about 7 seconds to 700 milliseconds. It did not solve the outages though.

December then became a very stressful month. We had three major outages. After the first outage I decided that it was time to do the server upgrade, sooner than planned. So we booked that in for the holiday period, as it's the quietest time of the year. There were a lot of late nights (early mornings), both while dealing with the outages and while doing the migration.

Fortunately though, by the end of the year the new server was ready and we were migrated successfully. We are now spending a lot more money on our hardware but it's worth every penny, as the service is now ultra reliable and fast. Hardware is everything.

Sometimes Two is Better Than One

I've always done things better when it's just me involved. It's the whole, 'if you want a job done, do it yourself' ethos, which has always worked for me. I built Project Bubble from scratch by just Googling questions I had about PHP and reading tutorials. I applied this same ethos to Invoice Bubble which I launched in 2010 as a side product to Project Bubble.

However, because I spent so much time on Project Bubble, Invoice Bubble started collecting dust and didn't get the attention it deserved. It was growing at a rapid pace and was getting a lot of interest from blogs and review sites. I didn't really know what to do with it, until I met Hamlesh.

Hamlesh expressed great interest in Invoice Bubble and offered to join forces with me in order to re-brand it, re-launch it, add new features, fix the business model, and market it. So in the late months of 2012, Invoiceable was launched. We're now getting nearly 80 users sign up every day for simple, free and easy online invoicing. It's got a great future.

Sometimes two is better than one. I wouldn't have been able to do this on my own. Hamlesh not only provided some capital to fund the new service, but provided great ideas, motivation, inspiration and also friendship. I'm looking forward to working more with him this year on Invoiceable and perhaps expanding the team even more.

Failure Equals Learning

With the successful startup launches and amazing revenue growth, there has also been the failed projects too unfortunately. They say that 3 out of 4 startups fail. That's probably about right.

At the beginning of the year I had a lot of projects concurrently running, with hopes that they would also be revenue generators. I had a customer support knowledge-base app, a document sharing app, a freelancer job sharing site, a blog about great web apps, a publishing platform, a networking site for entrepreneurs, a portfolio sharing app, an invoicing app, and a project management app. That's a lot of projects.

If you read my blog you'll know about Fowndr, an online networking tool for startup founders. I wanted to build something that would help founders connect, share their stories and answer questions. It was a good idea, and had a lot of press, but unfortunately never gained traction. I launched it privately at first, and that's when I had lots of people signing up with interest, wanting to be a part of this private club. However inside the closed doors, those that were a part of the community weren't engaging. Then there's Quora.

I tried launching Fowndr again towards the end of year, hoping I'd get more press, more buzz and hopefully more traction. This time I would open the gates and allow anyone to sign up and post their questions and answers publicly. It did buzz a little, then it deflated. It never gained traction, unfortunately. By the way, did I tell you about Quora?

I also shut down Kroud, which was a tool for customer support and might pick that up again some time, along with Entri, the document sharing app and Gigshare, the freelancer job sharing site. Those were projects that I didn't have the time to market, so never really gained traction.

I also sold a few other projects that I had under my belt, Great Web Apps (the blog), Favwork (the portfolio sharing app), and Halogy (the publishing platform which I'm the most proud of). Why did I sell these and not just leave them running? Read on.

Focus is a Good Thing

Focus is everything. I wrote a post about this titled, Keep Focused on the One Thing which was when I learnt this valuable lesson. It's important not to split your time too much between various projects, and focus on the one thing that brings you the most results.

Today my focus is on Project Bubble because it brings in 95% of my income, and is showing amazing growth. I also spend a little bit of time on Invoiceable, which I can afford to do because it isn't very demanding at this time. With that level of focus, more gets done, and the quality of what gets done is much better. Before, projects were getting started and not finished. Plus they lacked in quality and direction.

I sold and shut down the projects that I wasn't spending enough time on, and allowed others to take them on and build them in to much better products. For example, my publishing platform Halogy is going to be looked after by someone who has great ideas and vision for it.

I enjoyed building these projects, and I learnt a lot in the process about development, marketing, and customer service, but mostly I learnt to focus on the one thing. It's important.

I'm a Full Time Dad

One final thought about my life right now. I'm a full time dad!

You could say that I'm pretty much in the lifestyle business. I work when I want to work, and spend the rest of my time with my family, which is awesome. I realised recently therefore, that I'm pretty much a full time Dad! We are full time parents!

I work from home, one eye on my baby girl and another eye on lines of code, and I love it. I'm able to watch her grow up, and be there for her in these important early days of her life and I'm also able to help out my wife whenever she needs me. These last 6 months therefore have been amazing, and I've been grateful for having the luxury of a 'lifestyle business' that allows me to be flexible.

I'll never regret the amount of time I was able to spend with my baby, while the business was being managed by virtual assistants, whilst making money through regular recurring revenue. It's a great lifestyle.

However, I'm aware that the growth of the business and its overall success is greatly affected by the amount of time that its founder spends on it. I could let it grow slowly, and put out the odd feature update every now and then, and it will do just fine, and our customers will still get a great service. But overall, it'll never be as good as it could be, and we won't make as much money in the long term.

Therefore in 2013, I'm going to be committing myself more to the business, finding an office to work in (3-4 days a week) and really working hard to grow the revenue of Project Bubble enough to pay for at least one other full time developer. I'll also be working some of that time on my other startup, Invoiceable, with Hamlesh.

I'll still have time in the week to spend with family, and I'll still have the flexibility (which is the best thing about the lifestyle business) to drop everything if I need to and come home. But overall I think family life and business life will be healthier if I maintain a regular 9-5. I'll write another post about this some time.

So it's been a good year. The first half seeing great growth to the business, and the second half seeing great growth to my daughter! Now I've got a great family and a great business behind me, making exciting possibilities and happy times for this new year.

Bring it on!

I'm excited to announce the launch of Invoiceable, formerly Invoice Bubble, a free, easy-to-use invoicing platform for freelancers and small businesses.

We've been covertly running the new service for a few months now, having soft launched it back in September. Today we hard launched it with a new welcome email, making it all official. My business partner Hamlesh said I should do a little write up about it and give you all a bit of a 'behind the scenes' tour of the new service. So here we go.

The Past

I launched Invoice Bubble back in 2010, a stripped down version of Project Bubble that just contained the invoicing aspect, and was targeted at small businesses and freelancers who didn't need all the bells and whistles that other invoicing platforms provide. The idea was to provide a free, simple and easy-to-use tool for just billing your clients, that's it.

The problem with Invoice Bubble was that it had no real direction, and I was too busy thinking about Project Bubble to take it anywhere. Then I met Hamlesh who became very interested in Invoice Bubble and the fact that it was growing by about 50 new users per day! He offered his help and had lots of great ideas about how to take it forward, so we began a new partnership and Invoiceable was born.

We re-branded the service as Invoiceable, gave it all a new look, with a new web design and logo from the amazing Ben Hanbury, and switched the sites over in September.

We also made use of the shiny new .co domains, and they've supported us too with some publicity and general good vibes. I heard someone say recently that the .co is a sexy version of the .com. It's one less character to type anyway.

The main added benefit to our users, apart from some new features, a better design and better infrastructure, was the fact that Invoiceable was totally committed to being free. No catches, no hidden pricing plans, and no small print. All features, unlimited invoices, unlimited clients, all for free. The only thing we did charge for was to have our links removed from the invoice for a single one-off fee, which was optional of course.

The soft-launch went well, and today we sent out our first welcome email to introduce everyone to the new service.

The Present

Now we're pretty pumped. Why? Because we're about to hit 30,000 users with about 60-80 new users signing up every day! That's pretty amazing growth.

One of the reasons why we think Invoiceable is growing so fast (apart from the fact that the service is free, is super simple to use, and is generally awesome), is that Billing Boss, the only other free invoicing service, recently shut down, leaving lots of users left in the lurch and not being able to bill their clients. We filled the gap.

We're excited about the service, in particular the new API which is about to be launched, allowing users to build on top of the platform and integrate with other applications.

Personally I'm really enjoying working with Hamlesh. He has great ideas, is very motivated and has a lot of experience with scaling a service like this. He's also helped with managing the operations and customer service aspect, which as you might know if you've read my other posts can really stress me out.

It's a really fun and exciting project that fortunately doesn't take much of our time, because a lot of it is automated and already built. That way we can focus on our main projects, in my case, Project Bubble. With that said, we still put a fair bit of time in to it and have some big plans for next year.

The Future

We're hoping to grow the userbase massively by the end of next year. I'd like to see 100,000 users, and think that's achievable with the current growth.

We'd like to run a Hack Day or two next year, so that developers can meet up and work on some cool tools for Invoiceable using the brand new API. We'll have an announcement about that shortly, so make sure you're subscribed to our blog if you want to get involved.

We've got some new features planned, but I can't talk about those just yet. The main thing with Invoiceable is to keep the invoicing process super simple and easy-to-use, and not to run away with features. So if we add anything new, it will be keeping in with that philosophy.

So it's all happening, and very exciting.

Say hello to Invoiceable - let us know what you think!

What do you think the number one most important factor in gaining customer loyalty and maintaining customer retention is? What is the key ingredient that will keep your customers using your service for a long time?

I used to think that the one most important thing to customers was features.

My original user base mainly consisted of freelance developers like myself. I would email them asking what features they wanted next and they would tell me. Over time the feature requests would keep coming in and I just assumed that's what all customers wanted.

When my target market moved more in to design agencies, consultants, universities, healthcare groups and small businesses I would continue to ask them what features they wanted and a lot of the time they didn't really know. Their main aim was to just get a workflow in place that was simple so they could save time. They also wanted to be supported along the way and make sure that they were being looked after.

It took me a while to realize this. I was annoyed that they would request features very custom to their needs and not inline with where I was taking the product. But how were they to know where I was taking the product, and why did I presume that they would know anything about how to develop an online project management solution that would solve all their problems. If they did surely they would have just built something themselves?

It was my job to provide a solution that would help them, and their job to be users of my product. My emails to them were more about getting feedback for developing the features in my product, rather than actually solving their problems and helping them grow their business.

There was something else that they needed more than features and product development. I soon learned that this is the key factor in producing retention and the golden word in customer loyalty.

The word?

Relationship

When I look back over the accounts and study the churn rates and retention metrics it's all numbers and can be rather impersonal. Then I go a little deeper and see that one particular customer of ours has been with us for well over a year now, who is that particular customer with a 14 month retention?

The customer was my friend Josh, who has indeed helped me with feedback on certain features, but more importantly has provided testimonials and has chatted with me on numerous occasions about his business. I know what his company provides, I know some of his team members' names, I know his website address and I even know what he looks like. How? Because I took time to get to know him and build a business relationship.

Another user happens to have a 16 month retention, who could that be? It happens to be another friend Laurence who I met in person and discussed playing a round with golf with.

Of course as founders and CEOs we can't all go playing golf with each client every weekend (although that much golf would be fun). The point I'm making is that it doesn't take a great deal of time to build a relationship with a customer or client, who could end up being your most loyal subscriber and recommend to many of their friends too.

One thing that annoys me about LinkedIn is that it's so easy to add people you know to your network. Every day I get new requests to join my network with people who apparently I've done business with. Sure we might have exchanged an email or two, but have I actually picked up the phone and talked to them? Do I really know these people in my network? I shouldn't really add them unless I can actually say I have a business relationship with them, even if it's just talking to them on Skype. Maybe that should be a goal of mine before adding people.

Customers will love you if you love them. It's that simple.

How many of you email your customers every now and then out of the blue just to ask them what they think of the service? (I'm speaking to myself here too!)

One thing we're not very good at in this country is customer service at restaurants (though it is getting better). In the United States you can guarantee that 10 minutes after you've started eating, someone will come over to you and find out how you're doing. It doesn't take much at all, but it makes you feel valued and allows you to express any concerns with the food so the restaurant can get it right. In this country it rarely happens, so you just don't feel as valued.

It's the same with web companies. It doesn't take much to send out an email, or even hire a VA to do it. But doing this will mean your customers will feel valued and be able to provide feedback on your service. If there's something you're not doing right, this gives you a chance to get it right and build relationship with your customer. In turn they'll feel like a million dollars that you've taken the time with them.

Another tip is to offer ultra fast customer service. We had someone on a free trial email us asking if they could get a certain featured added, it was a tiny suggestion. I had a gap in my diary and thought it would be easy to fix, so I did so and emailed him back within the hour. He was so happy he said "Sign me up right away!".

If you offer this level of customer service your customer will feel special, like you've turned the development roadmap upside down just for them. Again, very easy to do, but makes a world of difference.

So to wrap up, get to know your customers and treat them like you would want to be treated. Who knows, you may even get a round of golf in the process!

We all know happy customers are the most loyal customers, who in turn will recommend to other potential customers right? So why do we so often offer terrible customer service?

I once walked in to a shop in a Hampstead (a rather posh suburb of London) with my wife. The shop was selling upmarket children's toys and they were quite expensive. We were looking for something for a friend's baby.

Now the thing with this shop is that for each customer they get, the average spend would be quite high. If they had a good conversion rate of 'person walking through door' to 'person purchasing toy' then their daily takings would be huge. Enough probably to pay for a wage increase for the staff working there that day, and some.

The problem was that we did not have a very good user experience. We were totally ignored. The two girls in the shop were just chatting behind the counter. The toys in that shop were pretty good and I'm sure if we'd be made to feel more welcome then we would have purchased something. However we were made to feel like strangers, in fact we were made to feel like we were actually getting in the way of their conversation. So we left.

I really believe this scenario applies to SaaS businesses as well. I've signed up to various apps and the only communication I've had from the company is an email to tell me my trial is about to expire and my data will be deleted unless I pay up. A bit like someone behind the cash machine pointing to the door and saying "close the door behind you please".

It's a shame.

When we remove the service from customer service, we are just left with a lonely, frustrated and angry customer who will end up leaving you with nothing.

So I've compiled a list of five ways to remove the service from customer service.

1. Be absent

In the old days we used to pick up a phone when we weren't happy with something. Now we send an email and wait, sometimes up to 24-36 hours or more. If we do ring a phone number we usually have to wait a long time before we're connected with a real human being (if we're lucky that is). So if you want to really annoy your customers and make them leave you, be absent. Take a long time to reply to your emails and don't offer phone support.

2. Don't offer social networking facilities

Social networking allows customers to get in touch with you immediately. What's worse is that whatever they say will be archived on the web for all eternity. So definitely don't offer any form of social networking to connect you with your customer, e.g. Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. If you do decide to offer social networking, create an account with very limited info and make sure your last tweet or post was two years ago to make yourself look even more disconnected.

3. Be blunt and un-helpful in your emails

If you do decide to offer a method for allowing your customers to contact you then make sure the emails you send back are blunt and un-helpful. Use copied and pasted responses which don't really answer the question and mean that your customer has to spend a long time reading material which is totally irrelevant.

4. Take all personality out of your emails

Be as un-human as possible. The more like a computer you can be in your replies, the better. Don't mention their name in the email, don't ask them about their business and don't remember any previous conversations with them. You want to try and avoid any possible relationship with your customer as much as you can, because if you do that then you might end up offering a really good service.

5. Don't follow up

Was your customer happy with the last response? Did your customer solve the issue that they were contacting you about? It doesn't matter. Try your best not to follow up and just close the ticket. In fact delete the ticket otherwise you'll remember them next time they email and end up being helpful. The best thing to do is never follow up any conversations or email them out of the blue to find out how they are doing.

To summarize, I hope you'll have noticed a hint of sarcasm in my post. Removing the service from your customer service will be extremely damaging to your business.

Perhaps try and do the opposite of those things and just see what happens to your business. I think you'll be pretty pleased with the results.

It's here. Fowndr has been launched and is now open to all founders. Share, learn, grow and network together with other like-minded startup founders.

We've been in private beta for a while, but the time has now come to open up the doors. Fowndr is now officially launched.

Who?
It's for startup founders, entrepreneurs, those trying to build a product and grow it.

What?
It's an online community specifically for the aforementioned. Founders can share success stories, they can share blog posts or online resources they've found helpful, they can ask questions. Discussions can happen around those entries, for example a question about "What is SaaS?" and then other members can answer the question and get points for replying with good answers. Networking can happen too, so you can view their profiles and follow their posts.

Why? (the important question)
There aren't many online communities with discussion facilities, questions, answers and resources that are just focused on startups. The ones that do exist, such as Reddit, Hacker News and Quora are far too busy these days, and the focus isn't just on startups but on many other things.

• Where would I go to just view a load of really useful startup articles on churn, for example?
• Where would I go to find a co-founder?
• Where would I go to ask a question specifically about Free Trials, without being down voted for not being relevant, or lost because I'm not well known enough.

It's free to join, so check it out and let me know if you have any feedback.

I was stressing out with 20+ hours of support work every week and not being able to do what I really wanted to do, until I met my virtual assistant

It's funny. What started out as a couple of nice friendly emails a week turned in to over twenty hours a week of stressful emails three years later.

I used to enjoy reaching out to customers (and I still do) but after a while it became less and less personal and more of a chore because I was getting so bogged down with sending emails every day. I wasn't able to do to things that I really wanted, or needed, to do. The support issue had become a bit of a nightmare.

What's worse was that I knew that customer service is probably the most important part of any business and the customer must know that they are valued and that we have all the time in the world for them. In reality though this wasn't true because while I was writing the emails I knew I was supposed to be getting on with some development or a new marketing campaign.

The emails I was sending to customers were getting shorter and less friendly. Not good. I was getting stressed by it, and the business was being affected.

Enter the VA

The solution? A Virtual Assistant.

I had thought about hiring someone full time to do support. I figured that getting someone full time would be better because they'd have more time to 'get' the business and be much more committed long term. However the budget was tight and we couldn't really afford it.

I also had been reading a book by Rob Walling about staying lean in your startup. He makes heavy use of virtual assistants and basically bangs on about it in his book - it's excellent by the way! His methodology is to have lots of small, automated businesses that use virtual assistants for marketing, development and of course, support.

I didn't thank that you could even hire a virtual assistant that would be any good at customer service, I thought they were just useful for things like "make me a spreadsheet", or "create some backlinks". Rob encouraged me to explore oDesk for some VAs, create a job posting and see what happens.

My First Job Posting

I was very excited because I was about to make my first hire. Apart from me and my wife there was no one else in the team. We'd hired a few local contractors from time to time on a project basis, but I'd never hired anyone in the US dedicated to a particular task part/full time. So this was going to be a fun project.

The job posting went up and within about two hours I had about thirty requests for the job. Wow! Most of them were actually people who fell outside of my requirements, but I had a short list of about five to work through.

Hiring is an interesting process. One the one hand you have the side of you that wants to find the perfect person for the job and who will benefit the business. On the other hand there's a side to you that thinks "I really want to help this person out and give them a great opportunity to work for a cool startup".

There were some who looked less experienced in the field but more likeable characters, there were others who seemed like they really needed work and could have valued the opportunity, then there were others who were really experienced but were expensive and seemed rather cocky, like they just expected that you would hire them.

I then came across someone who ticked most of the boxes, but what stood out was that she had taken the time to read about us and actually respond to my points in the job posting.

She wasn't the most experienced and also looked less comfortable in tech and startups, however I had good feeling about her and wanted to give her a shot. The fact that she had taken the time to research us and also expressing a passion for learning about what we do made me quite excited about the prospect of hiring her.

So I did.

The next few days were incredible as she basically learned our system in about 24 hours. She also had initiative which was the main thing I wanted but couldn't really describe in a job posting. She went over and above what I asked and did things like read our blog when a customer asked a question about something she didn't know. She only reached out to me when absolutely necessary.

The Results

After a week she was very comfortable responding to emails and she knew the system pretty well. She was even taking the initiative to create a training manual documenting what she had learnt so she could ultimately pass it on if necessary.

Now I don't know if all of that is just her or if that's the general experience you will get from a virtual assistant, but I was very impressed.

The results were that after a week or so I had stopped needing to spend three hours a day on emails. I was now spending about 10-20 minutes a day on emails, if I wanted to. Also the speed at which customers were getting replies was dramatically improved from about 8-10 hours to 1-2 hours on average.

Happy Customers, Happy Business

Customers are now happier, and so am I.

I've been able to spend time doing other important things like marketing and development without worrying about support emails. Also when I do jump on the emails I'm a much nicer person!

We are also saving money as she will only work the hours she tracks time for. You can also set a weekly budget so she won't go over the number of hours I specify. For a growing startup, this is perfect.

Incidentally we started utilizing an amazing email support system called Helpscout which I highly recommend. It meant we could both see the tickets and assign them to one another with notes. It allowed her to learn how to respond to tickets as we discussed how one should respond within the notes. If you need a system to handle your tickets I do recommend this.

5 Tips for Finding an Amazing VA

So here are some tips that might help you in hiring the right VA.

• Find a good tool for searching and hiring candidates. I use oDesk but there are others like Freelancer.com and eLance which are also good. Make sure you can do everything through the system such as searching, hiring, messaging, time tracking and paying them.
• Put together a cover letter with specifics on what you want from the candidate and details on the company. Give them something to read through and you'll see notice those that actually took the time to read about the role and those that didn't.
• Don't be in a rush. Take your time to prepare the job posting and take time to search through the candidates. Don't be afraid to wait for candidates to come in a few days after posting. You'll get those that initially respond but then those that come a few days later who might be just what you're looking for.
• Arrange an interview over Skype or phone. Be friendly with them and see if they are behind what you're trying to do. Get a gauge for their enthusiasm and passion, because this is what will make the difference to your business.
• Welcome them to the team and be really proud of them. Make sure you encourage them once they are hired so that they don't just treat it like another job. Don't forget they are likely working for other businesses too, so you want yours to be their favorite.

Let me know your experiences, and good luck!

Ouch! The summer has been hard on us. Our conversion rate dropped, visitations dropped and churn increased. What was the outcome? Hard work.

Since my last post it's not all been going so well. You'd think that I would have been chilling out on a beach somewhere with my iPad in one hand and a beer in the other watching the business growing automatically. Not quite.

We experienced the 'summer slowdown' which seems to happen quite a lot apparently in business, most commonly traditional retail businesses and house prices.

Our conversion rate had dropped a little (not as much as it was previously though fortunately) and the amount of visitors coming to the site had dropped. The thing that was really hurting us though was the churn (the amount of people cancelling their subscriptions).

The Dip

Our recurring revenue graph saw its first dip for a while. It's the first time since last summer in fact.

Although we've experienced some flatlining this year, when the revenue just doesn't grow, it's not really dipped as bad as this. The dips can happen when your rate of growth drops and your churn goes up, meaning you end up getting more leaving than you do coming in.

It's resulted in this month likely being the first to not grow in revenue compared to the last month, which would be a shame, but there's still some hope if you read on.

Anyone Else in the Same Boat?

I did try searching for answers and asking around in the community to see if anyone else experiences the same problem, however I couldn't seem to get much empathy from other SaaS founders as they seemed to report that their businesses were doing quite well, a friend from Wistia being one of them.

I also couldn't find much on the web about other SaaS businesses struggling except for some lone question on Quora. There seemed to be a bit of content about the traditional market as mentioned above, but not very much in the SaaS world.

The only thing that I could lean on was my own data which actually showed a similar trend happening last year. However last year I was hardly doing any marketing at all and didn't have as many channels for customer relationship management, analytics, free trial conversion optimisation etc.

The graph last year showed things didn't pick up again until mid September, however I wasn't going to wait that long.

Rather than searching for answers, analyzing old data and sulking in a corner in the office I decided to get to the bottom of this issue and sort it out.

What are the Causes of the Summer Slowdown?

There's a number of factors we can look at, some of them controllable and some of them not so much. Let's break a few of them down.

• Visitations
  Understandably visitations are going to go down in the summer because people book vacations and businesses tend to slow down a little due to the lack of staff. Plans to release new features or undertake massive marketing campaigns get postponed until later in the year. There's not much we can do about this, so we take it on the chin.
• Conversion Rate
  Maybe people are less keen to purchase for the reasons listed above, e.g. they might want to wait until after the summer before signing up to a new service. However having even a slight drop in the conversion rate can be costly, so measures need to be put in place to compensate for the lower conversion rate, e.g. a higher overall conversion rate which can drop to a minimum acceptable rate during the summer.
• Churn
  The dreaded churn. Although this is the biggest of the causes and probably the hardest to tackle, it's also probably the most controllable with lots that can be done to reduce it.

What Causes Churn?

I often ask a customer when they cancel why they cancelled. Most don't respond but those that do have similar responses like:

• "We are no longer using it."
• "We loved the application, we just couldn't get the rest of the team to utilize it."
• "We decided to stick to our old workflow, whiteboards and stickies (etc)."

Rarely do people cancel because you hadn't brought out a certain feature, or because they're going on holiday, or because it's just too darn hot outside.

Customers were cancelling because they never really relied on the service.

Why this was happening over the summer more than in other months? I'm not sure, possibly because they've had time to look back over the year and review their spendings in line for the next quarter. Regardless, something needed to be done about the problem listed above.

What is the Solution?

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure yet, but I'm working towards some solutions.

Visitation Drop

I'm not doing anything to combat the visitation drop but I'm doing something else quite clever instead. For every 100 users that visit the site, about 90% of them will probably never come back. Not because they didn't like what we're offering but because they've just gotten distracted and then forgotten about us.

So we're looking at Re-targeting to make sure that those that leave get reminded about us and encouraged to come back. The results for this are not in yet, but it will hopefully increase the amount of signups we get.

Conversion Rate Drop

We've been tweaking the home page and other pages that don't perform as well in order to get more sign ups, it's been working so far (only a few days of data to go on though). Also I went through the free trial process once again and did my best to make sure users get invested in the application as early as possible, by adding more guidance and help boxes while they use the system.

This has helped a little, and will accomodate for the lower conversion rates in the summer I'm hoping. Our conversion rate this week since doing these tweaks has been close to 20%, which is great!

The High Churn

Customers churn because they don't rely on your service. So we've been looking at features that will make users depend more on Project Bubble for example calendar synchronization, better notification and reminder emails, better messaging facilities with email integration, the list goes on.

I've also found that the other reason people churn is because they don't have a relationship with you, their service providers. They don't feel valued.

When was the last time you had a good, informal and friendly conversation with one of your customers? I had one with someone at Wistia recently and then realized, 'hang on, I've been a customer of theirs for ages and will be for a long time'!

In fact there's a really good article on Fast company about this. I encourage you to read it.

In Summary

The solution for reducing churn in my opinion is to basically reach out more, and encourage relationship with your customers. If they feel valued and listened to then they will more likely reach out to you when there is a problem or a concern before hitting that red cancellation button. I've even encouraged my support staff to 'go over and above' what they would normally write in emails and just be that extra bit friendly and more helpful. It makes a huge difference.

The graph this week is looking much better. My work though in this area of marketing and customer satisfaction does not stop, and that beach will have to wait.

So we just had a good few months. In May we had a free trial conversion rate increase of 240% thanks to a new program I signed up to in March, the Free Trial Dominator which aims to help startups like ours increase their free trial conversion rate.

The other day I was asked to do a presentation with the Free Trial Dominator group about how exactly we achieved this. I wanted to share some of what I said in this presentation on my blog. So here we go...

The Marketing Plan

So as you know from my last post I've been focused on the one thing, growing Project Bubble. It's been a blast and I've been enjoying every minute of it.

In March I decided to spend some time on marketing after spending a couple of months on development and building some much needed features. The task for me was to see how I could increase the revenue while keeping the spend down as much as possible.

The obvious path was to spend money on PPC and increase the number of visitors coming to the site, however I knew that it would cost a lot of money to do this because we're in a saturated market (project management) and I also knew that our conversion rate was quite low for a SaaS provider (6.57%) so I'd be wasting a lot of money on the 93% that weren't converting.

So I decided the best thing to do was to focus on increasing the conversion rate of those already signing up to the free trial, not getting more signups for the free trial. If I could double the conversion rate to about 14-15% then I'd be doubling the growth, which would be awesome. The question was, how?

The Free Trial Dominator

I'd read a lot of content already from Lincoln Murphy who is an expert at marketing for SaaS startups. He'd even done a little consultancy for us on our pricing page which was a great help. Then I heard about a new program he was launching for startups called the Free Trial Dominator which focused on improving the free trial conversion rate for SaaS businesses.

I was pretty sold, so I signed up.

I committed about 3-4 weeks consuming the material he had posted on the site and putting it in to practice. Obviously not all of it would apply because the material was written for a broad range of startups, but whatever I could apply I did.

Also I built my own Kissmetrics style tracking system for Project Bubble so I could measure the change in visitations, signups, conversions, and the conversion rate. If you don't measure everything that happens in your app then you will be doing a lot of guesswork which is not recommended.

The Results

It only took a month and I couldn't actually believe the results, but our conversion rate went from 6.57% to 16.63% in just 30 days. That's an increase of 240%! I was pretty impressed. This has meant more growth, more revenue and has meant that we've even now been able to budget for our first hire. Great news.

You want more stats? OK, here you go...

March

• Free trial signups: 426
• Conversions: 28
• Conversion rate: 6.57%

April

• Free trial signups: 505
• Conversions: 84
• Conversion rate: 16.63%

As you can see there's a clear difference in the amount of conversions yet the amount of signups is roughly the same. The conversion rate is across the board, so it's for all users that signed up to the free trial not just active users.

How!?

There are lots of things that we did and I won't go in to specifics (if you want specifics then sign up to the Free Trial Dominator, and mention me as a referral!). In general here are some of the key things that helped get the conversion rate increase, and all of these things I learned from the FTD.

• Manage Expectations
  From the moment that visitors land on your home page you want to convince them that your product is the perfect solution to their problem and they need to get using it to find out why. Make sure they are aware that they will need to pay in 15 days (in our case), and also that they are aware exactly what your app does and how it does it along the way (with video tutorials for example).
• Clear Messaging
  Deliver a strong message when they first land on your site, and keep that messaging carried across your free trial process. For us it was the strong message that they will save time and hassle. Everything between the home page and the payment page tried to reinforce that message.
• Keep 'em Keen
  Make sure your users stay interested in the app and informed about how cool the app is. For us it involved hiding lots of advanced functionality and things that might confuse them, and instead just showing the basics and exciting stuff in the early part of the free trial. Another important factor is regular emails during the free trial that encourage users to come back and stay engaged.
• Investment
  Get your users using the app as early as possible. The more invested they are in the system then the more likely they are to convert later on, because it will be a hassle to change to a different system at that point and they'll be familiar with yours. For us this meant making it easy to add those first few projects and also ensuring they invited the rest of the users in their company. Study what your common conversion activities are and try to get your users taking steps towards these activities.
• Asking for the Sale
  At the end of the trial it's important to send out an email letting them know their trial is about to expire and encouraging them to buy. We've tried to make it really easy for users to choose their plan and enter their billing details, no matter where they are in the app. Never be afraid to ask for the sale.

I'm being very general here, and I'll probably share more details in future blog posts but mainly I just wanted to share some of what I've learnt these last few months. I also want to encourage you if you have a SaaS startup with a fairly low conversion rate, you can increase it! We did!

Also be sure to check out the Free Trial Dominator which I highly recommend.

How does one succeed at something? Simple really, stay focused on it.

It's been a while since I last wrote in my blog. Why? Because I've been focused on the one thing, growing Project Bubble. In the process I've been trying to remove all other things that could potentially distract in order to get this focus.

When I last wrote I was explaining how wonderful it is to be able to work full time for your startup. In November 2011, two years after launching Project Bubble in Beta, this dream became a reality for me because the revenue it was making was enough to support me and my wife working full time in London.

It's an awesome feeling being able to work full time for your startup, and it's been a really amazing 6 months since I last wrote. I'll explain what's been happening in that time and tell you about an important discovery I made.

The Busyness

After going full-time in November I set about doing some much needed development that required intense concentration and a lot of time. I built various features for Project Bubble that were much needed, such as the API, mobile site, and the calendar.

In early 2012 I formed Project Bubble LLC as a separate incorporated company in the US, away from it's UK based incubator Haloweb Ltd as the business was doing so well. This process alone took weeks, lots of paperwork, phone calls, and a visit to the US!

By late January I was very busy indeed. The userbase had grown to about 10,000 and we had about 300 businesses using Project Bubble every day. The support emails were coming in thick and fast (about 2 hours a day) and I was trying to spend the rest of the time on marketing and growing the business. This mean that I had practically no time in the rest of the day to work on other projects or past clients that previously I would have spent a fair bit of time on.

The Realisation

There had been a switch. Previously, I'd spend my evenings and weekends working on Project Bubble and the day working for clients and other projects. Now I was finding that I was spending my evenings and weekends working for clients and other projects which I didn't really need the income for.

I'd always been the type of person who had lots of projects going on at the same time, and a lot of you who know me will confer. Whether it's a new startup idea that I'd built in a weekend (I had at least 3 of these), a few online forums that brought in a few quid per month in advertising, a new project that aimed to help lots of other entrepreneurs like me, or just freelance work for old clients.

I thought that if I had a lot of irons in the fire one of them would surely become successful or I'd have a plethora of other projects that I could fall back on in case my main one fails. The trouble was that I was stressing myself out with the many projects, and not really spending enough time on the one thing that was actually showing the most promise.

I realised that I needed to focus on Project Bubble solely and not be distracted, or it was going to lose direction and fail. So I started to begin the cull.

The Cull

I decided to remove all my projects that weren't bringing in very much revenue and were taking up too much time. Even if they weren't necessarily demanding my time I knew that it just wasn't ethical for me to continue to be attached to them (and in some cases take people's money for them) when I wasn't intending on continuing to support them or lead them in any particular direction.

I sold quite a few of the small businesses I had that were bringing in revenue (albeit a few hundred pounds per month) to entrepreneurs who would take them in new directions and offer something a lot better to the communities. I officially ceased support for some of my other projects and offered them for free with no support. I had to tell clients that I was no longer able to work for them in any way at all as I was now working full time for a new company. And finally I was able to outsource support for all my past clients who were on maintenance contracts for websites I'd done for them.

Basically, between February and April I managed to cut down all my many projects to just two, Project Bubble, and Invoice Bubble (which is an offshoot of Project Bubble). I no longer have ownership or dealings with anything else pretty much. It's a huge weight off my mind and allows me to focus.

The Focus

So now I'm completely focused on Project Bubble. I'm able to work fully in marketing, or development without distraction from other projects, and I feel it's going to be very beneficial to the startup's growth. With that said, we're having a baby in June so I might be distracted by a very worthwhile cause for the next month! I'll probably blog about that separately as there's something I want to share about entrepreneurs who are also Dads like me.

I'll be focusing on customer support for the next few weeks as that's taking out about 3 hours per day at the moment. I'll be writing a help section on the site and then hiring a virtual assistant to handle the emails, hopefully reducing my support time to about 20 minutes per day.

I'll be focusing on marketing in July/August so that we can grow the revenue to a place where we can actually hire another developer.

Then towards the end of the year I'll be focusing on the CEO side of things along with product design. By the end of next year hopefully we'll be a multi-million dollar revenue company with a tight-knit team working somewhere in the US. Hey, dream big!

Without focus, none of this would be possible. So don't be afraid to drop the things that are weighing you down so you can really soar.

I've just reached a major milestone in my life: I'm now working full time for my startup Project Bubble and it feels awesome!

I can't tell you what an amazing milestone this is and how excited I am about it. A few months ago I blogged about the amazing privilege it is to work full time for your own startup. At the time I was a few months away from this milestone and there was still quite an up-hill climb to make.

However this October I've been working full time for Project Bubble and it has been an utter delight, although slightly scary financially! I thought I would share some background in to this.

The Summer

This year I've worked harder than ever before. I wanted to basically be full time for one of my startups before the end the year. To support myself, my family and the high cost of living in London I had to take on contract work to make up the shortfall. The income from Project Bubble has been growing lots since I finalized the pricing in January and I calculated over the summer that it would be approximately November before I could work full time for Project Bubble and then I wouldn't need to take on any more contract work. Until then I had to work as any normal freelancer would but in my 'spare' time I'd be working insanely hard on Project Bubble.

Over the summer I had the amazing opportunity to do some great contract work for some really cool companies including zferral and Analytics SEO doing UI and UX design consultancy. These companies are startups too and the best part about working for them was that I felt like I was really contributing to their 'early days' and I knew they were surely going to be big-time in a few years. It was also a real privilege working for companies that understood what it was like for a bootstrapper entrepreneur who needed to balance paid work with growing his startup. I salute you guys.

The Now

Now it's approaching the end of October and things are looking good. Project Bubble can now just about support my wife and I to work full time. I'll be managing the direction of the business along with doing development, and my wife will be managing accounts, finance and a bit of support. Hopefully next year we'll be able to make our first hire so I'll need to figure that one out.

Being full time for my startup means I can actually commit proper focused time in to development (not evenings when I'm really tired). As a result of the amount of time I've had to spend on development this month a whole new API has been launched, which has been a lot of fun to build. I can also get to the office and spend time thinking about the direction of the business without getting distracted by lots of emails about a freelance project I'm working on. It's so cool.

I always knew that the first thing I'd nail when I was full time was the API for Project Bubble and a big marketing strategy around that. So the next big project is to network with lots of developers and try to get lots of cool apps, add-ons and integrations built. I'll also be contacting some of the big companies to try and get featured on their apps pages. The best thing is that I'll be doing all of this 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, not 12AM at night!

Advice for Other Bootstrappers

I have to say that although I'm enjoying the rewards now (such as having the time to write this post!), it's been a year of real hard work. I've been working hard for my clients to pay the bills but also working hard for my startup and only now can I actually step to one side and think about what I've learnt so far on this journey. Here are some tips I thought I'd share.

Be 100% Sure

It's scary financially to take the plunge into working full time for your startup. Although we run a SaaS business model which brings in regular recurring revenue, it's still a little scary when you don't get the growth that you wanted, or you get a stream of cancellations for no apparent reason. You have to be 100% sure you can do it before you tell your clients you are no longer taking on contract work. Don't burn all your bridges and continue to be available at evenings or weekends if your clients need extra work. Also don't forget your clients were the ones that helped you along the way to get there in the first place.

Don't Make Wild Predictions

It's easy to look at the graphs, draw an imaginary line with your finger and then say "in three months we'll be making $50,000 per month judging by this graph!". Things can change quickly and you might find yourself in the unfortunate position where your server has issues and you lose a load of customers, or perhaps you have to take on expenses that you didn't anticipate such as extra hardware or development work. Be conservative with your estimates. Fortunately I have my lovely wife to help me with this, because I'm often the one making wild predictions and my wife puts me right.

Do it Yourself

When things go well it's easy to start saying, we'll hire a freelancer for this or we'll pay another company to do that. However if you do start earning more than what you need it's really useful to save up a pot of cash for that unexpected expense that you might get, such as legal expenses or server upgrades. Think 'can I do this myself?' when it comes to some aspects of the startup. For example recently I was thinking of hiring someone to build our API for Project Bubble, and I would have loved to have worked with someone else on this aspect. However it would have been a luxury that we couldn't have afforded, so I learnt all about API development and did it myself. It took longer, but saved us quite a bit of money. If you're a self-learner I suggest this approach to lots of things!

Patience

The obvious one. There were lots of times I was a bit fed up with not being able to work for my own startup and have to work for someone else (as cool as those companies were). Nothing really compares to the joy of being able to put your time, effort and passions in to something which you own because you get the immediate rewards but also the long term rewards too. However to do this you need to be patient and know that it takes time to get there.

Honour Your Clients

Remember that your clients helped you get to where you are and if it wasn't for them you wouldn't be able to even work part time for your startup because you'd have no money to support it. I tried my very best to make sure I was being as honourable as I could be with the hours I was working for my clients. Holding off on support emails, phone calls, even thinking time. I wanted to make sure that I was fully committed to the project I was being paid to do and putting all my energy in to that one thing. It was hard, but I felt like by doing that good things would come back around to me, and they have done. Your clients may be paying you a day rate for a project, but also they can be your friends and perhaps be really helpful in your success later on too. You may even partner with them somehow later on, so like I said earlier keep the bridges open and honour them in your contract work.

Get Little Rewards

You might have to put in lots of your spare time, such as evenings and weekends, or even your own cash, and you might think that you're not going to see the rewards for months (when the revenue your startup makes can afford you full time). However you can get little rewards too. For me the 'little rewards' were getting customers emailing me back at 1AM while I was still working saying things like "You're still working this late to build this feature for me? You're awesome!". Other rewards are things like looking at the revenue growth chart and saying "this growth spurt happened when I worked that whole weekend on the Time Tracking feature". Sometimes you need to just appreciate the small details before you can take a step back and enjoy the whole picture. Reward yourself with these little milestones.

Not There Yet

Just because I've now hit my milestone of working full time, I'm not 'there' yet. In fact I've only just begun because now I've got a massive responsibility. I've got to really earn this amazing privilege and work hard to not only grow the business for myself and my family, but also for future employees that might want to join the team later. There's loads of foundations I've got to lay to make this startup in to something even more awesome than it is already. That's going to require a lot of work. We're there just about financially, but we've still got a long way to go in lots of other aspects. Again patience is the key, and lots of hard work. Now that my startup can afford to support me and my wife, it's time to think about who (and what) else it can support with the revenue it makes.

So I'll blog probably at Christmas time with maybe some more lessons learned about life as a full time bootstrapper.

How cool!