WorkHappy.net: killer resources for entrepreneurs

Launch Effect

November 4, 2011 in 4 out of 5 stars, A piece of software, Analytics, Free, Landing Pages

What is it?

Launch Effect: A free WordPress theme anyone can use to quickly create a professional looking, virally inclined pre-launch page for your upcoming product website, app, service, etc.).

Who makes it?

Barrel LLC

Why is it the killerest?

First let me state that I'm saving you some trouble, because I did this the hard way first. For my latest venture I started by building a pre-launch site from scratch. It's a couple pages, right? How hard can it be? Well - to do well, actually - kinda hard. Or, time consuming anyway. Consuming of time you should be spending building your New Thing.

1. It's very easy to set up - virtually anyone can do it.

I'm no WordPress guru, but I went from nothing to a fully launched site in just a few hours. First, I fired up a super cheap hosting account with my registrar NameCheap. Once my account was set up, I logged in, installed WordPress (literally a few mouse clicks), then downloaded the Launch Effect theme, uploaded and installed it in my WordPress, made a few tweaks, and my site was ready to go. 

2. It's got built in social-sharing tools and viral spreading motivation 

This is perhaps the nicest feature and something you likely wouldn't have time to build yourself. And it's all baked in, and very easy to configure. 

How it works: After someone gives you their email address, they're presented with a thank you message, and a panel of social icons they can click to share. 

Subscribers are also given a unique tracking link. When they use that link (or any of the icons) to share, you and they will both be able to see how many folks they've sent to the site, and how many signed up themselves.

Additionally, you can give them an incentive to share. On mine, I'm giving away a free lifetime account to someone who shares and leads someone else to sign up.

3. It's got great built in tracking

As mentioned above, each person who signs up will show up in your admin panel, along with the number of clicks they've sent you, and how many of those have also signed up (plus conversion rate). Both you, and they can see these stats at any time.

What could be improved?

Tracking your referrals is too confusing for visitors.

When a visitor shares, they have access to their referral, and conversion stats, but in order to see that information, they have to re-submit their email address into the signup form. Clever - but how on earth are they supposed to know that? There's really no good way to communicate that to them at this point.

It needs to integrate with MailChimp and/or Campaign Monitor.

First, it's very easy to export your signups in a CSV and import them into MailChimp - which, if you're only going to do that once, is no big deal. But ideally, you'd like to get an auto-response email to your signups. This would allow you to tell them about the referral stuff noted in my last complaint, as well as a few other bells and whistles that MailChimp offers.

It's a bit hard to fully customize without touching the code.

Out of the box, it probably does most everything you need, and you can certainly make a perfectly good-enough site without customization. But if what you want to do isn't exactly what the theme expects you to do, you'll need to dive into the css and/or php files. This is a minor niggle though, it has very solid customization constructs.

It has only a small subset of the available Google Fonts to work with. 

That said, they do natively support TypeKit and MonoType.

And I note, they're working improving it. This roadmap looks great.

How much does it cost?

Nothing (it's free)

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

p.s. Here's the one I set up. If you make one, please share it in the comments below.

 

Answers on Startups (a Stack Exchange site)

May 17, 2011 in 4 out of 5 stars, A community, A website, Business Intel, Business Planning, Expert Advice

What is it?

Answers.OnStartups.com BrightJourney.com: A question and answer site focused on Startups and Entrepreneurship.

Who makes it?

Stack Exchange (with a dash of clout from Dharmesh Shah)

Why is it the killerest?

Stack Exchange (the company behind this) have built a highly effective Question-and-Answer gamification format offering. They started with the absurdly successful Stack Overflow which is focused on answering software development questions, and applied the model to various other topics, including startups.

All of us have questions as we venture into these challenging startup waters, and Answers OnStartups is a productive place ask them. Because of the reward system built into the site, you will typically get high quality, and varied answers from experienced folks who know what they're talking about.

It also skews heavily toward online and software startups, which is where my own passion lies (as it does for many of you).

What could be improved?

I've been watching and participating for a few weeks now and I've had a great time, but two things could be improved:

1) The number of participants. What it has now is great, but I would love it to reach the level of some of the higher volume Stack Exchange sites. I know a bunch of you reading this have valuable insights to share, so get over there.

2) Some repetition in questions. Equity splitting, marketing, and funding questions occupy a large percent of the questions. That said, there are still interesting and helpful questions posted frequently.

How much does it cost?

Free

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

Balsamiq

May 8, 2009 in 4 out of 5 stars, A piece of software, Productivity, Software Development

What is it?

Balsamiq: It's a tool that anyone can use for making web page mockups.

In the early stages of creating a web site, or specifically a web application, there's a period of time when you need to wireframe, or sketch out rough ideas for page construction and layout, without necessarily worrying about the precise design of the pages (i.e. colors, fonts, exact shapes, etc).

Balsamiq is a tool designed to help you do that. It has various "elements" or building blocks that you can drop on your page to construct your mockup.

Who makes it?

Balsamiq Studios LLC

Why is it the killerest?

In mocking up the screens for my current hair-brained idea, I decided to take Balsamiq for a spin. What I found was a tool that was delightfully easy to use, and rich enough to make me feel like I didn't have to compromise on what I wanted to do in order to use the tool. The unexpected bonus was that in perusing some of the element options it sparked some creative ideas for approaching my user interface.

Tip: on the free web version, when you’re done with a layout, you can export it as an image (PNG) and you can also export some code which you can paste into a text editor, then re-import next time you return to the site and resume working. It’s a poor-man’s “save.”

What could be improved?

I assume this is just a limitation of the free web-based version that I used, but I’d like to be able to have multiple pages I can work on at the same time - and a generic template I can use as the starting point for subsequent pages. There are workaround for this (export/import and delete elements you don’t want) but it’s a bit clumsy.

Also, on the free web-hosted version, you get a nag screen every 5 minutes. If you are moving an element at the exact moment the nag screen pops up, the element becomes stuck, and you can't select, edit, or move it. (Note: to work around this, I found refreshing the page to work - but do that with caution, you could lose everything, so do an export first).

How much does it cost?

Free for web version, $79 for desktop version

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

Shopify

January 27, 2009 in 4 out of 5 stars, e-Commerce Solutions

What is it?

Shopify: A hosted store/shopping cart solution which allows you to heavily (and easily) customize the design. You can have a professional-looking store, with a fairly modest investment. It’s aimed at helping folks who want more than a PayPal link off their site, but who can’t afford (or don’t need) a custom solution.

Who makes it?

jadedPixel Inc.

Why is it the killerest?

First - you have to understand that the options for robust hosted shopping cart solutions out there, which allow you to heavily customize the look of your store, are pretty dismal. Most force you into using their proprietary templates or severely limit your flexibility, and usually top it off with terrible customer support.

Shopify does a good job of addressing all of those issues.

I interviewed Scott Lake of Shopify back in 2006 as they were launching. I didn’t have an opportunity to really put Shopify through the paces until late last year, however, when a client of mine was a perfect fit for Shopify. So I finally took the plunge and helped them get everything set up, and I found the experience with Shopify to be just as good as I’d hoped. My client is now successfully processing sales, and I can comment on the whole process.

The first thing I needed was the flexibility to customize the look of the store to match my site.

On this front, Shopify gets an A+. I should note that fully customizing the look is not for the non-technical. If you’re not technical, you need to hire someone who is. To customize it, you need to know XHML, you need to know CSS, and you need to learn a little bit of their proprietary code for pulling in the store elements on a page. That said, the interface and system for working with all of that is just superb, and the support documents (via a wiki) are solid. I started with a little trepidation, and the usual fierce resistance to reading anything, and was quickly making very favorable progress.

So here’s a screenshot from a page on the site in question (www.madsencycles.com):

And I wanted to bring a similar look into the store, creating a seamless experience for users from site to store, and back.

Here’s a screenshot from the store, hosted by Shopify (shop.madsencycles.com):

By the time I was done, I didn’t feel like I had to make compromises on design. Shopify gave me the flexibility I needed to make the store look like I really wanted it to, and at a tiny fraction of what it would have cost to build a custom solution.

I should mention here that if you don’t need the look of your store customized, Shopify has a range of “themes” you can choose from – no deep technical expertise is required to set up a store using one of the themes.

Here’s what else I like:

• Order management has all the features you would want for viewing, filtering, organizing and printing. You can get an RSS feed of your orders and email alerts. You can send out shipping notifications to customers include sending shipping tracking info. Plus you can download csv files of your orders for processing and reporting in your own system.
• Product management has inventory management, variations on a single SKU (think: red/blue/pink shirts), multiple photos, flexible descriptions and pricing. You can also organize items into collections for easier display and cross-linking/up-selling.
• You can add any additional pages you need that aren’t part of the product/checkout flow, for example your privacy or return policies.
• While I haven’t used it, they have the ability to add a blog to your store.
• They have an opt-in (or out) email list they’ll build as people buy, and you can download a list of those people to use in email marketing.
• You can set up discount codes to provide either a percent, or a dollar amount off of orders that meet a certain criteria, and you can limit them by date, and number of uses. Very nice.
• You can use virtually any payment processor if you already have one set up with your merchant account (I used this, and it works great), and/or you can use PayPal and Google Checkout, or even good old fashion Checks, Money Orders or COD.
• You can have customized shipping prices provided by carriers, or come up with your own.
• They’ve even got relationships with some of the large fulfillment service companies (like Amazon Services).
• They also make it very easy to hook Shopify up to your Google Analytics.
• If you’d like you can password protect access to your store (handy when you’re under construction).
• Finally, they’ve made the checkout clean and simple. This increases conversions, and is a welcome difference from virtually every other hosted shopping cart solution.

What could be improved?

My list of complaints is short, but it’s strong. None of these are deal-breakers for me, but I hope they’ll be addressed soon.

Must haves:

The final payment and checkout pages do not retain the look and feel of your site. This is the #1 issue they should address. The jarring transition when customers may already be nervous about pulling out their credit cards is surely causing cart abandonment. The crown jewel of Shopify is the ability to customize your site look, and this shouldn’t stop on the most important page of the process. Fortunately, while they work on that feature, there is a little-publicized way you can at least update the look somewhat using CSS. See here for details.

Support responses are a bit lagged. I found it look a couple days for them to respond by email. I fortunately didn’t need support much, but I’d prefer a snappier response. I talked to them about this, and they said they’ve just started using a new system to help them improve on this.

Would be extra super nice to haves:

I would really like the ability to swap the main (large) product photo, as I swap the selected product variation. I could have hacked this together using javascript, but I’d prefer that functionality be available in the system.

A built-in custom affiliate program. In other words – an affiliate program I can offer to my customers, managed within Shopify. Clearly this is a beast of a job, but it would make Shopify a tremendous force in the marketplace.

More flexibility with promo codes. They’re pretty good as is, but I’d like to offer free shipping, or buy X get X free.

Gift certificates. I’d like the ability to sell gift certificates which generate a code my customers can enter at checkout. Again – a beast, I know, but a guy can want.

Better reporting on discount codes. Right now, I have to open an individual order to see which code was used. I’d like a report of all the codes used, how many times, and by date. This is partly to address the lack of an affiliate program, but would be a nice feature to have.

The ability to allow regular users to login so they don’t have to re-type their information. This should be unobtrusive, to be sure, and ideally it would be an option a store owner can enable or not – but it would be nice.

How much does it cost?

From $24/mo + 2.0% of transactions, to $299/mo + 0.5%

Rating?

 

Reviewed by Carson McComas

senduit

January 13, 2009 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, File uploading services

What is it?

senduit: A beautifully spare and elegant file sharing tool.

Who makes it?

Davidville, Inc. (the crew who created Tumblr)

Why is it the killerest?

Last week I reviewed drop.io which was also clean and simple, but full-featured. If you don't need all those features, it'd be hard to beat senduit for uncompromised simplicity and elegance. It's another site I can (and will) use with my family and clients and won’t have to explain anything.

Here’s the process:

1. To send a file: Browse for File – Click Upload Button – Copy Link – Paste Link (to email/IM).

2. For the recipient: Click Pasted Link – Save Download.

The End.

No login, short easy-to-share urls.

You can set the expiration on a file for from 30 minutes up to 1 week.

The download page couldn’t be simpler. It starts the download without any user action needed (while you look at an ad). 

It has 100% of what you need to share a file, and 0% of what you don’t.

It does not get any tighter than this.

What could be improved?

It might be nice to also enter an email address to send the file to after its uploaded. This would be a compromise on the perfect simplicity of the beast though, so it’s a hard call.

How much does it cost?

$0.00

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

FaxPipe

January 6, 2009 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Faxing

What is it?

FaxPipe: After initially recommending, and then getting hosed by Send2Fax (they significantly raised the prices, didn't let me know, made it hard to cancel and get a refund, didn't give a full refund), I was on the hunt for a replacement. I've been using FaxPipe now for several months, and can say it's everything I need and want in an electronic fax system.

Who makes it?

AirCom LLC.

Why is it the killerest?

When someone  faxes you, you get a PDF attachment of the fax in an email.

To send a fax, you send an email with an attachment to a special email address, put the recipient fax number as the body of the message, and you're done.

You get a toll-free or local number.

Highly affordable.

There's isn't much to it, it's just what you need, and nothing you don't.

What could be improved?

Paying yearly on the lower tier plans isn't my favorite (although, not a big deal).

How much does it cost?

$48/yr for 25 pages/mo, $0.15 for more pages. Other plans.

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

Elance

August 8, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Collaboration, Hiring, Productivity

What is it?

Elance: A place to (primarily) find freelance help, and also to find work as a freelancer.

Who makes it?

Elance, Inc.

Why is it the killerest?

Elance has been around for a while (at least since 2002) and serves a wide range of businesses. I won't speak to their breadth, just their value to me as a non-Fortune-500-level entrepreneur.

Elance's real benefit is in finding inexpensive (many of their providers are in Asia and Latin America) help for more specialized tasks that I can't afford the time to do myself, or that I don't have the skills to do myself.

For example, I have about 1,000 product images that I need the backgrounds removed from in Photoshop.

My friend needed a customized Flash video player designed for his site.

A quick (relatively simple) post on Elance, and we found the help we needed within 24 hours.

I like how careful they are about vetting businesses and providers to ensure everyone is the real deal. They also have an escrow service (free for businesses), and a fairly robust messaging and agreement system to make sure everyone knows what's expected and how the project will pay out.

My results have been very satisfactory.   

What could be improved?

The site is pretty complex, and as such, it's a bit cumbersome to use (I did muddle my way through without reading much and just guess-clicking and did ok however).

Some of the communication structure feels more like insulation designed to make sure Elance gets their commission than a way to make my life easier.

Most of their project management constructs are far too elementary to be useful.

How much does it cost?

Free for businesses, providers pay 4-6% plus a monthly fee depending on usage.

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

Google Sites

July 23, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Collaboration, Free, Hosted "Office", Hosted software, Issue trackers, Productivity, Project management

What is it?

Google Sites: A poor man's (pretty darn good) intranet. An online, Google-hosted wiki-meets-project management software service. Google gobbled up Jot Spot (a hosted wiki service headed by Joe Kraus) before it even really got going, it was later re-born as Google Sites.

Who makes it?

Google

Why is it the killerest?

I have a growing and widely dispersed team for my latest venture. I've set up a Google Sites website which is serving as an "intranet" for this team, and it's working quite well.

It's like a wiki in that anyone (whom you allow) can edit or add pages or documents. It also has several built-in tools to help you create things like, a file download repository, a todo list, an issue tracker, or an announcements board.

There are also many more options available through "Gadgets" like a Google Calendar, a Presentation (read: Microsoft Powerpoint-like document), or a Spreadsheet. Plus hundreds of third party gadgets like maps, weather, games, news feeds, and chat. Not to mention a million other useless things no one would ever want (Woody Allen quotes?). Fortunately it's easy to ignore that stuff.

Most anyone can set one up and manage it, it's not difficult, there are no HTML skills required. You have some limited control over the look and feel; for example you can easily brand it with your own logo and colors.

They've made management of the site very simple. You can invite others as owners, collaborators or just viewers. You can also optionally make the site visible to everyone on the internet.

You get 100MB of storage space for free, and can bump that up to 25GB per account for their paid version which costs $50/user/yr.

They even have an API.

What could be improved?

My primary beef is no discussion forum built in. That would make it twice as valuable for us. Even if they just took Google Groups and married it in, we'd have a winner. This is a huge omission.

I would also like the option not to have previous versions of all my pages available to everyone. It's not a huge deal, but I don't need the last umpteen version of a page viewable forever, and there's no facility to disallow this.

How much does it cost?

Free for most everything, $50 per user per year for the deluxe version with lots of storage space.

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

RescueTime

July 2, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, Hosted software, Productivity

What is it?

RescueTime: A time management and analysis program.

Who makes it?

RescueTime (3 guys rocking it with some YCombinator funding to start)

Why is it the killerest?

Because it achieves the holy grail of being fun to use, and darned useful too.

It consists of two parts. An application (software) you install on your computer (PC or Mac) and a website which reports on your time usage.

The software logs the applications you use (a plain text log). By default it logs in two-second increments to paint a pretty accurate picture. Then every 30 minutes it beams this information up to the mothership. The mothership is a glorious reporting site you can pull up to see how you're using your time. It features all manner of reporting graphs and charts. It shows you how productive you're being, where you spend your time, how you're doing on your goals, and more.

While it's pretty helpful even with zero configuration effort (just install and let it go), you can really make it come alive if you spend a little time telling it about the things you do through simple tagging, and rating for productivity. It's an intuitive process that unfolds as you want it to. The usability is solid.

The first benefit to me was realizing just how much time I was frittering away with useless garbage. It was troubling information. Well, harrowing is more like it. And it has already changed how I use my time. As an entrepreneur, being accountable even if only to RescueTime is proving to be very valuable. The old "what gets measured gets improved" adage once again proves true. I'm rigorous about measuring so many other things, it's a little embarrassing I haven't applied that better to my time until now. I guess I just needed the drop-dead simple "do it for me" solution that RT provides.

In addition to measuring time, RT lets you set up goals, which it then tracks for you. Some example goals might be "spend more than 3 hours per day working on my secret project" or "spend less than 1 hour per day on email." 

They also have some paid features that allow groups to use it together so you can compare how you spend your time versus the average member. I haven't dived into that. Everything I'm using is free.

I've really resisted having a big crush on RT, but have so far failed. I love it.

What could be improved?

This is still immature software, and it's important to know that going in. I sincerely hope they can make their revenue model fly so that they can evolve this to the point where they build on the killer progress they've made so far.

In fact, if they would address the issues I'm about to outline, I would be perfectly happy to pay a modest fee (say, $4/mo) to keep my records indefinitely (right now they only keep a 3 month backlog) and have the following features:

1. I'd like to do intra-application tagging. For example - if I'm writing a poem about my dog in Word, I'd like to tag that differently than a work proposal for a new client. As it is today, they only break things out that way for the web browser.

2. I'd like to be able to manually enter time. Right now it only tracks your time at the computer - which it does spine-tinglingly well. But if I have an off-site meeting, I'd like to enter that in as productive time to gather a more accurate picture.

My other lingering concerns are privacy, and support.

Privacy: You're sending some potentially pretty sensitive information up. They've got some mechanisms in place to limit what you send if you want. For example, they've got a web site whitelist so you can say "only send specifics from this set of websites" so you'd specify the top 20 or so websites you frequent, and everything else would be sent as generic web use. You can also easily turn off logging for a period of time, you can tell it to ignore certain data (which is claims to delete and ignore), and  finally if you have a panic attack, you can delete your account and all data, which presumably deletes it all from their servers.

However, even with all this, the privacy policy still feels a little weak. Essentially stating, "we'll never look at your data, unless we need to" [link]. Mint.com for example says something more like, "we won't ever look at your data, and couldn't if we wanted to" [link]. Obviously Mint.com deals with more sensitive data - but for many users, that doesn't matter.

Support: This is a pretty minor concern, but I'll mention that I ran into some odd logging times, sent an email to support, got an almost instant personal reply (under 1 min) with some information, and a request to send some debugging logging information to them, which I did, but I never heard back (it's been about a week now). It wasn't a critical issue, it's free software, and it actually seems to be behaving properly now (I may have just done something stupid) so I didn't push it.

How much does it cost?

Free for individuals, unlock some groupy/teamy goodness starting at $7.95/mo for the first 6 users, and $7.95/mo more per user after that.

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

ReviewBasics

October 16, 2007 in 4 out of 5 stars, Collaboration, Design, Free, Hosted software, Productivity, Project management

What is it?

ReviewBasics: Hosted software that allows you to submit, for review by others, a website, an image, a document (Word, PDF, Powerpoint), or a flash video. Others can add comments, drawings, emoticons, text, etc.

Who makes it?

SharpStyle Labs, Inc.

Why is it the killerest?

It's an impressive technical accomplishment. It's polished and easy to use.

Plus, it offers nice controls for the author: You can have comments visible just to the author, or to all reviewers. You can you write up a set of instructions for your reviewers. It offers a comments history. When done, you can filter all your stuff by date, by reviewer, and by files which have reviewer comments on them.

If you need to do asynchronous reviews, and/or if you have a geographically distributed team, this is a great resource.

What could be improved?

It feels a bit slow (which is probably because it's so rich, so that's forgivable).

If you want to submit a website for review, you can't do it as you are creating the workspace (like you can with everything else), you have to create the workspace, then dig around for it (they tell me this is going to be addressed soon).

How much does it cost?

Free

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas