InvoiceMore, the startup I have been working on in my spare time for over 7 months, has finally launched. This post actually comes a bit late to the party, because I actually launched InvoiceMore at OpenBeta on March 12, 2009 and blogged about it on the Actridge blog that day. I haven’t even had time to think about sitting down to write this post on my personal blog about the launch until now. That’s a testament to how crazy busy my life has been since I decided to pour all my spare time into starting a business. So what is InvoiceMore, and how is it different?

InvoiceMore is an online billing and invoicing application aimed at freelancers and small businesses. It basically provides a super-simple web interface for creating and sending invoices to clients and recording payments for them. You can email and generate PDF invoices, print and snail mail them, and just keep track of your clients and their payments in a really easy and intuitive way. It was created based on my experience from a different billing application I created to fill my own client billing needs for freelance and contract work.

Differentiation

A lot of people ask me why I made InvoiceMore, and how it will be any different from what’s already out there on the market. If you’ve ever used an online billing application, or currently are using one, InvoiceMore works much the same way, with one major exception: Recurring billing. All of the online web-based billing applications I have come across so far do recurring billing the same way: a “recurring invoice template” that has a recurring interval set on it, like “1 month” or “2 weeks”. The problem is, if you have a client with multiple recurring services at different intervals, you have to setup multiple recurring invoice templates, and your client ends up getting more than one invoice per month at least a few months of the year.

Clients don’t ask for recurring Invoices. They ask for recurring products and services. An invoice is the natural end result of the products and services they buy. Competing billing applications make you create and setup what should be the end result: the Invoice. So to solve this problem, I built recurring billing in InvoiceMore in what I believe is a much more natural way: the products and services themselves. So with InvoiceMore, you associate products and services with clients and pick a recurring interval for that association. Then every billing cycle, invoices are automatically generated for that client from the recurring products and services that are due sometime within that billing period. You end up with a single invoice with everything due on it instead of multiple “recurring invoice templates” that are generated and sent independently.

So if you’re interested in learning more, you can try InvoiceMore out for free, or just read the information on the website. Let me know what you think in the comments here, or on the official UserVoice page for feedback and ideas.

The dashboard is the place for the most important things to be.  it should be the single place you can view to and get an overview of all the most important things about your website regarding your visitors without having to drill deeper or go through multiple pages or sub-sections.  But the default dashboard Analytics starts you off with is all wrong, and is almost never the information I really want to see.  Let’s see how we can fix this.

The Default Dashboard

Google Analytics Default Dashboard Setup

The first thing to note here is the repetitive information.  The “Visitors Overview” widget is the first thing you want to get rid of.  The exact same information is displayed larger above – no use in repeating the same information twice in the same screen area.  To the right of that is the “Map Overlay” widget.  While this information may be neat to see, it’s not really the real information you need day to day.  That one’s leaving our dashboard too.  So that leaves the two bottom widgets – “Traffic Sources Overview” and “Content Overview”.  These both can stay, but perhaps can be arranged a bit differently.

The Information You Need

For most webmasters, there are essentially two important questions: “How are visitors getting to my website?” and “What are visitors doing on my website?“.  The widgets we select for our dashboard must help us quickly answer those every day questions without having to drill any deeper or take any more of our time.  We also need only the information that isn’t already present on the dashboard that we can’t edit.

A More Useful Dashboard

Google Analytics Customized Dashboard

With a customized dashboard, we can now have the information we really need on a daily basis that help us answer our every day questions:

How are visitors getting to my website?
I can clearly see here that the dominant source is Google searches, followed by direct type-ins and the typo domain that redirects to the real site.  I can also see the top search keywords that visitors used to reach my website, which is very useful for measuring SEO effectiveness.

Another dashboard widget I like to have to help answer this question is the “Referring Sites” widget.  This tells me the actual websites referring visitors to me through links.  This is especially helpful if the site gets mentioned in a blog post or article so you can know about it quickly.

If you run any Google Adwords campaigns, there is also an Adwords section and a dashboard widget for campaign clickthroughs and conversions that may be helpful.

What are visitors doing on my website?
This question may take a bit more analysis to answer because there are many parts to this.  The “Content Overview” widget helps us spot the most popular pages and areas of the website, which helps us solve most of this question.

Taking the analysis further, you may want to setup conversion goals and add a dashboard widget to display the number of daily goal conversions.  You can also add widgets for the entrance and exit pages, among many other things.

Conclusion

Most of the time for most of my websites, I have only the widgets above shown on the customized dashboard image above.  The great thing about Google Analytics is that it can be customized with any widgets you want to display.  So although the default widgets are not particularly useful on a day to day basis, they can easily be replaced with widgets containing information that is useful.

One more final thing about Google Anlytics is that the date range can be customized as well.  In the screenshots above, stats for the whole month are displayed.  If you have a larger website, you may want to customize the date range to a week or even a single day to get a better understanding of what’s going on most recently.  The drawback of course, as anyone that uses Google Analytics knows, is that the stats aren’t live or real-time.  There is a 24-hour delay because all the stats are compiled and processed at the end of each day.  I’m not going to complain about it because the product is free, but just remember that if you do choose to view a single day, you will have to select the previous day instead of the current one.

Just when I was seriously considering spending some of my own hard-earned cash on a logo by a professional, holding a design contest, or taking on a design partner, I instead took about 3.5 hours out of my lazy Saturday afternoon football watching to attempt to make a logo for my app on my own.  I had the basic idea in my head of what I wanted it to look like, but I know that most of the time what I picture in my head and the end result rarely look even close to the same when I am the designer.  Sometimes that’s okay.  The end result logo (pictured) actually ended up looking very much like I had pictured in my head, and (at least in my opinion) looks great.

So with a few hours on a Saturday afternoon doing it myself first, I managed to save myself at least $300 and a few days waiting for the end result.  Moral of the story: Always do it yourself first!

Procedural to Object-Oriented: The Benefits of Using Object-Oriented PHP

Learn the power of object-oriented programming in PHP5 and the many benefits it offers over the more traditional PHP procedural programming style.  This session will include a light introduction to object-oriented concepts and will provide real-world concrete examples of the benefits it can offer you and the PHP projects you work on.

I will be speaking on October 9th at 2:30pm, and the presentation will last for roughly 75 minutes (60 minutes to speak, and 15 minutes for Q&A).  That’s a good chunk of time to fill, but there’s a lot on this topic that will need to be covered.  If you’re thinking about getting into object-oriented PHP programing or would like to learn more about it, please attend.  I will try my best to make sure there is at least something that everyone can learn.

You can also view my page on the conference website to read a short biography and get more information on the event.  Hope to see at least a few friendly faces there!

P.S. – I plan on posting my presentation slides on this website after the event just in case anyone missed anything important or was unable to attend.

UPDATE: The conference is over, and I have posted the powerpoint slides in another post for those that are interested in the presentations I made.

The name is not very corporate. It reminded me of what I’m having for Thanksgiving. Maybe you could use a Yam for a logo.

And during the presentation of FootNote, a sort of social network for remembering the lives of the deceased, panelist Jeff Weiner made the comment:

I don’t know if anyone wants to be remembered as a footnote.

But you have to ask yourself – does the name really matter?  Would Google or Yahoo! really have been any more successful if they had launched with the name “Web Search” instead?  Do you even know anyone who has ever been to the domain search.com?  I can’t think of even one instance where I would type in the domain name of the service I want instead of a memorized company name that’s offering the service.  Do you go to pizza.com to find pizza in your area, or go to a useful service you know instead, like Google Maps or Yellowpages?

These panelists seem like they’re the type that would have also recommend that Flickr, now one of the most popular photo sharing sites in the world, change it’s name to something like “Photo Sharing” instead while it too was in the early startup stages.  The idea that a more generic name can have any kind of profound impact on your startup is preposterous.  The name or domain name of your business or startup generally doesn’t matter.  The only cases I can think of where changing the company name would really matter is if the original name was offensive or incredibly hard for the average person to spell.

So in short, no – the name of your company or the domain name you choose to launch your products and/or services on doesn’t really matter at all.  And the puzzling part about all of this is that you would think that Venture Capitalists and other investors in startups would understand this concept most.  If your product and/or service is good, people will flock to it, no matter the name.