We recently added the Google Website Optimizer to LessAccounting.com. My first test was to see if reversing the layout would effect the sign-up percentage.

Conversion Results

With the design below were receiving 10% of our traffic to sign-up with a trial account.




With the design below were receiving 12% of our traffic to sign-up with a trial account.

How Google Website Optimizer Works

The optimizer works by adding pages to test and then having a goal page to mark the "conversion". We had two pages and the goal page was the sign-up page.

My Theory

The buttons are the left are "easier" (less cursor distance) than having them on the right. There is less chance the visitor will scroll past them. A jump from 10% to 12% is huge in my book. I highly recommend using the optimizer, I'll continue to test the brochure portion of the app in various ways.

In case you haven’t heard RailsConf Europe is happening after all, just not by O’Reilly. In all fairness, since O’Reilly owns that name, it’s not actually RailsConf, but the premier European Rail conference is happening at the end of this month in Berlin. The RailsWayCon is happening May 25 – 27 and is featuring some of the brightest in the Rails community.

Besides myself, Yehuda Katz, Ola Bini, Michael Koziarski, Jonathan Weiss, Thomas Fuchs, Amy Hoy, Neal Ford, Michael Johann, Lourens Naudé, Mathias Meyer, Stefan Tilkov, Heiko Webers and others will be speaking. If you’re going to be in Europe and want to have the Rails Conf experience, here it is.

If you register you’ll have the opportunity to hang out and schmooze with all of us. Don’t be shy, come up to us, say hi and we’ll talk and have drinks.

I’ll be in Berlin for that whole week and am firming up plans to be in Budapest for a few days early the following week to do a day of Ruby/Rails tutorials, so please reach out to me if you want to hang out.

See you there!

Be cautious when hiring a firm that charges by the hour (time and materials) rather than a fixed price. It is too easy to lose track of the budget and wind up paying A LOT more than the original estimate. Even the best firms, with the best intentions, can run into situations where things take longer than anticipated. There is no way around that risk if you are paying hourly. We have seen many projects come to us where the previous developers have used more money than they originally estimated to produce less functionality. Often, hourly goes so far over budget because it is too easy for the developer to say “we’re almost done” and be in that almost done phase for a long time. A good, trusting client will believe that for a long time, in for a penny in for a pound.

At Less we only charge hourly when we are taking over a project that someone else has started. For all new development we charge a fixed price. We have never gone over budget when the scope of the project has remained the same. Never. Not once. One way we achieve this is by breaking down large projects into two week iterations and having a fixed price on each iteration. Sometimes we’ll plan several iterations and price each one, changing the scope of each as needed when we get there. This way the client always knows where they are at and can plan their budget. After any iteration, the client can reassess our performance and decide to stick with us or walk away. By lowering project risk in this way, we build strong, trusting relationships with clients and have a much higher likelihood of project success.

I purchased Apple TV about a month ago. I have two laptops at home plus an Apple Time Capsule for my router/backup drive. We've been using AppleTV for it's intended use, purchasing media from iTunes and watching home movies. My first issue, media files cannot be just dropped onto the Apple TV hard drive. You have to network the devices together. You can network your computer's iTunes media files to your Apple TV two ways 1) Sync 2) Streamed

1) Sync does just that, it syncs the laptop to the Apple TV. So all the media purchase thru AppleTV would be synced and download to your linked device. Personally I would have 30gb of Barney episodes on my computer. This would quickly fill up my hard drive.

2) Streamed allows my AppleTV to see my iTunes libraries and play media from it. My current setup is to add an extra library to my laptop's iTunes, link the library to the home movies on the time capsule where my home movies are. Then I set Apple TV to link share my iTunes. This suck because if I am gone with my laptop you can't watch the movies on my time capsule. Kinda a bad workaround, which Apple doesn't recommend.

Now to the really sucky part

I have 160gb of space on Apple TV, not enough HD for a serious film geek.
I have about $400 worth of iTunes shows and movies on my AppleTV. The unit recently froze up. I called Apple Tech support and they instructed me to do a factory reset. This erased all my media that I purchased. It's Apple policy not to allow you to download the media again for free. What? Yes if you lose your media you can't redownload it. After me yelling for about 2 minutes they said okay and allowed me to redownload them. They insist that syncing your computer to your AppleTV is the proper solution. This doesn't seem to be a great solution because most people don't want a computer filled with their AppleTV media.

Here's what I want.

I want to drag home movies onto the Apple TV from my computer. Just like it's a mounted external hard drive.
I want to be able to plug an external HD into the back of the Apple TV and have it backup or use the drive as extra storage.
I want to be able drag a movie from AppleTV to my iPhone.

I've owned over 15 Apple products and always been overly impressed with them. Apple TV is cool, we've been renting tons of movies and enjoying the quality, but damn it, it seems Apple delivered a half ass product this time.

Here is a little graph I made up to show the rate of adoption of new paying users in Less Accounting. The numbers have been removed because I just want to show the growth curve. The chart shows the total number of paying users for every day.

We know someone who charges $1000 for a four hour review of your website. He’ll look, take screen grabs and have a conversation about your site, giving feedback and recommendations.

Here are my questions for you:

1. Is $1000 worth 4 hours to you?
2. Who would be your first choice to review your site?

We tweeted about this, but forgot to mention it here on the blog. About a week ago Allan was interviewed for Startup Stories. We really liked the way the article turned out. Allan talks about our philosophy and some of the keys to our success.

When running a business, especially a startup, one of the greatest challenges is simply how to manage all of the stress so you don’t ruin your life. The stresses of running a business are tremendous. In addition to all the stresses every working person (yes, stay at home moms count here too, that is a tough job) face, there are additional stresses like:

• Meeting payroll.
• Keeping clients happy.
• Keeping users happy.
• Making sure there is enough new work in the pipeline to keep paying the bills.
• Payroll taxes.
• More emails than anyone can reasonably handle.
• Finding new employees.
• Firing employees.
• Keeping employees motivated (hopefully happy).
• Keeping business partners motivated and happy.
• Making a profit.
• Getting everything done.

I’m sure you have your own list.

Managing that stress is one of the most important skills for any person to learn. Sometimes a person can get so stressed out that (s)he doesn’t even know how stressed (s)he is and needs a friend to point it out to them.

Here are some things one can do to relieve stress. Not everything on this list will work for everyone, but here are some things we try to do (having a business partner is great, by the way):

• Talk things out.
• Help each other see the big picture.
• Help each other see which things don’t matter and can be dropped.
• Go for a twenty minute walk.
• Take the night off, or a day off.
• Actually stop to smell the roses (for me it’s looking at the clouds).
• Exercise.
• When you see your kids do something really cute, take an extra moment of pause to reflect on the wonder of the moment, your love for your child and how these are the moments in life that really matter. Try to burn it into your memory.
• Jump in the pool.
• Close the computer for a few minutes and rest your eyes.
• Take a few really deep, slow breaths, focusing on your breathing.
• Meditate.
• Close the door and scream for a few moments.
• Close IM, twitter and email for a day or a few hours so you can focus.
• Take empty beer bottles and go throw them off of a dam or in your fireplace.
• Craft a really funny tweet.
• Go buy something nice for yourself.
• Have a drink.
• See a shrink.
• Build and launch something small but satisfying with no profit or business motive.
• Paint something.
• Take a nap or go to bed early.

What’s your favorite way to deal with stress?

Tweetie, an osx twitter app, is a good app that could be great with a few changes.



I'm expecting a comment from @timchilcott who is Tweetie's #1 fan.

billFLO is a new desktop application which aims at changing the way you send and receive bills. It is not an accounting application, but it does integrate with your favorite accounting application, Less Accounting. When you send an invoice with billFLO it is automatically recorded in Less Accounting. When you receive an invoice it is automatically recorded in Less Accounting.

Download the buyer version and the seller version.

I want to congratulate Ian Sweeney and the whole billFLO team on launching this awesome product!

In a recent blog post @johnflurry says to use a filter on twitter and ask yourself 3 things before posting. He even admits he uses it too much causing him not to tweet certain things. John's blog post

Social marketers rely on numbers, number of followers, number of comments, number of unique visitors. They can't offend, they can't lose any of their hard earned numbers. Everyone has a filter, you shouldn't kick puppies and trip old ladies (unless they deserve it). But constantly thinking, "oh my, will this tweet upset my followers" is total bullshit. Yes it's fucking bullshit. See how I made that extra offensive to prove my point? Did you stop reading it? Probably not, the ones that did stop reading, thank you for leaving, I cannot handle the pressure of living up to your expectation. I am relieved to have weeded you out, worthless, piece of garbage that your mother wishes she had never shit out while squatting in some humid, grassy rice paddy in Minnesota. But since you read that, obviously it doesn't refer to you.

Those of you still here, pat yourself on the back you're not a douchebag. I lose Twitter followers all the time; personally I don't care. I am more worried about being lame than being offensive, but that's just me. Be yourself, if you're a mild mannered dude, be it. If you're a loud mouth jerk, be a jerk. Be yourself, be real and don't suck, most people suck.

Everyone is on a budget, but beware of the customer that picks you JUST because you're cheaper than another company. Most of these customers are quick to leave, quick to complain and rarely the happy. If your service is a great deal be prepared to do volume, which will weaken your ability to bring service to the table. The good news is there are few people looking for a great deal. What? Yes, do you buy generic cereals? Probably not. Most people will spend a few dollars more for a better product or service. When all products/services seem to be on a level playing field, the potential customer will pick the cheapest price. Can't position yourself as the value proposition? Perhaps it's time to find a new playing field.

Newsflash: our economy is tanking, what are you selling? Are you providing a great deal or a value?

The separation of deal and value is growing further apart. There are more self-checkout lanes and more self-help tech support applications; cutting the overhead allows these business to cut their price, giving you a great deal. On the flip side some companies are looking to provide more value and more service to separate them from the "middle." Many car washes are adding wifi, barber shops and playgrounds for the customers' children.

Most businesses are in the middle and no one talks about them. That gas station who's prices are "average," that Applebee's that no one really enjoys eating at, they're stuck in the middle. If you want people to talk about your business offer them either an awesome value or give them a great deal.

Being able to go on Apple.com and get tech support in one minute with a human that knows what they're talking about, while this might cost $50, is a great value to me. The gas station where I can buy gas for five cents cheaper per gallon but I wouldn't step foot in the bathroom is a great deal. Both of these businesses are successful, they both know what they're selling.

Here's my latest idea for an iPhone app.

My Problem

I have alot of movies on my computer purchased from itunes (i just bought Apple TV too).
I own an iPhone.
Sometimes when I go to a friend's house and I'm like "we should watch this movie I just got, but we can't cause it's on my computer which is at home". *false statement I have no friends.

My Idea

I would like to put a movie on my iphone from iTunes.
Then go to my friend's house and connect to his wifi.
Then stream movies from my phone to his Apple TV or iTunes via the wifi connection.

Please build my idea, take it, make some money, I want to be your first user.