Ok, so we’ve been talking about our huge billing project for months. We’ve been trying to think of any scenario and corner case that might happen as we ask for customer’s money, because we want to eliminate any potential confusion. So……

Billing Launched!

For any startup, the ability to bill a customer is a huge milestone. Anyone can offer a great product for free, but will users pull out their credit card to get access to more features & functionality? We’re sure going to find out.

We feel that our free Tall pricing plan is great for many small businesses and non-profits who need a quick data fix. For more advanced users and maybe larger small businesses that may need more bells and whistles, we offer the Grande Plan (virtual branding hat-tip to Starbucks) which gives a growing business more dashboards and more insights they can track. Hey, we feel that the more access to actionable data, the more you should be growing right? Let’s all share the wealth!

A big up to Josh for PM-ing the crap outta this project, and to Andrew and James for their awesome ability to think through all things billing and then code this stuff. And to Alf for getting ready to answer the myriad of questions that may arise, as well as making the site understandable (huge user interface stuff going on here). Everyone had input on how to price our offerings, and we went back and forth as you might imagine.

We’re starting to think about how referrals are handled from a billing and payment perspective so stay tuned on that. We’ve had lots of interest in this area.

What else did we do? GetResponse email marketing dashboards launched to round out SEVEN email marketing providers.

Marketing - READ THIS!

As you know Janine Popick came on as CMO, happy to have her! Check out her article: 5 Reasons I Decided to Dive Into a Startup on Inc.com. It’s pretty cool.

Check this out: this past week we were lucky enough to get an article written by @SteveStrauss CEO of @TheSelfEmployed. He mentioned us in his USA Today small business column. That’s great.

And it gets better…

What was weird was a few days later we got a huge spike in Google organic search traffic. Weird because we weren’t spiking for any of our keywords. Sooooooo….

Here’s what we found: our own Jenny’s husband Arthur, was on an elevator here in San Francisco and saw Steve’s mention of us running on Captivate, those TV screens that hold your attention in elevators. It was on the screen for 2 minutes at a time over the course of three days and we GOT FLOODED with users. Whoa. People took pictures or remembered and searched for us on Google and signed up. Incredible!

One more thing, we have a listing on GetApp and we need reviews, can you give us one? It won’t take long, promise!

Board Meeting

I’ve got my monthly board meeting this Thursday, and it won’t be BORING. I’ve been getting slides ready for that one since it’s been 6 weeks since our last one. For a change we’ll be having it in a hotel lobby that doesn’t get used. We’ll see how that goes.

Side Note - One of the Coolest Tools Ever

Alf found GifGrabber which is a FREE way to make a video (no sound) that replays. It takes about 20 seconds to understand and create a video. So you’ll see these gifs of how-tos in our help. Awesome, thanks Alf!

Platform First

Not to geek out here but James and team are building out a pretty significant part of Dasheroo, our Developer Console. This is “the app that builds our app integrations and insights” so to speak. What’s very cool about this is that if a business doesn’t see an app they want to make a dashboard of, they can build it themselves (or get a developer to do so.) Point is, the team has done a lot of work behind the scenes to get this up and running and we got an awesome demo of it this week. More on that as we plan to launch, but we’ve had a plethora of inquiries about this from various business that want access to our API. It’s coming.

Whew, more next week, check out my Startup Lessons Learned if you’re up for it!

John at Dasheroo.