BrainFuel

Over the course of the last year I’ve immersed myself in the world of startups. For years I’ve wanted to do a web application but I was always too busy. But that’s part of the lesson about startups. Despite how busy you are, you have to start.

My startup is called Minuteglass and it is quite simply a tool for tracking time. I’ve used or tried dozens of time tracking applications over the years and Minuteglass is our response to the question of “what could be better in time tracking.”

I’m so excited by time tracking that I started a blog devoted to the topic.

Currently Minuteglass is in private beta. We’ve released to a few select friends and as soon as we have our bug list whittled down we will be releasing to our 500+ person beta invite list. Right now we have 49 bugs / improvements we’re working on.

Most startup founders are programmers or business guys. I’m different in that I’m a user interface designer. While I’d love to be a developer I wouldn’t trade what I do for the ability to code. I love approaching the world from a design perspective.

In the coming months, I hope to share more about Minuteglass and the process I’ve gone through to get to this point (along with my excellent team).

I have been designing some of the payment and plan upgrade screens for our upcoming web application, and while doing a little bit of research I discovered something interesting.

Basecamp (above) does not charge incrementally. If you upgrade your plan a day after your billing cycle you’ll have an entire month at the previous rate.

FreshBooks (above) on the other hand charges you incrementally based on changes you make. So if you add extra staff to your plan for example, you’ll have to pay.

Both ways are fine, but it’s just an interesting thing to consider when you build your own web app.

Over the last couple of years I’ve become immersed in the world of startups. I’m not even sure exactly how this began. It might have been after reading the excellent book Founders At Work.

But I think I’ve had the bug from the start. The consulting business has been good to me, but at times I get frustrated by the very nature of consulting and how nothing you do has residual earnings potential.

With consulting, it unfortunately has to always be about the next project (and hopefully with existing clients, otherwise you have to find new customers). In our consulting business, we’ve managed to acquire 1.1 new client every month. Which is an amazing average (over 10 years).  Our business is going strong and we’ve had some time over the last year to focus on our own startup.

I’ve written about our startup before – it’s a new time tracking application. I wish I could share screenshots and specifics but I can’t until we launch (we’re still in development). We’re building Minuteglass in Ruby on Rails. It’s rather interesting and I like how it offers fast development (I’m more of a designer myself). We’re hosting all of our code on GitHub and we’re hosting our development server on Slicehost. I don’t know if that will be our final hosting company or not.

One of the best resources for new discussions and topics surrounding startups is Hacker News from Y Combinator. It used to be a site called Startup News which frankly was a better name. The site focuses on web startups.

A new networking group has formed in Phoenix called OpenCoffee Club. The idea behind OpenCoffee Club is that entrepreneurs and investors meet on a regular basis over coffee just to connect and talk about share about their startups. I’m really excited about the group and have already met some cool people (and even done some business with Flatterline, the company that is organizing the events!). I think it’s a fabulous beginning to more frequent and interesting discussions in Phoenix about startups.

Anyways, I haven’t been blogging much because I’ve been so busy working on client projects, building Minuteglass, and working on my house (check out this video of my home office!). I’m hoping to start blogging more regularily again.

In case you aren’t aware, we’re building a time tracking tool and actively developing it right now. It’s called Minuteglass and you can sign up for beta at Minuteglass.com.

Alongside of main application, we are now working on a desktop widget for Minuteglass! It is being developed in Adobe AIR and we’re pretty excited about the prospects. We designed everything in Photoshop first to get a feel for how it would work.

We’re realizing quickly that the widget will be a major part of our application’s success. Because it’s in Adobe AIR, we will be able to roll it out on all the major platforms and at the same time.

Screenshot: Widget sign in page.

As we get closer to launching Minuteglass we’ll show you the rest of the widget. It has two major features: a stopwatch mode and a manual time entry mode. But you’ll always be able to use the web based tools as well.

Feature Lockdown

For about 6 months now we’ve been in a bit of a “feature lockdown” meaning no new feature is added if we think it will take an extra day of work. This allows us to concentrate on launching our product, and keeping our code debt to a minimum.

In the world of web startups they say “launch early” for a reason. The longer you work on your application the more details and ideas you have. Before you know it your simple idea has turned into the next bloated version of Windows.

We’ve recently picked up a lot of development momentum (5 people now working on it). We don’t have a launch date yet, but we’re really excited about our progress.

As many of you know, I built a web-based CMS. While my product is aimed mostly at people with an existing site, I recently did some research on web-based site builders, aimed at new sites, and wanted to share my findings with the Brainfuel faithful. I found 4 products and they all look great, especially for those occasions when you need to whip a site up quickly.

1) Squarespace
Squarespace
This is my favorite of the bunch. It’s not free. Pricing starts at $8 per month. That’s what a lot of us pay for shared hosting, so it’s pretty reasonable. This system is very user friendly and the menus and dialogs are very Applesque. One of their claims to fame is that Kevin Rose uses it. They also feature some really nice designs.

2) Brightegg

Brightegg is also a paid service (they do offer a free package) with pricing starting at $19 per month. If you happen to be a designer, they have a program where you can make money by submitting your designs. Another great thing about Brightegg is that they have a private label service.

3) Weebly

This site builder is totally free and features some nice designs. They offer a developer API that allows some extended functionality.

4) Synthasite

Finally we have Synthasite, a completely free site builder that offers (like the others) a design, hosting, and custom domains (custom domains cost money).

These are all great products and for canned websites, they have some very impressive designs and features. For free or for the cost of hosting, you can slap nice site together in minutes.

I just discovered Common Craft. It’s a great educational resource for all sorts of things (Chris posted a video by them a while back: here). They produce short videos that explain things to people like Twitter, or how to use LinkedIn, all in ultra-basic paper style. So now, the next time you have to explain what Twitter is, you can point that person to Common Craft. They cover a wide variety of topics too like Zombies (see below…no, really, you gotta see it).

Zombies in Plain English

Social Networking in Plain English

Twitter in Plain English

Wikis in Plain English

Recently I was doing some work with logos (business cards, desktop backgrounds, etc) for my product. As I was working away, I would periodically save the files to my DropBox. For those who aren’t familiar with Dropbox, it’s an online storage/syncing utility that will make your life much easier (you can thank me later).

You see, I’ve been saving files to my DropBox for a few months now. It’s become such and integral part of my daily computing experience that I don’t think about it. The reason I don’t think about it is because it’s a trouble-free product and the experience is totally natural.

I think this is probably the high-point of any product or service; the ultimate benchmark for quality and usefulness. When something is so good you totally take it for granted an forget about it. That’s when something is truly valuable.

Another example of this phenomena is with my hosting company. I really put a lot of time into researching what host to use for my product, but no matter how great the deals were at competitors, no matter how good the reviews where, I still had to deal with a nagging truth in the back of my mind. I have never had to think about my current host. I don’t think about them because they are so good that I forget about them. Because of that, I stuck with them and I’m glad I did.

I’m not sure what this means, but it seams like there’s a pattern here. While not every product is best forgotten, there are some things in life you just don’t want to think about (like web hosts and file syncing) and when you don’t have to think about them, you probably found a good one. What do you think?

  
As some of you may know, I launched a new, simple cms system yesterday called Clover Content. I thought you might be interested in understanding why I spent the last year developing yet another cms.

There’s a real problem with content management systems. I’m not talking about the big enterprise platforms. I’m talking about the basic content management software that simple web sites need and use. They often do too much. That’s right. Modern content management software does too much.

For example, I have a friend with a pretty average technical acumen. This friend needed a simple website for an organization that he had started and I, being a web nerd, decided to help him set up a site. So we did the usual. I went to Godaddy and bought a suitable domain along with a basic Linux hosting account, while he stared over my shoulder in wonder. I found a template for his site and we paid a fair price for a nice pre-made design. So the next step was to get him up and running with a cms so he could manage all of his content without needing any further assistance from me.

My first instinct was to go with Drupal. I have tooled around with Drupal in the past and it has a good reputation among the web-savvy. So I installed Drupal, started configuring the site and I soon realized, this is way more functionality and configuration than my friend needs. Not to mention, it’s way more than he can handle. A little time with Joomla presented the same dilemma. These systems have too much complexity; too much functionality; too much configuration. Not only that, but working with the template frameworks of these systems was going to be a nightmare. Remember, I already spent some money on a pre-made template for this site. I was going to have to make the template fit the cms. Not fun.

So, with all these issues before me, I realized why so many developers end up rolling their own cms system. It’s because what’s out there is more than a simple site needs. A simple website needs a simple cms. Don’t get me wrong, Drupal, Joomla, Worpress and the like are all great systems and they have their markets, but often they are more complex than necessary for small sites. Another major issue with the standard content management system is the need to have a database running on your server and the need to install software. It’s always a problem to have to patch your cms because of some update, or deal with setting up a database to run your cms.

Just like software is moving more and more from the desktop to the cloud, it seems advantageous that server based systems might do the same. Instead of installing 10 versions of Wordpress on the sites of 10 of your clients, on 10 different servers (all separate, all requiring maintenance), why not host your content in a central location? This way all of your client’s content is in one place and there are no software installations or databases to maintain. Centralizing content makes good sense. Using a CMS as a services makes good sense.

I realize there are lots (thousands) of content management systems out there and there’s no one system that’s right for everyone, but I think that Clover Content is right for most small sites and for people who manage a lot of sites for clients. Anyway, that’s why I boostrapped this startup and entered the arena. Let me know what you think.