Beta Program helps you understand how to make the Web work for your business. Use commonly available Web sites and services to run most aspects of your business – acquire customers faster, run business operations efficiently, reduce costs, create a well-known brand, and build a better experience for your customers online. In software tech lingo, a “beta program” is a controlled experiment to get feedback on a product before it’s ready for the market. Here, we use and test Web services – software you rent and use on-demand, not buy and install on your computers – that helps you run your business, and then recommend which software you you should use, and how you should use it. If you run, manage, or simply work at a business and want to harness the best practices of Silicon Valley’s Web companies, you’ve come to the right place.
With Customers, Question Everything
March 12, 2013 — Vik ChaudharyThere’s the old adage that “The Customer is Always Right”. If you run a company, a division, or manage a product for your company, I would recommend updating this truism to first start with “The Customer Believes They Are Always Right”, and it’s important to really listen to them, so you understand why they feel this way. It starts with understanding their frame of reference, and for that topic, I recommend Tony Robbin’s post on LinkedIn.
To fully understand your prospect or customer’s point of view, start with getting really deep insights into their needs. Today I read an excellent post by Duct Tape Marketing on how to ask the right questions of your customer or prospect. You can read it at Why Good Questions Always Trump Even Your Best Answers. Try these with your customers, and you will be amazed at the insights you learn. It will help you sell better, to build better products or deliver a better service.
Can we get specific? – to sharpen the focus on a specific topic.
Is that a question? What does that mean? – If the conversation is rambling, or you want to get more specific.
Why is that a problem? – to discover what pain they have, and understand how you can solve it.
How do you measure success? – If you can help them improve this measure, they will want to work with you.
What would you do if this were solved? – You solve their problems, but find out what they want to do.
What do you enjoy most about your business? – Helps you understand what drives them, personally.
What would 10 times look like? Google always thinks about improving the status quo by 10 times.
Why is now the right time? – Tells you if there’s budget towards fixing a problem.
Ask the right questions every time you speak with a customer or a prospect - read the full article here.
Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who’s The Fastest Web Host Of Them All?
March 6, 2013 — Vik Chaudhary
Every business needs a website fast website. If you’re like most small business website CEOs, you have outsourced the decision on how your website is hosted. “Ah, the tech guys at the agency I hired to build the website decide that, I don’t really spend time on stuff like that”. Oh, but you should. The infrastructure behind your website – i.e., the data center, power, computers, software, and people that make it possible for your website to run – can make your business hum online, or jitter uncontrollably.
The Web host – a company whose job it is to run your website software – provides a “hosting” service to you. Hosting is like dialtone – when you purchased phones for yourself and your employees, you probably had some say in whether it was AT&T or Verizon. You made the decision based on reliability, price and options like making conference calls. This article is about choosing a host that ensures that your website is F-A-S-T! According to Econsultancy, a market research firm that looks at digital marketing, 67% of consumers cite slow websites as the reason they abandon those sites. According to a New York Times article on website speed, “Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to respond to a click on a Web site or a tap on a keyboard? These days, even 400 milliseconds — literally the blink of an eye — is too long, as Google engineers have discovered. That barely perceptible delay causes people to search less.”
Keynote, a company that monitors the speed of websites using a cloud of computers and mobile phones, has tools to help you measure your website’s speed, and make the right decisions about hosting. Companies like Yottaa also provide a free service to help you keep an eye on your website, and Google engineers have built a free service called WebPageTest to help you measure your website speed. We used Keynote to test the speed of the exact same food website, hosted on two different Web hosting companies’ servers – Bluehost and Linode. Bluehost charges a paltry $6.99/mo to host your websites, and this cheap price means that your site shares the same computer as thousands of other sites. This means traffic to your site can affect other sites, or vice versa, causing frequent congestions. What this means is that your site begins to appear sluggish. To be fair to Bluehost, they have great customer service, and it is rare to have your site completely offline. Linode plans begin at $19.99/mo, and uses a more advanced technique called virtual private servers, essentially a “sandbox” that separates your websites from that of other websites running in the datacenter. We tested the exact same website – one that was written in HTML, JavaScript, PHP and uses Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (what developers call the “LAMP stack”) by hosting them on Bluehost and Linode. Early results show a dramatic increase in website speed, as the graph from Keynote below shows. The top graph line shows that the website takes between 2-4 seconds to load when hosted on Bluehost, and between 1-2 seconds when hosted on Linode.
Your website is significantly faster on Linode than Bluehost (source: Keynote Systems)
This was all the proof we needed to know that Linode was a much better choice for a small business website (one where you want to spend less than $100-200/mo in hosting costs) than Bluehost. Note, however, that Bluehost takes on much of the technical configuration issues, and their customer service is superb, which means that you will spend less on having your outsourced IT staffer debug technical problems. Linode essentially gives you an empty box, and you have to, as their tech support person said to me, “configure every little thing to make it work”. And if there’s a technical problem, you will need to get an IT person involved. For instance, this website’s order cart refused to function, and it took an entire day of tinkering and then posting on Linode’s community forum, before we were able to discover and fix the problem. Time is money, so be prepared to have a top technical person on your team, or available on call, if you host with Linode.
At the end of the day, though, you should make the decision based on who is the most reliable and fast Web hosting company, because your customers who visit your website are the ones that matter. Having a fast website makes a real difference to your business, as it improves the perception of your brand, makes visitors breeze through the pages, and causes them to do business with you, online or offline. Choose the Web hosting company with the fastest site speed characteristics – this is dialtone for the Internet age. In a later update to this post, I hope to be able to compare many different hosting companies and give you some guidance on which one is the fastest Web host of them all. That’s for another time, but for now, Linode is a winner.
Test Your Website Using Cloud Testing From CrossBrowserTesting.com
April 29, 2012 — Vik Chaudhary
If you run any business today, chances are that you have a website that helps you bring in customers. Creating a great experience for your website visitors – your customers – is both an art and science that you usually leave to the experts. Unless you are an trained web designer and programmer, you want to give the task of building your business’ website to people you hire. In this post, I highlight an excellent tool that gives you, the business manager, the ability to direct your website designers just so, so you can have them build a great website. This is a Cloud service called CrossBrowserTesting and it helps you understand how your website operates for users on computers, smartphones and tablets.
When you hire home construction experts, you need to hire or yourslef play the role of the general contractor. The general contractor – in addition to finding the right professionals and overseeing the project – ultimately is the assessor of quality. The general contractor ensures that what’s being built works for the many people who will visit the home – you and your family who use it daily, your friends when they come to visit you briefly, or family who stay longer. Sometimes this simply means looking at the proposed design through the eyes of the people who will use the home – and making adjustments to make their experience better. In the kitchen, for instance, the general contractor might observe that not just adults use the amenities, but also kids who enter it to forage for snacks. For example, lowering the shelves in the kitchen just a little can make a big difference to their experience.
It is the same with your website – you can play the role of the general contractor to ensure that the site is being built so that its visitors have a great experience. When designing your website, a question you must ask your website designers is: will the site work acceptably for visitors using different web browsers, mobile phones and tablets? Let me give you a real world example. A local San Francisco foodery, Indian Bento, just redesigned its website after a year so that it was more usable on smartphones and a variety of different computers. When you look at the website before and after screenshots on a typical web browser, the results look pretty good:
The good news is that the Indian Bento website works well on most web browsers, or at least the popular browsers – Internet Explorer on Windows 7 PCs, in this case. However, the Internet Explorer, or IE, browser has a worldwide share of about 50%. The other half use browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or the browsers on the iPhone or popular smartphones. That means that half your website visitors may be arriving on one of the other browsers.
So how well does your site work on other popular browsers? For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, Firefox is commonly used by the technology crowd, and around the world, the Google Chrome browser is rapidly gaining in popularity. Also, it should be no surprise that, with more people owning smartphones like the iPhone, Samsung, or even the latest Nokia phone, website visitors fire up the browser that’s on their mobile phone and visit your website. This is where CrossBrowserTesting comes in – it helps you understand the consistency of experience of users on popular browsers and mobile phones.
We tested the same website, above, to see how it works for users using a smartphone (an Android phone, not an iPhone, in this case), an iPad, and using a PC running Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. Here are the abridged results from CrossBrowserTesting:
The same website on an Android phone, the Apple iPad, IE7, and IE6.
While the Indian Bento website looks good on an Android smartphone and on the iPad (the first two screenshots on the left), the site looks definitely inconsistent, even broken, on older Internet Explorer browsers (see the screenshots on the right). Those browsers are older versions of Internet Explorer – versions 6 and 7. The latest version of Internet Explorer is version 9, IE9, but large segments of the population are using older browsers like IE6 and IE7. One reason is that people are not necessarily upgrading their Windows PCs or laptops to the latest version of Windows, Windows 7, which is required if you want to use IE9. And of course, if you have visitors from parts of the country or world where computer replacement happens at a slower pace, older PCs, and therefore, older browsers, will proliferate.
Once you have determined that there’s a problem on a particular browser, your website designers can do a deep diagnostic. For example, they can fire up the IE6 browser on Windows XP running Service Pack 2, and see if they can replicate a problem. This will help your designers fix these problems, and ultimately result in a better experience for all users.
CrossBrowserTesting is a remarkably easy service for non-technical users. You can sign up for a plan that starts at $29.95/mo that allows you to test your website on dozens of browsers:
CrossBrowserTest tests websites on iPhone, Android, iPad, Windows and Mac browsers.
Not every business owner needs to have a monthly plan to test a website, so there are other options you can look into. Browsera has a free service and a $39 plan for 14 days, for instance, Mogotest is $35/mo, and Browsershots.org is free. Use a service that fits your budget and skills – some of the services can be harder to use than others. And like me, if your time is money and better spent in other areas of your business, having a reliable, fast, and easy to use browser compatability testing service like CrossBrowserTesting is priceless.
your website operate consistently and well for your customers on smartphones, Windows PCs and Mac computers is important. A good user experience with your website builds your business brand, and a bad experience can work against your brand goals. You can win crucial business if your website work for every one of your customers, and, conversely, if even that one experience on your website is bad, your competition is just a click away for your customers. At Beta Program, where we tell you about Cloud services and give free advice to run your business online, we wholeheartedly recommend using CrossBrowserTesting to understand and optimize your users’ online experience across three screens – smartphones, Macs/PCs and tablets.
Cash Flow Management In The Cloud With Indinero and Outright
October 1, 2011 — Vik ChaudharyIn the early days of operating your business, you don’t need to worry too much about managing your cash flow. Soon, however, managing cash inflows, outflows, accounts receivables and payables becomes a herculean task. It’s tempting to file all receipts in a shoebox (or, in my case, stacks of shoeboxes and extra large ziplock bags), and then wait until quarterly or annual tax filing deadlines to reconcile them. Then, I would sit at the dining table, muttering about the tedium that lay before me, counting up and categorizing all receipts. The problem was, I had no real-time visibility into my business’ cash flow, customer spend, or vendor expenses. I needed to answer questions like – “Who are my most profitable customers?”, “How much is this customer likely to spend in the next 12 months?”, “Which customers have not bought from us lately?”, “What is the cost of goods of the business?”, and “How much cash am I generating every month?”
Bookkeeper or QuickBooks Software?
To answer these questions, a business owner or office manager typically needs accounting help, or lots of time spent wrestling a spreadsheet to the ground. As far as I knew, I had two good choices – hire a bookkeeper/accountant, or purchase Intuit QuickBooks software to manage the books by myself. Hiring a bookkeeper seemed appealing because it was hassle-free, but I had the feeling that the costs would add up over time – at anywhere from $25/hr to $75/hr in San Francisco, estimating 8 hours a month, would cost between $2500 and $7500 a year, not counting first time setup expenses, which could be just as much. While not a terribly large amount, I wanted to explore more cost-effective ways of solving the problem. Hiring a bookkeeper doesn’t allow business owners to get immediate answers to the questions previously posed.
The other option was buying QuickBooks software – the mainstay of accountants everywhere. However, Quickbooks was designed for accountants/bookkeepers, not business owners/managers. Moreover, traditional QuickBooks software runs on a single computer – a PC or a Mac. If you are sitting in a cafe, or using a different computer than the one where the data is stored, or in a hotel while on the road, you may not have access to that computer. And what if your computer got stolen, or, as it happened to me recently, fried completely because my kids accidentally poured water on the keyboard? Even after being diligent about backups, it could be days before you had a replacement computer with all the business’s financial data on it – and that’s if you’re lucky. And you’ll always worry that your entire business finances and accounts were now in the hands of some unsavory character.
Cash Flow Management Software in the Cloud
There is, fortunately, another option: the Cloud – always-on, available-everywhere, browser-accessible, online software to manage your cash flow. This is software that is designed for a business owner, not a finance type. It runs on any computer, wherever you are. The data is stored securely, always backed up, and cannot be easily stolen. I narrowed my search to four companies that deliver cash flow management software that is 100% Cloud software. Cloud software runs entirely in any major web browser of your choice (Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, for example), which means you can access your financial data from anywhere, even if you are on vacation and obsessed about how your business is doing. That’s not you, right? Right. Me neither.
The nominees for cash flow management software in the Cloud were: InDinero, Intuit (QuickBooks Online), Kashoo, and Outright. These are a few of the companies trying to solve the problem of managing your business cash flow online, but I chose these either because I recognized their brand, because they appeared in Google search results for phrases like “cash flow software”, and had websites that were intuitively designed. The last criterion was important to my evaluation, because a company that has a well-designed website indicates that the company takes the online channel seriously, and it makes you more productive to navigate through the site information, e.g., if you want technical help or support.
Outright's Dashboard Shows Your Business Cash Flow Snapshot
Outright emerged as the winner in my evaluation of cloud-based cash flow management software. Outright’s web application was fast, the product easy to learn, connecting to bank accounts and credit cards was both easy and accurate, technical support was excellent, and the resulting graphs and reports gave me rapid insights into my business cash flow, customer spend, and expenses.
A close second was InDinero, which in fact had a more intuitive and flexible user interface, with many of the same features as Outright. Business owners will prefer Outright because it is designed from the ground up to answer the questions that business owners/managers have – e.g., “Which customers are spending more or less over time”, whereas inDinero was designed from the bookkeeper’s perspective, e.g., “What does my income statement look like?”
Detailed Review of Outright and inDinero
I evaluated the cash-flow-in-the-Cloud software products on these capabilities:
Bank/Credit Card Account Sync. To use Outright effectively, it really helps if you already have bank accounts and credit card accounts from which you can easily download your transactions, e.g., from Wells Fargo/Citibank or American Express/Visa, though practically any bank/credit card today has these online sync capabilities to connect with products like Quicken. Outright connects to your online accounts with these financial services providers and others, and synchronizes your Outright register with your credit card/bank. The synchronization is very sophisticated and accurate – e.g. my American Express Gold card account has 5 different credit cards – three for business, and two for personal use. Outright was able to download all my transactions and allow me to exclude credit cards that were not used for business expenses. inDinero worked almost as well, but was not as robust in connecting to my Amex credit card account and sorting through the different cards. inDinero’s customer service suggested that I delete the Amex account I had created, and reimport the transactions – but this had no effect; it correctly read one card’s transactions accurately, but another card’s transactions were intermingled with the personal card, and this caused a problem. If you have a business account, say with American Express OPEN, with several corporate credit cards for yourself and employees, I would not recommend inDinero. On the other hand, if you have separate business credit card, not an account with multiple cards, such as a second Visa card that you use just for business, inDinero’s account sync features will work very well.
Transaction Register Management. Like with any software, it takes time in Outright to massage the data into a format that makes it useful. For example, your bank deposits might be imported as “Deposit #22546″, and you would manually need to change these to indicate that it’s a payment by a customer, e.g. “Acme Manufacturing”. Once you edit the name of a customer or vendor, Outright remembers this, so that, next time, it automatically does the renaming for you – a very useful feature. inDinero has a better interface for managing all your transactions – it has a great Filter view that allows you to only view transactions from one or more accounts. inDinero’s transaction register was well designed, and more modern than Outright, with a fast, snappy feel that promises to make you very productive.
Importing Data. In Outright, I should caution that importing financial data from a spreadsheet is tricky, and prone to errors if you are not careful, so be prepared for the pain you must go through to make your data useful. Some banks, like Wells Fargo, don’t allow websites like Outright to download more than 90 days of transactions; so it’s likely that you will need to go to your bank’s website, and manually download your older transactions to a spreadsheet, which you can then import into Outlook. In my tests, I made the error of importing the same spreadsheet more than once, resulting in many duplicate transactions. However, it was confusing in Outright to figure out how to delete recently imported transactions, and I ended up deleting legitimate transactions as well; this all took some time to figure out. inDinero‘s better transaction register makes it very easy to search for the transactions you just imported, and delete or edit them if you need to.
Business-Oriented Reports. In all of the evaluation factors, above, Outright and inDinero were mostly evenly matched. Outright has more robust account sync, while inDinero has better transaction register management, for instance – and in the end there was a tie. The tie-breaker went to Outright, for its excellent business-oriented reports. Outright has reports such as Best Customers that show the income from your top customers, sorted by revenue, and Biggest Vendors, which shows which vendors you spend the most money on. These reports really speak the language of business owners, and my wish is that Outright add more such reports, such as “Who are my most profitable customers?” and “Which customers haven’t bought from us in some time (and therefore, those we should call)?”. inDinero had perfectly good reports, but these answered standard accounting questions such as Income, Cash Balance, and Spending, but nothing that specifically answered the questions most business owners have about their customers’ spending, profitability, and recurring purchase patterns.
Price. All in all, Outright was an excellent business financial management application, and for $9.99/mo, a Web app that I recommend to small business owners or managers. You can try Outright by signing up for a 30-day trial. inDinero has a free version (FREE is a very powerful marketing message), and pricing begins at $19.95/mo for a full-featured version that allows you more than 3 months of transaction history. You can try inDinero by signing up for a free account.
For the other contenders – Intuit (QuickBooks Online) and Kashoo, let me explain why I do not yet recommend them over Outright or inDinero:
- QuickBooks Online‘s web app made me feel like I was living in the 1970′s – it has a very outdated user interface that had not changed very much from the familiar QuickBooks software (that you install on a Windows or Mac computer). Though QuickBooks Online was more “web-ified” than it’s Windows/Mac-based versions, I realized that it would take me days to learn how to use the product. QuickBooks Online is clearly designed for a bookkeeper, but not your average business user who is not an accountant by training – and this is why it’s just not suited for most small business owners. You should be able to cost effectively understand your business’ cash flow without spending loads of time, or hiring accountants. As the newspapers say, Intuit did not return our calls for comments – and this itself tells you something about the company; it has grown so big that it’s management doesn’t make it a priority to help small businesses uses its products to its fullest.
- Kashoo doesn’t yet allow you to connect to your bank accounts or credit cards, so it’s not yet a very useful cash management application for businesses. All businesses run on credit card transactions and bank checks, so Outright and InDinero had the right idea – to make you very productive by automatically importing these transactions from your financial services provider into your accounting books. Kashoo’s customer support team tells us that bank/credit card account syncing is coming in October 2011, so it’s great that they have anticipated a much-wanted feature.
For business cash management and accounting software that works brilliantly in the Cloud, Beta Program highly recommends both Outright and inDinero!
Email in the Cloud With Google Gmail
August 20, 2011 — Vik ChaudharyWhen running a small business, business owners often don’t have the technical IT staff to make the best choices for our company’s software presence – such as website hosting, the email system, backup of computer data, or accounting and taxation software, etc. As it turned out, I know enough to be dangerous myself, and there was always Google search to help me seek out advice on how others did it. I’d like to tell you about how you can begin to use Google Gmail to setup email for your business.
Many business owners don’t know that you have a choice of using Gmail instead of using that sub-optimal email program your website hosting company gave you. For example, when I signed up a website domain and got it hosted, I first used the web-based email program that the hosting company supplied me. For $6.95/mo, which is what I was paying for my monthly hosting account at that time, I didn’t expect that much. But, over time, the unwieldy interface of my default email got to me, and it looked sort of like this:
Enter Google Gmail. Now you already knew that you could get an email address like james.bond@gmail.com, but did you know it’s real easy to get a professional looking email address like james.bond@shakennotstirred.com? Using Gmail for your business email means that you will have a very simple, yet blazing fast, email program. Whether you keep all your email in your inbox (and just search for it when you need it), or methodically file away most email into folders (for the super organized types), Gmail helps you. Gmail’s easy search, which is of course what Google is best known for, makes it easy to find that obscure email in your inbox. Plus, the service is never down, is always amazingly fast, and best of all, I can read my email from either my Mac at home, mobile phone, or Windows laptop at work.
Here’s how I setup Gmail, seamlessly moving over from my antiquated to a modern email program:
- Signup for a Google Apps account with Google.
- When asked to enter your website address, use the domain that you have, e.g., mycompany.com. Note: don’t include the “www” when entering your domain name.
- Google charges you $50/year per email address, and the first user you create will be the administrator of the account. Choose this username carefully. If you choose your personal address, like carmen@mycompany.com, then later as your company grows and you add more employees, you will perhaps need to turn over this administrator email address to your IT department. There might be a way to switch administrators later, but I have not found it.
- Work with your hosting company to point your email to Google’s servers, which techies will call “editing your MX records”. This is not rocket science, but needs to be done carefully. Your best bet is to contact the customer service department of your hosting company, and have them help you with this. Or, you can do it this yourself, just like I did, if you know what you are doing.
- If you switch your email, do this on a day when you can afford to have your email unavailable for 48 hours, because this is how long it could take to switch your email to Gmail.
At the end of it, you will have an excellent and modern email program, and you will thank Google for it.
If you have any questions, please let me know and I would be happy to give you some pointers and help you setup your business email on Google Gmail.
