April 2006 Archives

Coming back in action to announce some changes to future podcast content.

The long-awaited second installment of the Sproutit newsletter, The Illustrated Sprout, is now available for your delectation.

If you missed the first issue, stop beating yourself up. The debut of The Illustrated Sprout is also available online.

Read it, learn it, love it.

If you run, or work for, a “hosted software company” (thanks Jason), you may want to check out our new Web2 Page. Here we lay out the benefits of Mailroom, our email management system, for people in the “Web 2.0” sector.

This sector is as diverse as the people who’ve created it. But if you live online and produce products that live there with you, you’re probably going to find that Mailroom has a lot to offer.

I’m somewhat dissatisfied with two phrases I’m using a lot.

The first is “Web 2.0.� The reason I’m dissatisified with this one is that it’s become the “victim of a drive-by lyrical whippin’� (to quote Mix-a-lot) by the so-called “A-list� bloggers, who seem to be running out of things to talk about. I think I’ll probably just keep using it because the alternatives (“live web� — yech) are too contrived. But is there a different way to think, or talk, about the sector as a whole?

(An old professor of mine spent several years researching “post-modernism.” His conclusion? “It’s modernism.” Is Web 2.0 really just the Internet?)

The second is “web application companies.” It’s terrifically awkward. Does anyone have an alternative suggestion? What do all these companies (or a bunch of them anyway) have in common? Are they web app… outfits? crews? posses?

Scott Lake of Jaded Pixel (makers of Shopify) has written up his company’s experience with Mailroom.

For us, the experience with Mailroom has been amazing. This app is completely intuitive to use with no training required. It literally took us 5 minutes to figure out how everything worked and get ourselves set up. In hindsight, we were so lucky that we got Mailroom set up when we did because a couple of weeks later when beta, Techcrunch and our newsletter all hit, we were inundated with email and Mailroom made it all really easy to manage.

We’re very glad indeed that we were able to help make life a little easier for Jaded Pixel. That was the idea behind Mailroom, after all, and here’s a very gratifying example in living color.

Now, if we can only figure out a way to claim that Mailroom was the reason behind Jaded Pixel’s success, then we’d have a real malt liquor-style lifestyle commercial!

(Though it’s good to know we made the “pain of success” a little easier to handle, Jaded’s gains are clearly a result of good ideas and hard work. There goes my commercial.)

For those of you who want a bit more information on Mailroom before you sign up for an account, check out the lovely and talented updated Mailroom page. It includes benefits, features and user testimony.

Sweet.

Mailroom may run a little slower this weekend. See all the details in our What’s New forum post.

And in case you haven’t done so already, be sure you subscribe to the What’s New feed. It’s the definitive place to get all the latest news and updates on the Mailroom service.

The fine folks at BlinkSale have quietly launched a massive upgrade to their excellent web-based invoicing system. If you like using simple web apps to run your business, if you bill clients and you manage by feeds, you have to give BlinkSale a try.

Another new Mailroom feature today. Just a little one but, hey, it’s Wednesday! Come check it out at the What’s New! Forum.

I love working at an agile web two-dot-oh-ish company. Release cycles are measured in hours, sometimes minutes.

This shouldn’t always be the case—once a day at most would probably be more ideal.

Anyway – to all those who have been kind enough to submit bug reports / feedback, I just wanted to say thank you!

Chatting about my trip to Vienna and meeting with Wollzelle, makers of Fluxiom.

Over the weekend I received a couple of emails from JadedPixel in regards to Shopify now being in beta.

Peter is training Dan to do support:

“The important thing to remember about doing support is that you have to use Mailroom and absorb it until you love working with it. That way when you write people back, it will show that you love Mailroom and, once you help them fix the problem they are having right now, you are sure they will love it too.”

Support is a challenge because most of the email you receive will be negative (people having problems, needing help, etc.) but you must be able to look past that, enjoy solving their problems, and keep a great attitude about using their product.

If you think having evangelists for your company is important, don’t forget support. Support people have a hard job, but they are your most important evangelists.

Coté at the People over Process blog has an interesting series going on about Management by Feeds in response to Marshall’s recent post here pointing out some of the areas that might make Management by Feeds difficult to adopt.

I have some strong opinions on the points Coté raises here that I plan to post a little later on once I have the time to write them, but in the mean time, check out his posts:

Part 1: Feed Filtering

Part 2: Getting Social Behind the Firewall

Part 3: The RSS Golden Hammer

My favorite quote so far:

we’re trying to use the software to strengthen the social bond that you would otherwise build face to face. As I said early on, this is one of my key understandings/desires of social software: a proxy and amplifier for what you would do face-to-face.

Yesterday the signals wrote a great post on the kinds of email they receive from customers asking for support. This comment generated a lot of comments, but my favorite came from Josh Williams at FirewheelDesign:

We use Mailroom to tag incoming support email. Some or our tags include: buzz, client, and moron.

How do you use tags in Mailroom?

Update: The kind folks at Central Desktop called me on this post and they are right. I highlighted this comment by Josh because I thought it was a little funny. As a someone who dealt with customer support for years, its important to keep a little sense of humor about things so you can continue to provide great support.

We definitely think providing great customer support is really important. That is why we created Mailroom. It’s also why we wrote on this topic a few weeks ago saying that Customer Email is a Gift

More new Mailroom features today. Small but useful. Get the full skinny in our What’s New! Forum.

Managing by feeds, Chris is ready to get back to work.

Pajama Marketing featured the Big Act a couple days ago. Brian was nice enough to do a follow up interview with Charles and his take on blogs.

Charles Jolley: The blog is one of the most important ways we have to communicate with our customers and our market. Peter, Chris, and I started Sproutit because we have this idea of how a small business can be run using cheap, web-based technologies to save time and make better decisions. We know there are other people out there interested in building companies the same way. Our blog is the primary way we can interact with them and develop this Big Idea together.

Read the rest here…

[Marshall Kirkpatrick is fond of feeds. As the author of Weblogs Inc.’s Social Software Weblog, an interviewer and presenter with NetSquared and consultant for The Committee to Protect Bloggers , he is imminently qualified to speak not only on the benefits of feeds but possible obstacles. In this, our second in a series of guest-blogged posts, Marshall tackles potential bottlenecks in the process of management by feeds.]

I love RSS, absolutely love it. I love search feeds, enclosures, feeds displayed in HTML, filtered feeds, feeds bundled in OPML and IM notification of updated feeds. I love the flexibility of feeds. I really like the idea of management by feed as well, but I’m worried about two bottlenecks that challenge its viability. First, management by feed requires effective management of feeds and team members must be relied upon to document updates in a format available by feed.

Although we had a couple people who took umbrage at our newsletter, the reaction overall has been fantastic. Our target demographic (rock stars, stone masons, technologists, graphic designers and localization managers) have reacted with uniform enthusiasm.

The Illustrated Sprout #2 is due out on or around April 27. Oh lucky day!

My most sincere apologies for not having written sooner. I was (and still am) sick. Fortunately, I have mustered enough strength to write this blog post.

I have not been podcasting for simple reason of not wanting to cough through an entire episode. Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.

Most importantly, I have not lost touch with the happenings of Sproutit. Why? Because we have adopted the concept of managing by feeds. Even while dealing with the side-effects of my meds, I was able to keep in touch with most all of the happenings within Sproutit. Sales, support, development, marketing, blogs (internal and external), logistics, etc… All managed through RSS feeds.

Now sing with me in the traditional Louis Armstrong style…”and I think to myself…..what a wonderful world.”

Alec Saunders is the latest of many to wonder if Apple’s release of Boot Camp means a long term switch to Windows.

As someone who has been involved in the Mac software community for a long time, let me assure you: Apple will never switch to Windows nor will it sell Mac OS for regular Windows hardware. Here are five reasons why:

The latest Newsweek had the cover story, Putting the ‘We’ in Web. It was a good enough story as these things go, probably pretty informative for people who didn’t know much about Web 2.0, though a bit basic for those who work with it.

The problem is that, although they talked in a seven page article about MySpace, Dabble, Craigslist, Flickr and others, they mentioned RSS only once, briefly.

RSS lets you “subscribe” to targeted information from a Web service in the way you subscribe to magazines.

They don’t deal with the implications of RSS, just shunt quickly into APIs. The one thing all of these companies have in common is that they generate feeds. It’s interesting enough I suppose that you can see and use free photos on Flickr, but the real ground-breaking going on here is the ability to govern information, to bring it together into one place, in one interface, based on what you find important and useful.

Feeds are starting to gain real ground. It’s not just blogs that offer them, not even just other media like the New York Times. They are used in most of these new services and technologies. They allow the user to leave off the puttering around and cherry picking that a “post-scarcity world” of information requires.

Every product created by Sproutit, starting with Mailroom, has a feed. Soon, all of a companies business will be doable, or at least surveyable, within a feed reader.

That’s the real story.

37signals changed to their API in the last day that broke our Basecamp integration feature. We have now updated Mailroom to support the new API and everything is working again.

If you tried to turn on Basecamp integration in the last day and had trouble getting your Mailroom account to connect, try it again.

[This is the first in a series of guest blogs from friends who are also building excellent web apps for small businesses. Today’s post is from Jonathan and Matthew from StikiPad. Read their full post for a great introduction to wikis and how it can work for your business!]

Hi! We’re Jonathan and Matthew, two young guys from small towns in rural areas who have used the Internet in our daily lives since before we were in high school. In fact, we met online, worked together online and built 95% of our first product online, all using a handy tool called a wiki. And a wiki is what we built – called StikiPad.

Isaac Garcia at CentralDesktop writes about Why Email is still the most adopted collaboration tool. It’s an interesting (though very long) post from someone making a competitor to email in the form of a hosted collaboration tool.

We use both wikis (a collaboration tool) and email (with Mailroom of course) here at Sproutit. Of course, we bring all of it together using feeds and feed readers.

The Forum, Philosophy and Coming Up In Mailroom in todays Living The Dream

It is here!!!!

The newly formed Sproutit Forum is upon us and ready to be filled with your thoughts. We decided to use Opinion another wonderful creation using RubyOnRails.

Why did we create a forum?

As always, you could have easily dropped us a line via email. But, so many of your ideas and thoughts we wanted to be available to everyone in the Sproutit community and beyond.

How do I get there?

Easy. Either click here or type forum.sproutit.com/mailroom into your URL.

What should I say?

Anything you want. Preferably in regards to Mailroom. (we use the blog for all the other stuff).

And, in the words of MiracleMax, “Have fun stormin’ the castle boys!”