On our way to 50 000 users...

But while consultants tell their clients: “Make your users love you”, we have come to realize what everyone who has ever been in love must have felt. Love is a two-way relationship. And sometimes the best way to maintain a relationship is simply to say you love them back. So here goes.

I love you. 50 000 times.

How do I know? Knowing if you love one person can be hard enough, so you wonder how can I truly say I love you 50 000 times? I do not blame you for asking that question. After all, the world has bigger problems to solve than entering data into an application. But this is what we do. Yast is where we place countable (corrected from countless…) hours and by simply registering as a user, you are a part of our life.

And when I wake up, I wonder if you have any news for me? I wonder if you have told me something I need to know before I get to work. I am looking through feedback and fear you have discovered faults and errors I am not aware of and left as a result. I get frustrated when you do not understand our interface, but I know we are the ones that have to change. Sometimes you ask us to do things we cannot do. Sometimes all we can do is to answer your question with another question. Sometimes I feel miserable because we do not live up to your expectations. Knowing the only way to reach out to your wishes of quantum upgrade-leaps is for us to get a little better every day.

But I smile when I see you are using new features you had not discovered before, and I look forward to the next time you click a new button we designed for you to click. And when you give praise or tweet to the world that you love us, it is like a fuel injection into our engine of productivity. I appreciate every hour you share with us and I can tell you I love you not because I am fascinated by the looks of your website or a monthly fee, but because I want to be a part of your daily routine. When I go to sleep I hope you will be there in the morning. I know I love you simply because I think of you every day and I want you to come back tomorrow.

And I will love you for as long as you can scroll the timeline into the future.

Halvor Gregusson - CEO

1. Create your company in Yast

When creating a company, you create a top-level folder with your company name attached to it. At company level, you will find more functionality than under the rest of your projects and folders. You can even create several companies. If you work FOR several companies, you can be added by each company in the same user interface. You don´t have to log out and log in with another account.

2. The Company and Payment Tab

On the company level, you will find the Company Info and Payment tab. This is where you manage subscriptions, users and payments. This functionality is only accessible for company admins, meaning those who have access level “administration” (the highest access level) at the company folder.

3. Default access levels

We have made a new interface for “the sharing” tab, and we will cover this in a separate post, but because there are some default options that will affect the company, here is a summary. The person creating the company in Yast will be the only person with default “administration” (the highest) access level. Every new user added to the system will be default “worker” (lowest) access at company level. Meaning, after the upgrade, the default option is that only the administrator can see and make time reports for anyone in the company. You will have to assign higher access levels to others to make them do reports as well.

4. Company account, no user premium accounts

Trial and Payment is now linked to the company. Not the user. Meaning, if you start a trial account you start a trial for a company, not a trial for every user in the company. There are no longer premium users or trial users. A user can be present in several companies no matter if one company is in trial and another is not.

5. Your personal folder

Every user has a personal folder. This is basically the free version of Yast. Tracking time on projects in your personal folder will not affect any projects under the company folder and will not show in any of the reports done in the company. No one else has access to your personal folder, and no one ever will. It is only yours. To share a project from a personal folder, you would have to create a company then invite users to that company.

“When Halvor Gregusson got off the stage, an audience full of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors was cheering and the moderator was giving him a high-five.

Pretty good for a two-minute pitch about a time-tracking tool from a Norwegian startup.” Read more at VentureBeat.

When you read the article, you are also given a preview of the new Yast design for the time line, and hints of a new feature we are working on are present. We will comment on this when we launch the upgrade. For now, the VB article is your best source of information…

The Appdirect entrance and door monkey, Appy.

I´ve never really figured out if I am a person that gives a good first impression or not. But I guess the answer to it is the same as for most people. It depends on whom you meet and why you meet them. However, coming from a different country, you usually get away with the weirdest of things, for some time. Then you are expected to catch up. Meaning, I would have to ask all the stupid questions first, and the good ones later. Which pretty much will make my first impressions worse to begin with than later on. And my first meeting was with Appdirect.

So I landed in San Francisco and thought I might just dig into it. Jet lagged, still a bit sick and with a huge bag on my shoulders, I entered 650 California Street, Appdirect´s office.

“Hi Halvor, welcome to our office. We´ve saved a seat for you,” said Paul.

It is almost a year ago when I talked to Paul for the first time. Then he offered us to be one of few apps in their new marketplace. Several app marketplaces had approached us before, but our experience was that besides the big ones like Google and Apple, they really did not offer a lot of distribution due to an inflation of apps. This was different. Appdirect had actually tried Yast and chosen it among others. Besides, Paul seemed service minded. Now I met him in person. Would he be the starting point for my questions?

“Nice place, does every company here paint business models on their walls?”

“Probably not, but we do”, he replied.

So I met their team, and got my seat in the open spaced office. Which really gave me a huge benefit. Sitting at “the market table”, I pick up some of the conversations. The interesting part is not necessarily the outcome of the conversations. Rather the underlying accepted facts.

Example: A discussion had the topic “what apps should be in this bundle?” I don´t know what the answer was, but one of my many questions here was supposed to be how, when and if apps would bundle (apps integrating with one another to form a stronger service together). The underlying fact is obviously that bundling will happen and has already started.

For my question of going locally or globally though, it doesn´t seem to be much of a question when it comes to web apps. A national approach in USA might as well be a global approach. In other words, if you are supposed to reach clients from California to New York, you might as well reach them in Europe. Because we all speak English, right?

So besides allowing myself to ask the stupid questions for three weeks, I read between the lines and am tapping into a huge knowledge base of the app market.

Thanks a million to the Appdirect team for having me in their office, answering my questions and providing feedback on my upcoming presentation at Under the Radar.

Halvor

After sending a newsletter to ca 35 000 of our users with the subject “A Sneak Peak of our new features” and blogging the same story. It didn´t take long for a user to give quality feedback:

*peak* = peek
“A Sneak Peak of Our New Features” — PEAK is the top of a mountain. PEEK is looking at something! Feedback link

The damage was done, and hopefully forgotten. I excused myself as a Norwegian and sometimes need help from autocorrect, but in this case, it didn´t help.

But then I see this. From the company that made Google Translate, and spellchecks all I write in Chrome, they did the identical typo.

We are certain the Googlers must have read our newsletter. My only regret, we didn´t patent the typo before they copied us

November 4th:

And what do you know: Here is the corrected version

Last weeks user of the week was not a result of input that came last week, but our last week decision to implement design elements from this support post made the difference.

We have not done all decisions yet, but our time tracker looks like this in the test-area now:

Thank you and Congratulations!

And when we receive your adress, we will send you this gadget worth less than $10:

A Solar Powered Flip Flap Power Plant

The Yast Team.

Seeing other web applications distribute to a global market, and being tech students, of course we thought this was the way software would be distributed in the future. Of course we thought of global domination from day 1. It did not even strike us that this approach might contradict the usual ways of the local market.

Photo Credit: Katy Raddatz

But it did. When we started Yast as a company, and not just a tech project, we soon got the questions of when we would be integrated with the national leading software on accounting and billing. How soon will you hire a sales staff? When would we do advertising in local magazines? Good questions. And they still are. But it also raised a question above all. What if we were wrong? What if our global approach was an illusion? In that case, where did this illusion come from? Well, where does all modern IT dreams come from these days? San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Up until this point, I have never doubted the global approach. It is my sincere opinion that it is the right strategy to pursue. I think many software developers selling to local markets will be in trouble when the best of web apps are offered together as bundled offerings. But it is my job to look for signs that falsify our strategic foundation. If our strategy is based on a concept we believe to be “the American way” of cloud based solutions, but turns out to be nothing but an illusion of “the American way”, then we are probably not doing it right.

So my first and most important question in San Francisco would be: Is our global strategy a common approach in San Francisco? Even if we thought the obvious answer to that question would be “Of course”, it was still an important question.

My starting point for asking any questions about the app market was obvious. Our partners at Appdirect have recently raised $ 3,25 Million to their white label web app marketplace. Being listed as one of their handpicked 40 apps, I felt quite sure they had gone through a lot of apps in the process and been able to answer tons of questions about the app market on their way. Why not use it as my starting point in San Francisco? So I did.

To be continued…

To read previous blog posts from the CEO in San Francisco, click here.

He has won this gadget worth less than $10:
Unique 1.0″ LCD Clip-on Red Wine Digital Thermometer (1*AG10)

Hugo has spent hours of his time doing fixes on our dutch version of Yast.

Thank you Hugo and congratulations.

Haukåsen airport…

Planning the trip however, was an interesting reminder of how IT and communication has changed the world. Imagine yourself having this conversation 10 years ago:

- How did you plan your trip to San Francisco?

- Ease as a breeze, found round trip tickets for less than $1000 at finn.no. Then I skyped with our partners at Appdirect, an app marketplace for web apps. They offered me space in their office so I have a place to work. They also told me to monitor Craigslist for a place to live, but when I finally was about to close a deal that looked reasonable, I received a link from yelp.com where several users warned me about the place. Then I discovered Roomorama, kind of a mix between couchsurfing.org and hotels.com, so I booked a studio from a host with many ”likes”.

- And then you just left?

- Almost, I did a ”goodbye video” with my Android Smartphone. It will be posted on the company blog and shared through our Twitter and Facebook account. After that, I left. Nothing more to it.

So I left, and the video is here:

For a web entrepreneur, it´s not an option to sing “If you´re going to San Francisco”, but “WHEN you´re going to San Francisco”.

I don´t need more reasons to leave for San Francisco for the rest of the year, but I will in this series of blog posts explain why I am here and what I am doing. Primarily, I am not here to sell or market Yast in this region. I am here to ask questions. And I have many. Told differently, my intension is not to be the wise guy telling people what they should do or not, my intention is to have enough people provide me the information I need to grow our business.

What my questions are will be revealed a piece at a time, but for now, accept the fact that I am an IT entrepreneur and CEO in a web app time tracker company on a pilgrim journey to the IT capital of the world.