{"id":2616,"date":"2008-08-29T11:09:13","date_gmt":"2008-08-29T15:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2616"},"modified":"2008-08-29T11:09:13","modified_gmt":"2008-08-29T15:09:13","slug":"freshbooks-7-ways-it-almost-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/08\/29\/freshbooks-7-ways-it-almost-died\/","title":{"rendered":"Freshbooks: 7 Ways It Almost Died"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a little late on this one because I’m on vacation this week, and my blogging and Twittering metabolism has slowed down, but I wanted to take note of a great post that my friend and fellow mesh<\/a> organizer Mike McDerment wrote the other day<\/a>, entitled “7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks.”<\/em> It’s a list of lessons that Mike has learned during his time as CEO and co-founder of the online invoicing company, and there are some definite pearls of wisdom in there. Among my favourites:<\/p>\n

1. Thinking we had to move faster than we did<\/strong><\/p>\n

I remember back in 2005 feeling that if we did not blow our lights out and spend every penny we had on marketing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153right now!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d someone would obliterate us. I had this impending sense of doom for *years* based on our speed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

and <\/p>\n

4. Placing my faith in consultants<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nobody cares about your business as much as you do, and frankly people who are smart – consultant\/MBA smart – don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know your business as well as you do despite the fancy words and references to past success.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and <\/p>\n

6. Believing we could not get this far without doing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153x\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I remember talking with people back in 2004. Many believed we could not get anywhere without signing a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153deal\u00e2\u20ac\u009d with a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153partner\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or taking \u00e2\u20ac\u0153VC money\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153whatever\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my advice: sign the right deals with the right partners at the right time for the right reasons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go read the whole thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a little late on this one because I’m on vacation this week, and my blogging and Twittering metabolism has slowed down, but I wanted to take note of a great post that my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mike McDerment wrote the other day, entitled “7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks.” It’s a list … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Freshbooks: 7 Ways It Almost Died”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}