Our latest and greatest creation has just entered a public beta: http://getprofiting.com

Elevator pitch

Help freelancers and small teams reach their financial goals by always knowing how much they’ve earned vs. where they need to be.

Get Profiting

The story

Over the past year, we’ve continuously had a difficult time knowing where we stood financially throughout the month. Although we use Quickbooks Online (bookkeeping) and Harvest (time tracking/estimating/invoicing), it always took a lot of time just to figure out where we stood vs. where we wanted/needed to be.

Realizing that Harvest had a robust API, I went to work hacking together a rough first version of what is now Get Profiting. It would download the information on how many hours we worked on each project and then compare that with a monthly goal for our team. Seeing how many hours you should have at any given point in the month and seeing how many you do gave us the financial transparency we needed. Due to Get Profiting, we have daily motivation to reach our goals and the last two months have been our best months so far.

As Get Profiting completely changed our productivity for the better, we thought it might be useful to clean it up and put it out there for others suffering the same problems. So here she is.

What’s it cost?

It’ll be completely free during the beta. When we release 1.0 (sometime in Nov, hopefully) we will add a reasonable monthly fee for the full featured version. There will always be a free version, but it will have a minimum feature set and will be restricted in how often you can refresh the information.

If you do give it a spin, please let us know what you think.

View from Brian's mom's house

Office from the front corner. Hi Brian. He likes to stand up when he works.

From the back. The same kid that haunted the '3 men and a baby' movie also haunts our office. Check the arrow.

This is us laughing at some hilarious wireframes.

In the group of guys I hung out with in high school, we had one friend who was kinda the odd man out (to protect his annonimity we’ll call him Burt McFlannagan for the purposes of this post). He was pretty awkward and a little shlubby, but produced some of the best random one-liners I’ve ever heard. One day all hanging out around somebody’s locker he walked up all cool like and said “sup guys?” We responded all mumbling “Hey.” There were a few seconds of awkward pause as we weren’t really talking about anything in particular beforehand, to which Burt piped up “So.., I’m going where it’s at.” Then he turned and gave us the ‘over-the-head-two-finger-hook-shot-send-off-wave. It was a gem of a moment.

From that day forward it became a goal of mine to always honor Mr. McFlannagan and try to go “where it’s at.” The following pictures of our current rocket office, my friends, are currently where it’s at.

For those that don’t know (everyone but our wives, hey wives!), we started rocket a year ago September and are in our third home now.

We worked first in a local venture center/liquid space where we had a few open rooms/facilities to choose from everyday, but couldn’t leave our things. Then moved into Brian’s parents house while they were snowbirding in Florida for 5ish months (free rent!). It had a great view over part of the Boise river valley and was a nice place to watch the snow fall and sip herbal tea.

We also did have a pet bald eagle that would occasionally ride the air currents 25 feet outside the back door (there was a big drop right behind the backyard). We nick-named the eagle Steve. I think it was sort of in homage to the Flight of the Conchords Hiphopopotomus vs. Rhymnocerous song where Jemaine says something like “Did Steve tell you that… what kind of rapping name is Steve anyway?”

So, after Brian’s parents were due to return last May, we had to find a new place to set up camp. We looked around online, we happened upon a commercial real estate agent named Tim. He was a little older, but very laid back. He got excited when we said we make “the apps” and was then willing to help us find a place. We ended up picking this one in downtown Boise. It is basically one big room, one smaller ‘conference’ room and a small ‘food’ room (appx 800 sq ft). There’s usually just the two of us, but we occasionally have client meetings or freelancers that work here, so it makes for a nice little office.

One weekend we took a U-Haul to IKEA (really) and bought us some furnitures. Then we went to Lowe’s and bought a bunch of 4×8 sheets of melamine white-board stuff and put it around the walls. Sometimes we like to doodle.

Anyway, we just wanted to post some pics to give you a little sneak peek. If you’re ever lost somewhere in the desert and happen upon Boise, drop in and we’ll have a ‘funniest whiteboard doodle’ competion. Two turn tables and a microphone.

When I leave home heading in to the office, or leave the office to head home, I like to finish my thought and quit almost all the apps I use regularly. The reason is so I start fresh when I crack open my laptop again. Instead of quitting everything by hand, I setup a Concentrate activity I call ‘Cleanup’ that quits all my apps for me. When it’s done quitting everything I’ve told it to (which is almost everything running) it runs an AppleScript that simply tells Concentrate to stop Concentrating (script here).

What do I allow to keep running? Path Finder, Webnote and Concentrate itself.

I’ve been using this action for a while now and thought I’d share it. Although this isn’t really what we built Concentrate to do, it’s still in line with the goal of removing distractions.

Surely there are plenty of other ways to accomplish this, but since I always have Concentrate at the ready this works best for me. Feel free to share other ideas in the comments.

We just released a minor update to Concentrate. Here’s what’s changed:

• Added support for Choosy as a browser in “Open websites” action.
• Added support for “Do not disturb” status in Skype.
• Concentrate now honors specific spaces specified for applications set in the Spaces preference pane.
• Handle app’s with helpers correctly (previously it would think an app is running just because it’s helper was running).
• Support for Fluid.app app’s.

Enjoy!

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new web application we built called Clientr. It helps small teams keep track of clients and deals.

Clientr - Crazy simple client tracking for small teams

A little background: A few weeks ago, we were feeling overwhelmed not being able to keep track of who talked to which client, if estimates were pending or sent, or the status of our current deals.

We looked at many other web apps, and took a few for a test drive, but nothing did what we were looking for – a simple place where we could glance a few times a day and know the latest status of each client and deal. So, we decided to build it and after about a week, had a rough, but functioning version. We started using it ourselves and found right away that it made a world of difference to keep clients and deals organized and simplified our lives immensely.

After a few more weeks, polishing things up and adding a few other necessary features, we gave it to a handful of friends to see what they thought. We received many positive responses and realized we must be on to something. So, now we’re opening it up to the world…

Take it for a spin with our free 14-day trial and let us know what you think. We will continually be adding new features, but leave a comment with any thoughts or feature requests you may have – we’d love to hear them. Happy Clientr’ing!

Look at us, all growed up with a blog and all!

We’ll be announcing a new web app within a week so we thought we should have somewhere to announce it. That’s all for now.