1DayLater

The WonDayLater Golden Ticket

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:55:00 +0000

A common problem faced by many software companies using a freemium pricing approach is:

“How do I show the value of our premium features without simply giving them away”

The answer for most (and the majority of our competitors) is to simply use a good old 30-day trial. Great, easy, badabing, badabong - yes?

Well although this might be straightforward, we realised that the 30 day trial method actually presents the customers (and therefore the company) with a second problem:

(customer)

Signs up to service

forgets about it for 30 days or more (or is too busy to take a proper look) - easy to do

returns - to find out their trial has now expired

loses interest / becomes annoyed

goes elsewhere

For a customer-orientated service based company like ours this really is no good. We want to impress our users from the outset, not alienate them!

So we sat down and put our heads together for an epic brotherly brainstorm. Some cups of tea and wonderfully obtuse ideas later, we finally hit upon a nice elegant solution…the 1DayLater ‘test-drive’ pass!

A photo of what the free pass might look in the real world, if it were conceiled in a chocolate bar.

Now each of our customers will get 3 passes as soon as they sign up with us. They can be activated when one of the premium features is clicked (currently invoicing, export and mileage claims)

The passes themselves last 30 minutes (just long enough to have a good play around with the premium features we think). However they can be used at any time - whether a user has just signed up or has been signed up for 6 months. Returning customer problem solved!

— Next week should mark the start of our paid-for subscription services. Once this is underway we hope to get some feedback as to how the free-pass system is working out.

And if anyone has any feedback now - please get in touch:

feedback@1daylater.com

Paul

oh. ps. phone and desktop app development are going very well - more info to come soon!

The Cost of 1DayLater

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:24:00 +0000

1DayLater currently stores over 22,000 entries tracking 26,000 hours, 72,000 business miles and over £3,000,000 of receipts and expenses. The cost? A £20,000 bank loan, 1,700 dedicated man hours creating 30 iterations of 100-200 files resulting in around 5,000,000,000 database queries, 2,000 users and hit spikes of around 5,000. But lets not forget the 85(+1) blog posts, 2,000 Tweets, 120 hours of networking, £600 in bus fares, £250 of metro tickets, 450 business cards, a 50 page business plan (constantly revised), 500 working documents, 3,000 emails, countless publications, 40 support tickets, £3,000 of legal documents, £12,000 of 3rd party development, 600 long days, and approximately 1 TRILLION CUPS OF TEA.

The result? A server that constantly says “usage = 0.01%”, a business network we’d happily call friends, a product that gets better every week and a wonderful outlook for the future.

Did I mention, we’ve just rolled out a new version? Do you like the tweaked design? How about the mobile site? You know everything is faster too? And that there’s more output options? That the search is more powerful? And the apps are on the way? Go figure.

Bonding with Bond Solutions

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:23:00 +0000

I have 8 ambitions for this year. 4 are related to 1DayLater, 2 lifestyle, and 2 personal/professional development. I pin the list to the wall behind my desk helping me instill each point into my day-to-day efforts as I repeatedly mull them over.

Here’s a little peek at the first 4:

~~Get world wide recognition for 1DayLater~~

Become market leader for activity tracking software.

Integrate 1DayLater with Sage

Host a charity based event

……..

Being featured in Lifehacker last week let me cross off no.1 and now I can happily say that 3 is officially underway too. The brains of 1DayLater met this week with the brains of local Sage reseller - Bond Solutions to work out how to best integrate with, and compliment their popular Sage offerings.

As far as business alliances go we really couldn’t have asked for better. The 8-year-old company is headed up by Derek Curtis, one of the most likeable guys you’re likely to meet. And as the biggest Sage reseller in the North-East and North-West of England they really know their onions.

My bro David King (1DayLater), Derek Curtis (Bond Solutions) and me

It looks likely that we should be able to integrate 1DayLater with the popular Sage CRM system - Sales Logix and Sage Accounts as a useful add-on, which will then be available throughout the Sage reseller network. If all goes to plan it should make entering data into these complex systems easier while out ‘on the go’, greatly saving admin time later. More on that to come soon.

Lastly big congrats to Derek and his new family unit, as he’s just taken on some foster kids. Great stuff

Take it easy

Paul

Exciting New Tender For Programmers

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:58:00 +0000

If you’re a local (North East based) programmer who would like to work on an exciting new project we might have something just for you!

Local quango (quasi-autonomous non governmental organisation) and centre for Digital excellence - Codeworks are pioneering a new timesheet system for their employees. The new system will bring data from Outlook into 1DayLater which will then be used to carry out reporting functions. Cool or what!

We need an experienced programmer who can help develop the Outlook side of things. This will involve creating a desktop application which can collect data from Outlook and transfer it to the 1DayLater API in a suitable format.

The project is guaranteed to be exciting as you will be working alongside both Codeworks and 1DayLater to create something pretty unique.

Maximum project size: £10,000

Project duration: Up to 10 weeks (specified by supplier)

Quotation due date: 19th Feb 2010 (12.00 noon)

Contract award date: 26th Feb 2010

Invoicing: Fortnightly

As you can see the closing date is drawing near so make sure you get your skates on if you’re interested. The full tender brief can be found here

Take it on!

Paul

Rocket Ronnie Redesigns...

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

You’ve probably noticed that Paul has been running the blog on his own for the past few weeks, this is because I’ve been knee deep in a big rejiggle of the 1DayLater service. Now, the goal of 1DayLater is to turn a typically mundane task (keeping track of your business activities) into something enjoyable and rewarding we must do two things:

Make it easy to use - check!
Make it as good looking as possible - errr..

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had some excellent feedback on how the service looks, but we’re not satisfied, not at all. It needs to be beautiful, stunning and clear to new visitors what service we’re offering - this is where Ronnie Atkinson comes in.

Me and Ronnie actually go back about 10 years - when I was dabbling with code, Ronnie was nudging pixels. We honed our skills together by toying with various projects and websites as kids, we even did our first professional work together at my Dads multimedia company aged 15 or so. Immense.

Oh I’m getting all nostalgic… Anyhow, I’m very happy to introduce Ronnie as a temporary member of team 1DayLater! For the past week we’ve been working together on a major redesign of the homepage, and as daft as this may sound, I’m bloody proud of his work - it looks stunning! I can’t wait to roll out the new design.

Ronnie works for Foundry Media, they’re an excellent full-service design agency based in Newcastle. You have seen their work around.

Oh, I have other news, but you can wait… right?

2600 hits and 915 new users - in 1 day

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:17:00 +0000

Words cannot describe what has happened here at 1DayLater yesterday. Here’s a clue..

But first,

This is what happened the day before

woke up
Had my cereal (Weetabix)
Made cuppa (Yorkshire tea)
Went to office
Discovered this nice little article on Webworkerweekly
Checked the site stats

I THOUGHT- “Oh 60 signups this morning - cool”

I SAID - “Here David, check this out man, 60 signups not bad. Nice article too, the editor really seems to have done her homework”

The next day

Woke up
Had some toast
Made a cuppa (No Yorkshire so chose second rate Typhoo)
Went to office
Read my emails
Checked the site stats

I THOUGHT “pnaaarrf?!”

I SAID “Davrnod….pnaaarf?!”

Turns out this is what happens when you get noticed by lifehacker. Lifehacker are one of the worlds most influential sites giving daily tips on how to ‘get things done’. They currently rank in the top 1000 sites worldwide, very cool indeed

And don’t be fooled, those other ‘little blips’ were actually also epic days including when we were featured on Techcrunch Europe. They’ve just been dwarfed by Lifehacker!

So a big welcome to all our new users. Please get in touch if you have any questions or just want to say hello :)

Take care,

Paul and David King

Surround yourself with skilled people

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:09:14 +0000

Some advice I was given recently was “Don’t do it all yourself”, a great piece of advice I think every business owner should take to heart. Which is why when it comes to dealing with law or accounts it’s wise to enlist the help of a pro.

As brothers, David and I are generally very trusting with a shared optimistic outlook on life and people. We find life is just nicer that way.

But with the occasional unscrupulous shark about and a service that can be used anywhere in the world it’s time to call in the legal team. And lovely local lawyers Mincoffs have stepped up to the mark.

Paul King (1DayLater), Antony Hall (Mincoffs) and David King (1DayLater)

So this past week we’ve been making sure that the 1DayLater terms and conditions, privacy policy and reseller agreements are all top notch. Legal banter has been flying around like you wouldn’t believe.

Why go to so much trouble and expense? Well the way that we collect and protect our users data is very important to us, as you might imagine. We take every possible care to make sure that information remains private and secure at all times. So these documents are just as much for our customers benefit as they are for ours!

Antony Hall, Mathew Foster and the rest of the Mincoffs team come highly recommended.

1DayLater phone & desktop applications

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:05:00 +0000

Some months ago we surveyed our beloved 1DayLater users to find out what the most-wanted features were. A mobile phone application came out on top, with a desktop application not far behind.

We’ve decided to kill these two particular birds with one stone. And enlisted the help of some local pro’s to help us do it.

Twisted Studio are a digital design house operating from the heart of Teesside’s Digital City. They are versed in all the latest creative and interactive technologies, and whats more, they’re big on data visualisation.

Now here at 1DayLater we LOVE coming up with cool and innovative ways of displaying data. So as you might imagine they’ve already won us over! But apart from that we’d really urge you to use their services because they’re a great bunch.

Here’s what we can expect for 1DayLater over the next month or so:

1) Phone applications for the following platforms:

Android

i-phone

Blackberry

N-Series

2) ‘Adobe air’ cross platform desktop application
(serving as a handy reminder to log your time, money and mileage)

Assuming everything goes as planned we should see these start to emerge in February, with the desktop application coming first. I can’t wait to give our customers something really special as I get the feeling they’re going to dazzle us.

Paul

Techcrunch Europe and other great exposure

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:00:00 +0000

January has been a phenominal month in terms of press for 1DayLater. Almost overnight we’ve started to attract a swash of Beta sign ups from across the waters. And like proud parents we’d like to share with you some of the great reviews 1DayLater has had.

1DayLater - A feisty time-tracking solution from the North East of England

Techcrunch Europe is ranked as the most influential tech blog in the UK - by information site Wikio

“1DayLater - Keep track of your business”

Useful Tools sift through the abundance of technologies available to you, and help you find the most useful web tools and apps.

“1DayLater - Ensuring the right amount is invoiced”

Killer Startups review 15+ startups a day. The public votes on which one they think will be ‘a killer’

“1DayLater - Keeping track of your time, money and business miles”

A daily dose of web 2.0

Sunderland Software Ventures 3

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Helping to drive forward the software industry in our region

We’ve had a small request from our good friends at Sunderland Software City. They have asked us to spread the word of their new Software Ventures program.

“The program itself is designed to help encourage the creation of high-growth software based businesses.”

“It is aimed at individuals who have the seed of a software related idea, a full blown idea or are looking to buy a software related business”

David and I were lucky to be a part of the very first software ventures program at the start of our 1DayLater development. These guys have been with us every step of the way and their program has taught us invaluable lessons in finance, protecting our IP, marketing, sales and so on.

We can both vouch that the program is delivered at a very high standard, and the network we have built up there has been an incredible asset to our company.

The brothers King (left) on the pilot software ventures course

Software Ventures are accepting applications now for their program which is due to start on the 16th February. The course will run for 7 weeks, one evening a week. Not only is it fully subsidised for successful applicants but you also get the chance to pitch your idea to a panel of investors on the last day just as we did!

If you have an idea for a software related business we’d really urge you to get signed up for this.

Graphic.ly, the beautiful comic beta

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:46:31 +0000

Probably the fasted I’ve gone from thinking about writing a blog entry to actually doing it…

”@1DayLater writes: So there’s bugs and missing features - but it’s *very* clear that @graphicly is the Usain Bolt of the comic world… Time to blog”

Graphic.ly, another North-East startup has begun handing out “Baby Beta” invites for their graphic novel application… oh. my. god. it’s beautiful. Like stupidly beautiful and well thought out to boot.

The concept of digitizing comic books has been around for years and I’ve never seen anything like graphic.ly - these guys have not only revolutionized the way the comics are presented but they’ve added a ream of features that will coagulate the comic world.

Reading [anything] has always been a solitary act, but with graphic.ly you’re given the freedom to communicate with other readers, the writers and artists of a comic! OK, the Beta has a lot of functionality disabled as they develop it, but it’s instantly clear what they will achieve - they’ll make huge ripples in the graphic novel world.

So with that, I say hats off to @kevinmann and his team, I can’t wait for your software to mature and I’m giving you something to quote me on:

“Graphic.ly will be to literature as YouTube is to movies” - David King

The Export feature lands!

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:00:00 +0000

7 days between 1DayLater blog posts?! It’s unheard of!!

Being busy is a terrible excuse for not writing on the blog, I think it might be time to invent a word that’s busier than “busy”… We’ve got some great news about 1DayLater, but first lets recap other goings-on:

Me and Paul have moved in together
a shared home office = double productivity
We’re starting an exciting charity event
we’ll starting blabbing about that soon
Phone development is under way
funding is sorted and the dev team standing by
I seem to have acquired a rabbit
he (or she) might become the 1DayLater mascot…

The real news is that the much awaited 1DayLater Export feature has finally arrived - I’ve grafted hard to make this as simple as possible and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results you can get

It’s worth trying out to see how tasty the results can be.

We’ve a lot more in the pipeline, and I’m already excited to get the new features finished and start writing about them! Till next time, David

Time Management Tips - no.2

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Understanding Urgent Vs Important

By being pro-active rather than reactive, and ensuring you work on ‘the right’ things rather than on all things you will become far more effective in work and in life.

Maelstrom is a timeless classic and favourite game of mine, a lot like the popular asteroids. It provides a great visual aid to describe how your daily activities fit within Urgent & Important frameworks.

Here are a few screenshots from the game…

The Important Tasks

1) Not Urgent + Important - These are the fast little asteroids which aren’t on an immediate collision course. They won’t kill you straight away but these little guys will get you eventually. Best to pick them off now before they become a threat later on.

(business) think of preventative tasks, personal development, networking, planning, developing new product lines - all the things which will ensure growth & long term survival but are easy to put off. You need to spend more time on these tasks.

2) Urgent + Important - This is anything which is on a collision course to wipe you out. If you don’t deal with it right now there will be serious problems.

(business) This could be a crisis, a meeting with your bank manager / investor, the filing of an impending VAT return. Always deal with these things in a timely fashion.

The Unimportant Tasks

3) Not Urgent + Not Important - Slow asteroids which just ramble along, no threat at all. But by far the most fun to shoot gung-ho at! And once you do, there will be a whole barrage of smaller faster asteroids to deal with when you have to play catch-up

(business) Sneaky time spent on facebook, procrastinating, basically most things you know you shouldn’t be doing. Don’t waste time on these!

4) Urgent + Not Important - Shooting stars appear momentarily and give you points when shot. But they are never a threat and you often get hit by something else while you’re distracted by them.

(business) A ringing telephone, any staff interuptions which take you away from your train of thought and working. You need to exercise restraint in dealing with these things all the time. Learn to say no!

What a great analogy for your working day! By visualising activities like this it’s easy to see you should be spending more time in quadrant 1 (the non-urgent, important tasks) and less time in quadrants 3 and 4 (the unimportant quadrants)

Developing these habits will help you to massively increase your productivity. Why not use 1DayLater to track your time spent in each area as you try to improve your working focus day-by-day.

Props to Steven R. Covey & his great book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for teaching me about this awesome technique.

Dan Hurst introduces 1DayLater

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:00:00 +0000

1DayLater now features a delightful “how to use 1DayLater” video animation for our new users which you can see on the main page when logged in. It’ll stay there for a week, so make sure you check it out. It’s been sat at the top of my list for about a month now and I can’t express how happy I am to see it up and running, it’s beautiful!

Of course I’ve put a lot of time and effort into making the thing, but silky smooth voiceover guru Dan Hurst has saved my sanity by supplying us with more audio, for free, again. So with that I’m dedicating the rest of this entry to the main man himself…

The last time we spoke to Dan was back in August when he did our hompage voiceover but a lot has happened since then…

Morning Dan!

Dan’s new podcast has such a lovely format, he interviews people for stories - each is about 10-20 minutes long and give a great insight into Dan and the people around him. Quite honestly, if you have a listen you’ll be hooked. His Christmas story had me welling up, he’s the walking talking proof that good people exist.

Voicebooth Webcam

He’s recently installed a webcam in his voicebooth so that he and Jared can show face to clients and listeners. I really admire the technical wizardry behind these guys - kudos!

The Dan Hurst Blog

The blog has a wealth of information about working in the voiceover business, spans a lot of areas from technical stuff to really sound advice (hah! no pun intended!)

So yes, thank you Dan! You the man

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:07:00 +0000

HUGE thanks to all our friends, Beta testers and supporters. You’ve made this year very special and enjoyable for us.

Hope that you all have some nice time off with your family and loved ones :)

Paul & David King

Our Ambitious Vision for 2010

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:00:00 +0000

1DayLater have enjoyed a great 2009, and look forward to celebrating this Christmas and New Year. But before we go, here are a some exciting things to look forward to in 2010…

A Full feature set — with outputs including invoicing, mileage claims, export, more in-depth analysis, and 3rd party add-ons.

Mobile phone & desktop app development — you’ll be able to log your activities on the move, and our handy desktop app will remind you to log them while you’re working at your pc.

The launch of our market intelligence campaign — by London-based firm, Kingpin Intelligence. That means MORE FEEDBACK which essentially means better end service for you

Development of an Outlook application for 1DayLater — A useful Outlook ‘skimmer’ being created by our friends at local Centre for Digital Innovation - Codeworks as part of their new Dev scheme.

- check out David doing ‘The Proposition’ pose, perfect for corporate photos!

Aaand if none of that other stuff tickled you, we’ll also have…

Integration of 1DayLater with Sage Sales Logix (CRM) & Sage Accounts — Using the expert guidance of our friend Derek Curtis & his company Bond Solutions, the leading NE supplier of Sage software products

A ‘secret charity based project’ — supported by our friends at Sunderland Software City, Newcastle’s Culture Lab, Codeworks & Bond Solutions - more info to come soon!

A discounted ‘Time Recovery Tool’ for 1DayLater members — A tool to help you save time which has been created by time-management coaches, Cadenza associates.

Wow!

Writing it down like that just made me realise that next year is going to be epic. I don’t know about you lot but I can’t wait :)

Time Management Tips - no.1

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:47:00 +0000

Aggressive Prioritizing / extreme time management

Here’s one of the most effective ways to boost your work productivity. I do this every day and seriously - it works!

Bend time to your will…

Step 1-Create a to-do list every morning

First thing in the morning (after you’ve had your morning cuppa of course) spend 15 minutes constructing a to-do list of activities you feel should get done that day. This won’t be wasted time.

You now have a list of activities

eg.

20 activities

5 really need doing

Step 2-Use aggressive prioritizing.

If you had to pick just one of these to do today - which one would it be? That is your number 1. Repeat this exercise to find number 2, and so on.

Step 3-Get working!

Stick to the order of your list and make sure you complete each task as much as possible before moving onto the next.

Now if you only get some things done in your day, they will have been the most important ones. Simple but truly effective!

- coming soon: time management for programmers

100 users in London, 100 up North

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:11:00 +0000

Tis time to celebrate - the 100th user signed up to the system today! Our beer-based motivation system (we’ll blog about that in the future) says that we must have a pint together to celebrate, happy days.

The real reason we’re writing is to talk about The Big Smoke - London. Last week we took an extended weekend to visit Kingpin Intelligence to talk about the marketing campaign that they’re generously giving to us. The main goal of the campaign is to get another 100 users signed up, and to get feedback from 50 of them a couple of weeks later- leaving us with a comfortable amount of testers and information to launch the full service. The Kingpin guys (James, Darius and Darren) are clearly a talented group and we feel incredibly lucky to have won this great prize with the Teesside’s Business School.

visiting the financial district - can you imagine being rich?

Sad as it may seem, but this visit was our 2nd ever trip to London, and as a city we’ve both got mixed feelings, it’s both vibrant and despairing.

it’s hard to believe that in the many thousands of faces I saw, there was only 1 girl with pink hair…
David King

laughter on the tube must seem like an alien landing, we got stared at a lot - bless them :)
Paul King

And they really do love a good stare, especially if there’s any smiling going on or unusual hair (like Davids) - we bore the brunt of many a steely gaze as we laughed and joked our way about the place. I guess the glumness comes with living in such a big city, but wow does it make me glad to live in Newcastle and remind me why I’m a North East Ambassador

Take it easy, and don’t forget to smile

Paul

Use-Case diagram for the API

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Happy December people, Christmas is really creeping in!

As 1DayLater is a member of the Codeworks DEV project (Digital Evaluation Vehicle) and as such we’re required to supply certain technical documents to tick some boxes. One such document is the “use-case diagram” that explains the 1DayLater API, while a doodle on a scrap of paper would have been OK we realised that other coders looking at the API could benefit from it - so we decided to do a real good job of it!

So far as these things go, the diagram is very simple, but the real value is that once more, we’ve created a nice animation with voiceover to make sure that our coder friends get a true understanding of the system! No professional audio this time, just me being nervous and getting the job done…

Wanna watch it? Head over to the API documentation and it’s right there at the top - unmissable.

1DayLater - An Update

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:44:00 +0000

With Beta testing well underway and our userbase expanding rapidly, I thought it was about time we had a wee update on general progress.

But what’s that you say? Our good friends at Ifwecanyoucan (a subgroup of Entrepreneurs Forum) have done it for me? Oh cool - well I guess you’d better have a mosey over there then, my work here is done! I’ll just hold the fort here and slurp some more of my tea :P

Ifwecanyoucan, for those not in the know, aims to connect eager-to-learn mentees with volunteer mentors in order to take them to ‘the next level’. A fine vision I feel!

You can read the 1DayLater article here , and I suggest having a read through some of the other stories, as many of them are truly inspirational.