Behind The App: Curdbee – sweet and simple billing

1. What brought you into the idea of making CurdBee?

This was the time we were looking to smoothen the billing process since our inception in early 2004. At the beginning we had just a handful of client accounts to manage so the spreadsheet + .doc template solution was sufficient enough to send a decent invoice and keep track of the activity. But as we entered in to more contracts things got complicated with billing tuning to be a key priority with more work to do (e.g. periodic invoicing, collection tracking, etc.), which made us look for solutions available from paid to free, proprietary to open source, hosted to installable applications. There were quite a few excellent solutions but they were either beyond our budget or way too complex for what we wanted to. This made us think of creating our own simple solution to meet Vesess billing needs while saving time for more productive stuff. With this in mind, we created a single screen billing app and replaced our spreadsheet + .doc solution quite smoothly. Days passed and everyone started to talk about Web 2.0, with software as a service. New and innovative solutions were being added to the marked on a daily basis. We realized this would be the ideal time to enter the small business product market, which was an idea we had in the back of our minds for awhile. We selected our billing app which we developed for our own use as an entry point, and a few months down the line, CurdBee came in to play as a free service targeted at entrepreneurs/SMEs with similar needs to us, and yet enjoy simple solutions.

2. During your thoughts on branding and identity what other names did you toss around before you landed on CurdBee?

That’s what happens more often. You spend most of your time picking the name, looking for the .com availability than concentrating on creating a better experience, something even we did in our other projects. But for some reason, whether you believe it or not, CurdBee was the first and the last name we came up with for our billing application. CurdBee was the first project name we assigned internally since calling it “the billing application project”. By the time we completed the product, all the team mates were in love with that name and even the .com was available. In our culture Curd is a symbol of success, purity and Bee on the other hand stands for the efficiency and team spirit, both of which worked well with our product.

3. What kind of hurdles did you have to overcome in making the CurdBee application?

While the design and development of the product was not easy by any means, we were able to execute the idea on par with our original intentions. The hardest part in getting CurdBee out the door, then, was adapting it to suit our clientele. As new players in this field, we were starting out from scratch, and a lot of what we did was a trial and error process as we worked hard to ensure that the features which our future users would want were included in the application. After a lot of testing and debugging, the first version of CurdBee went live almost year ago (June 2008) and we discovered that we had hit the nail on the head. People liked the product and we were lucky to get featured in LifeHacker, MSNBC, etc. which resulted in more account signups. Since then, we have been constantly evolving based on our users’ needs, and this is what we plan to do in the future as well. Being a team from outside the United States and Europe, we also had to work hard to win our users’ trust, and did so by offering a totally free product for about 10 months. After we had a steady user base, we naturally took the development of CurdBee to the next stage.

4. If you were doing this all over again what is some insight that you could pass on to new app developers that would be beneficial?

Know the purpose of your application and who will eventually use it. Do adequate research and find out what majority of the users want in common, and then aim to develop those features without complicating your product by overloading it with features. Especially in today’s vibrant post-Web 2.0 world, there really is no excuse for creating products that nobody uses. Get out there, find out what people want, and make it. Be humble and ready to change – your users will always be the ones to impart the lessons you need to learn. If you ignore them, they will ignore you.

5. How important is keeping a clean and functional UI when making an app especially one that deals with something so critical like billing?

For us it’s all about the UI. Simple, clean and functional interfaces. It doesn’t mean we ignore other stuff like code quality, scalability, security, etc. when it comes to apps, but we strongly believe that the majority of the people put more weight on what they see and how they interact compared to how good the backend is when selecting their products. Billing is a common function to any business whether you are a lawyer, web designer or a plumber. So as the designers, our objective was to make billing, something you enjoy irrespective of your knowledge, computer literacy, experience, etc.

6. Through CurdBee you can customize your colors to make it to your liking. How is customization important to keep a users experience positive?

Yes, CurdBee does allow users to customize their branding by changing colors and adding their logo to invoices. However with the introduction of the PRO version, we have gone couple of steps forward by letting the users have full control over their messages (invoice notifications, reminders, etc.) and have created a platform with that focuses on features such as recurring billing, estimates, etc. We really hope these customization options would create a positive user experience allowing more users to fulfill their needs at minimum cost. Everyone wants to feel unique, and at CurdBee, we pride ourselves in giving each of our users the ability to customize their experience. We don’t like it when applications tell us how we should behave, and believe very strongly that people should be the ones in control. At CurdBee, customizability is at the very core of our design philosophy, and something that we focus on in every project of ours.

7. How do you discern what the right amount of customization is without loosing the integrity of your app?

We do get requests for more features, better customization options so on and so forth from our passionate users and some of them are of real value. But then again we are following a wait and see approach in deciding which features, customization request to roll out as higher customization / flexibility could make CurdBee a complex application for the average user and those who with simple needs. We’ve seen simple, clean applications getting very complex in trying to make them all-in-one

solutions, and this, we feel, destroys the user experience. This is one of the main reasons why we implemented an on-demand architecture, so the user can make the decision regarding which features he or she needs and still keep the application clean, simple and functional.

8. How important is safety in making an application that deals with users crucial information like billing?

Safety has always been a top priority for us at Vesess. From our early days, through the development of CurdBee and the recent release of CurdBee PRO, the integrity of our users’ data is of paramount importance to us. While we do undertake all the usual precautions when it comes to our server side security, we also recently began offering SSL secured billing with CurdBee PRO, a feature that many users will no doubt find attractive. In terms of code, all core components of CurdBee are developed and tested entirely in house, and we are therefore 100% sure of the quality of the application.

9. CurdBee offers PayPal and Google Checkout integration as well as multiple currencies and PDF support. How vital is integration?

Sending a bill to your client online could certainly make life easy for most of the people when they have more important stuff to attend. But what if we can go that extra mile by allowing busy customers to accept payments online? What if we can let them download PDFs directly and send it via email if they like? They will save both time and money which will make a significant difference at the end of the day, isn’t it? Everyone is trying to go global and do business with the world. So, if you can send bills in the currency preferred by your customer, won’t he or she be happy? At Vesess we use at least four currencies when working with clients from different continents and we have experienced this first hand, which convinced us to become one of the first billing apps to allow multiple currencies and make our product a usable one for the majority of people around the world.

10. Do you think the final outcome of making the app outweighed all of the struggle while making it?

Most definitely. It is a truly a joy to open up our stats page every morning and see new sign ups, and sent invoices. As a SME it’s truly a privilege to have the opportunity of helping so many others like us. The development process was long and difficult, but the rush of creating a web application that is used the world over cannot really be explained in words! It really is a wonderful feeling to be of service to others. This is our first attempt at developing an application and it was a great learning for the entire team. Although we had experience creating apps for our clients, we mostly handled the tech side of those but here we had to get the app out and then start working really hard to get the word across to our future users as well. With the PRO version coming into play we have opened a new revenue stream for our product and it’s encouraging to see more and more users going PRO, which in turn confirms that they value our service and are willing to support us to make CurdBee an even better product.

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Where Can I get more Curdbee?

Curdbee on the web | Curdbee on Twitter | Vesess Site