Blinksale and Tick - Web 2.0 and the small business
Friday, August 04, 2006
There’s been lots of talk about Web 2.0 - an amorphous collection of ideas and functionality that is supposed to change the way the world works (and make VC firms lots of money again). It’s mash-ups, ruby on rails, AJAX, 37 Signals’ quick and dirty approach to development, and sites like Flickr and YouTube.
That’s all great, but I want to look at some practical examples of sites that do real things that work. Close to my heart (and my bank balance, as a small business owner), is anything that helps me do the admin stuff I can’t pay anyone to do.
Blinksale - because getting paid is good
Basecamp handles the project management side of things admirably - and the added Chat feature could be useful (but I’ve not tried it yet, because I’m too busy Skyping everyone - particularly the folks in Dublin I work with regularly).
But two more recent additions to my armoury (bearing more than a few similarities with Basecamp) are also helping out. They each do one thing, and do it well at a reasonable price (nothing, in my case). Blinksale handles my invoicing elegantly and flexibly - making it quick to create, send and manage the happy documents. It handles Euros and Sterling effortlessly (for my Euro clients), and sends nice thankyou notes when the money comes in.
I know a calculator, an email account and a copy of Pages would do the same job (and used to), but this is simpler, better and free. Sold.
Tick - because, um, time is money
An even more simple requirement for a consultant/contractor like me is keeping track of time. 
Basecamp has time tracking for projects, but only if you have a higher-level account, which is where Tick comes in.
Tell it your projects, how much time in the budget (broken down into tasks if you like), and simply enter the time you spend on each project each day. It graphically shows where you are in you budget, and you’ll be making sure you don’t lose all your profit fussing over a minor detail (and you’ll be more accurate in your pricing next time, as you’ll really know how long things take). Again, you could do this with a pen and paper, but I’d lose the paper, or it would be at the office when I was doing a little extra work at home.
What would be super-cool would be if these programs would integrate - some of the same data is necessarily duplicated (client contact details, project tasks . . . ). Given that the APIs for these web-based apps are published, we might not have long to wait.
The ability to bolt together business efficiency tools to suit you (rather than plunking down cash for MS Project and Quicken and only using a fraction of their bloated feature list) is very attractive. But even with the standalone sites we see now, my job just got easier.
And if that’s what Web 2.0 is about, then I’m all for it.