Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

Last year I discussed some of the tools I was finding useful for running my company. This post is an extension of that and discusses how things have changed now.

The biggest change is regarding finances, and how we handle them. Previously we had used Freshbooks for our Invoicing needs, and also used it to track expenses. This worked to a degree, but due to the nature of our revenue streams we had items that were ‘off book’ and we couldn’t account for them in FB, instead a variety of spreadsheets and other tools were needed to keep on top of everything.

The issue we were finding was two fold,
1) Proper tracking of all our revenue streams and being able to segment our expenses into P/L accounts with decent breakdowns, budgettng etc. [And not just things we had invoiced].
2) And how much have we spent, over time by category.

It’s not to say that Freshbooks doesn’t work well. I could easily see how if you were a freelancer, and doing timetracking, and rebilling expenses to clients that it suits your needs. For us, we needed accounting details, and thought it was time to see what else was out there.

There are variety of SaaS web accounting packages out there, and the one we went for was Xero. A personal recommendation secured it, easily when it was referred to as ‘idiot proof’ - perfect for my needs.

Quite simply Xero allows us to have information about our bank accounts (including paypal), and set up automatic rules for dealing with transactions that are not Accounts Receivable/Invoiced based (i.e Google Adsense earning, users buying subscriptions, and clothing orders).

For FY11 we will be able to setup our budgeting, and have one or two views that really give us an overview into how the ‘business’ is running.  All we want is for Kitecrowd to get into the black, and with Xero we now have much more of an idea as to what our core expenses truly are, and what those ‘one off costs’ of year one really amount to.

Due to Xero being able to handle our Invoicing needs, we will be dropping Freshbooks. It’s certainly worth a look though if you use other accounting packages, and l’d strongly suggest testing the market – only by trying things will you know what will allow you an effective workflow.

I’d also like to say how good the service is from Freshbooks, and Xero. A welcome from Xero, and an enquiry from Mike McDerment Freshbook CEO about what I was finding hard with expenses, and why I’m switching. So Mike, this is for you – you guys rock, and served my needs well, but you just at this moment in time don’t allow me to get enough information about how my business is operating.

On an aside, Xero can integrate with Freshbooks, but we are a small company, and can’t afford to be paying for two solutions that handle Invoicing/Expenses. When one of them also handles the rest of our accounting functions, maybe this will change in the future, maybe it won’t. Either way Freshbooks it’s been fun using you.

This post has been inspired by the thoughts on Spotify, and them not being social, by Phillip John – Spotify Are Digging Their Own Grave By Not Going Social :

The other week at SXSW I was listening to Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, talk about the future of the service as well as some interesting facts and figures. One aspect that caught my attention was the mention of involving a ’social’ aspect regarding music sharing.

Daniel Ek: Playlists are the mixtapes of 2010

Now along comes mflow, a service I had heard of, but only recently received a beta code to join the service (want to join, use the code ZANE444). It’s a way to share music that you like, amongst a group of followers, consider it a recommendation engine powered by your friends.

I believe that Spotify really needs to take a look at mflow, the social aspect of music is where it needs to, and apparently is, heading. For me, I’m not the biggest playlist creator, but I love finding new music, and listening to good playlists by my friends, and others.

What people love about Spotify, is the ability to listen in full, and with no restriction on play count, any song of their choosing that is in the catalogue. They can then create playlists of full albums, or selected tracks.

They can share these with a link, to their friends – but this is a manual distribution, via email, twitter, facebook or whatever media they utilise, (the only automatic sharing is to Last.FM). Daniel talked about how in the future the interaction would be occurring within the app, rather than outside it.

Daniel Ek: Music discovery is the future

On the other hand mflow, once you’ve added/found friends using it, allows you to recommend songs by ‘flowing’ them. The issue is, I can only listen to that track ONCE in full, thereafter I will get a 30 second preview. This is due to the licensing terms with the labels.

So Spotify, has a way to be social, yet it’s outside of it’s environment.

It’s been stated that Spotify don’t want for you to have to recreate a social network in their environment, they want to harness your existing social networks. To me, this is important, I don’t want to have to recreate existing social groups on every new platform I try.

This is where mflow is lacking, if I was able to instantly see who of my friends were using mflow then I might use it more, it’s a service that works well when you are being given a constant stream of new/old music to discover. For me, I have to ‘hunt’ my friends out (I’m the user Neil on the service, find me, add me!)

Spotify and mflow are not in direct competition, mflow is sitting in the music discovery space, and it works well (I consider it more usable than Last.FM). If it was able to link in with Spotify (to hear songs more than once), then it certainly could hit a critical mass more easily.

mflow: Music’s better shared

A differentiator between mflow, and Spotify (when it has a social aspect), is that you purchase music that someone has flowed, then that user gets 20% of the price as a credit. If there was integration with Spotify, that likely stop the incentive to buy music through mflow.

Spotify, currently have a revenue stream based on user subscriptions (and selling of advertising, alongside subsidised bundles with mobile operators). You can purchase music through Spotify (but that would be targeted more at the non-subscribers), after all Spotify want ‘music to be like water’ if you are a subscriber, it’s always with you – on any device.

Spotify is not dead, it’s still developing it’s feature set including addressing a social aspect. As well as ‘revision’ histories of playlists etc. mflow, well I’m not sure where they are heading yet, they seem like an open company and hopefully they will take on board some of the points myself, and others raise.

In other news, check out the numbers:

Spotify Numbers: (Source: SXSW Talk)
7 Million Users, in six countries.
320,000 Paid Subscribers
Over 100 Million playlists, 30% are just full albums
Around 10 Million tracks

mflow Numbers:
None known at this moment.
Edit:
Expected 2 Million tracks at launch (15/04/10): Source

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