Monthly Archives: April 2008

The hidden Fortune 5,000,000 niche

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Mic sent me 2 days ago a video of David Heinemeier Hansson, DHH for the web geeks.

DHH is the creator of the Ruby on Rails web framework and is also a partner of 37signals, a well known provider of web-based applications, such as Basecamp.

37signals have a certain philosohpy (and humour) about how business should be done on the web, that could probably be summarized by the sentence: “Keep It Simple”.

I was happily surprised when I read their book but this video contains also great stuff I wanted to share.

There is nothing really new there but a simple message about getting back to the basics of what selling softwares is and was even before the “viral” effect came down with Google, Facebook, etc., …

As one of the comments below the post says : “Every time I get disillusioned, frustrated, and unmotivated with my business, posts like these slap me back on track.”.

I guess I’ve just had the same feeling.

Boarding

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Hey, I am Hughes, I have a child, a super cool girlfriend and I live in Brussels (Belgium).

My first contact with a keyboard was with the Philips Videopac console back in 1984 … closely followed by a C64 and a ZX Spectrum. That’s where it all began, with a simple Basic program.

After my University years, I did intranet sys admin jobs and started playing with Linux as a hobby.

In 1999, I had the chance to be hired by Mic’s brand new company ‘Code’ (‘OpenHR’) for a 4-year-discovery of the fascinating web development world.

In the meantime, I blew my mind using Linux as a development platform.

And now after a few years of freelance jobs (mainly with Ruby), let’s BeeBole’n roll!

I’m really excited to work with you again guys,
The beehive is buzzing!

How To Get Users Feedback

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Getting your feedback is and will be an important point for us. It is not only about correcting bugs. It is also about listening to customers needs, create a real dialogue between users and us, or simply between users.

The first idea was to see how we could use an application such as Facebook and its groups to create a community around BeeBole and BeeLit. The problem is that with Facebook, you can create a community but you get a lot more than that. The product is great but I often surprised myself spending too much time with funny applications compared to the time I had spent on what I was looking for at the first place. So, let’s say I have a focus issue with Facebook that is shared among my friends as well.

Then we came across Get Satisfaction, a new service offered on the Internet that did what we were looking for. A few others such as Complaints.com and PlanetFeedback give the same service but Get Satisfaction is the only one without ads.

Once the environment for BeeBole was set up, I seem to have made a mistake and had to take contact with the support. What a surprise ! Two minutes later, I had a first answer from their Community Manager, Eric Suesz, and just after a new email from their CCO and co-founder Amy Muller.

The problem was of course directly solved, the service after tests is great, well thank you Get Satisfaction, you have a new fan.

At Your Service !

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Hello there ! My name is Yves Hiernaux. I am Belgian and live in New Delhi, India.

I started working a few years ago in a small company called OpenHR, the company Mic created. As he said, we were creating web applications on the top of SAP HR. A few years, 2 acquisitions (ARINSO International and Northgate) and 5500 more colleagues later, I was still working in the same environment, leading the developments and the outsourcing practice of those web applications.

Starting BeeBole is an exciting dream started around a pint of beer in a pub of Covent Garden in London. A brand new sand box to let us create our vision about web applications. A hope and a will to bring something back to the web communities that were our inspirations all those years.

From Music to Software

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I’m Mic, and here is my CV !

I live in Belgium. You can talk to me in French, English, Spanish and Croatian.

A wife and two kids are my family.

I played pro saxophone until I was 25. No formal school, no degree, just music.

Then I spent two years drawing and LISP programming with Autocad.

A great guy hired me and propelled me in the world of SAP and Human Resources.

Two years later, with a brother and friends we started a company providing, briefly said, web applications on top of SAP HR.

The company was acquired in 2006, incidentally by the same great guy.

And now, BeeBole.

Stay tuned to our blog to know what will BeeBole do for small and medium companies or independants.

Welcome !

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This is the first post for the small BeeBole team.

We will use this blog to share with you, step by step, our successes, decisions, questions or difficulties and keep you posted all along the journey.

In the coming months, we will mainly focus on our new web-based invoicing software called BeeLit.

BeeLit is aimed at helping freelancers, SME’s or small teams of bigger companies with administrative tasks such as Timesheet, Expense Management and Customer Invoicing.

Welcome onboard, hopefully we’ll all enjoy the ride !