blog

10 Ways to Find Web Design and Development Work

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:23:17 -0700

For agencies specializing in web design, web development or other consulting work, finding new clients is about knowing where to look. There are a number of resources and platforms meant to match companies with digital agencies. Here, we have put together a list of websites and services to help you find your next project. Your impressive portfolio will take over from there!

Find potential clients:

The San Francisco EGOTIST: A creative, online community local to the San Francisco Bay Area. Their job listings also show jobs, freelance work and internships across North America, London, Sydney, Auckland, Dubai, Singapore, Mumbai and Budapest.

SimplyHired: An acclaimed job board site that publishes over 8 million listings, including contract, temporary and freelance work.

Krop: A creative industry job board and portfolio hosting website based in Calabasas, California. They represent a global audience and list an extensive jobs database.

Coroflot: Another job board and portfolio hosting site that meant to put creative talent in front of decision makers.

Smashing Jobs: From the popular Smashing Magazine blog, Smashing Jobs provides a place for readers to find work in design, programming and more.

Authentic Jobs: An online community where companies and creative professionals can find one another.

Behance: A leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work.

Expose your agency:

Along with spearfishing efforts, you might want to let clients looking for creative professionals find you. The following lists sites where agencies can display work for companies to discover.

Sorfolio: A website built to help companies to find web designers for their projects.

WWDC - Which Web Design Company: An online platform that also helps companies or interested parties in finding a web designer or digital agency for their business needs.

Agency Tool: Another platform that seeks to both list and expose digital agencies to interested companies.

Let us know in the comments if you found these useful!

Product Roadmap Q2 - Progress Update

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:00:00 -0700

Does anyone remember when we used to call activities "diaries"?

Indeed it was some time ago that we went to a bit of effort renaming this creature throughout the AffinityLive interface. However, the database, design and functionality of activities was not changed. Around 8 weeks ago our development team took the plunge to upgrade this core element of AffinityLive properly - as it was holding us back from making big improvements to other modules. As we approached the last leg of this quarter, it became clear that we'd pulled a big thread on a knitted jumper, with the work increasing in complexity and scope, leading us to look more widely at the fundamental ease of use matters surrounding AffinityLive.

We'd also been detecting a slight agitation from some of our users, who have helped us see the error of our ways: Focusing too much on features that admins and decision makers care about, and not focusing enough on the people at the coal face every day - trying to do work, manage tasks and log time.

As a result, we've decided to double-down our efforts on features that end users - both your staff and your clients - will get the most value out of for the remainder of this quarter. Here’s an update on how we’re progressing:

Activities Overhaul

This really has been an epic job - our team are not only upgrading existing areas but also have to scrutinize features currently in development to ensure they’re respecting the new activities module structure!

Some highlights that will make a real difference to the way you work are:

New View Activity screen that also allows you to edit fields on the fly - no more trying to use a clunky, separate Edit Activity screen.
New Compose Activity screen - being able to create activities in a separate "compose" window - much like Gmail. This allows you to keep working with the record you were looking at, and add your activity in a new stream-lined design.
Inline replies - allows you to quickly reply/comment on records without loading the full Create Activity screen, saving you time and energy!

Inbox Replaces the ToDo List

With development also tracking well, this new approach to managing all of your client communication will bring some key benefits:
Faster to view/read through client emails thanks to a preview section.
Intuitive to use - it is designed much like an inbox with quick reply capability.
Easily turn emails into tasks to keep track of your work.

Late Entry: Tasks Redesign!

Yep, this wasn’t exactly on the Q2 roadmap - we were just planning a few light improvements to tasks as part of the projects module upgrade - but with time running short, and users suffering daily with the limitations around tasks, we’ve resolved to tackle a proper tasks upgrade ahead of the projects upgrade!

You can expect a lot of awesome improvements, like:

More task fields, like description, manager and priority.
Tasks to allow comments
Tasks to have more statuses (including custom ones)
Tasks to have progression actions/triggers (including notifications such as when a task is completed)
Ability to accept/decline tasks
A Tasks Board to manage deadlines and work in progress
New task view and improved list screen.

Gmail Gadget

Personally, I can’t wait try to this - as someone who keeps an eye on support, it will allow me to just view an email and quickly see if someone has replied to a support email - no more need to check the requests queue or find the contact in AffinityLive! Once the team are familiar with this, the amount of cc noise should greatly reduce too.
Development progress has been solid considering this feature also relies heavily on API improvements and the activities upgrades. Here are some feature highlights:
Instantly know, within Gmail, whether someone has already replied to an email:

Automatically detect if the sender isn’t in AffinityLive, and quickly add them
If contact is in AffinityLive, instantly see the context for the conversation - potentially a sale, project, issue, and even change the status for that object!
Easily relocate a conversation (E.g. from a client record to a project)
Create a task against the record that the email is linked to

Client Portal

Developing a client portal for a product as horizontal as AffinityLive is quite a mission. In some ways it has an extra layer of complexity around setting the permissions for what the end-clients should be able to see. As a result, developing a much stronger and more flexible permission scheme for the portal has been our biggest hurdle. We are close to having this ready, and will soon be building out many of the new screens and features.

Some highlights for the new client portal will be:

Ability to share a lot more detail with your clients - budgets, progress, tasks and more
Fine-grained access and visibility controls - by client and even per record.
Sign-offs - the ability to submit work for sign-off from AffinityLive, with the client reviewing and approving via the portal
Sales opportunities within the portal - for when you want your client to see some of the sale details and collaborate with you
Client directory where your clients can see who’s using the portal, update their details and invite others
More visual customization - upload your logo/banner, custom colour schemes and create welcome messages.

Re-launching the Campaigns module!

A surprise bonus! Running effective email marketing campaigns is actually an important need for our business as well, and we’ve been wanting to expand functionality in this area for some time. Considering suggestions from our users for alternatives to Campaign Monitor, we are working on:

Support for MailChimp integration
The ability to send bulk email campaigns without 3rd party integration!

Conclusion

The changes above mean that we've had to push back a few items to Q3:

Upgrade to projects
Multi-user Scheduling & Workload Reallocation (dependent on projects upgrade)
Tasks, Activities & Requests in AffinityLive Sync (dependent on tasks upgrade)
Request Module Upgrade & Autoconversion (dependent on activities upgrade)

However, we strongly feel that this is the best approach - not only from a product design perspective, but because it will help reduce the friction for new users who are trying to familiarize themselves with a new product - which in turn makes it easier for an administrator to get their whole team on-board!

So, after a focus in Q2 on things end users love/need to manage their daily work, we'll be re-focusing in Q3 in things that make the business easier than ever to manage.

Attracting, converting and closing with double the efficiency

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:22:47 -0700

Ask any digital agency,and they’ll say that delivering awe-inspiring projects is only half the job. From leads to interested parties, staying on top of communications is critical in winning clients and keeping them happy.

Based in Sydney and specializing in digital strategy, web development and online marketing, Ziller Digital Agency love what they do. With all the creative effort they put into their work, it’s not a surprise that the quality of their projects do the talking.

However, staying on top of sales can get messy. Critical information from clients is often scattered amongst individual inboxes, email chains and various spreadsheets. Knowing what’s going on with client accounts comes in the form of surprise rather than expectation.

“Everything was everywhere,” explains Trent Allan, the founder of Ziller. At a certain point, it became imperative that they find a smart way to organize their sales process, communications and client accounts.

Building structure - a defined and automated sales process

The first step in resolving their dispersed sales process was organizing all of their contacts in one succinct place. After implementing AffinityLive, the team at Ziller began by categorizing sales, leads and clients by status.

“We use all the features of a sale to understand what’s hot and important and what’s not. The star rating, dollar value and stage of the project helps keep the important sales at the top and the unimportant ones at the bottom.”

After which, assigning staff and resources was a breeze; account managers had a place to document their efforts. They also leveraged AffinityLive’s shared database to allow everyone on their team a window into the progress of leads and client accounts.

The Outcomes -- visibility & utilization

Trent explains the benefits of having defined and automated their sales process. “We are more on top of sales than ever before, because we use it everyday the sales pipeline is right in our face and its hard to forget leads or sales we are working on. Its improved efficiency with tasks and just clarity and visibility around what’s happening in our company.”

Visibility into performance and tasks

With all communication defined in one place, keeping track of the sales pipeline became easy. “Just to have everything on the one place for starters is seriously beneficial. We love the way it collects all emails to to and from clients, how easy it is to track time, and the visibility it gives you over your whole operation.”

Not only were they able to see the status of client accounts, but the tools provided insight into how well they were performing. All efforts became measurable and compared to number of wins.

Projects team able to access client conversations from the sales pipeline

Once a sale closes, clients are turned over to the land of projects-- where proposals, approvals and deliverables live. One of the greatest things about AffinityLive for Ziller is the complete record of client interactions. Trent elaborates, “our key employees not involved in sales can still at anytime get an insight into what happened in the sales pipeline, which is awesome for transparency.”

Linking work done to invoices sent increases billable utilization

“We use Xero for accounting, and previously used Zoho CRM for our customer relationships. It just seemed inefficient.” As it turns out, there was no link between the work done for clients and invoices sent.

As a result, “it was hard to understand how much money was coming in based on work that was being done at the time.” Being able to document hours allowed them to know how much work they were doing and subsequently bill for that time.

Trying AffinityLive in your business

If you'd like to see if AffinityLive can help your business transition easily from the mess of sales communications to a defined, organized model, we'd love you to try it for yourself.

Ziller Digital Agency is an award-winning boutique agency, recognised for innovation and technology. Their team is located in Sydney, Australia and consists of passionate and dedicated designers, developers, strategists and UX specialists who draw upon a combined 30 years experience to develop businesses into success stories.Learn more about Ziller.

Free Live Webinar: Learn How to Automate Your Client Life Cycle

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:50:03 -0700

The studies have been clear: businesses who use cloud apps make 23% more revenue and gain more days off from management-level tasks than those who work amongst scattered spreadsheets and emails.

Whether you've moved to the cloud or you're planning on doing so, there is always more you can learn to strengthen the power of your platform and gain these benefits.

That's why we're bringing together the CEO’s of three leading cloud platforms for your business to share the lessons and insights gained through combined decades of experience in the cloud business software space.

Hear from the leaders of QuoteRoller, AffinityLive and Saasu and learn how you can better streamline your sales, projects, invoicing, and accounting to create one end-to-end workflow for your business, unlocking the power of the integrated cloud.

In this live webinar, you’ll learn how to:

Streamline and automate your client sales process

Turn quotes into sales. Turn sales into projects. Turn projects into invoices.

Sync your billing and invoicing data with Saasu’s accounting software

Save & share client communications across teams, departments and platforms

Generate automatic & ongoing quote, sale and project templates

Leverage the integrations between QuoteRoller, AffinityLive, and Saasu

Presented by

QuoteRoller is a proposal software platform, built to deliver beautiful and purpose-driven quotes to clients.
AffinityLive is an all-in-one CRM, project management, time billing, client support and invoicing solution.
Saasu is an online accounting product that manages business financials.

Get a 2 month free trial

Saasu and AffinityLive are offering a 2 month free trial for all signups, and QuoteRoller is offering a one month free trial. That’s a total of up to 8 weeks to test, set up, and get to know the platforms for your business.

Try AffinityLive, QuoteRoller, or Saasu free for an extra month by using the code ENDTOEND

Reserve your space on June 5th, 2013

Certified Partner Program

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:37:55 -0700

Do you have a passion for business, technology and helping clients embrace the cloud? Become a Certified Partner to earn ongoing revenue & provide high value services to your clients.

If you’re looking for something to offer your clients and want to spread the word about AffinityLive, you might be interested in our Certified Partner Program. It’s meant to offer businesses all of the tools necessary to configure, implement and offer training for AffinityLive. Best of all, Certified Partners are compensated with commissions between 15% and 30% on an ongoing basis.

Who the Certified Partner Program is designed for

The AffinityLive Certified Partner Program is for businesses that want to include AffinityLive as a key part of their service offering for clients - providing sales, configuration, implementation, training and support to their clients on an ongoing basis. Examples of the kinds of businesses well suited to the partner program include:

How to become a Certified Partner

Becoming a partner is a five step process:

Register your interest using the form below. Our team will get in touch to learn a bit more about your business and answer any other questions you have about the partner program.
Pay a one-time fee of US $1995. This cost covers the 6-part training program that is essential (and required) to become a Certified Partner.
Undertake the 6-part online training course and pass the online exam to learn and prove your ability to sell, implement & support AffinityLive.
Undertake 2 client implementations of AffinityLive. Don’t worry, our expert team will be standing behind you as you “go solo” for the first time.
Sign the Certified Partner Agreement. Once you're officially a partner, we'll list you on AffinityLive as a Certified Partner and you'll benefit from regular commissions of between 15% and 30% on an ongoing basis!

What you’ll get as a Certified Partner

Training & Certification

We’ll provide you with training through 6 online training sessions for you and your team. You’ll also need to pass an online certification exam - this is all part of making sure that only the best, most capable businesses are able to call themselves Certified Partners.

Priority support

When you’re out there selling to, training and supporting your clients, you never need to feel alone. AffinityLive Certified Partners get their own priority support email address and escalation phone number - so you’re never left out on your own.

Ongoing Margin of between 15% and 30% for your clients

As an ongoing partner and service provider of AffinityLive to your clients, you also get the benefit a cut of ongoing subscription revenue for all subscriptions you sell and support. The percentage increases as you have more active AffinityLive clients under your account; 15% for the first $2000 a month, 20% for the next $8,000 a month, 25% for the next $15,000 a month and 30% for any revenue beyond $25,000 per month.

Sales materials

We’ll provide you with sales materials, teach you our sales process and give you access to our demo sites to help you show prospective clients the features and benefits of AffinityLive.

Support materials

We’ll provide you with training and support materials so that you can quickly and easily start offering paid training, implementation and support services for your clients.
$500 for every new Certified Partner you introduce. If you know other businesses that would be great AffinityLive Certified Partners, introduce them to the program through the Registration Form below and if they become Certified Partners we’ll also give you $500 to say thanks!

A Listing on AffinityLive.com

Once you become a Certified Partner, your business will be listed on the AffinityLive.com website. Trial users of AffinityLive will be encouraged to check out the partner directory - sending your business leads that you can still earn margin from if you close & support them.

Early access to new features

There’s always new and exciting features coming out of the AffinityLive labs. Get an inside run with special access to development platforms and heads up on new features so you’re never caught on the back foot.

Your own development & test AffinityLive instance

Certified partners will also get their own test and demo platform for AffinityLive free of charge. Great for demos and experimenting without affecting your sensitive business data, this environment is free for you to setup and configure as you wish.

Certified Partner Dashboard (coming soon)

We’ll be introducing a new partner dashboard soon which will allow you see the deployments that are under your Certified Partner accounts, including active user counts, margin share and usage.

If you’d rather just recommend and refer AffinityLive to your clients, associates or other people you influence, check out our Referral Partner Program - it is quick, easy, free to join and you can earn up to $100 for every new account you refer that signs up to a paid account.

Email: The New Gateway to Productivity

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:00:00 -0700

The workplace has changed significantly over the past decades. Years ago, employees had to be in a physical office to receive notifications and stay connected to their business accounts, clients and colleagues.

Today’s globalized work environment is often comprised of partners, offices and customers around the world. Employees need to be able to communicate effectively, discuss ideas and make decisions regardless of location.

The development of web-enabled mobile devices and cloud-based apps has changed everything about the way employees connect to business, and thanks to advanced web-based communications features, workers are becoming more productive than ever. Employees can access their faxes, business-line voicemail and much more, all from their own personal devices and from the palms of their hands.

But there is one crucial business platform holds these new communications functionalities together and keeps employees connected: email.

Over the years, email has transformed into an all-encompassing information hub that keeps employees tied to their business from anywhere in the world. Today, it is the gateway to some of the most important collaboration functionalities and productivity tools including:

Virtual Fax

While fax communications no doubt remain critical to daily workflow, Internet-based technology has changed the faxing process. Fax over IP solutions eliminate the need for fax machine hardware and give employees the ability to send and receive faxes via email. Whether they are at their office desktop or have access to their email remotely via a personal laptop, tablet or smartphone, they can always download and respond to important faxes.

Voicemail to Email

Web-based services like voicemail to email let employees send their voicemail messages straight to their email accounts to ensure that they never miss important information. Voicemail messages are converted into audio files, transcribed and forwarded directly to their email inbox so they can listen at their earliest convenience and from the device of their choosing. With voicemail to email, employees can promptly return calls, address issues, keep colleagues from waiting for answers and help get projects done faster.

Call Notify

With the mobile devices available today, employees are expected to be accessible, especially for important clients. Cloud-based features like call notify let workers manage and receive notification emails containing specific callers’ names and numbers when important calls are missed on their business line. They can predefine the settings so that an email is only sent when the missed call meets specific criteria, and can promptly return the call without delay.

Web and Video Conferencing

Collaboration tools like audio, web and video conferencing have changed the way businesses conduct meetings over the past years. It is now easier than ever to collaborate with business partners or customers across the country, and make sure that everyone in the meeting is on the same page with features like whiteboard and screen sharing. But where do those platforms start? They are most often launched through an invitation via email that includes the bridge and conference information.

With IP-powered communications, employees now have the tools to stay on top of their work, even when they’re away from the office. Advanced communications features are integrated directly with their email accounts, and are easy to get started.

Businesses that take advantage of the collaborative tools that pair seamlessly with email give employees the power to be more productive, no matter where their business takes them.

This is a guest post by Victoria Fields, Copywriter for Momentum Telecom, a cloud-based communications provider

New Feature: Email Aliases

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:03:45 -0700

Send Emails from Anywhere & BCC Your Project, Sale, Issue, or Retainer

AffinityLive users love the ability to keep track of all activity related to a client, project, issue or retainer. Between the emails you send back and forth, documents signed and approved, support questions submitted, and projects hashed out, everything is recorded in AffinityLive.

If you're like us and you do most of your work from email, you might like the ability to record those emails in their rightful places in AffinityLive.

Before

Up until now, the best ways to track emails under a particular Sale, Project, Issue or Retainer item was to either relocate an email after the fact from the Client record, or to send emails the original email to a client from within AffinityLive.

However, many of our users write emails from Gmail, Outlook or even via mobile, and relocating things after the fact is good in theory, but not done much in practice. Additionally, emails you get from non-clients - like receipts, quotes or other important stuff - don't get captured against projects or retainers etc - it would be much easier to just forward them across and know they're in the right place, attachments and all.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to BCC an email to a specific project, or forward a quote/attachment across to a retainer? Well now you can, and more, with Email Aliases.

Introducing Email Aliases: easier, faster and more convenient

What most users don't know is that AffinityLive has been capable of this feature for a while, but the aliases weren't listed anywhere and thus, undiscoverable. Now, we've set them up under each Sale, Project, Issue, or Retainer record so that you can easily copy or add them to your address book.

Now from wherever you email, you can add a special BCC that will record that email to a particular Sale/Project/Issue/Retainer in AffinityLive. And if you've got something in your inbox you think should be against a key Sale/Project/Issue/Retainer, you can now just forward it to the same address, and we'll either store or relocate the conversation accordingly.

Add aliases addresses to Google, Exchange or Office365 Contacts

Of course, being able to see a space on the side of a screen and copy the address is all well and good, but if you're in the back of a taxi or otherwise working exclusively from your email account, it would be much handier to just have that address on-hand in your contacts or address book. If you're a user of Google Apps, Exchange of Office365, we've got a solution for you - with a single click on the send to address book icon, you can forward that alias to your address book, where it will be automatically named and saved, making it quick and easy to BCC or Forward emails to a sale, project, issue or retainer straight from your email client or smartphone.

BCC or Forward to categorize a whole conversation

When AffinityLive captures an email automatically, if we don't have an existing conversation to link it to, we capture it (and any replies) against the client/company account. With this new feature, when you're writing an email response, you can easily BCC the Sale/Project/Issue/Retainer's alias as a BCC, and it will record that email - and also move previous emails in the conversation - across to the same record in AffinityLive. If the email that's just hit your inbox happened to come from a client (and has been captured in AffinityLive already), forwarding the email to the email alias will ensure the previous messages in a conversation are moved as well!

Find emails where they belong

Now, when looking upon your Sale item, you’ll find all related emails in the center activity stream. You’ll never again have to interrupt your workflow by having to send emails from AffinityLive. Do it from the comfort of your own phone, Gmail dashboard, or Outlook/Office365 inbox while knowing it is securely recorded.

New Feature: Chat Live with our Support Team!

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:19:26 -0700

With the success and engagement of the Live Chat box on AffinityLive.com, we’ve decided to bring that utility into every AffinityLive account. Today, we’re happy to announce the Live Support feature. Not only can you ask quick questions about how to make the most out of the application, but you can contact us for any issues that may come up, and get answers right away. Best of all, you’ll be live-chatting with someone from our team.

Find it in your Help Section

Before, any inquiries for our team had to be submitted through the ‘Questions’ area and awaited response via email, which can sometimes takes a day or two depending on the load. Sometimes, questions or issues that come up are small and can be answered quickly, and we wanted to have a way for users to get the reactive support they needed. With Live Support, all questions-- big or small-- can be answered instantly from someone on our team.

Get your questions answered quickly and get things done

We understand that there are questions about the product, imports, integrations and more that are specific and vary for each account. Live Support aims to provide the help your business needs in getting acquainted with AffinityLive, whether that be importing customer data, integrating with your accounting platform (Saasu, Xero, or Quickbooks), or finding out where to configure your business processes.

NOTE: If our team is fully occupied with other accounts or absent, you won't see the Live Support option in the Help Section.

Admin Settings Has a Whole New Look

Wed, 08 May 2013 13:25:05 -0700

Over the last year or so we've been introducing a steady stream of improvements - things like new features, upgrades to existing feature or unlocking more options for configuration and customization.

Unfortunately, as we've been making AffinityLive better, we've been making the admin experience gradually worse - new stuff often means more options for configuration, and we realized a little while ago that the interfaces for configuring and setting up AffinityLive needed an improvement themselves!

That’s why today we're excited to let you know that we've just upgraded the Admin Settings section of your AffinityLive account. From module configuration, project templates, data imports, sales and rates, administrators can now set up AffinityLive more quickly and easily than ever before.

Here's an overview of the highlights of this upgrade.

New navigation to find your way around, fast

With all of the features embedded in Admin Settings, we knew the most important thing was to make it easy - and fast - to get to the screen you need to make the change you want. Now we have a persistent left hand side navigation, where you'll see a list of all the section headings and sub-sections - all just a click or two away from anywhere in the admin area.

Simpler, clearer screens to change what you want easily

In the old Admin page, we often jammed things together that didn't quite make sense - we're not proud of it, but often when a new feature is released you don't realize how many options it is going to need in the future, and like a weed things tended to grow and get very messy.

The result of this was screens - the worst of which being our old "general settings" screen - which jumbled together lots of options, making things hard to find, and when you did find them, confusing to use. While there are now more screens, each one is focused and easier to work with, often with just a handful of focused, related fields - they've been designed to flow seamlessly with the way you configure AffinityLive.

Highlighting powerful tools you want to tweak

In the old Admin section, some of the most powerful features - like adding custom fields, or changing the business rules/progressions for modules - were hidden away. With this upgrade, we've made the things you'll likely want to do - like create custom fields on a sale or a client record - a lot more obvious, easy to find and of course easy to use.

Introducing the New Integrations Screen

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:38:56 -0700

When we first launched the Integrations screen, it was built to house our Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange connections. Since then, it has grown to support a dozen integrations with Application Partners, and with more on the way it was time to give it an upgrade.

The new screen rolled out this past week, meant to make connecting all of your applications a whole lot easier. If you haven’t seen it already, you’ll now notice some changes that give you more control so you can easily set up your AffinityLive account with Google Apps, Yammer, Twitter, Xero, or Quickbooks and tweak your integration preferences, quickly and easily.

Here's a quick run-down of the major improvements.

A navigation bar to help you move through applications

Before the makeover, all integrations were placed in a dense array of boxes. Since most AffinityLive users often sync up with various applications, we knew that being able to easily connect was a priority. Now you can breeze through your integrations settings with the added navigation bar - the light green border shows the integrations that are connected, and they orange border shows those that you haven't connected to yet.

Better focus on configuring your settings

When you click on the navigation bar, you'll get a page which outlines the changes you can make to the various integration settings. Different integrations have different settings; depending on the one you choose, you'll be able to turn on and off pushing, pulling and syncing functionality with ease.

Features are now easier to find & set up

With better visibility, you can take advantage of all the possible features provided by integrations. If you haven’t already, check out the Google Tasks Integration.

Avoiding Boom & Bust: using ongoing momentum to double revenue & retain clients

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:15:38 -0700

Like many web agencies, GRAYBOX spends a lot of time winning and delivering great digital projects. However, as all too many agency owners know, the stress of constantly chasing new clients and relying on project revenue has its own problems.

Not only is project revenue lumpy and delivery stressful, focusing on projects rather than ongoing relationships means all the work you put into winning the project becomes a faded memory.

"The secret to overcoming the feast and famine project cycle is to deliver a range of ongoing services and build a close, consultative relationship for the long-term," explains Paul Weinert, the founder of GRAYBOX.

The GRAYBOX strategy is simple: never lose clients after winning them. If predictable revenue and better margins aren’t enough, Paul also knew that a close, ongoing relationship with clients gives GRAYBOX a better understand of their business, resulting in better work and improved results.

The Catch - Managing Chaos

Of course, the only downside to providing ongoing services is the effort managing it; keeping track of tasks, hours and budgets manually makes the effort seem worthless.

"Many web agencies will usually provide ongoing website support," Paul explains. "With support tickets, the work you do is reactive and small - making it difficult to keep track of." As a result, many agencies will take a loss on small support tasks or won’t offer other ongoing services because they can seem more difficult to manage than their worth.

While there are plenty of project management tools for a digital agency to choose from, when it came to managing ongoing services, Paul soon found there were few products that could handle the transition from project to ongoing work effortlessly - after all, it is the same client, the same team and the same sorts of design, development and consulting work.

"We needed an application that could record the work done for a retainer and invoice clients every two weeks," he explains. GRAYBOX chose AffinityLive because it was the only platform on the market that could go from sale through project and into ongoing services - all with invoicing built in.

The Graybox Process

"95% of GRAYBOX’s Client’s Stick Around After a Project is Done"

Typically, GRAYBOX begins its client relationship with web development. "Once a project is done, we typically move them into one of three different types of retainers," he says. Each of their retainers are pre-approved hourly agreements with clients:

Online Marketing and Conversion Optimization
Hourly Website Support & Maintenance
Fixed-Fee, Term-Based Website Support & Maintenance

"Most of our clients will start with web design and development and continue with online marketing and ongoing website support," Paul notes.

"Auto-generating invoices and tasks is awesome"

Now they’re on AffinityLive, GRAYBOX runs their regular invoices with ease. "We setup our support services in AffinityLive’s Contracts & Retainers Module," explains Paul, "I just quickly approve the work done, generate the invoice and send it off to clients."

"Another thing that’s awesome is its flexibility," he adds. "GRAYBOX does things a little differently, with hourly billing instead of fixed fees." Fortunately, AffinityLive was built to handle just about any business process.

The Outcomes

Not only does GRAYBOX continuously grow their number of projects, they go beyond to build a thriving business. They retain almost all of their clients and are able to better guide them with the long-term relationship provided by ongoing services.

Trying AffinityLive in your business

If you’d like to see if AffinityLive can help your business transition easily from the boom and bust of projects to an ongoing service model, we’d love you to try it for yourself.

As a special offer, you can get the premium Contracts and Retainers Module included free of charge in a subscription of AffinityLive Plus, which starts at just $29/month. Just sign up for a trial of AffinityLive using the promo-code of GOCONTRACTS before May 31st 2013 and you’ll get the Contracts & Retainers module included, free of charge.

GRAYBOX is a premier website design and development firm located in Portland, OR.

Learn more about GRAYBOX.

AffinityLive’s Geoff McQueen Hosts TechCrunch’s Disrupt #Hackathon

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:40:41 -0700

With a crowd of hundreds, prizes in the thousands and projects that should require months to complete, developers at TechCrunch's Disrupt Hackathon were as sleepless as the city. This past weekend, our very own Geoff McQueen hosted the 24-hour event in Manhattan, where 164 innovative demos were spawned from nonstop coding and caffeine.

The winning prize went to Rambler, a web app that allows users to see where they've been charging their credit and debit cards on a map. Disrupt continues for the week with a few other exciting demos, announcements and products from some of the most talented companies. We'll wait to hear back from Geoff McQueen on some key insights in the next few days.

Check out some photos from the event:

Here are some of the latest posts from TechCrunch covering the event:

uGurus Reviews AffinityLive as an End-to-End App for Managing a Web Design Business [Video]

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:43:51 -0700

Web professionals everywhere know the difficulty of keeping business data together. Brent Weaver (founder of uGurus, a training, consulting and advisory firm for leading web developers around the world), writes:

Keeping your web design business organized can be a huge challenge. Often you have to use a bunch of different systems to keep everything in order: sales CRM, project management, support, billing systems, and so on.

There are a growing number of APIs available for various SaaS programs and "pipe" apps to help you sync data, but it is still a pain to get it to work just right.

As such, Brent Weaver seeks out a review of the platform meant to help small agencies manage with enterprise-quality features. In the video interview, CEO Geoff McQueen explains why he created AffinityLive and how it’s designed to completely manage client services from end to end. AffinityLive users know that having everything in one place allows the flexibility and ease that comes with an entire middle-level of management.

Check out the post on uGuru’s blog, along with the video below!

Brent: If you’ve got a web design business and you’ve been wondering how you keep track of things like contacts, your proposals, your expenses, your retainers, your issues and support tickets that come up-- and you’re also currently using 5 or 6 or 7 different systems to manage your business. This is coming from personal experience: we use Basecamp, we use Podio, we use Freshbooks, we use Xero. We’ve got all of these different systems and there’s nothing in one single place that allows me to manage my customers.My guest today is going to help you with that problem with one single system. I’m really happy to welcome Geoff McQueen from AffinityLive. So Geoff, what is your background?

Geoff: I started off doing telecommunications engineering back in college. Back then, I was paying my way through college by working in bars and nightclubs and started to build websites in my spare time. I realized that it was a lot more lucrative and a lot more fun to be putting my skills in that area to use. So that then turned into an agency, which then turned into a bigger agency. We ended up with a crew of 20 people doing projects in Australia for everyone from the local businesses in the area to the federal government and department of the Prime Minister. So it was an interesting journey of running a digital agency. A few years ago, I started to realize that the pain I was feeling managing an agency was how to keep the wheels on with all of the different projects and things that were going on. It was driving me a bit crazy. And so, we’ve been building an internal tool. My background as an engineer was instrumental in that. I took that tool and started to commercialize it. After a few iterations and a lot of beta testing, that’s where we are with AffinityLive.

Brent: So you started AffinityLive out of your own desire to manage all of that information in your website agency?

Geoff: Yeah, absolutely. It was driving us crazy to have our customers in one place, our sales in another, projects in another, and timesheets in another. What would happen is that at the end of a quarter, we’d be sitting there trying to tie up all the loose ends and work out if we’d bill for a project. Sometimes we’d do all this work and forget to invoice because we’re so distracted by the next project we’re moving onto. Things like retainer-based work and support we often did out of good will as opposed to making any money out of it, which is kind of a bad idea when you have a full-time staff. I suffered all of that pain first hand and it drove me crazy. I was working weekends and late at night doing the work I hated-- I wasn’t being creative or strategic. I wasn’t helping clients, I was just doing damn paperwork. I was like, this is enough. I can’t do this anymore. That was kinda where it came in.

Brent: For a web designer, what key problem would AffinityLive solve for their business?

Geoff: The real key problem for a web designer is managing the work that’s going on for their clients in a way that takes less effort than actually doing the work for their clients. You only get paid for doing the work-- you don’t get paid for managing it. And you certainly don’t get paid for doing all of the administrative work that goes on with keeping the business operating outside of the valuable stuff you do that is specialist and unique. What AffinityLive is all about is taking away all of the operational and management aspects like what things are up to, “is this project overdue?”, “how much did we say we were gonna quote these guys?” “what’s this project up to?” or “who’s working with it now?”

Even in a small two-person shop, you might not feel like you need it because conversation is good enough and it is. As you start to grow and as you start to do more and more work, it’s quite common that the wheels start to fall off.

Brent: How many customers would you typically say is good for a web designer to start using something like AffinityLive? Is it good if I have 5 customers or do you guys come into play once you have 10 or 20 or 50 customers?

Geoff: It tends to be more of a function of how many people are working in the business for those customers including contractors. And it also comes down to how many concurrent projects you’re running at any given time. We don’t find the number of customers a typically effective test. If you’ve got a 5-person business and one client that really matters and all you’re doing is a project for that client and it’s going to take 6 months to do, a product like AffinityLive isn’t as useful because you’re completely focused on that one project. If you’re running with a few clients at once, it would be useful even if you’ve got a two-person company.

Brent: I see you’ve got pulled up an AffinityLive ecosystem of how all the different pipes and processes work. Can you explain a little bit about how that works into my business and my processes?

Geoff: The thing we see all the time is that in a first lead inquiry all the way through to an invoice being generated, there’s this continuity of a relationship you have with a customer. One thing that tends to be a problem in the market is that if you’re a business person looking for tools to try and manage that, you’ve got a couple places where you have some go-to options. It’d be crazy if you haven’t already done some of these things. For example, the front-end of the process when it comes to CRM software and things like email blasts-- that stuff’s so available in commodity that you’d be crazy not to have it from day one in a business. And at the other end with the accounting, as soon as you have expenses or any form of revenue, it’s really important to have a system. You’ve got Quickbooks, Xero, or Saasu-- one of those products that manages the books. At the end of the day, the IRS or whoever the government is gonna come after you for their tax dollar and if you’re not organized, you’re in trouble.

With that bit in the middle-- Post-CRM and before you generate an invoice, is the broken or missing piece for a lot of businesses. They fill it up with lots of different bits. The problem with filling it with different things that don’t talk to each other is you as the owner or manager end up being the one trying to tie it all together with brute force. So the pipes and demonstration we’ve got here is a bit of subway map concept: there’s this sale flow where you’ve got your first inquiry and you follow through and end up closing a deal, which then turns into a project. At the end of the project, it potentially turns into a retainer where you’re doing ongoing work and generating ongoing revenue. All the way through that, you need to be keeping track of who said what to who, what the promises were, and spitting out bills and invoices so that you can get paid and grow a successful agency.

Brent: Let’s say that I do signup. What’s the most basic level that AffinityLive starts to integrate into my business?

Geoff: The most basic level it integrates into your business is the name and address book for your clients. We start right at the beginning with customer engagement. For example, you can go and find a client account. We can see here that we have a customer record we’re working with and we can see all of the contacts at that organization. The way in which we start to integrate immediately is with email. So anytime you send an email in your business to a customer, that’s an important touch point. If it’s you and your partner or your team, there’s probably good reason to see who’s saying what to which customer over time. It’s the left hand knowing what the right one’s doing.

So the first way AffinityLive really gets into your business and helps you is that it provides you a central tool of all the things that are going on for this client account all in one place. So any emails, issues or tickets raised, sales that are coming off, projects that are underway, will be listed here in the news feed. We automatically capture those emails at the mail server level, which means you can be typing out a quick reply in the back of a taxi on your iPhone or you can be sending an email from your Gmail account, and all of it gets captured and indexed automatically no matter where you’re sending it from and no matter how you’re sending it. We’ve got a lot of powerful features around it for privacy and confidentiality and stuff like that for obvious reasons. But for these client-focused emails, this is really valuable and important stuff.

Brent: Just to focus in on that differentiator, a lot of other CRM systems out there have this concept of email forwarding. So if I want my CRM to catch that note that I’m sending to a client, I have to CC my CRM system and I always have to remember that. So you’re saying that with the AL system, it doesn’t work like that?

Geoff: No, it’s completely automated. The way that it works is you either set up a single forwarding rule once or with your permission, our system will access your Gmail, Outlook, Exchange or Office365 account to pull in new mail from your mailbox a couple of times an hour. The cool thing is if you set up the forwarding just once to one address, AffinityLive will automatically capture the email traffic from then on. But we’ll only capture things that are to or from a customer who’s email address is in the customer database-- which is how we’re able to keep the security and privacy thing under control. It means that your client emails get captured but things to your spouse or your friends or your lawyer don’t get captured and shared. Obviously, a shared inbox is a good thing to a point, but we don’t believe a fully shared inbox is a good strategy.

Brent: If I’m communicating with my wife versus my team, I don’t necessarily want them to see what I’m having for dinner that night. So thinking about a web practice, there are certain things that are important. Obviously, sales are important. The idea of recurring retainers and support incidences - those are the types of things that are really important to me in my practice. How does AffinityLive handle those types of things?

Geoff: It has modules that does those core customer-facing functions in a business. And the great thing is that they’re all linked back to that same customer identity. So, you can look at that customer and see from what proposals you’ve got in front of them right now. A typical web agency will be working with a customer in different ways. Post-sale activities will move into Project Land. You can see what’s going on, the different notes and budgets going on in real-time. There’s an Issues piece which is really about that post-sale reactive stuff.

Projects is for the stuff you plan and go into with a quote and timeline and Gantt-chart. Issues are all of those “I need you to update our Board of Directors page because we just fired a director and we need that updated. Can you do that for me and send me a bill?”

We’ve got our Retainers Module here, which is really all about helping you as a business go beyond the project-based work of feast and famine. It allows you to introduce some ongoing services and ongoing revenue but without the headaches associated with moving business. Instead, you set up your contract, you designate that it’s going to have a certain number of hours per quarter or month or whatever your time period is. Maybe there’s some add-on services you’re including there like third-party licenses and hosting. You’re able to put all of those in there. When your staff does work, whether it be projects or issues, all of that work can funnel down into the same bucket of hours. Then, the process of invoicing is almost completely automated. You can just review or maybe invoice for overruns. Everything else can be completely automated-- you can make money from the beach.

Brent: Now that’s what everyone is dreaming about-- or at least everyone who’s read “The 4-Hour Work Week”. Talking about invoicing and some of these other things that in my mind, I immediately start wondering if this thing integrates with payment solutions. How does my customer actually pay me? How do you solve that problem? I’m generating invoices in AffinityLive now, but what does that mean for how I get money from my customers?

Geoff: Great question! The place where you’re doing your work and time-tracking is the place where you’re starting your invoicing journey. But there are times where you want to add things into your invoices-- customize, tweak them, round them up, round them down. There are things you might want to do outside of AffinityLive. So what we’ve done is we built really robust connections to the leading online as well as offline accounting products. So with AffinityLive, you create an invoice and when you hit save, if you’ve connected it to your Quickbooks account, we’ll automatically push that invoice across into Quickbooks. And that not only includes the online version of Quickbooks, but the offline desktop version as well.

It’s great because your bookkeeper or financial controller doesn’t want to learn a web system and your Quickbooks system contains a lot of sensitive information like payroll and other expenses and capital structures of the business that you don’t want all of your staff using to enter their time. They can both be used for their perfect jobs.

So AffinityLive is where your staff do and log their work. Your project manager hits create invoice, approves them, ups and downs them, hits save and the invoice goes to Quickbooks. Then your financial controller can worry themselves about doing tax reporting. And when a check or electronic transfer comes in, they can pay it in Quickbooks and have it reflect back in AffinityLive automatically.

That two-directional thing doesn’t just work for Quickbooks and Quickbooks online, but also for Xero and Saasu who are two of the leading online accounting players.

We’re also beta testing at the moment because those accounting platforms aren’t so great at doing online payments. We’re experimenting with credit card processing, PayPal processing, and Google Checkout processing where the money comes through the AffinityLive gateway and gets delivered and posted back to those accounting packages as well.

Brent: Very cool. We personally use Xero and I’ve been using Freshbooks for years so if Freshbooks isn’t already on your radar, that could be a suggestion, if I may.

Geoff: Absolutely, we’ve got Freshbooks, Cashflow, and a couple of other things our users have been suggesting to make a difference in their world.

Brent: For sure. When I first join something like this, I would feel a bit overwhelmed by all of the different levers and pullies. How do you guys tackle the training and onboarding for somebody that’s looking to use AffinityLive in their business?

Geoff: That’s a really good point. We know that this isn’t a drive-by product that you sign up for once and it sort of disappears in the back of your mind. This is front and center, key to your business and so you want to put in the intellect into doing it right. So in terms of how we approach that, we’ve gotten really good and really practiced at it.

I’m loading up here, an example of our demo system. With the demo system, you’re able to go in and play with a fully loaded kit which is nice beause you can make a mess and know that it’s going to be reset.

Obviously, there’s the trial period where you can load up your own data. Connect it to your own Google Apps account so you can see the calendar synchronizing both ways, the contacts synchronizing both ways. So you can do that with your own data in a trial environment.

The other option we’ve got is that every single week, we run six live webinars covering six different pieces of AffinityLive to help our users get familiar with it. We call it our “Ask an Expert” Series. They only go for half an hour, so they’re nice and tight. They start off with some overview information which is instructional, and then we switch across to Q&A. It’s great, it’s free, it’s six times a week, and time-zone friendly all around the world. We have had tremendous success with these.

Of course, the last step is when you’re ready to pull the trigger, you know you want to embrace this thing and you know your time is money. You’d like to get experts to help with the implementation, configuration and training so you don’t have to learn how to build a car in order to drive a car. In that case, we’ve got our services. They’re very affordable. They range from a couple of hours of dedicated configuration and training to the admin, all the way through to getting your entire team up to speed.

Brent: So you guys are a true software-as-a-service business providing the software, the tools, and the help getting started?

Geoff: Yeah, absolutely. And we’re actually about to launch a partner program as well. That’s also got some exciting opportunities because we actually found out last week that one of our clients in New Zealand got in touch with another one of our clients in New Zealand after we did a blog post featuring them. They had a conversation, and flew out to meet each other. One of the clients spent the day with him, hearing about his experience with AffinityLive without any formal training or partner program. Both of them couldn’t be happier. That really got us to accelerate our plans to make this partner program with certification and training, which we’re looking to get out on the market very soon.

Brent: Very cool. It looks like you have some champions for your product, which is always a good sign.

Geoff: Yeah, yeah.

Brent: I’m always thinking selfishly about my userbase. Is there anything special you can offer the folks watching this?

Geoff: Absolutely. One of the things we have realized is that the Plus version of our product, which is the middle tier, is the tier that seems to be just right for a growing web development firm. What we’ve done is set up the product so that different modules come in at different tiers. We realized that the Contracts & Retainers Module is perfect for a BC-style partner, even if they only need the Plus version of AffinityLive.

For the rest of April, any BC Partner or development company that signs up for AffinityLive can get the Plus version and pricing but get the Contracts and Retainers Module for free.

Brent: Got ya. So any web designer or developer that looks at AffinityLive and says “this is good fit for me” can get a couple of extras in their plan for AffinityLive?

Geoff: Yep, and those extras are included for the length of their subscription. There’s no ‘bait and switch’ for this. We really want all of the partners that work for you guys, cause we know how important that retainer-based and long-term relationship work is important and lucrative for businesses. We want our users to be able to take advantage of that without having to stretch out for another tier of our product.

Brent: Very cool. Well, I’m impressed Geoff. It looks like you guys have put a lot of work into this. It also looks like there are a lot of new features and upgrades coming to the software in the near future?

Geoff: We had an epic quarter in Q1 (up more than 100%) and things are going to be even bigger in Q2. We have a new expenses module coming out, new stuff in project management and an extranet that will be truly collaborative. So we’re looking forward to the next couple of months. There’s never been a better time to check out AffinityLive. If some of your viewers have seen it before, when it was a bit rougher, this is certainly a great time to come back and have another look.

7 Steps to Developing Your Revenue Model

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:41:52 -0700

One of the most important things you can to ensure the financial health of your business is to create your revenue model. Your revenue model gives you a necessary understanding of your cash flow and needs and is your way of demonstrating -- to yourself and to potential investors -- how you plan to earn revenue and maximize your profitability.

The key to creating your revenue model is through forecasting -- that is, projecting revenue estimates, even if you’re currently pre-revenue. Forecasting is an ongoing process that will help you to manage your cash and continue to grow. There are two general approaches to financial forecasting: top-down and bottom-up forecasting.

To be honest, top-down forecasting is a bit bogus in terms of giving you realistic numbers, but it’s still a necessary exercise when seeking funding. With top-down forecasting, you start with the overall market size and use this to identify your particular segment. You extrapolate from total market to predict how much you can hope to capture; you then use this to calculate your total potential revenue.

Conversely, with a bottom-up financial projection you flip your forecast upside down. Instead of starting with the total market, you identify key variables to project your revenue over the next year or so. You calculate the spending necessary to achieve your revenue and development goals and identify what’s driving your revenue. From here you can predict how quickly you can scale based on headcount and milestone projections.

We’ve worked with many clients to help them through the process of creating their revenue model. This has enabled us to synthesize the key considerations for developing your revenue model. Here are top seven:

1. Choose a revenue model approach that is best for your company and background.

For example, if you have a team of engineers with good business sense, a technology model -- where you identify where you are in your R&D model and where you expect to be in the next phase and into the future -- will be a good fit for your company. Depending on your company type, it may make sense to have revenue projections that are linear in nature or ones that are exponential (in other words, do you want to mitigate capital risk and start small and build from there or prove your revenue model at scale?). Ultimately, you want to choose a model that helps you to direct your development efforts.

2. Your revenue model should allow you to communicate your value.

What is special about your offerings? Your revenue model should show what is unique about you. For example, if you offer the kind of service that customers will subscribe to, this is a selling point.

3. Identify potential investors strategically based on your revenue model.

If you’re looking for funding, it helps to identify strategic investors who are knowledgeable in your space. Make development choices that speak strongly to investors and build your pitch around these choices. Think big picture and long-term and try to find like-minded investors, financiers who aren’t just looking for profit short-term but are willing to wait for ROI to be realized.

4. Project out into the foreseeable future.

Investors want to know what the time horizon looks like, when there is going to be money to be seen, what the next major milestones are -- bottom line...when are you going to start making revenue? And this is important information for you too, of course. But you you can’t predict with any level of certainty too far out -- no further than 12-24 months. Farther out, it just becomes a ludicrous exercise where you have meaningless numbers on the page.

5. Understand that your revenue model is always evolving.

The overall architecture of your approach may not change much over time, but you should continually be refining your model and reforecasting. There are many revenue models to choose from. For example, if you’re a service-based business, you can sell services individually or offer a subscription model. Just keep an open mind and accept the fact that you may need to pivot your revenue model at some point if it’s not working to support your business.

6. Identify the key variables for your company.

Your variables will be process specific and will depend on what stage you’re in. Basically you’re looking to find those variables that have the most impact on your revenue -- and figure out what they are most sensitive to. You need to be able to isolate these particular variables so that you can address them individually. Analyze input and research values to identify if they are good where they are or if they need work. A sensitivity graph is a great tool for looking at each separate value and graphing its potential impact on revenue as that value changes. Charting this enables you to see at what point revenue improves or worsens as the data is manipulated.

7. Mitigate for variables.

The goal is to get your variables to a point where you can mitigate them. You want to be confident in your numbers -- this means seeing them realistically. There’s no sense in hiding from risk; you should identify it, understand it, and directly address it. Mitigating for variables leads to transparency which is good for your own understanding as well as for investors (who are always going to find something even if you try to hide it!).

There is a lot of choice when it comes to developing your revenue model -- but not creating a revenue model is not a choice. From helping you to stay focused to helping you to develop your service, your revenue model is the necessary foundation for your company’s success.

David Ehrenberg is the founder and CEO of Early Growth Financial Services, a financial services firm providing a complete suite of financial and accounting services to companies at every stage of the development process. The finance professionals at Early Growth Financial Services can help your business with everything from day-to-day transactional accounting to financial strategy, fundraising, and beyond. David is a financial expert and startup mentor, whose passion is helping businesses focus on what they do best. Follow David @EarlyGrowthFS

Product Roadmap Q2 & Q3 2013

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:40:28 -0700

In early February this year we published our first product roadmap, outlining our product priorities and plans through to the end of June (Q2)

The results were nothing short of amazing.

Firstly, our users responded with more energy, enthusiasm and excitement than we could have imagined. We had users sharing their ideas and their own priorities, a big uptick in voting in our Ideas Forum and a lot of feedback and suggestions.

Internally, having public, stated priorities and implicit promises had a powerful result for our own productivity and production. Our design and development teams rose to the challenge and were able to focus on the important things, which made sure they got done!

Finally, we saw a big effect in our conversations with prospective clients. While we'd always had clear future plans about features we were going to introduce in the future, it turns out that many technology companies use vague "in the pipeline" promises to hoodwink new clients into committing to a product and then being let down. Turns out being specific, honest and accountable wasn’t something many people were used to, and sharing our roadmap in detail was just another way for new faces to see that we’re not like the legacy technology companies they might have (had the misfortune) of working with before.

So, how did we do?

In keeping with the philosophy of Big Rocks, we focused on the priorities that mattered the most in Q1. We were excited to ship breakthrough new features in our Upgrade to the Contracts & Retainers Module, let you show your creative side with Custom Email Signatures, gave admins more control with Visibility Options on Financials and even shipped a new feature early - our new API.

While we just missed the cut-off date of the end of Q1, we’ve also recently shipped the Expenses Module and the Divisions Module, which were also important to us in Q1.

In terms of the missed targets, we’re still going on the Activities overhaul because we decided to make it a bigger upgrade in Q2 than we had in mind previously; keep an eye out for a new approach to your To Do list, a new way to create activities and more in coming weeks. We also pushed back the Weekly Activity Summary and the inclusion of Tasks, Activities and Requests in Sync until Q2, mainly because the proper upgrade to Activities will allow us to make these features even better.

What’s coming up next?

Now we’ve finished Q1 and we're into Q2, we’ve been able to look more clearly and closely at our plans and priorities, and unsurprisingly we have a more detailed view of what we’re focusing on this quarter. Additionally, we’re also able to share with you our priorities for Q3 - we’d love to hear what you think!

Product Roadmap for Q2 2013

The following are the priorities we’re working on delivering before June 30, 2013:

You might note if you compare this list to the priorities published in February that we’ve moved out the Resources/Attachments Improvements and the Automatic Notifications/Reminders.

The reason for moving back the Resources/Attachments piece is that we want to give our users more choice when it comes to files and storage in AffinityLive, and so in Q3 we’ll be focusing on integrations with Box, Dropbox and Google Drive/Docs natively within AffinityLive.

The Automatic Notifications/Reminders have been pushed back to Q3 because we’ve decided to invest more heavily in the Activity Module Upgrade than we'd planned at back in February, which is going to leave us too short on time in Q2 to knock over this new feature (which of course depends on activites being rock solid).

Product Roadmap for Q3 2013

The following are priorities that we’ll be focusing on in July, August and September 2013:

We'd love to hear your thoughts about our roadmap - feel free to contact us or join the discussion in our AffinityLive User Group.

Product Roadmap Q2 Update

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:16:53 -0700

We're now a couple of weeks into Q2, and our focus this quarter is on upgrading the core offering of AffinityLive - the Activities, Projects and Extranet features of the platform. By upgrading these cornerstone features to match the needs of our growing customer base, we'll be able to more easily and quickly implement further improvements which will make it easier than ever to manage all the work you do for your clients.

The following are the priorities we’re working on delivering before June 30, 2013:

Activities Module Upgrade

The activities module is at the heart of AffinityLive - it is where you record notes, write emails, log and track time, and the way we remind people about what they have left on their to-do list.

Unfortunately, though, with many millions of activities now logged throughout AffinityLive, it is starting to show some signs of strain.

Early in Q2 we're focusing on both deep-level technical enhancements to improve performance, speed and reliability as well as high level features we think you'll know and love, like a new approach to your ToDo list which we're calling the new Inbox, a much faster and easier screen to create activities and log time and enhancements to how you view - and make changes to - activities already in AffinityLive.

We were initially just planning to undertake an overhaul of the back-end and systems, but we realized this was a missed opportunity to really add value to the way you and your colleagues use AffinityLive, which is why we've extended he ambition and scope of this release. We look forward to announcing a sneak peek opportunity here on our blog in coming weeks.

Project Module Upgrade

Woah, this is a big one. And well overdue.

When we first built the projects module in AffinityLive, we were fulfilling a fairly narrow kind of project management requirement. Components or tasks would be allocated to individual users, while they could have sub-components they wouldn’t roll-up, and possibly most importantly the scheduling would use a simple business-days duration and dependency calculation to work out when something was supposed to get done.

As AffinityLive has grown with thousands of users all over the world, we’ve realized that this simplistic view of project management just wasn’t cutting it anymore. The interface we use for project planning - which we currently call workflow editing - is horrible to use, doesn’t provide feedback on deadlines and can’t handle the creation of tasks against a component. Additionally, budgets are very crude, with a very limited ability to consider non-time parts of budget such as license fees and one-off costs.

This big rock - the biggest of Q2 - is a major upgrade to the Projects Module. Some of the things we’ve got slated include:

Improving project scheduling. We want to make it easy to take full control of your schedule - specifying not just durations but also specific dates if you want - and showing the results on gantt chart in real time. We also want to make it really really easy to use, and also allow you to adjust schedules easily even after a project has commenced.
Improved project budgeting (with non-time entries and costs). Similar to our emphasis on ease of use and control, we are also going to focus in the overhaul at making the budgeting process a lot easier. We’ll be building on our rates improvements and extending them to also handle the cost-side of budgets, which could be reflective of contractor pay rates or the inclusion of non-time entries like third party licenses or other parts of a project scope. During the upgrade we'll be setting the foundation for the Contractors Module in Q3 when it comes to connecting these cost sides of the budget with users doing work.
Improved project planning/scoping. As our clients have become more sophisticated, their project plans have become more detailed and deliberate. This part of our projects module overhaul/upgrade includes the ability to create more fine-grained tasks within project milestones or components, and being able to set these tasks up against component/milestone types and templates so you can just snap them into a project plan and automatically have a set of tasks like a checklist autocreated.

These are just some of the things we have in mind for the projects module - feel free to add your own ideas to the Ideas Forum.

Extranet Upgrade

The Extranet that is built into AffinityLive is best described as rudimentary. Your clients can log in and see their projects, issues, contracts, invoices and create new requests, but it isn’t optimized for collaborating with your clients.

Some of the things you can look forward to with the overhaul will include:

A whole new interface to make your clients feel more like partners in the work you’re doing together, with the ability to see more (at your discretion), do more (make notes, comment, upload files and sign off on approvals) and share more (inviting their own colleagues into the extranet, in effect building your client database and making your business more entwined in theirs).
More fine-grained visibility controls. Do you want to show some clients the remaining budget on their monthly support contract, but not others? How about sharing progress on projects and milestones and real-time gantt charts depending on the client or project? With the new extranet module, you’ll be able to do all this, and more.
A new sign-off feature. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could send your client a link to an important design, document or other record and have them sign-off it right then and there? The new extranet will include this new feature, designed to boost collaboration and make it easier for clients to provide approval for the work you're doing for them.
See what they see. With more fine grained controls, it will be more important than ever to log in and see what your clients are seeing in real-time. With the upgrade, you’ll be able to click on a client, a project, an issue or a contract and see the "client view" - just to make sure you’re not sharing too much!
Automatic invitations. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell your clients to use the extranet to check for updates on a project, issue or contract instead of emailing you all the time? With the new version of the extranet, we’ll also be implementing an automatic invitations feature which will allow an auto-reply email to go back to your clients when they email support, for example, giving them details of their account access to log into the extranet.
Enhanced visual customizations. The extranet is your presentation of your brand to your clients. That’s why we’ll be supporting custom color schemes as well as the ability to upload your own logo... all designed to help you present your business and brand as professionally as possible.

Multi-User Scheduling & Workload Reallocation

The most common question we get from users of our dynamic scheduling module is: can I see a list of a group of staff (or all my staff) on one screen and move work around between them?

The good news is that we’ve got this coming in Q2, building off the overhaul we’re making to activities and the upgrade of the projects module. This new feature will enable you as a manager to see one or more staff and filter their work down by projects, issues or other places where you can create tasks. You’ll be able to see their comparative workload and easily reassign tasks and components between staff members - ideal if you’re trying to optimize the resource allocations among a team of designers or similarly skilled professionals on your team.

We're really excited to be bringing this feature to you just as soon as we can get the underlying features of projects and activities improved - if you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Tasks, Activities & Requests in Sync

While most of these improvements apply to our Plus and Premium versions of AffinityLive, we’re also going to be adding a bit of extra benefit for our Sync users.

Around the middle of this quarter we'll be enabling Sync users to create tasks and activities in AffinityLive, making it easy for them to create notes, schedule appointments and send emails to clients in AffinityLive as well as manage a client-oriented task list.

In addition, we’re also going to be enabling the Requests Module for Sync users to make it easier for multiple users on a Sync account to track shared conversations with clients around specific issues.

We’re hopeful these improvements will make Sync even more useful as a place to get work done and encourage more and more Sync users to upgrade to Plus and even Premium to really take control of the work they and their teams do for their clients.

Requests Module Upgrade & Autoconversion

Another module which has become more important and heavily used than we originally expected is the requests module. Designed originally to be a simple queue of requests that would be either be dismissed or quickly converted into sales or issues, the requests module has now become an important place where users actually collaborate and manage their reactive client service work.

A few of the improvements slated for the upgrade to the requests module include:

Improvement in the user interface. The listing format with expanding rows was a good start, but we think we can do much better now, particularly making the interface more useful for keeping an eye on requests that have a bit of interaction and history behind them.
Auto-conversion to issues & sales. One request we get regularly is the desire to automatically convert a request to an issue or a sale of a specific type and with a specific status and even custom fields set. This way, requests that come into a special address - such as emergency@yourdomain.com - can be automatically converted to a high priority, a short deadline and with an email re-sent to the critical response team letting them know something really important just came in.
More conversion options - while converting to an issue or a sale is nice, we want to extend the ways you can migrate a request from the queue and turn it into work that needs to be follow up on. With this improvement, you’ll be able to convert a request to become a new project, a new component on an existing project, or merge the request in with an existing project, sale, issue or contract/retainer, keeping all the conversation history, attachments and more in tact as you do.

Gmail Integration/Gadget

While AffinityLive has a lot of magic for capturing and sharing emails between your team and your clients, it has never tried to replace your main email client; there’s just so much non-client email that still flows into our inboxes it hasn’t made sense to go to the effort and duplicate the awesome features of Gmail just to give you another inbox.

However, this has created another challenge - you can’t easily see the conversations tracked in AffinityLive while you’re in Gmail. This means it is all too easy to reply to an email to a client that a colleague has already replied to, even more frustrating because AffinityLive already knew about it, but just couldn’t show it to you.

Well, help is at hand, at least for Gmail users. Early this quarter we’ll be releasing the first version of what’s known as a Gmail Contextual Gadget. What is it? It is a cool window that loads below an email when you’re reading it in Gmail which can tell you helpful thing:

Has someone else on your team has already replied to it, and if so, what did they say?
Whether the contact who sent the email is already in AffinityLive, and if not, give you a simple quick form to add them - all without leaving Gmail.
Should you create a task (for you or someone else) so you don’t forget to do some work? Sure thing - just give it a deadline and an estimate of the time you need to complete it, and you’ll see it automatically appear on AffinityLive’s todo list and schedule.

Of course, this only works for those users lucky enough to spend their lives in Gmail, but we’ve got plans later in the year to improve the usefulness of AffinityLive as a parallel inbox, making it faster and easier to do all your client email reading and replying... watch this space for more ;-)

Schedule Customizations

The dynamic schedule - found in AffinityLive Premium - is a powerful, adaptive tool for forecasting resource load and demand. However, currently it assumes that everyone in the business is working a regular 5 day week from Monday to Friday, which isn’t necessarily true.

In Q2 we’ll be introducing an improvement to the Scheduling module which will allow individual users, as well as the business as a whole, to have their work schedule days customized. That way, public holidays, part time workers and locations where weekends fall on different days will all be automatically accommodated in the scheduling view.

Desktop Timer/Stopwatch

While we’re remaining an avowed cross-platform, browser-based and cloud technology company, upcoming improvements in technology are enabling us to move closer and closer to the desktop.

During Q2 we’ll be releasing a feature built on Google’s new Chrome App functionality that will allow you to have an installable, desktop based and automatically loading timekeeper. You’ll be able to see a list of the tasks you have in AffinityLive and be able to run a timer and toggle between tasks as you’re working, all on the desktop, and all in the background.

What’s really exciting about this is that it is still 100% browser-based (meaning no security issues), cross-platform and still cloud-based (even though it works offline!). With more than 2 in 3 of our users already using Chrome to work with AffinityLive, we’re confident you’ll love this feature too.

Weekly Activity Summary Email

While many of us who use AffinityLive a lot know its power, there are still quite a few users who don’t check in as much as they could. So, to make their lives easier, we’re going to be taking the kinds of insights and critical information they’re missing out on now to them with a regular weekly email update.

Imagine getting a weekly email telling you the clients you worked with the most, who else was working with them last week in your organization (especially when they were conversations you didn’t even know existed), and making it easy to just follow a link to get right back into AffinityLive and get involved in the conversation.

Product Roadmap Q3

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:00:08 -0700

With Q1 and Q2 of 2013 being devoted mainly to upgrading the core features of AffinityLive - retainers, projects, activities, extranet all featuring heavily - our priorities in Q3 are focused on building on the stronger foundation of these upgrades so we can make AffinityLive even more useful for managing your client work. The big priorities for this quarter are mobile apps, a new quote module, a new contractor access level and integrations with Google Drive, GFI Max and other platfoms that we know will save our users time and help them make their clients even happier.

The following are priorities that we’ll be focusing on in July, August and September 2013:

Official AffinityLive Android & iOS Apps

Well, the time has finally come. We’ve known we’ve needed mobile apps for AffinityLive for a long time now, and you haven’t let us forget it - the request for a Mobile app is by far our most voted for feature.

The reason we haven’t gotten to this feature yet is that we didn’t want to build it on changing or shaky foundations, but with the upgrade to the Projects Module, Activities and our Extranet all happening in Q2, we’re now ready to throw down hard and give you an awesome mobile-app experience.

Initially we’re going to be focusing on giving you easy access to your clients, your tasks and your activities while you’re on the road. Logging time and making notes will be a key part of the mobile experience, perfect for people who want to use their iPhone as their timekeeping companion or their Android device as their way of making a comment on an activity on a project they’re managing right from the stream.

Quote Module

Keeping with the theme of prioritizing the things you want, the inclusion of a Quotes Module comes in as our second most voted on feature, and will be a priority for us in Q3.

The Quotes Module is going to be the bridge between the Sales module and the Projects as well as the Retainers modules going forward. You’ll be able to create a simple quote, put in some project components or line items complete with quantities, inclusions, rates and total prices as well as specify a retainer or contract with included hours and renewal periods.

You’ll be able to email your client a quote and if they accept it, you’ll then have a record of their acceptance as well as a dead easy way to create your project plan or retainer - all based on what was created and agreed to in the quote.

It is worth mentioning that our Quotes module is not going to be as powerful, flexible and pretty as the offering from our friends and partner, Quoteroller. We think that users of the our Quotes module will be creating and sending higher volumes of lower value (and certainly less detailed) quotes, whereas our friends at Quoteroller are still the best platform for creating beautiful, interactive and winning proposals.

Contractor Module

More than three quarters of businesses using AffinityLive engage contractors on a regular basis and with technology improving all the time our clients have told us they intend to work with contractors more frequently in the future.

Currently, however, AffinityLive is more well suited to working with colleagues and team members who are more permanent and "inside the tent" so to speak - sharing of information, client lists and visibility of projects, issues and work done is designed to foster collaboration and openness in a way that isn’t always appropriate, especially if you’re working with people on a temporary or transactional basis where you might not trust them as much as a traditional employee.

The other way AffinityLive isn’t currently as well suited to contractors or outsourced suppliers is that you want to track their billable time but if they’re only doing a few hours of work a month or on another temporary basis, it doesn’t make sense to be paying for a full professional account the way you would for your permanent staff.

Finally, unlike your permanent staff - who's costs to the business and compensation are largely fixed and where utilization is the key driver in the business - managing contractors is more about keeping on budget, approving hours, and making it easy to pay them when their work has been approved (and of course then on-bill your clients).

These are some of the challenges we’re aiming to solve with our forthcoming Contractor Module.

This new module will enable you to create a new tier or classification for these types of users which will only give them access to the specific work they’re assigned to do. They’ll be able to make notes, log time, upload files and of course see the budgets and deadlines they’re working towards.

Easy to access reports will let you see how much you owe contractors for approved time, making it easy to then pay them (and we're looking at automating this further in future). While we're still working out the specifics around subscription costs for these users, our plan is to introduce a variable monthly rate that moves in line with the work the contractor does (so you’ll pay less for someone who logs 2 hours of work a month than someone who does 20 for example).

If you work with contractors and would like to talk to our product team about the sorts of things that drive you crazy, we’d love to hear from you - just email support@affinitylive.com and we'll line up a time for a call.

Automatic Notifications/Reminders

Wouldn’t it be nice to harness AffinityLive’s powerful business processes and custom fields to make sure you don’t forget a deadline, let a project stagnate or forget to follow up on a sale?

This is what we envision with a new automatic notifications/reminders feature. These notifications will allow you to specify specific rules based on progression statuses, dates and custom field values to remind users that they need to take action if certain conditions are met.

An example would be to send an automatic email 24 hours before an issue’s deadline occurs, particularly useful for situations like hitting client SLAs. You could also have a notification get triggered to a sales person if there hasn’t been a note made in three days if the status on the deal if “quote sent” - that way they’re reminded to keep following up.

The uses and benefits are almost endless - we’re excited to see what you come up with!

Publishing Module

While the web browser is great for seeing things on a screen, a web page isn’t as useful if you want a document format that looks better printed or shared in a static format.

Enter the forthcoming publishing module, which will allow administrators to load up "mail merge" style templates. They’ll then be able to combine that with data in AffinityLive to create exportable documents like invoices as PDF files, work orders in Word document format and more.

Integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox and Box

Documents and files are still an important part of doing work for your clients. While AffinityLive has had its own attachment and file system since the beginning, the online editing and collaboration tools now available are much better suited for creating, sharing and working with documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more.

That’s why in Q3 we’ll be introducing integrations between AffinityLive and leading online document and file sharing platforms. We’re still finalizing the details, but our plan is to introduce integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox and Box.

These integrations will in-effect hand over the responsibility for storage, search and access of the resources and attachments in AffinityLive to these third party products, and will be totally optional. There’s still a few tricky things to work out - mainly because these platforms are built on a user-centric, access restricted model rather than a organization-centric, collaborative model like AffinityLive - but we wanted to let you know we had improvements and integrations like this on the horizon as a priority project even if we don’t know all the details right now.

AffinityLive Design Update

The last time AffinityLive got a major review of its navigation and UI was in early 2012, and as the platform has grown and evolved over the last year and a bit we’ve been conscious that it is important to review current needs, browser technology and usage patterns to make sure AffinityLive is fast and easy to use

In Q3 we’ll be taking a fresh look at the design of AffinityLive, with a focus on making the most common tasks and frequently used screens fast and easy to use, as well as making it easier for casual and new users to find their feet fast while at the same time keeping our power-users happy.

It is never an easy task, but we wanted to highlight this as a Q3 priority - if you’ve got suggestions we’d love to hear them; just email redesign@affinitylive.com and our product and UX teams will get your suggestions and take them on board.

Knowledge Base Module

Another feature that fits high on the list of most popular requests is a Knowledge Base which can help you and your team better deliver support, capture lessons learned and even speed up client self-service through the extranet we’re revamping in Q2.

RMM Integration with GFI Max

With an increasing number of MSPs and other IT services businesses transition to AffinityLive, we’re also working on Q3 to implement integrations between AffinityLive and popular online platforms for these users, starting with Remote Monitoring and Management applications like GFI Max.

When complete, this feature will enable requests to be created - complete with meta-data - and for the automatic creation of issues (using the autoconversion rules) to streamline support and incident processing. When combined with our powerful CRM with email capture, the Contracts and Retainers upgrade in Q1 and the enhanced client extranet in Q2, we’re expecting a lot more MSPs frustrated at the lack of innovation and expensive legacy offerings in their sector to switch across to AffinityLive.

Big News: The Expenses Module Has Arrived!

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:26:23 -0700

Whether it be lunch meetings or training materials, miscellaneous expenses can accumulate with the projects you deliver for clients. Now with the new Expenses Module, all of these transactions can be tracked within AffinityLive.

As another highly requested feature (and why wouldn’t it be?), the Expenses Module allows you to bill clients and/or reimburse business expenditures. The following is a quick look at the things you can do with the features included in the module.

Create an expense under a project

From the View Project screen, you’ll be able to create, export and approve expenses.

Approve expenses easily from the main navigation

From anywhere in AffinityLive, you can quickly locate submitted expenses for review or approval.

From here, you can see a list of expenses, and easily then approve, reject or modify expenses.

Project managers will be notified of submitted expenses

When an expense is submitted, an automatic notification email will be sent to the user managing the project. You will also be able to see this email inside AffinityLive (within the project activity feed).

Note: expenses don't affect project budgets

Expenses are not considered in the project budget. However, they will be reflected in the Approved and Unapproved details on the right-hand-side of the View Project screen. The top row shows the value of (Approved and Unapproved) time + expenses so you can get an indication of the total value of the project.

Expenses against Issues and Retainers

The demand for expenses has been most keenly felt in the Projects module - because projects usually run for longer than Issues, and because Retainers have a built-in inclusions feature which makes it easy to pass on planned and known costs through Inclusions. Having said that, it is our intention to introduce the Expenses module in other parts of AffinityLive over coming months - if you've got a pressing case, please let us know.

Got Questions? Want more info?

For more information on the Expenses Module, visit the help site. If you have specific questions on how Expenses can be used to help your business, email support@affinitylive.com

How KickIt got it together with AffinityLive

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:19:48 -0700

KickIt Digital, based in Ottawa, are more than your usual digital agency. "We work as an ongoing mentor/advisor with our clients", explains their CEO, Alexander Leslie. "We go beyond creating and implement a digital strategy into areas like operations and management. This way we help clients grow revenue and lower costs through things like training, bookkeeping and business process improvement".

However, there was a catch. "While we often knew where the problems were, fixing them was often difficult because of inadequate tools - and honestly, as small-business experts, we're a bit embarrassed to admit we felt it acutely in our own small business".

Things like communications breakdowns, mistakes and errors in managing client work and general chaos were often “the norm, not the exception in both our business and in the businesses of our clients”.

"Left hand didn’t know what the right one was doing"

Andrew Maitland, who is a business process specialist at KickIt felt this most acutely when it came to working as a team with their clients. "When we're engaging with a client, it is always a team effort - designers, developers, trainers, strategists, even bookkeepers" explained Andrew, "but the most common way we work with clients - email - isn’t built for teams at all".

"We always felt like the left hand didn't know what the right one was doing, and to compensate we'd waste lots of time on admin, management overhead and more which didn't really help our clients one bit". Then the team discovered AffinityLive.

First, getting in Sync...

The first thing the KickIt team were able to do after starting with AffinityLive was use email as a team. "You had us sold on email capture", explained Andrew. "Having everyone in the loop when it came to monitoring our client interaction was amazing". The fact this worked with the way the staff at KickIt already used email without any new apps, plugins or changes in behavior made "AffinityLive seem like magic".

... then getting automated

Having solved the isolated inbox problem, KickIt then moved onto their next challenge - systemizing their business. "As Gerber says in the E-Myth, if you don’t have a system, you don’t own a business. You own a job. There were two parts to us systemizing KickIt", explains CEO Alexander Leslie. "Firstly, we set up our business processes in AffinityLive so we had consistency around how we work, and secondly we set up our service offerings in AffinityLive so we had consistency in what we did for clients and streamlined administration".

The result

After trying dozens of other online/cloud products, Alexander has found a business platform, not just another CRM or project management tool. "With AffinityLive, we've been able to eliminate an entire middle level of management, and spend most of our time delivering value or advice to clients, instead of having our people swapping information and doing mundane tasks like locating files or having constant project update meetings."

Andrew concurs. "What I like is that you can literally work in that tool all day long and you don’t need to jump to your email and back and forth to a task list and then a project management tool - you can really work in AffinityLive the entire day."

To see whether AffinityLive could help your business the way it has helped KickIt Digital, check out our Product page, play with a live demo, or sign up for a free 30 day trial and see for yourself.

New Questions, Ideas & Guides in AffinityLive

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:46:34 -0700

This one is a bit of a smaller update, but we hope you find it useful, and most all, helpful!

We've recently upgraded our in-app help feature to make it easier to ask questions, share your ideas and most of all, made sure you and other new users know we've got guides and videos without taking over your screen!

Got Questions? Ask away!

While we've had the "Ask a Question" feature in AffinityLive for a while, it was hidden away under another click and a generic "Help" button. Now we've made it really obvious where you should go if you want to ask a question! Simply click on this link, enter your question and we'll send it straight through to our support team.

Share your Ideas (and vote on others)

While this feature hasn't changed - we're still using the great platform provided by our friends at UserVoice - we've made it a lot easier to jot down your ideas; just click on the middle "Ideas" button and then either create a new idea/suggestion or vote for someone else who had the idea first to push it up our priority list and onto our Roadmap!

Tutorial Videos & Helpful Links

One of the features we made a mistake with when we initially implement our in-app help videos was auto-loading them! Argh - you've just gotten to a new screen and there's a video in your way!

To help find a better balance between helping and hindering, we've redesigned our Tutorial Videos and Help Links. Now when you look at a page in AffinityLive which has videos or links to our Help website, you'll see a "Guides" navigation item. Simply click on that and you'll see a bunch of help content, and to help new users get familiar with screens they haven't visited before, we now show a video bubble the first time you come into a page that hovers for a second or two in the top right before sliding away behind the guides link.

Got suggestions on how we can make using AffinityLive easier for new users and experienced ones alike? Start a discussion in our Users Group or email support@affinitylive.com - we'd love to hear what you think!