PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast

Episode 42 of the PodLeaders show - 30 mins 30 secs

My guest on the show this week is Mike McDerment. Mike is the CEO of FreshBooks. FreshBooks is a hosted invoicing application. I was interested to talk to Mike because of the growing acceptance of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model in the last year or so. Also, FreshBooks was of particular to me because of the perceived conservatism of accountants - I was curious to see how an online accounting application was faring in this space.

With 70,000 clients, they seem to be doing quite alright!

Here are the questions I asked Mike and the times in the interview I asked them:

Michael, welcome to the show. Before we get into FreshBooks, can you tell me a bit about yourself, what is your own background? - 0:37

So, FreshBooks is an online invoicing application? - 01:20

So that helps companies bill for their services? - 02:07

What kind of pricing are we talking about, is it going to cost me an arm and a leg? - 02:24

How is FreshBooks going to save me time? - 03:50

The people receiving the invoices, do they receive them by email? - 06:58

The person receiving the invoice, can they pay that invoice online through FreshBooks or do they have to go and cut a cheque? - 08:49

So if the client pays online, is the invoice automatically marked as paid? - 09:48

Do you only do billing, or do you handle expenses as well? - 10:17

How many clients do you have? - 11:29

What kind of geographic spread do they have? - 11:45

Do your users report any difference in their experience of the application depending on where they are based? - 12:09

And is the application localised for your users in other countries or is it all in English? - 13:03

Do you come across issues with different legislation in different countries (21%vat in Ireland vs. 17% in Spain, for example)? - 13:26

Are people happy to hand over their client details and their confidential information to a 3rd party? - 14:54

Recently we saw that MySpace was down due to power issues. How are you ensuring that FreshBooks doesn’t run into similar problems? - 16:59

The other side of that is that if my local telco loses Internet connectivity, I lose access to FreshBooks - 18:38

What kind of automation have you built into the system; is it possible to automate the export of my data, for example? - 19:59

Are there email or RSS notifications built into the system to alert me to invoice status changes, for example? - 22:21

What kind of API’s do you have available to clients for integration - 24:15

What kind of reporting systems do you have? - 25:13

Is there much competition in this space? - 26:27

Finally, where do you see the SaaS space going in the next few years? - 27:33

Is it not a bit scary for people yielding up control of their data? - 29:06

Download the entire interview here
(14mb mp3)