Brian Dusablon

So I run a small business. It’s not hugely profitable (yet), but it’s a nice side gig to my day job, which I thoroughly enjoy and could not possibly give up right now.

My goal is to grow my business gradually, building long-term relationships with non-profits and small businesses.

I believe the most important tools for a small business are, in no particular order, customer relationship management (CRM), accounting and invoicing, and project management.

Now for my dilemma. For the first few years of business, where I had a very small number of clients, and several one-project clients, I hopped around between Blinksale, Freshbooks and some others on their free limited accounts, trying them out. They all seemed to work pretty well, and eventually Freshbooks won me over with their frequent feature enhancements and their wonderful product team and support.

So when I reached the next level in my business, I imported everything to Freshbooks and went with their lowest paid plan, at $14 per month. Since then, I’ve had no complaints, and no issues whatsoever, except for that monthly email notifying me that my card has been charged $14.

I absolutely love the simplicity to administer my account, monitor payments, automate recurring invoices, etc. But I’m wondering if something on my local machine, like Billings, would be a better solution at a one-time fee of $39 (less than three months of my current plan). At the same time, the simplicity and time savings of using a great SaaS app like Freshbooks is nice.

I’m hoping a few small business owners and/or freelancers read this post and can provide me with some feedback on what they are using.

Aaron is setup with Billings and Basecamp, which I’ve used sparingly. I’m not sure if they play nicely together, but it works for him. I’d love a fully integrated solution (or solutions) to manage my clients, both active and potential, billing, and project management.

Freshbooks and Basecamp play nicely together, as do several other SaaS tools. 37signals makes their case for web-based software. What do you use? What’s your experience? What’s your monthly bill for running your business? What other tips do you have for me?

The Apple Macintosh is 25 today. I’m 30 today. Being the geek that I am, I don’t think I could ask for a cooler celeb to share a birthday with.

Also, iLife ’09 starts shipping tomorrow. I can’t wait for mine.

Save $5 on it at:
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I develop a lot of elearning. Adobe has hopefully just made my job easier. I plan to upgrade to the newly released eLearning Suite as soon as I get my new laptop at work.

The eLearning Suite consists of:

• Captivate (massive upgrade from v3)
• Flash (with exclusive eLearning Interactions)
• Photoshop (I’d much rather have Fireworks)
• Dreamweaver (with eLearning Add-Ons)
• Acrobat Pro
• Presenter (this is replacing Articulate Presenter for me)
• Soundbooth (this will replace SoundForge)

I’m very disappointed that I’m forced to go with Photoshop instead of Fireworks. Photoshop is way more than I need for 98% of my graphics. I’m also much better at Fireworks for simple editing. I find it’s layout and workflow much simpler than Photoshop, and just as effective for the way I use it. What pisses me off most about all of this is that I will have to dump $600 to upgrade from CS3 Design Premium to the eLearning Suite. We picked up Design Premium last year, rather than Web Premium, primarily for InDesign, which again left me without a Fireworks upgrade. So I’m still using Fireworks 8, which is plenty effective, but does not integrate with CS4.

So, thanks to Adobe’s lovely pricing strategy, I now have to fork over an additional $149 to upgrade Fireworks. It’s like every year, to take advantage of new tools and features, I have to drop $500-$1000. I wish Adobe would have a loyalty factor in their pricing, so the more times you upgrade, the cheaper it becomes.

I do not have any hands-on with the eLearning Suite yet. I was supposed to beta test it, but I was unable to install the beta on my work laptop. Thanks IT.

I will probably install the demo on my home machine using Fusion – oh yeah, the elearning suite is Windows only. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Philip has more on the release here, with some interesting commentary about pricing, etc. In addition, Adobe has demos and a an overview (via Steve).

Did you watch the Adobe CS4 Live Launch last week?

If not, check out tv.adobe.com

While nothing completely blew my socks off, the new lineup is pretty robust, and, reportedly, marks the first CS that has completely integrated Macromedia and Adobe technologies, so the look and feel of the programs is universal and they integrate and share files better. In addition, all the apps completely support AIR development now, which is also huge.

Time will tell whether or not I make the upgrade. I am a little gun-shy after jumping at the upgrade to CS3 from my old Studio MX. I use Fireworks a lot in my web design work. I much prefer it to Photoshop for web work. However, I was VERY underwhelmed by the CS3 package, and I moved entirely away from Dreamweaver once Panic launched Coda, which might just be the best piece of software ever written.

So, I’ll wait a while for the reviews to come in, and try another round of beta testing, before jumping on the upgrade bandwagon. I love Fireworks, but at a $599 price tag just for an upgrade to CS4 Web Premium ($399 for Standard), I could easily find an alternative that goes well with the $99 Coda. (See Aviary, Acorn, Pixelmator)

What’s your take?