Chrometa is product to sponsor This Week in Web Design!

legal-toolkit-practice-management

Co-Founder of Chrometa, LLC, to take a look at some of the top web apps for this holiday season. Brett offers up his favorite apps across a variety of categories, including for collaboration and file sharing. In addition to relaying his thoughts about the best buffalo wings on the planet, Brett makes some bonus prognostications for 2012 and beyond.

Legal ToolKit: Top Web Apps for the Holidays

You probably know you’ve got to get some real users on this thing in order to get some product validation and feedback, so that you can recalibrate and align your product dev efforts with real user needs. It’s time to go above and beyond your cool ideas that have carried you this far.

But how exactly do you go about getting these initial beta users? You know, the early adopters with the keen eyes who can walk you through a day in their lives, share their maddening “pain point” with you, and (of course) patiently deal with a few bugs?

We faced this hurdle in 2008, and I’ve got to admit, it was a big effort to recruit people who would actively and passionately use our app, give us unfiltered feedback, and yeah, put up with their fair share of product bugs too!

That first beta recruitment process is a tough one. Here’s how we did it, as I hope that our lessons learned are helpful to you if you’re going through this process the first time.

What Types of Beta Users Do You Need?

Last week, an early stage entrepreneur asked me if we recruited our friends and family to beta test our app. We did, but in general, unless you’ve got friends and/or family members who specifically fit the profile of your target customer, I’d recommend moving beyond this friendly audience as soon as you can.

While our friends and family members were very kind in walking through the setup process, honestly that’s about where the usefulness of their testing ended. Why? Because they were running our app as a favor – not because they needed it.

And there is a HUGE difference between folks who run your app as a favor, and folks who run it because they desperately need it. You need the latter!

When we connected with folks who really needed our app (in our case, professionals who need to keep very close track of their time, like lawyers), that’s when we started getting very valuable “on the ground” insights from real users.

But what if you can’t readily find anyone in your target market? Better keep looking – because you’ll need to find them eventually if your product is going to succeed anyway!

Two Ways to Recruit Initial Beta Users

To locate these “must have” users to beta test, you can:

1. Have people contact you, tell you they love your idea/product, and offer to beta test it for you
2. Reach out to prospective beta users in your target market, and see if they’d like to beta test your app

How to Get People to Come to You

We had a pretty good website up before we had a pretty good product – which is probably the sequence you want to follow as well. At minimum, I’d recommend getting a simple one-page website (or better yet, blog) up as soon as you can.

The big benefit here is that people can now find you. You’re not going to see a ton of traffic, but you may be able to figure out a creative SEO angle to rank high for a long tail keyword or two.

With Google increasingly focused on delivering relevant search results to its users, I’ve noticed they are throwing more love to niche sites that more perfectly fit the users’ search term. And, the trend in search behavior is that people are typing in longer phrases, thanks to their ever-increasing faith in the almighty Google algorithm.

Going back to our case, we were fortunate enough to rank for phrases like “automatic time tracking software” fairly soon after getting our site up. While not many folks search on this (you’d never fill a sales pipeline with search volume from this alone), the people who do use this term very well know what they’re looking for! And we’re after quality over quantity anyway (more on that later).

When a prospective user found our site, and saw what our product did (or was supposed to do, at least!), some were interested enough to contact us about beta testing. So make sure you have an obvious contact form and/or contact info!

You could also sponsor search terms via Google AdWords. Common phrases can be quite expensive (especially in the B2B world) – but if you again think “long tail” search terms, you may be able to get a few relevant clicks for not that much dough.

In a perfect world, this step would provide you with more eager beta users than you’d ever dreamed of. But since this may not happen, let’s see what you’ll need to do if (and more likely, when) you need to press the issue and make something happen yourself.

How to Reach Out to Potential Beta Users

It’s time to roll up your sleeves and starting going outbound to potential beta users in your target market. Don’t worry, this doesn’t actually involve cold calling. Cold emailing, yes, but that’s no sweat.

Here’s the playbook I used (and still use, actually) to reach out to people about beta testing:

1. Hop on LinkedIn and search for fellow alumni who are professionals in our target market
2. Find the email address of the person I wanted to reach (usually you can either grab this from their LinkedIn profile, or from their company webpage)
3. Send them a nice intro email like this one:

Dear Mike,

I’m a fellow PCU grad, working on a new software startup. I’d like to ask your advice, if I may, about a new product we’re developing to help attorneys with their timekeeping efforts.

I’d greatly appreciate the opportunity to pick your brain for a few minutes, and get your take on the problem we’re trying to solve. Any advice you have based on your experience and expertise in the legal profession would be most helpful.

Thanks in advance,

Brett Owens ENG ‘03 (School/Class Year)

When Mike graciously replies to our email, we’ll setup a few minutes to chat and ask him for his advice. People love giving advice, and they rarely turn down an opportunity to share wisdom – especially with regards to their area of expertise (which is exactly what we’re asking for, as a bright and eager entrepreneur!)

Brief aside – most people’s everyday lives are really not that exciting. Perhaps manageable, perhaps passively interesting – but there’s not much in the way of outright excitement. This is important, because being contacted by a fellow alumni working on a startup venture is actually pretty cool!

When you connect with Mike by phone, ask him for his insights about the problem you are trying to solve. In our case, this is where I’d ask if timekeeping was a pain for him.

Hey Mike – how do you reconcile your time at the end of the week? Would you mind walking me through a day/week in your work life here? Appreciate your take on this – especially anything that you believe could be done to improve the process.

Then we let Mike talk. And if it turns out this is a problem he struggles with – bingo!

OK thanks Mike, that’s very helpful. We’re actually working on a product that may help with the headaches you face every Friday evening when you try to track down how you spent your time during the past week. Would you be interested in taking it for a beta test spin when we have something ready?

More likely than not, Mike’s going to say yes. Which gives us a new star beta tester, and gives Mike hope for his weekly headache!

How Many Initial Beta Users Do You Really Need?

Not that many, really – focus on quality over quantity. You want a wide enough cross section of users who will give you a solid breadth of feedback – but not too many that you get overwhelmed.

In our initial stages, we had a very solid group of 5 beta users. They were great, and we were able to give each person individualized attention and support. As long as you’re getting regular, detailed feedback from your beta testers, a small number like 5 or 10 can be plenty.

If you can get a small number of people to love your app, you can get a large number of people crazy about it too. Take your time initially, get the product fit right, and you can then scale up your beta from there.

Best of luck in recruiting your initial group of lucky beta users!

Ed. note: We originally drafted this piece for SacStarts.com – Sacramento’s technology startup hub.

As you know, it’s nearly impossible to accurately track your email time with merely a start/stop timer. You’re probably bouncing from email to email in rapid fire mode. The last thing you want to worry about is timekeeping, especially if you switch from one client to another as you reply to email messages.

The “magic” of Chrometa is that it runs in the background of your PC (and home Mac), quietly making note of my activities. It’s like having your own personal timekeeper.

But as great as Chrometa has been, it’s had one big flaw — it didn’t capture important details when generating email-based time entries. Such as the to/from fields for emails … and also the details on Outlook messages viewed from the preview pane.

Well, that is, until now!

We listened to your requests – that email details needed to be a priority for Chrometa in 2012.

For you heavy email users, we have great news – we now have special Chrometa plugins available for Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

Once you install them, you’ll never lose another minute of email time (you’re probably losing thousands of dollars in billable hours each year … or even month … today).

If you’re already a Chrometa user, please download your complimentary plugin for Outlook and Gmail now.

If you’re not yet a Chrometa user, you can get started with Chrometa for free — and be up and running in a matter of minutes.

Please start capturing your email time automatically with Chrometa now (with plugins now available for Outlook and Gmail).

Really Simple Invoicing, Too

Also by popular request — you can now create, manage, and send invoices directly from Chrometa. Since founding Chrometa in 2007, we’ve learned that many of you don’t use billing software because it’s too complex. Spending a day or two each month to create invoices is actually less of a pain than dealing with an insane software system!

So, as is our mantra, we kept things really simple — and we believe that “closing the loop” on your time entries via our new Invoices feature will save you many hours each month.

Please take a look at this sample invoice that was generated by Chrometa with the click of a button.

If you’re a Chrometa user, here’s how to create an invoice.

And if you don’t yet use Chrometa — now is the perfect time to get started. You can use it free for 14 days here (no credit card required).

Already Have a Billing System?

Do you wrestle with the manual entry of time into your billing system? We can help you here too because Chrometa now enables you to export your time entries into popular billing systems like QuickBooks, Basecamp, Timeslips, Clio, PCLaw, and FreshBooks.

Chrometa is the perfect time capture add-on — just ask TechnoLawyer subscriber and longtime Chrometa user Brian D. Byrnes:

“I can say that the QuickBooks Timer was pretty damn dorky … I tried it a few times a long time ago, and if memory serves it got really annoying when you’d generate a bill only to see you had a time entry for 17 hours … simply because you forgot to turn off the timer after you’d started working on a file.“

Fortunately, Brian can now use Chrometa to automatically capture and categorize his time — and he can use our new QuickBooks export to port his time entries into QuickBooks for billing.

MAKE 2012 YOUR MOST PROFITABLE YEAR EVER WITH CHROMETA

With Chrometa’s help, 2012 can be the year you capture and bill for all your time (i.e., hard work).

Please start capturing your billable time automatically with Chrometa.

“How can I get my Chrometa time entries directly onto a bill?”

Good news – now you can create and even email an invoice with the click of a button! Head over to our new Invoices section to get started. Once there:

1. Select your time period
2. Select the Client and Project you want to invoice
3. Click the “Get Time” button

Chrometa will pull your categorized time entries, with annotations, and…you’ve got yourself an invoice!  One that you can export (to Word, PDF, Excel), and/or email directly to your client.

Sample Chrometa Invoice

PS – Not yet a Chrometa user? You can get started capturing your time automatically – and invoicing for it – for free, today.

1. Enable the Xero export within Chrometa by going to Account – Integrations, and clicking the Enable Xero Invoice Integration checkbox.

2. Create your Project in Chrometa to mirror your Xero Contact – specifically by name, and most importantly email address, which is how Chrometa looks for a match during export.

The quickest way to populate your Projects within Chrometa is via a bulk import of your list in CSV format.  Go to the Projects tab in Chrometa, and click the Import Clients button (upper-right) to access the bulk import feature.

3. Create a new invoice by going to the Invoices tab.  Select the New Invoice button.

4. Create a new invoice, save it, and export it to Xero. You can combine the Save and Export steps by taking advantage of the “And” menu located immediately below the Save button.

5. Authenticate the Chrometa connection within Xero (you’ll be prompted to do so), and then you’ll be able to view and edit your invoice within Xero!

If you’re not yet a Xero user, you can take their online accounting app for a free spin here.

We have a couple of Timeslips TPL files available for the specific mapping from Chrometa to Timeslips – they are available on this page (use the 2011 version for everything prior as well).

Once you have enabled the export, you can tee up your time entries for export from our Invoices tab.  Once you pull your time for a given client and/or project, you can generate the file for Timeslips from the Invoices list view by clicking the Action drop down.

The data exports in CSV format, and it’s specifically formatted for Timeslips.

For Timeslips integration support, we’ve partnered with time and billing system guru Caren Schwartz, an excellent resource for anyone who needs a hand with a custom Timeslips setup.

Caren Schwartz
Time & Cents Consultants, LLC
caren@timeandcents.com
203-254-7736
www.timeandcents.com

By popular request, we have developed an export that lets you capture and categorize your project time within Chrometa – and export these time entries over to Basecamp with the click of a button.

To enable the Basecamp export in Chrometa, go to Account – Integrations, and enter your Basecamp account info. Then the export will be available under the “More” menu from Reports – Summary.

Chrometa will take categorized project time and match it up with the corresponding project in Basecamp (the match is by project name).  If you have a project in Chrometa that is not yet created in Basecamp, we will automatically create that project for you within Basecamp when you send your time over.

PS – The quickest way to create your Basecamp projects within Chrometa is to use our Bulk Import tool, which you can find under the Projects tab.

A recent survey of solo and small firm attorneys reported they were only capturing and billing for 67% of their legitimate billable time, on average.

This means that a firm with $1 million in gross billings could be losing as much as a half of a million dollars a year for work they performed but never billed the client for.

Want to learn how you can increase your billable time – while actually working less? If so, then this FREE special report, The Top 5 Ways to Increase Your Billable Time (Without Working Longer Hours), authored by Seth Rowland, Esq. (TechnoLawyer Consultant of the Year in 2002) is a must read. Specifically, you’ll learn:

• How you can save yourself two hours or more of administrative headaches each week.
• The best practices attorneys follow to bill accurately and ethically.
• How your peers are using cutting edge software to increase their billable hours by up to 33%.

For Seth’s 5 actionable tips on how to increase your billable time — without working longer hours — please download your free white paper below (no registration required)…

PS – As Seth mentions, time capture software can prevent thousands of dollars worth of billable time from falling through the cracks. Learn more here.

MAKE 2012 YOUR MOST PROFITABLE YEAR EVER WITH CHROMETA

With Chrometa’s help, 2012 can be the year you capture and bill for all your time (i.e., hard work).

Please join hundreds of your fellow TechnoLawyers and start capturing your billable time automatically with Chrometa.

If you live by your BlackBerry, here’s a list of some of the top rated time tracking apps in BlackBerry App World. Take advantage of these apps to capture your mobile email and telephone time, and get paid for your work on the go.

1. Call Time Tracker by momentem

Price: Free

momentem’s Call Time Tracker is one of the most downloaded business applications for the BlackBerry. It automatically tracks the time you spend on phone calls and mobile email. This app pops up at the end of important calls, letting you quickly tag that call to a client or project so you won’t forget to bill for it. You can tag the time you spend reading or writing emails on your BlackBerry. At the end of the month, you get an Excel sheet of your mobile calls delivered to your inbox, with entries neatly categorized by client/project.

Call Time Tracker - Tagging a call

Call Time Tracker - Call summary

Disclaimer: momemtem is also a Chrometa partner.

2. BlackTrack Lite Activity Management

Price: Free

BlackTrack Lite is a background application for your BlackBerry that produces a complete log of phone/email activity with duration details. The app automatically logs and reports phone and email activity — without any data entry. The activity report is automatically emailed to the user periodically.

BlackTrack Lite Report

BlackTrack Lite App Screenshot

3. Timr

Price: Free

Timr is essentially a BlackBerry timer app that integrates tightly with their multi-user time tracking web app. The BlackBerry app syncs automatically with the web, so all of your time entries are in one place. This application does not do background tracking of phone call and email time. However, you can create many projects and run multiple timers simultaneously. Key differentiating features include Drive Log and Position Tracking.

Timr BlackBerry Interface

Timr Web App

4. Exgis Time Tracker

Price: $4.99

Exgis Time Tracker is a simple timer for tracking your job time. You create time entries either by starting a timer or by manual input. You can export your time in the form of a spreadsheet, which can be sent to you via email.

Exgis Time Tracker - New Time Line

Exgis Time Tracker - View Clients

5. miTimesheet

Price: $3.99

miTimesheet is another BlackBerry only time tracking application that lets you log project time through timers and manual entry. You can export your timesheet to CSV format and it can be delivered to you by email.

miTimesheet - Time Entry

miTimesheet - View TImesheets

Honorable mention: AIRTIME-Manager

We’d be remiss if we didn’t also include an honorable mention of our own – from another Chrometa partner, Airtime Manager makes a solid BlackBerry Time Tracker for attorneys and legal professionals.

Geared towards firms with entrenched billing systems, Airtime Manager integrates smoothly with many of the top legal time and billing software packages.

That wraps up our BlackBerry time tracking app rec’s.  If you’re looking for PC-based time tracking, time management, and productivity software, check out our creations