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Sky Clerk
What can you tell us about the team that built skyclerk.com?
Skyclerk is a product of Cloudmanic Labs, once a consulting firm, now more of a product company. Currently, we are a 5-person team: 2 designers, 2 programmers, and a content person. Our team is simply amazing. We have a love of strong design, from the UI to the code. We spend much time looking at different products on the market and have a great deal of internal debate on how we could make things better. While the resumes of the team are impressive, our real secret sauce is our deeply shared passion to always make super high quality products.
What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?
Our main mission is to make small business bookkeeping simple, fast, and engaging. Skyclerk started out many years ago as an internal tool. Most bookkeeping products were just too complex, slow, and annoying to work with. In our non-skyclerk days often someone would take an entire day off of work each month just to do bookkeeping. Also, not every small business owner has a masters degree in accounting (at times it seems you need one for other solutions).
Everyday we focus on finding new ways to make bookkeeping even more straight forward and seamless. Currently we don't provide all the bells and whistles other bookkeeping packages provide, so our customers tend to be smaller companies, often no bigger than 10 people. Our customers are anyone from a web designer, to a small law firm, to pool cleaners. We have customers all over the world, the UK and Brazil being our top countries outside of the United States.
What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?
Flexibility. We played around with all the other PHP frameworks, and always felt confined to doing things by the framework's rules; very hard to expand. Some of them seemed too bloated. Before we discovered CodeIgniter we set out to write our own framework, with which Skyclerk was originally written. We were having internal debates on open sourcing our framework but the extra hard work of documenting it and adding the extra polish needed for public consumption seemed like a lot of overhead for a small company. One day we stumbled on CodeIgniter from a Google search of well documented frameworks. After looking at its guts, we realized CodeIgniter was where we were striving to be. We shortly killed our framework and have been a CodeIgniter shop ever since. So fast, so not bloated, so expandable. Perfect for what we value in a code base.
What is next on the plate for skyclerk.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?
At Cloudmanic we break our time up into what we call a 60/20/20 rule. We spend 60% of our time bettering our current features and product offering. This 60% comes mainly from user feedback. We have engaged users, who are always happy to tell us what they like and dislike. 20% of our time is spend building new features. Sometimes we build features from market demand and sometimes we build features we just internally really want. The last 20% is spent building new random things, for which we do not require a reason. The interest or passion of a team member is all that is needed, and all that matters. Sometimes these ideas flop. Sometimes it turns into some open source tools we release, and sometimes they become brand new products.
We have spend a great deal of time on our mobile apps (Android is released, and iPhone will be release soon). Invoicing is coming very soon, as well as some pretty cool integrations with other software providers.
Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community? Tips from this project you'd like to share? Lessons you've learned?
Take bets. I think this goes for any sort of software development. If you have an idea of how to do something better, just go for it. You might hit a dead-end or you might discover an amazing new way of doing something. Either way, the learnings will improve your software development. In the past we just followed the conventional wisdom. Often times via little bets we find better ways to build more scalable software.
Also, as a software team we build software on a no schedule bases. We do not have timeline or due dates. We never take shortcuts. Allowing the team freedom to dedicate as much time as necessary to build the best product possible is one of the worthiest development lessons we have learned. Oddly enough we get things done pretty quickly. The stress of a deadline just clouds judgement.
Lastly, we live in an Open Source world. Read through other people's code. We have learned so much by simply checking out random code from Github and reading through it. The more tricks you have in your bag the better.