Shutting Down Linkpatch

Over the last several months, it's become clear that Linkpatch doesn't get much love from our team by way of new features and improvements. We've finally decided to shut it down, effective January 31.

Every customer has been sent an email about our decision and no further charges will be processed for paid accounts. Customers with annual billing will be refunded all remaining months they paid for. If you have any other questions about your account, feel free to email help@linkpatch.com or let us know in the comments.

We came up with the idea for Linkpatch over four years ago. It's been a great tool to help us keep track of broken links and we'll continue using it internally. So why shut it down? 3 reasons:

Lack of passion

Time is finite. It's important to dedicate all your energy to things you are 200% passionate about. Linkpatch has never been that way for us. It's a nice little utility, but it's not something we want to hang our hat on.

18 months after launching the public version of Linkpatch, we haven't added any significant features. We have a list of things we'd love to do, but nothing gets done because we're not passionate about the product like we are our other apps.

In hindsight, Linkpatch would have been best kept as a little PHP script that we use internally or maybe released as an open source project. We didn't have what it took to see the product through in the long term. You can't ever half-ass a web app and expect it to be a success.

Limited Market

Linkpatch is a product for people that build websites. In the grand scheme, it's a small market of potential customers. We'd prefer to focus our energy on building products that can have a larger impact.

Focus

It's hard enough to build a great product without distractions. Linkpatch is a distraction we got excited about, but weren't fully dedicated to. By shutting it down, our focus can be squarely on making Feed My Inbox and Help Scout better products in 2011 and beyond.

It sucks to quit at something, but it's been an invaluable learning experience. We won't make these mistakes again.

We've done some research and came up with the following alternatives to Linkpatch. We have little to no experience using these products, so they are ordered alphabetically:

• 404 Notifier Wordpress Plugin (Free, Web-based)
• Deep Trawl ($149-449, Mac/Windows)
• errorlytics ($10-30/month, Web-based)
• Inspyder ($59.95, Windows)
• Link Tiger ($3-199/month, Web-based)
• Xenu Link Sleuth (Free, Windows)

Adding RSS Feed Support to Google Chrome

I'm a recent Google Chrome convert and have been extremely impressed with the browser (download it here). It's much faster than any browser I've ever used. The only weird thing I've noticed is a lack of native support for feeds. You know ... the feed icon that shows up on a website when there are one or more feeds available (seen in Firefox below on the right).

As an avid Feed My Inbox user, this is a really important feature to me. I did some research and found that the Google team intentionally left out native RSS support and opted to only include it as an extension. Kudos to Google for being brave enough to leave out something every other browser has by default because not everyone uses it. Leaving stuff out is probably why the browser is so frickin' fast!

The Chrome RSS extension can be found here: http://bit.ly/4CkQqe. Install it and keep feeding your inbox as normal!

Help Scout Video Update #2

We're about three months into the process of building Help Scout and are downright giddy about it. It's so exciting to see the vision for this product come together and to be using it more and more. We've made a bunch of progress since the first video update, so I figured we are due for another one. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Feed My Inbox: Scheduled Maintenance Dec. 3

Tomorrow afternoon we're going to be upgrading the servers that are running Feed My Inbox. Feed polling may run a little slower during the upgrades, but we don't expect any downtime. If you see any weirdness, don't hesitate to let us know. Thanks!

Why we think Help Scout can be Successful

A friend shared an article with me today, titled "On Building Awesome Business Applications". It sums up exactly why we're building Help Scout, and why we think it can be successful.

From the article ...

"Salesforce.com is powerful CRM software (and they make a shitload of money) but most small businesses don’t care about 90% of the features. In 2010, more features does not make a better product. Your customers, business owners that just want to run their business, don’t care how cool your technology is or how many features you’ve crammed into your product. To them, the interface is the product. The successful business apps of tomorrow will take complex business operations and roll them up into beautiful, easy to understand applications that anyone can use. Great user experience will be the differentiator."

Paul sums up exactly why we're passionate about building Help Scout. A lot of startups are trying to hit home runs in social media, gaming or mobile, when well-funded small businesses are sitting with their wallets open ready to use software that solves a practical problem. Why aren't startups solving more practical problems?

Help Scout's objective is clear: create a platform for teams to collaborate on email. It can be used for anything from customer service to processing website leads. Email is fundamentally ill-equipped to facilitate collaboration, so Help Scout exists to solve the problem.

The only startups that have begun to see this problem are "help desks", but they fall in the category of complicated software with a feature set that most businesses don't need. Email is one of several features in a help desk, so no one pays much attention to it or improves that aspect of their product.

By focusing solely on solving the email collaboration problem with Help Scout, we can build a better user experience that appeals to a much broader audience of businesses. We think it's a win for us and for customers.

There are a tons of companies that have proven Paul (author of the article) right. 37signals is most notable for taking apps like Salesforce and cutting out the excess, resulting in an app like Highrise. Wufoo is another of my favorites, who makes it easy (fun, even) to build a contact form for your website. Our first app Feed My Inbox is another good example ... it's the first application to successfully monetize RSS to email. 170,000+ customers later, it's solving a simple problem for people every day. Time and time again, we see successful startups on the web solving real problems in an elegant way.

As I'm using Help Scout almost every day now, I often shake my head at how basic the first version is going to be. But in the end that's what we're striving for; simple software that solves an everyday problem for our business.

The Updated Help Scout Branding

Last week we decided to do a 180 with the Help Scout branding. The previous post outlined several reasons why, and we haven't looked back since. Within 72 hours, we re-worked the branding and deployed a new coming soon page on HelpScout.net. Here's what the new logo looks like:

As you can see, we're now emphasizing a badge as the mark. A badge can say some pretty powerful things to people:

• Badges always represent something earned through hard work. In our case, it is a customer's trust.
• Wearing a badge gives you a sense of honor, pride and accomplishment. Companies that value customer service take pride in doing it well.
• A badge gives a person credibility. We think Help Scout will give companies more credibility with their customers by making them more productive and accurate.

I could go on and on, but overall this is an image that can go a long way in our marketing efforts. We'd love to get some feedback about the new brand, so holler in the comments if you feel so compelled

Making a Pivot

In startup language, when you need to re-think a concept and change directions, it's called a pivot. Yesterday we decided to make our first major pivot with Help Scout.

When we started building Help Scout, we worked on the branding and the wireframes simultaneously, but thought of them as separate processes. With the brand, we went with a really playful, fun vibe by creating the mascot. Conversely, the actual app is focused on minimal design and user productivity. Every pixel has purpose that helps users do their job, or we get rid of it.

The application and the brand have gone in different directions from day one. We don't want to find ourselves in a position where we need to re-brand in a year, so we've decided to start fresh on the branding now.

The current Help Scout brand:

Why change the branding?

1. We're building and marketing Help Scout on the fact that it does less than everyone in the help desk market, focusing solely on being the best at email. Does this brand say "less" to you? It doesn't to us.
2. This brand is not who we are as a company. Companies like Mail Chimp have masterfully embraced a really fun brand, so it can be done. However, our company has different strengths, a different company culture and different motives with Help Scout. We want a brand that's a better reflection of who we are as a company.
3. Our market is businesses. It's going to be tough to sell a cute guy in a boy scout uniform to businesses and convince them we can make their company more productive. We don't like the first impression our customers would see with this brand.
4. If you've seen the latest designs of Help Scout, it should be clear that it's completely different from the brand. We want our marketing website and materials to complement the actual app.

What would we do differently?

We should remember that the product comes first. The brand and the marketing don't matter until we get the product right. We shouldn't have started on the branding until about now, as the design for Help Scout is mostly complete. In reality, we could still wait another month before touching the brand if we want, because it has no bearing on how we design the app. Rather, the app has everything to do with how the brand comes together.

Moving Forward

In the last 24 hours we've already come up with a concept we really like. I'm going to save it for the next post so I can talk about the thinking behind it.

We'll probably be the first company to ever re-design a "coming soon" page, but we think it's the definitely the best decision moving forward.

Also, we're not spending all our time fiddling with the brand as it may seem. We're still hard at work developing Help Scout every day and are fired up about how it's taking shape. We should be using it internally within a couple of weeks to handle our own customer service. We'll post another demo video in the near future so you can see it in action.

Another Design Update

There's no doubt that we like having fun with the Help Scout brand. We started with a mascot, then gave him a pretty cool home on our coming soon page last week. We'll continue to put efforts towards being visual and creative with the brand when we build the marketing site as well.

However, building the actual web app requires a very different approach. Many people will be spending time every day in Help Scout (including us), so the focus has to be on helping them be productive. Every pixel has to help someone do their job or else it's just noise.

Successful web apps follow this rule ... the actual software is more simplistic and less visual compared to the marketing site because the motives and objectives on both sides are different.

We're trying to achieve three things with the design for Help Scout:

• Simplicity - This adjective is over-used on the web, but web apps in particular must be very judicious with every pixel and line of copy.
• Flexibility - People will use Help Scout in 100 different ways, all of which we have to be prepared for. The design has to work with one or twenty-one mailboxes, six or six thousand messages.
• Speed - Our competitors include desktop software and some excellent web apps. We can't be successful unless Help Scout is extremely fast.

After using Help Scout and doing a lot of testing over the last couple of weeks, we weren't happy with the design yet. It was too bubbly (especially the ticket page) and needed to be simplified in several areas.

We poured over the designs for 3-4 days and have been really pleased with the improvements so far. Here is a collection of before/after screenshots:

Tickets View

Tickets Before

Tickets After

Individual Ticket

Ticket Before

Ticket After

Ticket Reply

Ticket Reply Before

Ticket Reply After

I think we're finally happy with the look and feel of the main pages. We'll continue to iterate as necessary, but for now our focus is shifting to other areas of the app.

Help Scout Coming Soon Page

Today we launched the Help Scout coming soon page! Be sure to sign up and we'll let everyone know when the app is ready to launch. We'd love to hear your thoughts on it!

HelpScout.net

New Feed My Inbox Features

Hey folks! We deployed a number of updates to Feed My Inbox today and wanted to let you know what's new. Here goes:

• "Post Title - Feed Name" is now an email subject option you can edit on the "Feed Settings" page of your account
• Plain Text emails are now available to free accounts! You no longer need a paid account to choose between HTML or Plain Text format. Plain text is a bit more mobile-friendly for those of you that do a lot of email on your smartphone.
• The "Feeds" table in your account is now sortable! You can sort by feed name, frequency, status or last updated. "Last updated" is a NEW column that has been added so you can easily get rid of feeds that are no longer being updated.
• One feature request we've gotten many times over the last several months is to allow one email per post. Usually realtime does the job, but it's still possible to have multiple posts in one email. Starting today, all paid accounts can specify one email per post. This setting is editable in your global "Feed Settings" and on each individual feed you are subscribed to. It's great if you are sending your emails to a 3rd party app like Evernote, Posterous or Remember the Milk.