Bootstrap

Help us rename Bootstrap!

We are going through the process to find a new and better name for Bootstrap.  Since the most important audience for the new name will be our users, we thought it would be best to actually ask our users for their opinions and suggestions.  If you’d be willing to provide feedback on name candidates, or would even be willing to throw out some ideas, please email me at newname@gobootstrap.com or tweet us at @gobootstrap and I’ll follow up directly.

Cheers,

Kevin (Co-founder and naming guy)

New office space

Bootstrap has moved into a new office.  We’re now located in downtown Campbell, California at 33 N. First Street, Suite B.  As is fitting, it’s big on whiteboard space, short on overhead, and across the parking lot from Starbucks:-)

Thanks much to our new landlord, Todd.  He runs a really cool eco-friendly car and scooter business - check them out!

New customer testimonial page

We’ve received so many nice words of encouragement from users over the months that we wanted to share the feedback with others. Rest assured, we also receive plenty of comments on how we can make the site better, which is tremendously helpful. But we thought it would be good to showcase some of our users and the nice things they have to say about Bootstrap. As such, last night we rolled out a new customer testimonials page, where you can read what other entrepreneurs have to say about using Bootstrap.

Feel free to click on the links to each customer’s web site to learn more about your fellow entrepreneurs and their businesses. Cheers!

Helping small business - DC style

Saw an interesting post today in the Wall Street Journal’s Independent Street blog on the Presidential candidates’ plans for helping small businesses.

One thing that seemed missing was help to push though legislation to make the home office deduction easier. In fact, it’s pretty funny to see candidates talk about assistance in covering health care benefits for employees, or lowering the tax rate on corporations. Given that almost 21MM small business in the US have no employees (out of ~27MM), and the vast majority are sole proprietors, it makes one wonder if the largest segment of entrepreneurs isn’t being overlooked. Oh yeah, and those 20.7MM non-employer businesses? They generated $970 Billion in receipts in 2006.

We can’t make the government give entrepreneurs a break, but at least we can help them write off their business deductions.

Bootstrap is now on Twitter

http://twitter.com/gobootstrap

We’ll continue to use the blog for official announcements and relevant content, but we thought we’d provide folks with a bit more visibility into some of our (random and not so random) thoughts as we work to make accounting and bookkeeping easier for the self-employed.

Is there global demand for Bootstrap?

After some very early inquiries about supporting multiple currencies, I pulled up the following chart on our Google Analytics account.

In the first 5 days (through part of today) since we opened the site up to the public, we have had visitors come to Bootstrap from 63 different countries. So naturally this begs the question - what can we do (besides offering support for different currencies) to make Bootstrap more useful to non-US entrepreneurs and businesses? Please send your requests to support@gobootstrap.com. We’re listening!

We love to hear from our customers

I wanted to thank all of our customers who have been sending us feedback since the launch of Bootstrap. During the past couple days we have fixed a number issues and have received quite a few feature requests. Here are a couple enhancements we made the last couple of days:

• Improved date parsing when creating transactions.
• No longer allow a transaction to be created with a 0 amount.
• Fixed a sign flipping bug which was making 0 negative in certain cases.
• Created the Bootstrap Blog.

Stay tuned for a post in the near future which will describe some enhancements we are planning.

Please keep sending us feedback and feature requests. It really helps us prioritize what to work on next.