It’s a new year! We hope that everybody had a great holiday season and that you’re as excited about 2012 as we are! We’ve got some great things planned for the coming year!
After returning from a short break, we’ve been focussed on catching up with any questions and bugs that were reported to us. Naama had an epiphany while on holidays, and put out the rallying cry to Demand Better! The billing overhaul went very smoothly and we’ve been tweaking a few odds and ends on that front. We discovered a minor bug with our iOS app when the New Year hit (with Expenses), and a new version has been sent to Apple for approval. We also launched a new Twitter Contest for the month of January – Time Saving Tuesdays where you can tweet your best productivity tips for a chance to win some great prizes.
It hasn’t been all business around the office though, we have had some great chats on Co-op:
Patrick has relocated to Texas for the next few weeks, despite the lack (so far) of winter weather in New York.
Shawn made a quick trip back to New York over the holidays to welcome a new member to his family (and ours). Welcome Nico! Even though Shawn is off spending some time with little Nico, he’s still watching over us at Harvest HQ. (thanks Lettini and PillowMob)
Sri has suggested that maybe all of this talk of productivity is overrated. In the near future, we’ll do all of our goofing off while hidden by a time cloak.
Warwick has been busy digging up some wonderful delicacies for us to sample at the next Harvest Summit. I’m going to try out Casu Marzu if Warwick tries some Hákarl (I’ll report back if I survive the experience).
At Harvest, we take time seriously, and we’re constantly looking for new ways to be more efficient. Join us in sharing your best time saving tips, and you may even win a prize for it!
Each Tuesday in January, we’ll be asking a time saving question on Twitter. We’ll be accepting submissions until midnight EST, and we’ll share the best tips and tricks in the next week’s blog post. To sweeten the pot, one lucky winner will score a prize from us.
THIS WEEK’S THEME: We want your best time saving tips and tricks for meetings. Meetings are a notorious time sink. Tell us how you keep your meetings efficient and productive.
Follow @harvest and tweet your best time saving tips for meetings using #respectyourtime. This week’s winner will score a set of 8 colorful and lovely “You’re Very, Very Late” tatt.ly tattoos!
Please share this widely, the more answers we get, the more we can share with you. We can’t wait to hear your tips and tricks!
Other things on our brains, as evidenced by our link swapping in Co-op:
It was TJ’s birthday Wednesday, and the whole Harvest crew pitched in to make him a special website to help him launch his “side business.” We knew he had discovered it when he posted the link in Co-op.
Many of us at Harvest are fans of Louis CK. We were super impressed with everything about his recent internet special – from the comedy itself (the $5 is well worth it!), to how simple the purchase process is, to this statement below the purchase button:
To those who might wish to “torrent” this video: look, I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions.
I found myself actually reading every single word on the purchase form (and re-reading it). I did that, not because I was confused, but because I actually enjoy what Louis CK has to say. He’s genuine, saying things that make sense without any buzzwords or corporate language. It wasn’t crafted by an ad agency figuring out the tone and stuffing words in Louis’ mouth. There wasn’t a consultant urging him to be be a certain way in order to boost conversions. I’m sure he wasn’t even thinking about SEO or A/B testing when he was writing for his online store. It was just Louis CK, acting as a (somewhat!) reasonable human being, speaking directly to us.
It is incredibly inspiring and gratifying to see someone follow common sense, do the right thing, and make good money at it. Just in case you need another reason to pay Louis CK $5 for his “Live at the Beacon Theater” special, here’s a hilarious 4-minute outtake:
I’m in awe whenever I come across a physical object that’s been made by hand. I’ll often pick up the piece and study it, like a work of art. It’s easy to forget to appreciate handicraft, especially if your days are spent building for the digital world.
That’s why it was a pleasant surprise to hear about Brooklyn based Joel Bukeiwicz, a professional knife maker (not far from Harvest HQ) who does all his work by hand. Joel is one of only a handful of knife makers in the country to practice this art form. You can watch the video from Made by Hand below, or read on to learn more about Joel and his story.
Joel came to knife making from the unrelated craft of writing. After having a hard time selling his manuscript, he decided to take a 3 month hiatus from writing. He fed his desire to create by building physical objects — bookshelves, tables. Anything. For Joel, creating tangible things was a breath of fresh air. He eventually came to knife making and quickly became passionate about it.
After toiling in the shop for two years, Joel came away competent of his craft. He now sells handmade cutlery to fine chefs in Brooklyn and beyond out of Cut Brooklyn. Each knife gets 15 hours of attention, versus your high-end German knife which takes 10 robots, 15 minutes to spit off the line.
Cut Brooklyn’s mission is to make every knife the very best knife they’ve ever made. As Joel learns and iterates, the quality of the knives improve. This human element makes every piece unique and brilliant. It’s this level of care and attention to detail that we admire as software builders, and it’s why I continue to pick up the pieces made by hand.
True story: Danny, T.J. and I saw Woz walking past us on Lafayette St. We thought it was him, but we weren’t sure. If we had done what we should’ve done, you’d see a picture of us, with Woz, for this Playback edition (he was in New York for the Gizmodo Gallery Opening Party).
Wednesday night we had our Harvest Holiday meetup, and we got to see many friends, family, customers, neighbors, and even one of our New Founders, Kristel, that swung by to Harvest HQ. It was great to meet and re-connect with so many people that rely on Harvest to run their businesses, and a wonderful chance for Harvest customers and the Harvest team to chat with each other. We had food to perk up the rain-soaked masses – savories and sweets were from two local establishments, Soho bakery Oro and Spanish specialty foods supplier Despana, and our drinks master Jae concocted large brews of mulled wine and warm spiced apple cider – yum.
Here are a few pictures of the festivities, and thanks for sharing such a great evening with us!Continue Reading …
Last week we launched a new customer page. Our old page was simple, it featured some customer quotes and logos. It helped people who were thinking about Harvest know that other reputable companies use our application but the page didn’t offer much in the way of education. We knew that our newer customers (and some of our longtime customers) wanted to see more detail and learn about how companies use Harvest. So we improved it.
Since you can easily read the profiles here, I wanted to use this space to take you behind the scenes on why we chose to feature one of the companies, Cuban Council. All of the featured customers ended up on our page through a cocktail of admiration and serendipity. However the story of why we chose Cuban Council provides a glimpse into the history of Harvest so I thought it was worth telling.
As many people know, Danny and Shawn built Harvest to meet a need they experienced while running their own web design agency. They wanted a time tracking system that felt good to use. Shortly after the launch of Harvest, Danny and Shawn received an email from the founders of Cuban Council. They were also frustrated with time tracking and were considering building a tool themselves. Luckily they stumbled upon Harvest and liked what they saw.
That email stirred real excitement for Danny and Shawn. As college friends they had discovered a mutual interest in design and technology. And during their college years they became avid readers of a design webzine, k10k.net. Turns out the people behind k10k.net went on to start Cuban Council. It was hugely gratifying for Danny and Shawn to see Harvest adopted by the same people whose design aesthetic they had followed while in college. Needless to say, that email was one of the first outside indicators to Danny and Shawn that Harvest was onto something big.
We hope to expand our customer section down the road. If you have an interesting story about how you’ve used Harvest for your team, I’d love to hear from you.
Some things Harvesters talked about this week on Co-op:
We’re having a little Holiday Meetup next week at Harvest HQ, and you’re all invited!
Yesterday (Dec 1st) marks the second full year that our Sys Admin Extraordinaire, Warwick Poole, joined Harvest!
Matthew Lettini’s feedback on Android: “taking a screenshot of an android phone is so convoluted that I’m just going to take a picture of it with my iPhone.” But we are making good progress on the latest Harvest Android App – coming soon!
Kim linked to this neat little printer. We’re not sold on the usefulness but we’re impressed with the well-crafted site (hint: scroll down).
Speaking of little: T.J. professed his love for Rails for the little things.
I’ve been captivated by the sketchbook of Susan Kare, the artist who created Happy Mac (and the other iconic interface elements for Mac). It’s fascinating to see these original icons that have defined so much of our UI today came from a $2.50 sketchbook.
Perhaps it’s just nostalgia, but Happy Mac makes me smile – something the newer, slicker, monochromatic Apple logo cannot do.
Published January 6th, 2012 by Jonathan Lane 
