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How did the project start?
The project started as we needed a simple web based invoicing and billing solution for our own business that not only handled billing but could also be used for web hosting automation and to sell additional products such as domain names and SSL certificates.
Current solutions on the market ranged from providing only billing to the other extreme and only being geared towards large web hosts so were very technical to use with a high learning curve.
There was just nothing around for small businesses and web design companies that wanted a simple easy to use solution that handled both. This is when CannyBill was born.
A central software solution that could handle all our invoicing and billing, enable us to sell web hosting packages which would automatically be created on our servers, sell additional products such as domain names and SSl’s all via live APIs, be able to import time entries and clients from our project management software Basecamp, export lead lists to Campaign Monitor for tracking and be able to export all our data to SAGE to keep our accountant happy!
What options did you consider?
We thought long and hard about the business model and decided upon Software as a Service or SaaS. Updates, patches and security for mission critical applications are so important that being able to handle all this via one central location had so many advantages for us and our customers not even to mention the cost savings:
http://www.cannybill.com/comparison_chart.html
What help and expertise did you receive?
CannyBill was built by our happy team of developers and designers and not to forget all the hard work and planning by Wladimir our great MD (yep that’s me! :)
Did you face and challenges or learn any lessons?
Challenges, what challenges!? I think every application especially of this scale will face problems during the development and we certainly did. We learned a lot from this application and had to deal with very complex scenarios. The fact that we also dealt with subscription based automated billing and complex 3rd party API’s did make the development a hard but enjoyable experience. CannyBill took us a year and a half to complete from start to finish and we are all delighted with the end result.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
CannyBill has just come out of the public Beta phase as we speak. The take-up so far has been incredible - and that's even before its official launch. We put out a request for beta testers to businesses who were using our ecommerce system Tradingeye, and the response was terrific – that says a lot about the consumer trust in our systems. Feedback from customers is that they find CannyBill a piece of cake to use - it's a solid system with lots of features, but the design is simple and intuitive.
What are your plans for the future?
We have many exiting plans for the future and most notably our own API and integration with many more third party applications such as web hosting control panels, SSL and domain name providers, fraud screening solutions, affiliate schemes, stock photography websites and snail mail providers.
