This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00.

This is not true. Or rather, it isn’t true in the sense most people think. For example, it is presently 2024-12-25 at 18:54:53 UTC. The POSIX time is 1735152686. It has been 1735152715 seconds since the POSIX epoch. The POSIX time number is twenty-nine seconds lower.

This is because POSIX time is derived in IEEE 1003.1 from Coordinated Universal Time. The standard assumes that every day is exactly 86,400 seconds long. Specifically:

The time() function returns the value of time in seconds since the Epoch.

Which is defined as:

seconds since the Epoch. A value to be interpreted as the number of seconds between a specified time and the Epoch. A Coordinated Universal Time name (specified in terms of seconds (tm_sec), minutes (tm_min), hours (tm_hour), days since January 1 of the year (tm_yday), and calendar year minus 1900 (tm_year)) is related to a time represented as seconds since the Epoch according to the expression below.

If year < 1970 or the value is negative, the relationship is undefined. If year ≥ 1970 and the value is non-negative, the value is related to a Coordinated Universal Time name according to the expression:

tm_sec + tm_min * 60 + tm_hour * 3600 + tm_yday * 86400 + (tm_year-70) * 31536000 + ((tm_year - 69) / 4) * 86400

The length of the day is not 86,400 seconds, and in fact changes over time. To keep UTC days from drifting too far from solar days, astronomers periodically declare a leap second in UTC. Consequently, every few years POSIX time jumps backwards, wreaking utter havoc. Someday it might jump forward.

Archaeology

Appendix B of IEEE 1003 has a fascinating discussion of leap seconds:

The concept of leap seconds is added for precision; at the time this standard was published, 14 leap seconds had been added since January 1, 1970. These 14 seconds are ignored to provide an easy and compatible method of computing time differences.

I, too, love to ignore things to make my life easy. The standard authors knew “seconds since the epoch” were not, in fact, seconds since the epoch. And they admit as much:

Most systems’ notion of “time” is that of a continuously-increasing value, so this value should increase even during leap seconds. However, not only do most systems not keep track of leap seconds, but most systems are probably not synchronized to any standard time reference. Therefore, it is inappropriate to require that a time represented as seconds since the Epoch precisely represent the number of seconds between the referenced time and the Epoch.

It is sufficient to require that applications be allowed to treat this time as if it represented the number of seconds between the referenced time and the Epoch. It is the responsibility of the vendor of the system, and the administrator of the system, to ensure that this value represents the number of seconds between the referenced time and the Epoch as closely as necessary for the application being run on that system….

I imagine there was some debate over this point. The appendix punts, saying that vendors and administrators must make time align “as closely as necessary”, and that “this value should increase even during leap seconds”. The latter is achievable, but the former is arguably impossible: the standard requires POSIX clocks be twenty-nine seconds off.

Consistent interpretation of seconds since the Epoch can be critical to certain types of distributed applications that rely on such timestamps to synchronize events. The accrual of leap seconds in a time standard is not predictable. The number of leap seconds since the Epoch will likely increase. The standard is more concerned about the synchronization of time between applications of astronomically short duration and the Working Group expects these concerns to become more critical in the future.

In a sense, the opposite happened. Time synchronization is always off, so systems generally function (however incorrectly) when times drift a bit. But leap seconds are rare, and the linearity evoked by the phrase “seconds since the epoch” is so deeply baked in to our intuition, that software can accrue serious, unnoticed bugs. Until a few years later, one of those tiny little leap seconds takes down a big chunk of the internet.

What To Do Instead

If you just need to compute the duration between two events on one computer, use CLOCK_MONOTONIC. If you don’t need to exchange timestamps with other systems that assume POSIX time, use TAI, GPS, or maybe LORAN. If you do need rough alignment with other POSIX-timestamp systems, smear leap seconds over a longer window of time. Libraries like qntm’s t-a-i can convert back and forth between POSIX and TAI.

There’s an ongoing effort to end leap seconds, hopefully by 2035. It’ll require additional work to build conversion tables into everything that relies on the “86,400 seconds per day” assumption, but it should also make it much simpler to ask questions like “how many seconds between these two times”. At least for times after 2035!

In The bubble without any fizz, The Economist addresses the fact that financial-asset prices (stocks, bonds, and the like) keep drifting up and up in a world where inflation doesn’t; are we in a mega-bubble? What’s really going on? Looks obvious to me, but then I’m a left-winger. I think it’s all a straightforward consequence of economic efficiency and class warfare.

Inflation?

It stays low because our globalized economy is hyperefficient at making the things we want, extracting the fuels we burn, and growing the food we eat. And also flexible enough that it can scale up and down to meet demand without apparently kicking off waves of inflation or bankruptcy.

All of which is true, but I think the effect of class war is even bigger. Let’s start with a picture.

Unions are in retreat and conservatives rule in the great economies of the developed world. Generation Z is being forced into the gig economy, into low-agency, low-paying, no-commitment jobs where being a shift lead at Starbucks is an aspirational goal.

When you don’t have to pay people much, well yeah, you get low inflation.

Financial Boom?

When it’s the prices of household goods, they call it “inflation”. When it’s financial assets, they call it “a bull market”. But the cause is the same: Too much money chasing too few targets.

It’s like this: There’s a surplus of accumulated wealth (see Piketty), and the people who hold it can’t possibly spend it on goods and services — how many yachts can you waterski behind? So they throw it at financial products, which then inflate.

I think this is bleedingly obvious, but that’s possibly because I’m a citizen of the technology scene, and of Vancouver. In the venture-capital business, there’s just way too much money chasing way too few unicorns. Go to a startup showcase sometime and hear the pitches, see who’s getting funded. If you’re like most people, you’ll leave shaking your head.

I also sit in Vancouver, which is experiencing severe inflation, in our housing sector. Since Vancouver is a relatively low-paying city, not just on a world scale but compared to its Canadian peers, it’s obvious that global capital is part of the problem. Our real-estate frenzy has become an international news story (it appears in the Economist piece linked above), but I un-humbly think my own 2015 Game of Homes captures the essentials pretty well.

So, what do Vancouver real estate and financial instruments have in common? Limited supply, that’s what. Check out A Dearth of I.P.O.s, but It’s Not the Fault of Red Tape ; not only has the IPO rate plunged (from 706 in 1996 to 105 in 2016), so has the number of public companies (from 7,322 to 3,671). Declining supply, increasing demand, d’oh.

Other financial assets, e.g. bonds, may not be as supply-starved (I couldn’t turn up good numbers) but it stands to reason that when companies all over the world are reporting robust profits (class war, remember?) they probably don’t need to borrow as much. And (as The Economist notes) when investors are driven to buying 100-year bonds from Argentina, a nation that has defaulted on its bonds six times in the last 100 years, you know they’re getting desperate.

More evidence, were any needed, of the global capital surplus? How about the $21 trillion being hidden from the tax-man here and there around the world?

What next?

Beats me. The sad thing is, I don’t see any reason why things can’t go on the way they are for the foreseeable future. Objectively, it would probably be good for the world if a lot of the accumulated wealth was just vaporized. Unfortunately, the only way that seems to happen historically is in major wars, as Piketty’s graphs illustrate. Which nobody wants.

Then there’s the leftist world-view, for example On the Left from last year. Tl;dr: Tax wealth, force radical transparency on asset ownership, jail business criminals, offer universal basic income. Works for me; but I’m still looking for the right political party.

There’s just too much money out there not doing anything particularly useful.

So you have an amazing product and it’s time to create a killer landing page to sell it. Here’s how we did it.

Most landing pages for SaaS products tend to focus too much on highlighting what you get (the features) and not enough on what it will do for you (the benefits). Those that do highlight the benefits tend to go too far. There’s too much “marketing fluff” and you’re left walking away thinking “what the #$%^ does this product actually do?”.

A good landing page needs to highlight both your product’s benefits and its key features. It needs to do so concisely and using language that resonates with your target audience. So, where do you start?

Over a period of four months we created four new landing pages each marketing a different way in which Intercom can be used. We learnt a heck of a lot along the way. We thought we’d share our approach. Here goes.

1. The need: Focus on the job that needs to be done

We believe that some products are better defined by the job they do than the customers they serve. Customers come in all shapes and size, from all verticals and industries. The only thing in common is the job they need to get done.

The first thing you should do before writing a single line of copy is get an intimate understanding of the job people are hiring your product for. Know what creates demand for it and what people are searching for when looking for a product to hire for that job. Clay Christensen refers to this as job-based marketing and clearly explains the concept using a real-world case study in this short four minute video. Watch it–trust me, it’s worth it.

How we identified the jobs people hire Intercom for

With the Jobs-To-Be-Done approach in mind, we engaged the good guys over at The Rewired Group to understand what these jobs were for Intercom. The process involved interviewing a mix of active, inactive, lost, and trial customers. We then meticulously studied and debated the conversations we had with each of them to truly boil down what is was that they each “hired” Intercom to do. We ended up with four distinct jobs:

2. The messaging: Create some guidelines

Next up we created a messaging guide for each job – a job–a document that serves as the basis for piecing together the content on the landing page for each job.
It’s just a simple template that we collaborate on together in Google Docs, answering the following questions:

3. SEO: Optimize your page for organic search

Your landing page is going to be useless if your target audience can’t find it. When people are looking for products to hire for a job they need done, unless they have a clear product in mind they’ll search for one using a few keywords. Identifying and focusing on those keywords in your page URL and copy is one simple tactic to improving your page’s organic rank in search engines such as Google.

There’s much more to it than that and there are loads of best practices for, and guides to, SEO. We recommend this one from experts in inbound marketing Moz, The Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

4. The hero: Illustrate how your product gets the job done

8 seconds. According to some, that’s all the time you have to capture a visitor’s attention. So it’s critical that the first thing a visitor sees on your landing page makes it clear that your product can do the job they need done. We call this the hero illustration and it has two main parts.

Firstly, we start by asking a question that addresses the problem that drove the visitor to search for a solution. Accompanying the question is an illustration that aims to be both visually appealing and add context to further help drive the concept home. Here’s what we came up with for our landing page for the Support job.

Next we present the solution. Again, the headline here is accompanied by an illustration, building on  illustration that builds upon the concept introduced with the first illustration. Lastly, illustration and a short description describes  describing the job and how Intercom can help get it done.

With only a handful of seconds to make an impact, your copy must be punchy and the illustration needs to be simple to understand. We also make use of parallax to encourage people to scroll and help convey the story we’re trying to tell.

You can see these in action on our customer intelligence, customer feedback, and customer support landing pages.

5. The video: Show how it works

“Show, don’t Tell” is particularly crucial when marketing novel software. It’s a much more efficient way to communicate what a new product does than relying purely on text or a bulleted list of features. People are far more likely to click a play button than they are to read a paragraph of text. That’s because humans are inherently lazy and would much rather be spoon fed an idea than have to read it themselves. So we always include a video in each landing page that our landing pages that both shows and tells you how Intercom can help you get

that specific job done.We aim to keep our videos 

Here’s an example of the video we created for our customer feedback landing page:

Creating product videos is often considered too hard or time consuming. It’s not. Our resident video expert Ruairi put together this great guide to help you get started.

6. The sticky nav: Make it easy to find key information

It’s no secret that our landing pages are long. You’ve probably heard the myth that “long pages don’t sell” and it’s much better to have short pages that don’t require scrolling. If your content is not engaging, that’s probably true. But, if your content is engaging, then I guarantee you people will scroll. Check out Unbounce’s post, Size Matters: The Long and Short of Conversion Marketing, if you need more convincing.

On each of our landing pages once you scroll past the hero section we introduce a “sticky-nav”–a navigation bar that sticks to the top of the browser window as you scroll down the page. It provides quick access to jump to key sections of the page–overview, features, and pricing– and an ever present call-to-action to sign up.

7. The overview: Tell people what they can do

Now you’ve piqued your audiences’ interest you need to back up your claims. For us, this meant breaking down the job into easily digestible chunks. These “sub-jobs” make up the “Overview” section of each landing page.

We took different approaches to this section for each of the jobs. On the customer intelligence page, we highlighted key questions about customers that personas across your business would likely want answers to. Alongside each question we made use of a looping video to show how easy it was to answer those questions using Intercom. Each video starts playing automatically once you reach that section of the page.

On the customer engagement page we instead showed the different types of in-app and email messages you could send throughout the different phases of the customer lifecycle. Again, we made use of looping videos to show what those messages could look like inside your web or mobile app.

8. The features: Explain how they’re able to do it

In order to do the things you’ve just claimed, your product needs certain features. People don’t need every feature your product offers, they just need to know about the one’s that matter most for the job they’re looking to hire your product for. With this in mind, the Features section of our landing pages is broken into two parts.

The ‘key features’ are the must-haves. The features that are essential for your product to get the job done and in some cases differentiate you from your competitors. We clearly state what these are and give them more real-estate on the page.

Then there are the “table stakes”, features that aren’t core to getting the job done, but become important when stacking your product up against competitors. We designed this section as a grid to make it both easy to scan and look like a checklist.

9. Highlight key customers to establish credibility

It’s incredibly important, especially if your product is new, to establish credibility with visitors. Surfacing some of your most recognizable customers is a quick way to do this. We do this on each landing page in a couple of ways.

Right beneath the hero section of each page we display the logos of customers that are both recognizable and are likely to resonate with our target audience.

Logos show visitors that there are real businesses using your product, but ultimately, people relate to people. A photo of a customer is generally more engaging than a logo. That’s why on each landing page you’ll find a featured customer–an actual picture of the customer accompanied by a quote highlighting the benefits they’ve seen using Intercom for the particular job.

10. Tell people what it costs

A key question people want answered is, “can I afford this?”. You should make it easy for them to find an answer.

On each of our landing pages, with the exception of our free package of course, we have a pricing section where you can quickly understand how much Intercom will cost for that particular job.

11. Make it easy for people to sign up

This one’s simple. If you don’t make it dead clear how they can try your product, they won’t. That’s why we include multiple call-to-actions throughout the page.

There’s one right beneath the hero section for people who are convinced straight away, have been referred by someone who’s done the selling for you, or repeat visitors ready to pull the trigger. There’s another one near the bottom of the page and an ever present one in the “sticky nav” that follows you as you scroll down the page.

Placement is just one thing to think about, the other is copy. LeadPages have a great post on landing page trends that covers this topic in detail. Check out Trend #7: Using a Desired Action for Button Copy for more advice and examples.

12. Measure, test, and iterate

What’s a good conversion rate? There’s no straight answer. It varies based on the type of landing page, industry, and product. For example, a landing page for a free screenshot utility is more likely than not to convert at a lot higher rate than a paid solution for email marketing. There’s no hard and fast rule, but one thing is certain, there’s always room to improve your conversion rate. Fortunately there are a bunch of great tools available to help you understand what’s working, what’s not, and experiment with new things.

Here are a few things we recommend trying:

Track traffic and goal conversion with Google Analytics
This one’s a no-brainer. Implement it before you put your page live, so you can track visits, page views, goal conversion, and more. Did I mention it’s free?

See how visitors are interacting with your page with Inspectlet
Using Inspectlet’s heatmaps feature, we can see what people are clicking on or likely to be reading. We also use the scroll heatmaps feature to see how deeply visitors scroll down our long pages. You can see in the scroll heatmap for our landing page for the Learn job below that 50% are making it to at least the middle of the page. Considering the length of our pages this is a good sign (to us at least) that our content is engaging.

In instances where we notice that customers aren’t scrolling on new landing pages we’ve launched, our Marketing and Research teams have gotten together to iterate the page design which we continue to monitor using Inspectlet’s scroll tracking.

Conduct some research with UserTesting.com
Usertesting.com allows you to capture videos of real people talking out loud as they use your product, whether it’s a website, a mobile app or even a prototype. You can ask these people questions or set them tasks to complete.

One of the huge strengths of usertesting.com’s product is its video editing capabilities which are optimised specifically for research purposes: you can quickly annotate the videos of your users and make a highlight reel of e.g. five users explaining your pricing page. These videos will help you pinpoint any areas of user confusion with your site, or usability issues. You can then share the video clips with stakeholders in your company via a simple link and convince them of what needs to be changed.

Test your hypotheses with Optimizely
In addition to the learnings you’ll discover through using the tools above, you’ll likely have some hypotheses of your own that you should test. Enter Optimizely. Whether it’s a simple change such as a different color or copy on a call-to-action button or something more drastic, Optimizely makes it incredibly easy.

One test we recently performed was removing an entire section from one of our landing pages – the grid of feature icons from our customer engagement landing page. Our hypothesis was that considering the long length of the page, we could forgo some of the content and convert at a higher rate. We were wrong, the original won. Lesson learned.

We’re still learning

Building a landing page is not easy. And building four in four months is not without its challenges. But if approached methodically it can be done efficiently and still produce results. It’s early days, but we’re seeing conversion rates (visit > email signup) of ~5% across each page. Considering the nature of our product we think this is a good baseline to improve upon.

We’re still learning – whether learning–whether it be direct feedback via usertesting.com, conclusive experiments with Optimizely, or just how to explain each job better. Chances are that our landing pages will look different in a few months.

That’s enough from us. What’s worked for you?

You're reading 12 Steps to Creating Landing Pages That Convert, a post from the Intercom Blog.
Intercom is the easiest way to see and talk to your users. With live user intelligence, product, marketing, and customer success teams can send relevant messages that start conversations and create personalized experiences.

The post 12 Steps to Creating Landing Pages That Convert appeared first on Inside Intercom.

A guest post by Emessence Co-Founder Ryan Bloom

If there is one word to describe a startup, it would be “busy.”

At a growing company, there are always more things to do than people to do them, and often times those who are most successful are the ones who can be decisive and execute on a given objective efficiently. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, after all the old saying “time is money” has never been truer in the fast paced world of internet startups. However, this approach can lead to trouble when employees begin to jump to solutions before truly understanding their customer’s problems. Often, companies will line up a slew of customer interviews and soon after, product teams will have a list of features and screen-shots ready to go into production. Thoroughly defining your user’s goals can feel like a step backwards; why think about the problem when you’ve already got the solution?

The flaw in this logic really hit home for us at Emessence. Before the UX Boot Camp, we typically conducted several interviews with patients, did a quick debrief afterwards, and immediately made several conclusions about what types of product features would accommodate the many needs of our patient population. For example, we noticed that patients often asked for a way to reliably track their symptoms, so we just brainstormed a variety of unique ways that this could be done. However, with deeper investigation conducted by participants at the UX Boot Camp, we learned that the goal of the patients wasn’t really just to track symptoms — that was just a task in service of a key goal. Their real goal was to understand what was happening to them and feel empowered enough to do something about it.

This key insight led to new feature and product concepts almost indistinguishable from what we had originally dreamed up. Instead of journaling apps that allowed patients to log how they were feeling every day, we now were brainstorming ways that an application could help the doctor and the patient work together, to integrate patient symptoms with medical test results and determine the most effective ways to manage the disease. Designing for a goal rather than a task enabled us to think about our app in a whole new way and start down the road towards a much more powerful product.

Creating great products requires more than just talking to your users (though that is a big part!). Rather, talking to your users is just part of a larger process of understanding your users true goals. The transition from designing for your users tasks to designing for your users goals is one that takes a bit more work, patience, and rigorous application of proven design principles — no cutting corners! However, this is the only way that we can stop building mediocre, “faster horse”-type solutions and start launching products that will truly delight, and help, our customers.

Ryan Bloom is a scientist and entrepreneur based in the SF Bay Area.

At Cooper we design products that empower and delight the people who use them. Design documentation is integral to our process because it communicates the design itself, the rationale for decisions we made, and the tools for clients to carry on once the project wraps up.

Good design documentation doesn’t just specify all the pixel dimensions and text styles and interaction details (which it must). It can also tell the high-level story, stitch together the big picture, and get internal stakeholders excited about the vision. One of our primary goals as outside consultants is to build consensus and momentum around the design—documentation can speak to executives as well as developers. After all, we’re usually leaving a lot of the hard work of design implementation on the client’s doorstep, and building great software starts with getting all the stakeholders on board.

Design documentation should create trust and provide consistency for future iterations of the design thinking. We believe it’s important to give the rationale and context behind design decisions. Answering the “why?” of design helps new team members get on board down the road, prevents wasted effort later when old questions get rehashed, and provides the starting point for prioritization and roadmap discussions. This facet of the process is too often overlooked or omitted for expediency, but trust us: clients will thank you later.

The best design documentation gives the client a unified design language, a framework for talking about the design, and a platform for improving the design over time. Static documentation is quickly becoming a thing of the past—we’re always looking for new documentation techniques and delivery mechanisms because we want to equip our clients with the most approachable and actionable information possible. Delivering design documentation marks the beginning of the client’s journey, not the end.

When’s the last time you heard or read somebody discussing efficiency in software experience? Probably just about never, I’d wager. It’s not trendy. It’s not sexy. It’s certainly not easy… you can’t apply it with a Node.js library or an icon font.

This is not the sound of a grumpy old lady waving her cane at the kids — it’s the sound of opportunity begging you to take it.

If you design[1] software[2], this post will make you money.

[1] if you make decisions about your company’s software products in any way, even if you don’t think of yourself as a designer, you are a designer. Suck it up. [2] Aaaand… this doesn’t just apply to software, but all customer experiences: getting and receiving support, ebooks, workshops, conferences, etc.

Here’s why:

Fact: your customers have only 24 hours a day
And time is the one resource that you can never, ever make more of.

Fact: Inefficiency doesn’t just waste time, it aggravates
Sure, if a process takes 1 minute longer it has to, that time is wasted. But if your customer has to execute that process 5 times a day, every work day, forever? It’s also aggravating.

Fact: to your busy customers, aggravation destroys time
Stress is disruptive. Aggravation is disruptive. These emotions suck energy, which takes time to recover. When software pisses off your customer, they can’t focus on doing their best work.

Fact: to your business customers, time is money
…therefore, if you save them time, you save them money. And if you save them money, you create a consumer surplus that they’ll be willing to spend on your more efficient product instead of a competitors’.

Fact: You know all this. Duh.
You know this. Your competitors know this. And yet they (and you) act as if it’s immaterial when you sit down and design your customer’s software experience.

Daily life with software is terrible

For most software I pay for in my daily life — and it’s a lot — I am paying for the privilege of wasting my time. Extra steps, extra buttons, extra fields, duplication of effort… it’s everywhere and it drives me crazy.

The same is even more true for your customers — business customers — who have to suffer with the time- and soul-destroying professional tools like Quickbooks and Photoshop and Word.

Imagine if you could offer them a little sweet relief. Imagine what that could do for your bottom line.

“But I can’t…”

You may be thinking: “Wellllll, I can’t make this software more efficient.” You may think it’s because you have immovable requirements. You may think “The way it is is the way it has to be.”

Well, let me tell you about my parking garage — over which I have zero control.

Every experience can be designed more efficiently.

We live in a city, so we have to park our car in a paid lot or garage. And since I’m a person (like any other) with limited time and energy, I care very much about efficiency. It helps that I think about this stuff all the time.

Little things add up:

• I chose the garage that cost more, but that doesn’t require circling around the block after we stop off at the house
• I always park the car on the wall I can see from the elevator; even if it means going up another floor, I can just press Floors 2, 3, and 4 and poke my head out to see if the car is there
• I park in specific spots on that wall that let me pull straight out and go, instead of a Y-turn (or worse)
• I keep the garage RFID key on a sticky pad on the dash, so it is always visible and in reach
• …and before all this, we bought a small car that can fit anywhere and yet holds a lot

So, even when I don’t remember where I left the car, I don’t have to walk around the garage and up and down, and sweat or freeze. I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to drive in circles.

I have zero control over the garage, but I can exert control over the way that I use the garage.

This is the essence of “hardware” vs “software”. Design vs requirements. Real vs perceived impossibility. If I can do it to a garage, you can do it to your software.

There’s always room to improve. Always. You can always make things more efficient for your customers.

And if that improvement, however small is something that improves their life just a little every day? That adds up.

Efficency Case Study: Freckle

I whipped up a little video to show you the net result of efficiency design in Freckle Time Tracking, our little SaaS for professionals, teams, and peeps who care about their productivity, vs our most common competitor:

Here are some key differences:

• You can track time on every page in the Freckle app, thanks to the blue Quick Entry box
• Creating a new client or project takes no extra steps, no extra clicks
• For existing projects, are no select lists to mouse through… type and we’ll search or create for you
• Creating a new type of task/task category takes no extra steps, no extra clicks, except typing the ‘#’ sign
• The entire time logging process can be done with a keyboard only

And more.

And the shoot-out used to look even worse… now in Harvest you can create the client right on the Create Project screen, but a year or so ago, you couldn’t. You had to go to a whole extra section, do that, and come back. Again.

Naturally, Harvest has some efficiencies we don’t, like a bunch of integrations with software their customers use… like Quickbooks. I know we’ve lost customers to them over that, and I know they’ve lost customers to us over our efficient time entry. Every product is different, and different people need different things, and therefore different people love, share, and pay for different things.

People who adore Harvest will probably not be the ones we can lure to Freckle, and vice versa. But those people in the middle? Who aren’t utterly in love?

Those customers can be seduced to switching.

Here’s how to make your software more efficient right now

Look at every step. Question it: Do you have to reload the page? Do you have to scroll? Do you have to mouse around? Will the user end up jumping back and forth? Will they have to copy and paste?

Look at every interface component. Every button. Every interface widget. Every line of text. Question it.

Look at every customer-facing decision. Must they really make that decision, or make it right now, or is it for the simplicity of your data model? If it’s merely convenient for you, remove the requirement.

When you find a step, button, widget, etc. is avoidable… remove it.

When you find repetition, eliminate it.

Look at every task. Question it. Ask yourself how to make it easier, faster, more available, more direct, fewer decisions, fewer clicks, fewer page loads. Then do it.

Rinse and repeat… forever and ever.

Et voila. You will be more efficient.

It’s not easy. That’s the point.

That’s why most people will just slap on whatever interface widgets their JavaScript framework comes with, and call it a day. That’s why Select Lists exist.

That’s why efficiency is such an incredible competitive advantage.

What’s the most efficient software you’ve ever used?

Weigh in with a comment!

What else do your customers care about?

Find out with our free 7-part bootstrapping guide… which includes a bonus ebook that’ll help you identify inefficiencies in your life so you can make more time for your product biz: