Use your own logo on Ronin for Invoices and Estimates

Did you know you can customize the logo on your Ronin account to reflect your company or brand? This is the simplest way to customize the look of your Ronin account. The custom logo will also be used on your invoices and estimates, providing the easy branding. This is by far the most important step for taking your online presence to a professional level.

Changing the header background

We’re also excited to announce the much anticipated option to customize the header area with your own background image or background color. This is the perfect compliment to a custom logo and is now available for all paid accounts. Accessing this straightforward and you’ll find it within the Account Settings area.

Not a Ronin yet?

Ronin will help you give a professional impression. Give our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking app a try and we’re sure you’ll be amazed. Try free for 30 days.

The end of October marks the start of another year for Ronin. Two years ago, we “launched” (by our definition of the word) by opening up our services to our first paying customers.

Here we are two years later, and we couldn’t be more delighted to share the news of our awesome growth over the last 24 months with a sneak peek at our weekly application usage trend:

Here’s the same graph zoomed in for just the last year, which is where most of the growth has happened:

We like where things are going and we’re really excited about the future of our business and the prospect of helping many more businesses grow along with us.

If there is one lesson to be distilled from the last two years it is that there really isn’t a shortcut. This isn’t exactly a new message and it’s been said by many, but it bares repeating. Overnight success takes years. Every success is the result of years of hard work and steady growth.

More web companies should embrace this fact and optimize for the right kind of growth. Instead of front-loading the development process and trying to bust out of the gates to instant success, companies need to take time to refine and sculpt their product through the lens of iterative feedback. Treat this race like the marathon that it is and not the quick dash to riches that too many hope it to be.

In our case, instead of worrying about how to get X users on day one, we wanted to figure out how to get user one to stay X days. By thinking about the product in that way, the questions we ask ourselves are always aligned to benefit the user: “How do we refine the product? How do we reduce friction? What functionality should be add? What nuisances should we kill?” Growth becomes much easier when your product is something you’re proud of. Quality is the multiplier to evangelizing a product. That’s what we focused on two years ago and that’s what we still focus on today.

In fact, one interesting bit of Ronin history is that we never really had a traditional launch. There never was a day where a big button was pressed and champagne was popped.

The reasoning behind this is simple: A traditional launch is basically celebrating the release of a product that probably sucks. That’s because every product that hasn’t had its chance to get in front of users is probably not very good. Products only become great when subjected to real usage and feedback. Instead of a traditional launch, we hand picked an initial audience of people that were in our target market and contacted them. These were our first users and some of them are still our customers.

This gave us a chance to control the initial experience and the number of people exposed to that experience. From the feedback we were able to hone and refine the product, the pricing, the market, and even the message. Only when we got our first paying customer did we really feel like the product had been launched.

Two years later, I’m really proud of where we stand. And, I hope that more companies take our approach to launching (and growing) their product. Launch day is a flash in the pan, but growth and true success takes years.

We run plenty of usability studies here at Ronin. We run them so commonly, that we think of them as taste tests – it’s only any good if it fits the palettes of the everyday user. A certain magic happens when you combine the rich feedback mechanism that is usability studies with the instant gratification medium of the web applications.

Everytime we conduct a study, we walk away with plenty of improvement ideas. Then, we sort them in priority (including bonus points for biggest-bang-for-buck features) and we add them into the product, usually within one or two days. Simple as that. While that may seem mundane, it’s really only possible with the appliction distribution model of web-based applications. Instead of building and compiling the next version of software as an incremental release that our users have to download, we can ship it to them without them even knowing.

Case in point, after the last round of usability studies, we’ve made the following improvements, all of which were released Sunday evening, waiting for use on Monday morning:

• The ‘amount’ field during adding of payments is automatically filled out with the remaining balance of the invoice. This is so often the case, and it’s a big win for efficiency.
• Removed requirement that a ‘note’ be filled out during payment creation.
• Added two links to edit “from address” (and other additional informational fields, like tax ID) and “to address” right in the invoice interface. The most common case of client creation is during the invoice creation flow and additional address information is usually a necessary addition afterwards.
• Change the invoice summary section to read “Total Due” instead of “Remaining Balance” when there haven’t been any payments, partial or whole. Removed unnecessary tax information from the invoice summary when the invoice is taxless.
• Improved the invoice comments UI by moving up next to payments as a column. We noticed a lot of users mentally filtered out the comments section because it was so low and hidden on the page.

This is just one set of improvements we’ve made, but changes like this happen almost on a daily basis. Sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re small, but they’re hopefully always a step in the right direction.

Ronin was built with the idea that small firms and independent contractors should have an easy to use and super-affordable invoicing and client management app in one simple service.

Before we started Ronin, we took a look at existing products out there (and there are plenty) for our own freelance use. After reviewing the options, we decided that people deserve an alternative that doesn’t cost more than the monthly cable bill. Even better, for small businesses with a small number of clients, Ronin should be free. We also wanted something that fits our work flow.

To make all of this feasible, we applied the philosophy from Getting Real into the product that we built – everything you need, nothing you don’t. We built in all the features we feel that we needed in our experience doing freelance work, but we’re always open to more ideas and welcome suggestions to improve our application to what suits our users.

We also believe that companies don’t have to aim to be the next Big Thing. Instead we want to do something small, something important, and something really well. By not trying to be everything for everyone, we can be something useful for you. We hope you enjoy our product.