BenCurtis.com

I used to love the company Overnight Prints. They offer a great product at reasonable prices and with reasonable service. Until this week, I had no reservation about referring them to anyone who needed some printing done, and I saw no need to even shop around for any printing job I needed. But that changed this week, and for only one reason: they didn’t do what was best for me, their customer.

Here’s the story. On Sunday I learned of an event happening on Friday where I could promote Catch the Best to a group of people who would be interested in the service, and so I thought of getting a batch of business cards custom-made to hand out at this event. I checked their FAQ to find the turnaround times, and saw that if I had my order in by Monday, I could get 2nd day air shipping to have the cards in-hand by Thursday. So, I whipped up a design on Monday morning, got the order in well before the cutoff time, and looked forward to the event.

On Tuesday morning I got one of Overnight Print’s periodic special offer emails. One of the offers in the email was for a free set of business cards—just the thing I had ordered the day before. I emailed customer service to see if I could get that offer, seeing as how I had placed that order under 24 hours before they sent out that offer. I got no response.

On Wednesday I checked the order status to find that the processing had been delayed, preventing the order from getting to the shipper until Wednesday, rather than Tuesday, making the estimated shipping arrival day Friday. So, the cards would arrive too late for the event, squandering the promotional opportunity.

On Thursday I contacted Overnight Prints to see what they could do regarding a refund, since their processing delay made my order a waste. They offered a 10% discount on a future order. What?! I may never order from them again because of this, and they want to give me a discount on a future order? After a bit of venting on my part, I got the original order cost (but not the shipping cost) refunded, and a discount on a future order. Great, but I still won’t have those cards for that event, will I?

So, what’s the 1 tip to make your customers love you? Do what’s best for them! If they would have simply noticed the delay in processing, upgraded my shipping to next day air for free to make sure I got my cards when I expected to get them, and sent me an email telling me that, I’d love them right now. I’d be blogging about how great they are, and raving about them to anyone who needed printing. Instead, I’m blogging about how I’m still not satisfied with the outcome I got, and how I’ll shop around the next time I need printing, and how if I recommend them to anyone again, I’ll be sure to include the caveat about not trusting them to deliver when they say they will deliver.

A lot of us are building web applications that we sell (or hope to sell) to customers on a subscription basis, like Catch the Best. Every time you and I build one of those applications, we need to build a billing system to go along with it. I imagine you and I would build pretty similar solutions to that problem, and if you’re like me, you’d actually rather spend your time on more interesting things than a recurring billing system. Would you like to have a shortcut that would allow you to skip writing the code for managing accounts, upgrades, renewals, etc. Would you like to have a ready-made kit that would allow you to build a software-as-a-service Rails application in one hour?

If so, then check out my latest venture, Rails Kits, and the first Rails Kit, the Software as a Service Rails Kit. This Rails Kit provides a complete recurring billing solution for Rails apps. It’s actually a Rails application that you can use as a starting point for your own Rails application. It will give you a head start on building your app, complete with logins provided by the restful_authentication plugin, SSL protection provided by the SslRequirement plugin, and credit card processing provided by ActiveMerchant.

You get account management, including self-serve upgrades and downgrades, free trials, automated billing. Right off the bat you get the ability to tier your plan levels based on user limits, and it’s very easy to define your own limits (storage space, number of projects, etc.). You get support for accounts keyed on subdomains, with scoping to help ensure customers see only their own data. Check out the features list for more info.

If you want to save yourself some time building your next Rails application, check out the SaaS Rails Kit now. You’ll be up and running with an application that can start making money in no time.

Now Amazon’s EC2 supports static IP addresses that can be pointed at any of your instances on the fly. This is cool.

Many moons ago I wrote a quick status report on my first 100 days of Rails consulting. Now that it has been over a year since I joined the freelance world full time, I figured it was a good time to reflect again on that experience.

I said it then, and I’ll say it again—this experience has been a blast. I may go to work for someone else again at some point in the future, but for now I’m loving being independent. I’ve learned to manage the stress of worrying about where the next check is coming from, and I’ve gotten into a rhythm with the ebb and flow of client work, so life is good.

If you happen to need someone to help you build your web application, drop me a line. My schedule stays pretty full, so don’t wait until the last minute to get in touch!

I’m looking forward to seeing what the next year will bring. :)

I recently integrated the Scribd API with my resume management application, Catch the Best, so I thought I’d share a few details here about how I did that in case you are interested in using their great API.

To get started, first you need to install the rscribd gem and set up an account at Scribd to get API access.

Once you do that, it’s easy to send a document to Scribd:

One thing to consider when creating documents with Scribd is that you don’t want to be uploading documents to them during the request/response cycle. It’s not that Scribd is particularly slow, but you don’t want unnecessary delays slowing down your users. To accomplish that, I move the call for Scribd::Document to a method in my Attachment class (which is using attachment_fu), and then queue the creation of the Scribd document with the excellent Bj plugin. So, my model ends up looking something like this:

The scribd.rb script is itself pretty simple—it just does the setup code for Scribd and then calls scribdify on the attachments it finds from the arguments passed to Bj.

And that’s it! Easy Scribd API integration for your Rails app. You can see the finished product here: Catch the Best integrates with iPaper