One of my tweets is featured in an article on Mention.com:

How Close.io Closed $585 in Monthly Revenue from 1 Tweet.

Check it out!

I built a quick mashup/integration between two services that I love using, that I thought would be “better together”. It’s live at ArticleListen.com.

I use Pocket to save a queue of any article (blog post, news story, etc.) that I see on Hacker News, Twitter, Facebook, etc. There’s a web & mobile browser extensions for saving articles you see, and Mac & iOS apps for reading these articles later all in one place, even offline.

Using Pocket can be good for productivity because you may see a headline that interests you, but you really shouldn’t be reading it now. By saving it to Pocket you know you can easily find and read it later. I’ve got a few hundred articles saved from over the past couple years. I often read a few articles at a time, but they still build up.

I also use Umano, which is a service that has professional voice actors record narrated articles from across the web. It’s perfect for commuting. Many of the articles are only a few minutes long, so even a quick trip to the store or walking to the train can be enough to hear an article or two about something that interests you. Tech, current news, etc.

Umano has some article discovery built in (a “popular” page and a way to see which articles your Facebook friends on Umano liked), however they have thousands of articles already recorded and so finding what you really want to listen to is still difficult.

Then I realized that all the articles I wanted to read or listen to were already saved in my Pocket queue, so during part of a couple weekends I put together this site to do a few things:

• Look through my Pocket queue and identify which articles were already on Unman
• Allow me to very easily add matching articles to my “playlist” in Umano
• Also allow me to “Vote” in Umano for the articles that are already in my queue
• Add “tags” into Pocket for articles that were added to my Umano playlist, so I can easily archive those in Pocket

Umano does have a Chrome extension (and generic bookmarklet) for “voting” for articles, but I wanted my primary queue to be something like Pocket, which is better built for general purpose article saving, I didn’t want to have to save every article to two places, and I mostly wanted to listen to the articles that were already in my queue.

Check it out: ArticleListen.com

Feedback is welcome.

Built using Python/Flask and Bootstrap.

Future improvements I’d like to make: It should continually monitor a Pocket queue for new articles ongoing – looking for matches and adding them to Umano without any user interaction. At the moment you just have to login to the site occasionally.

I just finished reading “The Elements of User Onboarding” by Samuel Hulick. I discovered the book through the excellent site UserOnboard.com which has chronicled every screen in the onboarding process of several web and mobile apps and added great commentary (positive & negative) on each screen.

If you help make a web/desktop/mobile app, I highly recommend going through a few of these teardowns, as they alone will make you re-think some parts of your onboarding process. These teardowns together with the book have given me lots of great ideas for drastically improving the liklihood that a new user of Close.io will become successful.

For each chapter, I wrote down a brief summary or simply something that stood out to me. By all means, this isn’t a replacement for getting the book – but a teaser and reminder to myself what I read!

Ch 1
Onboarding starts way back with your marketing / how users hear about you and needs to be consistent throughout their entire experience.

Ch 2-3
Show people how you will make them better

Ch 4
Help people see specific details of how your app would improve their life (“aha moment”)

Ch 5
Cater to their emotions – show you understand the struggle of their current methods (use the exact wording of a similar audience expressing their pain points) + help them emotionally connect with your superior way.

Ch 6
Your app has a personality. What is it?

Ch 7
Give them logic to help defend emotional connection. Focus on how your product is as good as competitors + exceeds all other options. Also pitch customer service, resources, tech support, humans, add trust via testimonials (face/name/title/logo), and numerical social proof. state that you serve “stars” and “aspirational stars”.

Ch 8
Clear all possible obstacles in the path. Overcome objections, remove fiction, & remove points of disconnect (checking email for confirmation, looking up coupon codes, etc)

Ch 9
Design an experience that’s attainable in their first usage that gives that some joy / quick win / at least a glimpse to help them believe your product will be able to help them

Ch 10
Cut down the first run experiences to the fewest ones strictly necessary for helping them achieve a goal

Ch 11
First page after signup matters. Don’t keep users in a limbo state too long

Ch 12
Imagine you were in-person standing behind a new user helping them become successful with your app. Design your onboarding to be like this. Adding more UI to explain your UI is not onboarding. Make your UI better rather than adding explanations. Rather than fake sample content, use that default content to explain your app / give them a walkthrough, if possible.

Ch 13
Give users steps to complete in a way that motivates them to accomplish them. Show that progress has already been made even from the beginning. Make them happy by congratulating/rewarding upon first difficult or important action accomplished (Close.io: we should congratulate them when they close a deal or get their leads imported).

Quora has a nice “quest” that stays open as they browse around, giving them things to do on their own rather than forcing them through a mandatory guide

Ch 14
Send an email “congrats – your making progress!” after they do something good, that serves as a catalyst for next action.

Sales 4 Startups published an interview with me about Close.io.

Interview: Phil Freo, Engineering Lead @Close.io

Sales4StartUps: Tell us about the Close.io story. How was it started? What problem were you trying to solve?

Phil: Close.io was developed as an internal product to make our own salespeople at ElasticSales more efficient. Our company was doing sales for a bunch of companies (with different types of sales processes and needs) and through all these difference sales campaigns we recognized a lack of good software geared at the day-to-day tasks a salesperson faces. Our team needed to be able to make many phone calls quickly, send more emails, and see a history of sales activity for any given lead without having to do a bunch of manual data entry, and surprisingly none of the solutions we tried seem to actually be designed to make salespeople’s lives better in these ways.

After several of our customers asked if their salespeople could use our software (since they saw our productivity improvements from it), we decided to focus on productizing it, and Close.io was born.

Read the entire post.

Coinbase is one of the best Bitcoin related sites/services. They’re certainly the easiest way to buy or sell Bitcoin if you have a U.S. bank account. When I saw their Bug Bounty program where they offer $1,000 USD worth of Bitcoin if you find a security vulnerability, it improved my trust in their security, but of course also made me want to look for security bugs…

I had recently heard about Burp and wanted to play around with it. When I had some spare time around Thanksgiving, I fired it up and started poking at all the forms in the various Coinbase settings pages, trying to find an XSS or other security issue. I pretty quickly managed to generate a few 500 errors, but that wouldn’t be enough. But within a couple hours I found what I considered to be a real XSS issue. It wasn’t a huge issue, and not something a large number of users would have been affected by, but could result in an XSS nevertheless.

It took a while for them to get back to me, but eventually they agreed it was an XSS and granted me the $1000 worth of BTC and added me to their Awards section!