Forget Skittles, WeAllHateQuickbooks Is Brilliant | Hacker News Reader

Forget Skittles, WeAllHateQuickbooks Is Brilliant

iseff.com

23 pointsiseff23 comments

FreshBooks employee here:

I think this is a totally stupid idea.

"We all hate Quickbooks?" really? Grow up. Quickbooks has made millions of small business owners' lives easier. With out them they would have to spend countless more hours figuring out which tax laws apply to them, how to account for inventory, etc...

LessAccounting should focus on their strengths (and they have a ton, seriously) rather than attack Quickbooks.

I could never dream of the company I work for ever coming out with a "We hate {insert competitor}" campaign. We have friends everywhere, even at Intuit/Quickbooks. We might compete with them, but that doesn't mean we hate them. We share many of the same goals and we are all just trying to give our customers the best solution to their needs. Hate is no way to grow a business.

In my opinion - it's marketing. The point is to get you to talk about them & remember their brand. I would never have known about Freshbooks had I not met Mike McDerment in Miami. I would never have known about zoho had I not read about their HS student recruiting tactics. Companies have different marketing tactics - this is one of them.

Disclosure: I am friends w/ the less everything dudes.

I'm not going to remember Lessbooks (or whatever), just that Quickbooks is the market leader.

It's LessAccounting - there, now you should be able to remember it.

>> "The point is to get you to talk about them & remember their brand."

Right. I'm going to remember how unprofessional/stupid they were, and not use them.

Actually picking a fight is a great way to get noticed. It's good marketing to have an enemy. Business isn't about being grown up, it's about being effective, and sometimes seemingly childish things are very effective.

The reason there is such hatred for QuickBooks is there mac version sucks, and the web version doesn't work on Macs. They don't disclose before you try to sign in that the web version doesn't work on Mac browsers.

That seems like a reason to just use something else, rather than hate them :/

I am another FreshBooks employee and I happen to regularly hang out with the lessaccounting guys which frequently results in bear hugs by the end of the night. So before they are enticed to believe we are starting the "we all hate lessaccounting" fan club I will say that I know this QuickBooks campaign has been awesome for them and it is classic positioning. That being said I kind of have a crush on QuickBooks too so I feel I am trapped in an uncomfortable love triangle. Awkward!!

-- Sunir Shah, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks

(Seriously though it is classic Al Ries and Jack Trout _Positioning_. Excellent book.)

I had that thought too. The book is Positioning: The Battle for your Mind - http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&...

The concept used here is repositioning the competition, to create a clear position for yourself. (It's Chapter 8 in my copy of the book) By focussing on Why People Hate Quickbooks (and using Twitter to create genuine, user content to back them up) Less Accounting are saying "We're just like Quickbooks, only easier to use". They don't have to explain their product at all, but I still get (sort of) what they do.

Or at least, that's the theory. Can backlash if it comes across as too harsh, or if you paint a strawman of the competition.

Just type in "I hate quickbooks" into Google. We All Hate Quickbooks is #1. How is that a bad campaign? (We've used Quickbooks and didn't like it at all. 10 clicks to enter an expense, 20 clicks to enter a deposit. Awful.)

An effective way to sell a product is to sell on a pain point. Not to mention that everyone competes in business. Where do you think Coke and Pepsi would be if they loved each other and hugged all day? They'd be done. A new company called "Cokesi" would come in, kick their asses, declare that they are the best cola and take over.

Survival of the fittest. If people don't like Quickbooks, they will look for other alternatives. We All Hate Quickbooks just might lead them to Less Accounting. Good for them.

The kind of advertising immunity people have built up in this day and age is pressuring brands to move farther off the beaten path in order to get noticed.

Humans notice things that are new and different, and leveraging that irrespective of whether the difference is positive or not can be an advantage to some brands, especially ones that are trying to usurp an incumbent, well-established brand.

QuickBooks is like the wizard behind the curtain at many small businesses and accountancy firms. Viral marketing isn't always for good.

That's too bad. Nearly every freelancer/small business I deal with dislikes QuickBooks if not hates it. I am much happier with LessAccounting personally.

At my former employer we did some work integrating QuickBooks with several existing systems.

I wanted: Documentation; Intuit gave: Cut-and-paste C# examples.

I wanted: an easily parse-able format; Intuit gave: almost-XML-but-not-quite (order of elements is important!)

I wanted: a Linux server; Intuit gave: something that was almost but not entirely incapable of operating for six hours at a stretch without dying silently.

I wanted: descriptive error messages; Intuit gave: "Yeah error $RANDOM? That means restart the server."

To be fair the client-server API was reasonably sane, it was the interchange format itself that was bonkers.

I'd love to calculate the number of developer hours it cost working around those misfeatures just to get a reasonable facsimile of RPC working.

Anyway, I hate QuickBooks.

I'm reaallly interested in a solid Quickbooks alternative given all the negative feedback on it. But I'm having trouble trusting LessAccounting coz 3 favorable-to-them comments here so far have been made by brand new users (chrisyour, redinger, joshuastreet). Any others used them?

Yeah, Quickbooks sucks, but a totally web-based option is not better. There is no substitute for locally-run software for many things and accounting software is one of them for me.

Does anyone use LessAccounting? I signed up for it but it doesn't do very much. Disclaimer: I'm technically a competitor.

I signed up for it but it doesn't do very much.

I think that's what they're going for :)

Yeah I signed up. Love it!! Switched from Quickbooks. Free from the bulk of options no one uses. I have enough to train people on. My assistant can actually use it without needing to attend a class! And to freshbooks employee...their marketing worked for me :)

Considering you signed up to post this gushing post, you wouldn't happen to work for them would you?

Judging by the fact that he's hanging out on HN + a quick search for his name reveals that he's probably this guy:

http://joshuastreet.com/ http://twitter.com/JoshuaStreet

Doesn't look like there's any connection to LessAccounting...

I guess the moral is: don't let your first post on HN be laudatory towards a startup. Damn vultures :)

re: Freshbooks employee --

If this is such a stupid idea why did it show up in my RSS Reader? Why are people blogging that it's brilliant? Obviously it must be working to some degree.

ps: somewhat affiliated with Less, but that doesn't change my views... or the fact that I saw this thread.

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