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Government places an incredible role in society. It funds our police, our roads, and schools.

It also produces websites (and regulations) like the City of SF Business Registration Office, which takes an accountant to figure out. Instead of building the registration process like TurboTax and funneling you to the right answers, it lists a lot requirements and fines if you if you make a mistake.

Why does this happen? Because conversion doesn’t matter. We can’t walk away and try an easier signup process.  100% of the businesses in SF has to do this. 100%.  It could be 10x worse and we’d still have to comply. Until there’s an incentive to be easier, these agencies will simply not get better.

Until then, I’ll be dreaming of a government website that looks like this:

We got some very persistent emails from our users in the UK. It got harder and harder to put off.  So, we finally set it up! Also, you can get UK numbers for the exact same price as US numbers.  Basic, Premium or Ultimate Plans can get a local number. See if we have a number in your area >

Here’s how it works:

1. Pick the UK for your country:

2. Pick an area code, based on your city

3. That’s it! Then, whenever someone faxes that number, we’ll forward it as a PDF to your email account. You never have to touch a fax machine again.

I bought Steve Job’s biography a few weeks ago and since then, there’s been a few changes to the book. So, Amazon sent an email to me. All I have to do is reply with “Yes” and Amazon will download an updated copy to my Kindle.  I don’t have to log in, click on anything or agree to any terms of service. This is user friendliness at its best.

Read more at Minimum Viable Personality. Loved this picture. It’s now on my desktop.

One of the best ways to grow your user base is to have your users advocate for you. The most common way to do this is bribery. Many companies will offer a month free or some kind of cash incentive for referrals. That works, but it’s highly unoriginal. Sometimes, it can be a disincentive to share. I want to give my friends an honest referral, not make a trivial sum of money by helping them out.

HipChat does something completely different. For everyone you refer, they make you a custom emoticons. They already have a lot of secret emoticons released. Check them out on Quora.

A custom emoticon has absolutely ZERO tangible value. ZERO! But, I love it. They make you laugh, and that’s it. In fact, our team has been playing around and requesting ones all day.

So, if you sign up for HipChat, use this link

One of our engineers just moved out from Connecticut. His furniture hasn’t arrived yet, so he built his own desk… out of cardboard boxes. He says it’s “surprisingly strong,” since his iMac isn’t that light.

After Gabriel Weinberg wrote about us in Services I Pay For, I thought I’d do the same. The only difference is that I’ll write about services that we pay for at HelloFax.

Uservoice Help Desk

When we got started, I would reply to ever email individually. I slowly realized that I was re-writing answers to the same 40 questions over and over again. Uservoice has this great feature, called a “canned response”. What you do is search for the most commonly asked question and insert it. Then, you can personalize it to each person (see below). The trick is to write like a human, not a robot. We went through hundreds of customer support emails and  put our answers into the system.

Plus, as a user is writing in, Uservoice dynamically displays the user your Frequently asked questions, as they’re writing the question. So, many times Uservoice can answer their question, before they send the email.

We compared Uservoice and Zendesk; we ultimately went with user voice. Zendesk has amazing integrations with other services. But, we found their interface and ironically their customer support, lacking.  With all the time we’re saving, signing up for Uservoice feels like we hired someone dedicated to customer support.

Olark

Olark lets you chat with visitors to your site, in real time. It’s one of those service you’re not sure you need, but once you use it, you realize you can’t function without it. There are many moments when someone visits your site and may have a second of indecision or a question. If they’re confused, they’ll leave and never come back. During those moments, a visitor can chat with one of us and solve whatever question they have. Plus, we also get the benefit of learning what those confusion points are, so we can improve the service. It’s also great to see people visiting your site in real time. It’s motivating to see people using your service in real time.

Amazon Web Services

Surprise surprise. Your biggest services use AWS for hosting, since it’s insanely simple to grow your infrastructure. I’ll leave it there.

HipChat

We’re still in the free trial, but so far, so good. We just needed a way to communicate as a group, since gchat wasn’t cutting it. HipChat came highly recommended.

Google Apps for Business

We signed up for Google Apps for Business mainly to use gmail as our email provider. The gmail interface rocks and we don’t have to deal with mail servers. The only downside is that sometimes outbound emails have issues; so, I have to send the email from my person email account, which is unprofessional. But, it’s not incentive enough to switch.

Mailgun

Mailservers are just difficult to deal with and unless you’re a massive company, it’s not  worth spending the time managing them in house.  Mailgun has an extremely simply api and they’re do what they do really well, which is send email. Plus, their customer support is wicked fast.

Mailchimp

We use mailchimp for all of our email newsletters. I just realized that we’re paying for 3 difference services that deal with email.  The thing is, each emailing need is different and you need a tool that is focused on doing that one job really well. Mailchimp is one of those few tools that combines great user experience with something extremely useful.

Fogbugz

Bug tracker that’s been around since the beginning of the internet. What’s not to like?

Github

Github is just awesome.

Zerocater

If you think about it, you spent a lot of time each day deciding where to eat every day, going there, waiting for the order, eating, paying, then walking back to the office. Magnify that by the entire company and that’s a lot of hours. So, we get ZeroCater three times a week.

Having the right combination of services is helpful to having a company run well. Plus, you need software that will scale with you as you grow. We put a lot of thought into these choices, so I hope it helps.

Any great services you feel I left out? It’d be great to look into.

Neal (see more on Neal) was doing a technical interview when he noticed a tree in the back yard burning. We called the fire department, snatched up our laptops and crossed the street. Good thing all our servers are on Amazon. So, we had uninterrupted services on HelloFax.com during this entire episode!

Here are some photos of the fire. The building next to the office (see left) fared far worse than us. The place was pretty much gutted.  At one point, the fire department axed a hole through our office wall to get better access to the white building.  You can also see a hose going through our front door.

On that note, HelloFax is hiring! Never a dull day at the office. If you can still do well on a technical interview, while the building is burning, you’re hired! Email us at jobs@hellofax.com.