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Cushion — Forecasting, scheduling and invoice tracking for freelancers
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Mike Garrett
Killer product for freelancing or small businesses. So good it got into my New Year's resolutions. I can't wait to see what they do next.
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@mikengarrett Thanks, Mike! We have *so* much planned for these next few months. It's a very exciting time for Cushion.
I've been following the CushionApp updates for quite a while now, and it's awesome to see how it's changing and becoming a real player in the freelancing space. Well done!
Nice product, i've actually been looking at this myself and had settled with Harvest as we're a 2 man consultancy and i'd want to make sure we're all in sync. I am going to try the trial and do a comparison. What was most interesting here was your cost of business - https://cushionapp.com/running-c...
I found this so intriguing to see just how much you're spending on various costs. I must admit your SSL costs to me looked extremely high, have you considered using letsencrypt.com which is free and looks reaasonably easy to manage, although im not sure it's right for you guys? The other large cost was intercom that seems quite high, but again it does a lot for you. How often do you try to remove or consolidate these costs for all of these services? Do you find them all reasonable?
@kinnth Hi Tom! Good questions. We could *definitely* cut down on costs if we wanted to focus time on doing that, but lately, we've been in the mindset of paying for the convenience of not having to deal with it (right now).
Regarding SSL, our cert was set to expire somewhat recently and it was easier for us to simply renew it with what we had in place rather than spend the time on a different cert. We actually *just* used Lets Encrypt for our marketing site, which ended up being *much* easier than we thought it would be, so we'll definitely use that once our app's cert expires.
Intercom is definitely up there, but we use them for *everything*—probably more than we should. We love their email editor so much that we moved all of our newsletter emails to them, which certainly isn't cost effective as we grow, so we'll probably move that back to a newsletter-specific service.
All-in-all, we could spend a day or two cutting down the costs, but we've been 100% focused on building Cushion itself, so we've procrastinated a bit. It's definitely something I think about often, but I'm not really in a rush to consolidate—I'm much more excited about working on our next features. :)
Having used this since beta (almost two years now I believe!) I can honestly say it's changed the way I work. Not many apps actually do that. Also, huge new features come out like... every month, because @destroytoday is some sort of superhuman.
@nickisnoble That's so great to hear, Nick. :) And yeah—I get really antsy when we haven't launched a major feature in a few weeks. *Lots* of good ones coming very soon...
Everything about Cushion screams quality. The project timeline, vacation scheduling, and availability notices all work to keep me sane. 🙌🏻
Love love love Cushion. I don't really freelance anymore but Jonnie and team are an amazing crew who care deeply about improving the working lives of their customers. If you are a freelancer, use and pay for Cushion. Do it. Seriously.
Cushion has been completely redesigned and it looks awesome
@destroytoday tell us whats been going on behind the scenes and whats in this release :)
@bentossell Thanks for posting the redesign, Ben!
As far as the new website goes, we realized after a year of taking the typical "product" approach with the marketing site that we lost sight of the original idea behind Cushion. We've been marketing it as "yet another app for scheduling/invoicing" when we should've been pushing what makes it unique—that we're a small team of freelancers, building the tool that *we* would want to use as freelancers.
We also brought more attention to our transparency, like our Running Costs (http://cushionapp.com/running-costs) and our Journal (http://cushionapp.com/journal). Those took a backseat this past year while we focused on pushing the product itself, but I think it's just as important to share as a list of features.
Also, rather than simply listing features, we took a step back and decided to write the copy around our thoughts when we freelanced—what were the common problems and insecurities we'd face day-to-day and how could Cushion help fix those. We're going to continue improving the site in this direction and emphasize what makes Cushion different than the typical alternatives—mainly that we're a very small team of freelancers who actually uses the app we're building, we're *very* responsive (sometimes building requested features same-day), and that when you reach out to support, you're chatting directly with the founder (who can actually make decisions and provide insight into where we're going).
As for the app itself, we've launched a *ton* of new features since we were on Product Hunt originally. Here's our changelog of every change we've made since the beta 3 years ago. :) http://cushionapp.com/changelog/
I wish Cushion was around back when I was a freelancer. While I haven't used the product myself, several members of the Domino community (www.wearedomino.com) do and swear by it.
I highly recommend the Journal (http://cushionapp.com/journal) for anyone who is interested in the craft of building software, or who is embarking on a similar endeavor themselves. When I first came across it, I read it top to bottom.
@automaticyes Thanks for the constant support, Alexander! I always appreciate it. :)
Love the ideas here, super simple. I'm looking for something like this, where I can track my projects but not necessarily have tasks to complete, and also invoice through. Any ideas about an iOS App?
@jmabeebiz Thanks! We definitely plan to work on an iOS app at some point, but we're focused primarily on the core features of the web app right now. Once we get those locked down, we're going to build a mobile app that's more of an on-the-go extension of the main app (rather than a 1:1 feature match)
Hey! Just FYI the 'C' logo used above looks A LOT like Canary's (camera company) iOS app icon. Not necessarily a problem, but I just thought it would be important to know from a branding perspective.
