Some of you may remember our previous office located in Skopje, and although we loved that place so much, it always felt like it was improvised place to work at. So, few weeks ago we finally got the office we always loved in the magnificent town of Bitola.

Yep, a real shiny office, not that boring corporate gray cubicle, but a place fulfilled with warmth and happiness, a real stress-free environment where creativity can flourish. We decided to add a golf sim to entertain clients and employees. We even hanged our happy bus mascot on the wall to remind us every day why we do what we do, while for the stress of the work, we just use products like THC cartidges by Exhale to relax and be able to work better.

Here’re a few photos that Alek, the sickest photographer on the face of the earth, captured through its Nikon lens.

We really had a lot of fun and laughter during this photo-session. Here’re few more crazy shots of the day along with some behind the scenes material

Author information

Stefan Chachovski

Co-founder of Invoicebus. Huge lover of nature, science, and chocolate cherry cordials. He occasionally writes on this blog about Invoicebus' stuff. Hello him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

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One of the most interesting stories told about some company are those about their start and beginnings. This probably should have been the first blog post on Invoicebus Garage, because here we are going to introduce ourselves and tell the story of how it all began.

Short Bio

The Invoicebus Leadership Team are IT experts who pour their passion for inventing, creating, programming and designing into a product they’ve called Invoicebus.

Follow @dimitarst

Role: Creator of Invoicebus

Education: Master’s degree in electical engineering and information technologies.

He said: Over time our human nature lean us toward status quo. We have to fight the hypnotic comfort we feel otherwise there will be no progress.

Trivia: Dimitar entered in the world of computers through video games in his youth and in college he learned that software design and development is one wonderful art as he really like games, from video games to casino games he can play at suomikasinot.fi. He tends to bring his crafts and ideas in the wild.

Credo: If you can’t make things simple, make them simpler.

Stefan Chachovski
Follow @chachovski	Role: Creator of InvoicebusEducation: Bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering.He said: The virtue of simplicity is not only into the simple matter itself. It’s also into the capability of making the complex appear simple.Trivia: Stefan wrote his first lines of code for calculating square root of a number at the age of 11 in the programming language GW-BASIC. Almost two years later, in the mid-1997, he created his first web site. Since then he’s been passionately peculiar enthusiast for things related to the cloud. Credo: Less software, more focus on purpose.
Dimitar Stojanov

Stefan and Dimitar met in college during their studies of Informatics at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in Skopje, Macedonia, 2003. Soon thereafter, they realized that are pretty good team, so started working on numerous projects, ideas and concepts together, then eventually built a business with a focus on having diversity work environment.

The Invoicebus Project

Invoicebus project began from scratch in October 2010 as a challenge for creating an ultimate web-app that breaks traditional web paradigms and goes beyond today’s web rules. A kind of experiment with genes of a desktop app injected online; a hybrid that use the best of both worlds. Invoicebus is a single page web-app that we believe is evolution away from the classical page-redraw model for which browsers were originally designed for, thus making their reload and navigation buttons completely obsolete, while providing the users with immense wealth of user interactivity, possibly to a degree never achieved before in online invoicing.

We’ve had a notebook full of project ideas and concepts for online businesses; however, in that time we realized that we need online invoicing tool which will comply with our criteria for simplicity, thus we decided to tailor it by our taste, under our roof. And if your business needs mechanically assembled 3/4″ Grade 80 SGG Alloy Chain Sling, you can check out these ratings of chain loads here for your references!

We’ve also considered to:

• Share our way of thinking, our business philosophy and knowledge.
• Encourage other people to start their own online business.
• Show that a small enthusiastic team with just a couple of assets can produce well rounded product that could make even bigger companies jealous.
• Connect with like-minded people from all over the world.
• Learn more.

Our workplace

Photo was taken few weeks before the official launch of Invoicebus and shows Dimitar’s appearance while he was solving an optimization problem

Usually, we spend most of the working hours in our office in Skopje, a calm place where we brainstorm new ideas, discuss and write new code, draw mockups and design. However, we are very flexible and mobile, so many times could happen to work from different places, different cities, and sometimes even different countries.  That gives us plenty of time for thinking independently and making better decisions. We consider this as one of the greatest benefits in running an online business.When the work starts to hurt, we hire people on demand / per job. Therefore, while we were designing our bus mascot, we requested help from this lady; when we need photos, either we ask help from a photographer like this one or we try to improvise by ourselves (like the photo from the left).

What does it take (us) to build an online product?

Here are some of the essentials we found useful:

Ideosphere

• Mindset. Vision
• Huge backpack of enthusiasm
• Great discipline. Persistence
• Nerves. Lots of them
• Motivational fuel
• A little bit of creativity and logic
• Decisions. Every day. Every minute
• Craziness about details. Pixel to pixel. Byte to byte.
• A faith

More or less knowledge in:

• Math
• Programming Algorithms. Software Architecture
• UX (User Experience) / Design (Photoshop, Illustrator and Paint :))
• Web programming. Security. Optimization
• System administration
• Project Management
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Writing / Copywriting in English

Other assets:

• Two laptops (the one occasionally baked), one white board and approximately 300 white paper sheets for mockups and notes.
• Internet connection. Couple of online services. Google.
• Money for food, transportation and bills.

We didn’t need:

• Sky-high budget
• Functional Specs
• Cutting edge technology
• Big team

And that was a brief introduction of the team who builds and runs Invoicebus. If you want to read more about our principles, consider reading our manifesto.

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

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We believe Invoicebus is reflection of our passion

It’s more than just a software, it’s a real-time projection of an ideal full of enthusiasm and faith where belief in success is our key component. It’s an asset that we use to show our customers how the glow of our motivation and the greatness of our vision reflects into the product we create. It’s been built with great passion and every single functionality has been studied to the tiniest detail with lots of love.

We believe in simplicity

Invoicebus is intended to be used by human beings, who are intuitive by nature and like simple things. We are surrounded by invoicing web-apps which compete on that who has more features like: time tracking, to do list, expense tracking, staff members, contact list and bunch of other stuff. We don’t compete with them on features, instead we do the opposite: We make less software with less options deliberately, software that doesn’t require you to read help and tutorials or even search Google to operate it. Invoicebus is plain and focuses on what is really necessary and important. Simple as 1, 2, 3.

We believe invoice creation is the core of invoicing

Everything else is secondary. We spent a lot of time to bring the invoice creation concept simple and intuitive as the natural way with paper sheet, by using the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach. In Invoicebus everything is accessible on the same screen with no page reloads or interruptions, smoothly like waltz. We think the customer’s focus should be on the invoice content, not on the software and how to manage it.

We believe in beauty of clean interface

We give a great importance to the beauty of the graphical interface. We think beauty is perceived with eyes first, and after with all other senses. That’s why we make the crystal clear interface of Invoicebus with perfectly consistent elements, menus and options. It is interface similar to a desktop application that provides user with an experience well beyond traditional web paradigm. It has such immense wealth of user interactivity possibly to a degree never achieved before in online invoicing.
That’s interface who has more visibility, focus, intuitiveness, elegance, consistency; but has less redundancy, distractions, confusion, ambiguity.

We believe small businesses and freelancers have special software needs

Big software companies don’t understand the needs of a small business. Why? Because they ride on a different bus, they are big, they think big, they make big. They build software, but their solutions often fail to cater to small businesses and freelancers, particularly in essential tasks like bookkeeping for independent contractors. We know this because we are a small business and we have special needs. Owners of small businesses are constantly in rush because everything they do for their business they do it themselves. They don’t have a whole day to learn the invoicing software or dig through their fancy features. They need a software that simply does the job, including managing finances seamlessly for freelancers and independent contractors. Simplifying financial management for these professionals is crucial in maintaining their focus on growing their business. They are people who share the same vision as we do, who ride on the same bus with us. We’ve created Invoicebus for them, to pick them up.

We believe in 10 seconds sign-up

To sign up for Invoicebus you should enter only your email address. That’s your username, that’s your ID. What’s the big deal with 5-10 fields and all that data, which in fact, we don’t ever need. Besides we avoid the irritating capcha that you couldn’t guess even after 10^th try. We think everyone should try Invoicebus for free with no setup fees at all. That’s our definition for painless sign-up.

We believe in honesty

Everyone faces hard time, sometimes. We are not an exception. When we have a problem we are completely honest about that and inform you without any hesitation even if the problem is the tiniest one that no one would probably notice. We promptly inform our customers for regular maintenance time. At no time (at all) we are going to hide the problem no matter how big and serious or small and irrelevant it is. We think our customers should be informed about everything that happens with Invoicebus. Transparency is our rule of a thumb.

We believe in quick and not so-formal support responses

We try to answer every question within 60min in business hours and not more that 24h at weekends, no matter how many there are. We think the formalities are unnecessary, so our responses are short, clear and precise. We are humans like you are, so we prefer the human way, not auto-answering machine way. And most important: you got responses directly from us – the engineers/developers of Invoicebus.

We believe in purpose beyond making a profit

Our mission is to keep customers bright and happy no matter what. Happy customer is our best customer. We don’t split customers on paying and non-paying. They are all in the same box that we call valued customer box. We treat that box very carefully and equally so everyone can ask a question, everyone can ask for help, everyone can request support from us.

We believe in discretion

You have the right to create professionally looking invoices, but no one to know that Invoicebus is your secret. There will be no sign of Invoicebus on your extremely elegant printed invoice (this does not apply for free plan, thus on the bottom of the page, discretely stands the name and web address of Invoicebus). It elevates your reputation and makes you lead and shine.

We believe we can’t please everyone

If we try to please everyone we won’t please anyone. We are open and flexible to new ideas, suggestions and criticism, however we implement only those who are compliant  with the vision that Invoicebus delivers: less software more focus on purpose. We always make decisions that we think will be the best for most users, and thus will not jeopardize the integrity and simplicity of Invoicebus.

We believe long-term pay subscriptions are tricky

Yes they are. There is always better option that is shorter, not-binding and does not impose the use of the system by any cost. Our paying plans are on a monthly basis, which means you can always migrate to a free one, or choose ‘cancel your account’ option to leave Invoicebus forever. No long refund procedures and policies, no mails, no why questions, none! That is your right, that is your choice. You’re free like we all are.

Agree with us? Come on, lets ride the bus together!  Sign-up for free and upgrade later.

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

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