We have sort of a platonic internet love affair with the guys at Less Everything. When we started Jackson Fish Market we had to pick an accounting package. QuickBooks and PeachTree looked so ugly and complicated that I just couldn’t bring myself to use them. They made my eyes bleed and my head hurt. I went with the Microsoft’s small business accounting package. It wasn’t beautiful but it was clean. It had support for PayPal built in which made me feel like the team was thinking innovatively. I used it for a year. And then I left. It felt like an improvement over the competition but it was still designed to scale to run a huge business and not optimized for a small 3 person business with simple needs. I just wanted something that did the bare bones but was more than a spreadsheet and looked half decent.

Less Everything came to my rescue with Less Accounting. I’ve written about my appreciation for Less Accounting before.

Yesterday the folks at Skittles had skittles.com showing every live twitter post with the word “skittles” in it. And so help me, if I find the person who put up inappropriate tweets with “skittles” in them I will chastise them for their terrible behavior. And while the Skittles stunt is cute, the guys at Less Everything have bested them in terms of using twitter. To be fair, they have the advantage of a big, lumbering, and unloved competitor in QuickBooks.

Enter We All Hate Quickbooks. Given that we’ve been advocating branded experiences for the last two years it’s a touch embarrassing to get schooled in it by the folks who make your accounting software. But they did it. The site is a live twitter feed of every tweet that mentions “QuickBooks”. They noted intelligently that most are negative. And their new site… branded gently with the name of their competitor to QuickBooks.

According to the Less Everything blog:

“We’re receiving thousands of LessAccounting.com signups from WeAllHateQuickbooks.com.”

I wonder when they’ll start to get crappy notes from Intuit. ;)

Bravo.