In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Walter Chen — the CEO and co-founder of lightweight status reporting platform, iDoneThis.

Walter lets us in on some little-known secrets, busts a number of misleading marketing myths and shares some unexpected tactics that helped him get ahead.

The episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, you’ll learn startup marketing strategy from an experienced content marketer who — by any means necessary — pushed iDoneThis to $500k ARR. He says it’s okay for 90% of your content to fail, tell us the kinds of marketing emails you shouldn’t bother sending, and a trick he used to leverage the fanatical readership of Hacker News.

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You need a solid writing app.

It’s vital for practically every kind of company—whether it’s for drafting contracts, writing up website content, or just putting together internal documentation.

But team collaboration can easily become a huge nuisance.

The more people involved, the more difficult it can be to decide on the right edits and produce a coherent piece. That means the last thing you want is even more trouble dealing with a collaboration tool that doesn’t fit your workflow.

We delved into the features of three popular collaborative writing apps—Quip, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs—to help you decide upon which is best for your team.

In this post, we’re going to compare each app’s features in the fields of:

• Sharing
• Concurrent editing
• Revision history
• Chatting and commenting
• Organization

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It’s finally here.

I am excited to say that, after numerous delays, the release of our brand spankin’ new podcast, Business Systems Explored, hosted by myself (Vinay Patankar) and Tony Brown, has arrived.

One of the most painful aspects of having a distributed or remote team is something that’s incredibly basic: video conferencing.

Video calls are the main way to get face-to-face time with your colleagues in other offices or working from home, so you may be doing multiple calls per day. For each one, it takes at least 5 minutes to create the call, coordinate everyone to join the call, and get the audio and video working properly.

A company of 10 where everyone does 5 video calls per week will lose over 200 hours of productivity per year due to setting up video calls.

That’s why distributed companies like Foursquare have created an alternative to the traditional video call. At Foursquare, they use something that they call “The Portal,” which is an always-on video conferencing platform that’s constantly running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with one end in New York City and the other end in San Francisco.

What you end up with is more than a video conference—it’s a gateway that gives you the ability to appear in the other office and work face-to-face just by walking up to the screen. Here’s how you can set a portal up for your own distributed company or remote team.

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Every business uses spreadsheets. For years, Microsoft Excel was the obvious choice, but as
software migrates to the cloud, Google Sheets has emerged as a worthy opponent.

Some of the things both programs can be used for:

• Complex calculations
• Storing, sorting, analyzing and filtering structured data
• Generate code, keywords, or any type of list
• Create standard operating procedures

So, which one should your team use?

At Process Street, we took a deep dive into the features of the two hotly contested spreadsheet programs to determine the victor, once and for all. It all comes down to this: Microsoft Excel vs. Google Sheets.

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HR processes are often overlooked in a company. No matter how big or small that company is, HR responsibilities are extremely important. An organization cannot build a good team of working professionals without good HR.

The key purposes of the Human Resources team include; recruiting, training, performance appraisals, motivating employees as well as workplace communication, workplace safety, employee relations, and much more.

Over at Process Street, we have created 6 HR templates to help you keep on top of your HR. These processes can be used daily, but some of them are better used less often than others. They piled with information to help you improve Human Resource processes within your company.

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If you want to invest, but you’re too lazy to do the research and come up with a bullet-proof strategy, then Tim Ferriss has a dire warning for you: “You’re going to get your fucking face ripped off.”

Ferriss rose to prominence when he wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, the bestselling guide to drastically increasing your productivity output and getting more done in less time. Since then, he’s applied many of those same strategies to become a hugely successful angel investor with positions in disruptive startups like Uber, Facebook, Evernote, and several others.

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So you’ve had this awesome game-changing consumer app idea for years, and now you’ve finally gathered the chutzpah to make your mobile app dream a reality. You’ve consulted all your friends and family and even gone as far as running it past a few people in the industry. Everyone agrees—it’s a great idea. But a lot more goes into a successful app than just an idea and the development work.

Many consumer apps of all sizes and budgets fail because they overlook key factors that directly impact the success and sustainability of their app. Here are some companies we, at Process Street, have found that did almost everything right—and failed as a result of one mistake.

Ignoring the impact of even one of these five details will prove harmful—if not fatal—to your consumer app.

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This article comes excerpted from Hiten Shah’s SaaS DNA Project: The Anatomy of a SaaS Marketing Site, a 30,000+ word research study on how users actually browse and experience SaaS marketing sites.

Hiten Shah has built products on the web for over 10 years, including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and now Quick Sprout. He breaks down everything he’s learned about building companies in his weekly email newsletter here.

When it comes to price, customers want to know two things: what they’ll pay, and what they’ll get in return. But too many SaaS companies overcomplicate their pricing pages.

Your pricing page converts traffic into customers. But that only happens if visitors instantly understand what they’ll get from each of your plans, the value it will provide, and how much it’s going to cost them. Otherwise, they’ll never sign up for your service.

In a comprehensive look at SaaS pricing pages, we studied 30 different SaaS websites through 90 different user interactions, totaling over 1,800 minutes of user testing. With help from UserTesting.com, we guided participants to each company’s pricing page and instructed them to read through the plans the company offered.

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With legions of social activists paving the way, we’ve been dealing with the lack of workplace diversity in America for over a decade. And although you’d think that tech startups—with their productivity solutions and their open office spaces—would be at the forefront of the gender equality movement, the numbers tell a different story.

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