A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of GDPR.

It seems to be the one thing everyone in the data security industry is talking about, Equifax aside…

Articles are being written, consultancy firms are popping up, and businesses are quietly panicking.

Yet, like so many grand legislative changes, many people are unsure what GDPR is, how it could affect their business, or whether they should even be worried about it at all.

In this article, we’ll be looking to clear up some of those misconceptions while presenting actionable steps for how companies can go about adjusting to the coming changes. We’ve scoured the available resources to find the answers to our concerns about GDPR and now we’re sharing it with you.

(Still employ a consultant though. As you’ll see, there’s too much at stake not to!)

We’ll explore not just the impact on European companies but also companies outside the European market who process or control data which could come under the scrutiny of these EU measures.  SaaS companies like Process Street will find themselves needing to adapt their services for their large European clients, and if you work within the SaaS field you might have to do so too.

Before we go further, let me give you a Too Long; Didn’t Read:

The best short summary of the ethos of GDPR I’ve read comes from Wired:

For companies that have more than 250 employees, there’s a need to have documentation of why people’s information is being collected and processed, descriptions of the information that’s held, how long it’s being kept for and descriptions of technical security measures in place

The GDPR broadly sets out:

• You need to have a system in place to manage data and security.
• You need to have that system fully documented.
• You need to operate with the parameters of the GDPR, e.g.
  • Consent boxes cannot be auto-filled as “yes”.
  • Companies must respond to access requests from users within 1 month.
  • Requests for personal information must be processed free of charge.

At the end of this article, you’ll find a free Process Street checklist which uses ICO recommendations and Article 29 Working Party advice to guide you through assessing your company’s GDPR readiness!

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Websites are delicate, messy, and hard to manage effectively. Setup might be easy, but a beginner learning to maintain a website will hit a damaging snag sooner or later.

The main problem is that the tech behind any website is complex for beginners. The files that run your site are written in multiple different languages, depend on each other’s fixed locations, and are controlled by config files. In short, there’s a lot to grasp when you’re starting up a website.

To avoid making mistakes you need a basic knowledge of SQL, cPanel, and phpmyadmin, as well as a general idea of why and how websites work. Like I learned the hard way, tiny tweaks or careless uploads can take the entire site offline for days at a time, which is especially damaging when you have a recurring audience of any kind.

In this post, I’m going to go through the methods you’ll need when maintaining a website, and give you processes you can follow for each task.

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Dictation software isn’t just something that can save you time by typing out your speech and performing commands. Talking instead of typing can and will help you prevent lasting damage to your hands.

You might think that sounds silly, and so did I.

I’m 23 – way too young to be worried about my joints or work-related injuries (my work isn’t exactly manual labor).

Then my hands seized up. Repetitive strain injury.

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When you have a great idea for a startup or a service the first thing you desire to do is create it, talk about it, and see what people think.

In creating a minimum viable product, entrepreneurs choose between experiments that can validate or invalidate their assumptions about a business model. – N. Taylor Thompson

These experiments could be anything from interviews with potential customers, trying to build a client base on the promise of a future product, or building a basic version of your idea and testing it in the market.

That last one is what we’re going to focus on. How can you create software to make a product a reality?

For some people, this means sitting down and writing code. Line after line slowly pieces together the idea and shapes details until a version which works exists.

This is how we make software. It’s how we’ve always made software.

However, you wouldn’t think you needed years of coding experience to create a blog. You could just start a Medium account or a Tumblr, or whichever platform is trendy right now.

Because you’re not the only person who wanted to build a blog, other people with greater technical skill developed tools to help you build blogs without needing to code.

This makes it easier and faster for everyone. But it’s not just blogs which you can build without coding.

In this article, we’ll look at a number of different tools you can use to build a whole range of products by pointing and clicking and dragging and dropping.

If you want to make your product a reality, rapidly building a first working iteration is a very useful option to get started!

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The Art of SaaS shows that even industry veterans are sick of unnecessary jargon and bloated descriptions.

Rather than spending thousands of words (or multiple books) trying to explain every variation of the SaaS model, it draws from the experiences of Dr. Ahmed Bouzid and Dave Rennyson in order to cover all of the basics of a quality SaaS business in less than 60 pages.

Being so short, an Art of SaaS review might seem redundant at first. Why not just read the book in about an hour and learn what the authors believe to be:

• What SaaS is
• The bargain between vendor and user
• The importance of uptime (and how to maintain it)
• The three priorities all teams should share
• The three practices which achieve those priorities
• The structure of every team, and how they should be managed

Well, in this post I’m going to cover both the core takeaways of The Art of SaaS and the context surrounding the book itself by drawing from other figures in the field.

I’ll show you why this odd little volume is worth reading and what pitfalls to avoid when taking it at face value.

Let’s get started.

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The Guardian is a 195 year old British newspaper which expects to burn through £90m in 2017 after incurring damage of £200m the year before.

The Economist once described The Guardian as:

“[T]he most stylish paper in the hyper-competitive British quality pack, the wittiest and best-designed, the strongest for features, the one most likely to reflect modern life.”

At it’s peak it sold half a million papers per day. In June 2016, at peak Brexit-vote tension, The Guardian online claimed to have over 165m unique monthly browsers.

Yet, despite this history, reputation, and traffic, there are serious warnings that the money will run dry in as little as six or seven years.

If they can’t make it work, how can anyone? What future is there for journalism and traditional media?

In this article, we’ll explore a number of business models in use today on both a large and small scale, and begin to analyze their strengths and weaknesses.

We’ll break that down into 10 key recommendations for anyone looking to hop onboard the media startup bandwagon.

Then, for a bit of fun, we’ll delve into what could lie ahead for the future of print media.

Extra, extra! Read all about it!

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Look up the history of any modern technology, and you’re taken on a quick-fire tour of antiques, innovations, failures, successes, bubbles, booms, and busts.

Unlike the history of the Roman Empire or Greek poetry, software history is almost immeasurably short.

It’s rich and it’s exciting, but it’s also full of strange developments. Developments that never really went anywhere, but serve as warnings to organizations of the kinds of flops to avoid.

New terminology and seemingly revolutionary inventions have cropped up every single year since the 1960s, but by now most of what formed the foundations for today’s software market is obsolete.

In today’s world, the majority of businesses and consumers use software-as-a-service (SaaS). If you define SaaS an application that can be accessed through a web browser and is managed and hosted by a third-party, then Facebook, Snapchat, Google — and many things that most people would just call ‘websites’ — are SaaS products.

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Every SaaS company pours mountains of resources into building a sales team, creating efficient sales processes, and optimizing sales emails.

That’s because the most direct way to impact your revenues is by making sure your sales processes are as tight as possible.

But, how can you be sure you use the most effective methods to follow up with leads and close more deals?

Maybe we can help.

In partnership with PersistIQ, we analyzed the complete sales cadences of 281 SaaS companies, from intro to break-up. That included signing up for a whole heap of free trials, and then collecting over 1,000 emails and voicemail transcriptions.

If you want to get proven insights from some of the world’s best SaaS sales teams, build your ideal sales sequence and learn to write emails that close deals, then check out Inside SaaS Sales.

Inside SaaS Sales is a microsite we launched that collects and organizes every single piece of sales communication we received. It’s all there for you to browse through, swipe, and analyze.

With such a lot of data, it’d be silly not to study it to find out the key trends and share that knowledge with you. So, keep reading for our full analysis of the data!

Here are our key findings:

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From putting together flat-packed furniture to avoiding nuclear war, we’ve talked at length on why processes are important.

They’re the lifeblood of any consistent business, allowing it to repeat its successes, avoid mistakes, increase efficiency, and create effective to do lists. Without them you have no hope of even knowing what you’re doing right or wrong – you’ve more chance of putting together IKEA furniture with no instructions than of improving your situation and growing your business.

However, without standardizing processes you make, anything you document will do more harm than good.

Different layouts will make it hard to distinguish what the correct version of the process is, varying language across your teams will make working together a nightmare, while multiple naming and storage methods make it impossible to search for the process you need.

So, today I’ll show you how to standardize your processes by creating a documentation style guide which suits your needs. This guide can then be followed whenever anyone in your business needs to document a workflow.

It’s time to unify your company and cement your success.

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Processes are our deal. It’s what we do.

Unsurprisingly, it’s what our users do too. They use Process Street to manage their internal processes and keep their teams working at maximum efficiency.

In our constant attempt to understand our users’ needs, we asked the community what their biggest pain points were. We wanted to see what obstacles hampered the process management of companies and how we could help them combat that.

Our research across 83 respondents gave us a great deal of insight but one key takeaway stood out:

42% of respondents said they had no time to create processes.

Even worse, a further 54% of those (23% of the total responses) say they are currently taking no steps to remedy this situation!

This post will attempt to tackle this problem and present actionable ways you can ramp up your process production and save yourself time.

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