Working at a startup, you can often feel like you’re lost in space — thrown into the unknown, feeling lost and confused.
It’s a strange world, and something you have to quickly adjust to if you’re going to survive. The hours are longer, the workflow is intense and the expectations are like nothing you’ll have known before.
Recently, we launched our first ebook, “The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation with Zapier”.
After searching around for tips on launching and promoting an ebook, I came up a bit short, stumbling mostly across 90s-style sales pages for trashy looking products.
So, we decided we’d have better luck coming up with our own strategy. And, of course, documenting the process so others can learn how we got the results we did.
In this post I’m going to walk you through the steps we took to launch and promote our first ebook (…a great lead magnet, by the way).
In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Hack the Entrepreneur’s Jon Nastor about starting a podcast and getting 1,400,000 downloads.
Podcaster Jon Nastor has been host of Hack the Entrepreneur (HTE) since 2015, and between then and now his podcast has quickly become a runaway success.
From a few tentative early episodes to 1.4 million downloads, HTE has exploded. How did Jon do it?
If images are the snacks of the internet, and articles are the main course, then infographics are somewhere in between. A light brunch, if you will. Packed with sustenance, but digestible enough to get down in a short period of time.
I’m not going to waste time talking about how important infographics are because that’s been done to death over the period of several years. Instead, I’m going to go through some common mistakes, basic design principles and processes that teach you how to make infographics that don’t look terrible.
This post was written by Mauricio Prinzlau. Mauricio is the CEO of Cloudwards.net, a data and user feedback driven comparison engine for cloud apps and services. He enjoys writing and producing educational videos around the cloud to help people find the best cloud service for their needs.
From an early part of my life, I always had an entrepreneurial drive and was focused on starting up on my own somewhere down the line in my career.
A few years on, I started working as an online community manager for a poker school. The poker school I was working with made money through the affiliate model whereby we earned a commission whenever players were referred to online poker rooms.
My colleagues and I were primarily involved with creating high-quality content and social media posts in order to attract leads and interest to the poker school’s website. It was during that time that I learnt the importance of creating high-quality content (video tutorials, guides, walk-throughs etc.) which would capture user interest and also be good from a search engine point of view.
When starting a new business whether it be a tech company or a retail store you will have many challenges that you will need to face and conquer. Starting a new business has many challenges on its own but when you’re looking to scale many of these challenges will be new to you and you will be unsure on how to face them. They can range from Customer Profiling to Investor Pitching and when your startup begins to scale there are challenges such as onboarding processes that you will need to know to ensure your company runs as smooth as possible.
That’s why over here at Process Street we created the checklists within this startup processes post, to ensure you are one-step ahead when faced with these challenges.
In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Zapier’s Alison Groves about growing a tech startup to 1,000,000 users.
Want to grow your software company to 1,000,000 users? In this episode the Business Systems Explored podcast, we speak to Alison Groves, the Partner Marketing Manager at Zapier, and find out exactly how she did it.
Zapier is an intuitive automation platform that connects your SaaS apps together. In the beginning, Zapier was doing cold outreach to software giants like Salesforce, asking them if they could build integrations for their platform. Now, there are over 500 Zapier partners — Process Street included — and that’s because of the partner marketing work Alison has been a part of.
For a business that survives on the cooperation of other businesses, Zapier has quickly shot up the ranks and become the go-to platform for connecting apps that don’t have native integrations.
How did they forge such great relations with so many big companies? Listen to the episode to get the growth strategy they used.
When he started investing, Chris Sacca told himself, “F*ck it… I’m just not going to play this traditionally anymore.”
And as any Shark Tank fans out there know, Sacca is anything but traditional. From his cowboy shirt uniform to his self-described “colorful language,” the billionaire Lowercase Capital founder is constantly finding ways to shake up traditional conventions of a venture capitalist. Except one.
Quirks aside, Sacca follows one of the oldest VC rules in the book: always have a process. Every investor has a set of questions they ask themselves and rules they follow when weighing an investment decision. For Peter Thiel, it’s the ability to get a monopoly. For Social Capital, it’s the ability to transform society. Chris Sacca’s rules are a bit more varied — but just as stringent.
Following these rules has allowed Sacca to place hugely successful bets on early stage companies, on and off reality television. His impressive portfolio includes the likes of Uber, Slack, Stripe, and Twitter, and it’s all due to this process.
Thinking of starting a side project?
A month back, I realized I was getting to the point where I wasn’t bothering to take lunch breaks. I read as a big part of my job, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything heavier than reading articles. Frankly, I was bored during my lunch breaks and I got annoyed I wasn’t doing anything productive.
The solution?
After brainstorming several side project ideas, I started making a personal website.
This was the perfect amount of work because I had (very) basic HTML skills and needed to learn only CSS and how to deploy the code.
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.
