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.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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

Continue Reading

The copy on your SaaS startup’s landing page is one of the major factors that determines whether your product lives, or dies a horrible death.

Unbounce cites headlines as the single most important element of a landing page, and that’s for good reason.

Several decades back, advertising legend David Ogilvy said:

“When you have written your headline, you have already spent 80 cents of your dollar”

That means that for every 1,000 people who land on your page, 800 leave after reading only the headline. But that’s just an average. It’s possible to boost those numbers with great copy, and a small tweak at the top of the funnel, as we know, can really move the needle at the bottom of the funnel.

For this article, I analyzed 87 SaaS startup landing pages. This was taken from the top 100 in AngelList’s Trending section at the time, disregarding companies that had shut down.

I found hidden trends and best practices in two supposedly simple elements of the pages: the headline and the subheadline.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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.

What’s his secret? Continue Reading