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.
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.
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.
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.
The day is here and the time is now; we’re proud to announce the release of our Ultimate Guide To Business Process Automation with Zapier!
We’ve created the perfect resource to get you saving time and money by automating your business’ processes.
From basic tasks such as saving Gmail attachments into Dropbox to shipping your Salesforce leads into Mailchimp, the Ultimate Guide will guide you through setting up the perfect Zaps to automatically handle the tasks that clog up your schedule.
Plus, with Zapier’s 500+ integrated apps, chances are that your favorite programs are just waiting to be linked!
Better yet, it’s completely free!
Perhaps you’re not familiar with just how powerful this tool can be? Well then, allow us to demonstrate the power of this guide right here, right now by giving you the lowdown on some of its juiciest topics!
Continue Reading
In 2013, Zenefits co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad made a bold statement at TechCrunch Disrupt: “If you’re an insurance broker, we’re going to drink your milkshake.”
For a while, it seemed he would make good on this promise. Zenefits, the YC-backed free 2-in-1 HR platform and insurance broker, is championed as one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history. Last May, the company raised $500 million in yet another funding round, bringing its total valuation up to an eye-boggling $4 billion.
On November 18, 2014, Microsoft Azure went dark. Thousands of the cloud computing service’s customers experienced downtime on their sites for over 9 hours. When they flooded Microsoft customer support to ask what the hell had gone wrong, customers learned that it wasn’t some glitch, natural disaster, or devious hacking scheme.
It was pure human error.
Microsoft deployed an update without running through the standard operating guidelines specifically laid out for this scenario. Instead of rigorously checking that the update was good to go, engineers shipped it on the assumption it was bug-free. This wasn’t just this one-time incident—engineers at Azure regularly violated standard operating procedure because 99.9% of the time, it was a total waste of their resources.
And it’s not just Azure that does this—habitual violation of process leads to a ton of mistakes in all kinds of IT arenas.
When I was 16, I landed my first “real” job which so happened to be in IT. I had just passed my CCNA with the help of my dad (apparently the youngest person in Australia at the time) and was hungry to get my hands on some real technology.
But once I started, I found there was rigid process everywhere, and configuring a live Windows 2000 server was a totally different experience to tinkering with my fathers machines at home, with serious consequences for not following the process.
Continue Reading
When Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise wants something done, he points his finger and orders someone to “make it so.” This catchphrase is what the retail giant Amazon almost called itself: “MakeItSo.com.”
Doesn’t have the same ring to it, right?
While there’s no finger-pointing involved, this is basically how home delivery services work these days. We browse through a catalog of options, we pick one, we press a button, and poof—it becomes a reality. Whether it’s a box of paper towels, a new book, or a hoverboard, you can get it delivered pretty quickly.
And though this technology seems really like something straight out of Star Trek, the processes underlying it actually go back hundreds of years, for as long as humans have been trying to make home delivery services work.
But the systems and processes that Amazon has become synonymous with really rely on an appetite created by a name that was once a retail giant that cast a shadow as large as Amazon’s: Sears, Roebuck & Co. In fact, Amazon’s success can largely be credited to their ability to perfect processes that Sears innovated and honed throughout the 20th century.
And where Sears failed, Amazon is still succeeding…
…for now.
The following is a guest post by Brent Schiffman, the marketing manager for ProjectManager.com.
Are you a developer, SCRUM Master, QA Engineer, Project Manager, or a manager of any sort?
You might have the problem I had before I found a solution to:
If you can’t manage your projects, to-do lists or general planning and productivity with any single app, I’m about to give you some great news.
And that great news is… the existence of Zapier.
Customer Success isn’t something you do once or someone you hire to make magic happen. Unfortunately for those who are shy of putting in the effort, it’s a process.
A customer success process should include many of the functions we’ve talked about so far in this guide, such as customer support and NPS surveys, but also routine ‘check-ups’ on the health of your customer base.
There is, however, some good news about this. Since customer success is a process, it means a few things:
What does a customer success process look like, exactly?
In this final sprint of our guide, I’ll be telling you exactly that.
