Imagine if you had to send marketing emails manually, or keep your records in a tattered binder on your desk.

Every company, even startups, needs to make a minimum investment in SaaS tools for work like email marketing, project management, and tracking sales.

But the catch is that some of these startup tools can cost huge amounts of money, and when you’re a young startup you don’t want to be forking out in excess of $2,000/user/month for just one piece of software.

The point of this post is to explain the minimum viable SaaS stack your startup should invest in, based on what we’ve found out at Process Street in our many (many, many, many) tool-testing escapades. I’ll even do the math for you, and collate the estimated annual cost at the end.

Ready to start building up your toolbox with the best SaaS out there?

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Today is the first post in a new series – a guide to help consultants and their clients work with Process Street to boost efficiency and be more productive.

Whether you’re documenting your clients’ business processes, updating their toolkit, or generally improving company tools and practices, Process Street is the easiest way to document and manage both your personal and clients’ workflows.

Over the next seven weeks we’ll go through:

• An introduction to Process Street for consultants – why you should care, and the core features
• Advanced features such as process automation and custom share links
• Common use cases and how best to use Process Street in different forms of consulting
• The benefits of Process Street as part of your (and your clients’) toolkit
• How to easily set up and hand off processes to your clients
• How our partner program works
• Extra resources to become a true master of efficiency

I’ll even be writing this guide to let you give it to your clients to teach them how to use Process Street. After all, efficiency is the name of the game.

So, join me today as we kick off this mega guide for consultants by explaining what Process Street is, what the core features are, and why the hell you should care about it.
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Learning how to live stream may be intimidating, but it’s insanity to ignore the marketing opportunities and advantages it creates for your brand and company.

Want to engage your audience beyond your written content? 80% of brand audiences prefer watching a live video to reading a blog post.

Reaching out through social media? Live videos get more than double (+135%) the organic reach of photo posts.

In fact, producing live videos:

• Lets you reach a wider audience
• Encourages active engagement with your brand
• Builds stronger relationships with your viewers
• Provides a wealth of content to repurpose
• Makes you stand out from the crowd

To help you take advantage of live streaming, I’ll break down the benefits of doing it, the platforms and equipment you can use, and the types of streams you can host. If you want to know why, what, and how to live stream to give your marketing efforts a boost, keep reading.
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At Process Street, a lot of startup blogs are required reading for our team.

It makes sense, because your startup will be informed and improved by what it reads, and every team needs to stay on top of what’s being spoken about.

In this post, I’ve compiled the 55 best blogs for startups (plus one recommended article from each) in these categories:

• Venture capitalist blogs
• Marketing blogs
• Sales blogs
• UX & design blogs
• Customer success & support blogs

… All focused specifically on advice for startups.

Here they are:

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Your current team can’t handle any extra work. You’ve exhausted your process automation opportunities. You’ve got no choice but to bring in a fresh face.

You could hire a specialist, but they can be expensive and limited in the work you can hand off. You need to hire a virtual assistant.

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“How did they make this?”

I find myself asking this while playing games, and after doing some digging ingenious stories of building communities and managing resources came to light.

In other words, startups (and SaaS companies as a whole) are closer to agile game development than you would think. The core business processes may differ, but valuable lessons can be applied in terms of managing resources and organizing your priorities.

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Introducing new policies to ensure a safe and productive workplace makes sense on all sides.

Unfortunately, if your employees don’t know about your policies, it won’t do a damn thing to solve your company’s problems. In other words, if your employee handbook doesn’t get read, you’re fresh out of luck.

There are two ways to all but guarantee your employees will never read your employee handbook.

• Use a cut-and-paste employee handbook template
• Never write one in the first place

Think of the copy-and-paste template as the cookie cutter cold emails we all love to hate – there’s no feeling of a person behind it, so we tune out, ignore it, and get on with our day.

Unlike cold emails, however, if your employees ignore your handbook they’re inevitably going to fall victim to a rule they didn’t know about.

Sure, you’re still covered for the aftermath (as long as it was in the handbook to begin with), but if you want to prevent these costly blunders from happening your employee handbook needs to be interesting and engaging.

After all, wouldn’t you rather read a document that talks to you as a person, rather than another cog in some merciless corporate machine?

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The following is a guest submission from Teresa Millard, a passionate marketing strategist at Job Application Review. She loves crunching numbers and reading about the latest digital trends. If you want to get in touch with her, you can reach her on Twitter: @thea_millard.

Did you know: just by increasing your customer retention by 5% can improve your profits by 25% to 95%? There’s high reward for little effort. The challenge becomes finding ways to get that 5% increase…

The last couple of years have seen a boom in SaaS companies, with numerous startups competing with big brands. It’s a blooming industry that will continue to evolve and increase in popularity in the coming years for one simple reason: accessibility and reliability. With only a few clicks, clients can have access to incredible tools that mostly take care of themselves. SaaS software enhances business productivity and has an exquisite ease-of-use that makes lives easier for employees.

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The following is a guest post from Robin Singh. Robin is a Technical Support Executive with a combined experience of 6 years. He currently works with Live2Support – a live customer and sales chat software by ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.

Creating a great customer experience has never been more important, especially if you’re a SaaS company.

Your customers deserve a great experience and this is why it is important to support them with every tool in your arsenal. SaaS tools aren’t always perfectly self explanatory, and to ease the amount of support tickets and provide a self-serve option, you should be providing a knowledge base.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is used by companies to reduce support tickets and bring down customer support costs.

At the basic level, it’s the FAQ in your website that helps customers find instant answers, on their own without calling your support or raising a ticket.

Using knowledge base software, companies can create not just FAQs, but all kinds of help content from user guides, software manuals, online wikis and more.

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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.

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