At Process Street, startup blogs are required reading for our team because founders and operators need better inputs for the systems they build.
Use this list to keep up with venture capital, marketing, sales, UX and design, customer success, and support. When an idea is worth acting on, turn it into a documented workflow with Process Street’s workflow automation software: a single Compliance Operations Platform for Docs, Ops, and built-in AI.
Why can’t you get a job at a startup when people with less experience seem to get hired? Usually it is not one missing credential. Startups reject candidates when they see risk: culture mismatch, narrow ownership, slow ramp time, unrealistic expectations, or signs that the person did not read the role closely.
The thing to remember about startups is that every hire changes the company. In a small team, one salesperson, engineer, marketer, or operator can reshape the workload, the culture, and the speed of execution. Vinay Patankar, Process Street CEO and former executive recruiter, has seen that hiring decision from both sides.
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The world is full of ideas, especially in the business world, where rapidly growing competition has made innovation mandatory. Your idea can be a real game-changer, but that does not mean anything if you do not know how to set it in motion in the right way. If you own a startup, you probably cannot wait to see it launch, and that is completely natural.
Startup law is less about paperwork for its own sake and more about precision. Think of those space movies with close-ups of faces behind monitors drenched in sweat: if you are off by even a small legal degree at launch, the deviation is multiplied as you hire, raise money, sign customers, and build intellectual property. The legal mistakes startups make can turn big dreams into nightmares, but the law can also be a useful tool on the road to success when you learn to recognize its traps and turn them into advantages.
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Starting and running a business is hard enough without repeating the same business mistakes other founders and small business owners have already paid for.
The common thread is not bad luck. Most business mistakes come from unclear ownership, weak cash discipline, poor customer validation, undocumented work, or decisions made without the right expertise.
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Demshi Investment Holdings is a Namibian telecommunications infrastructure company that specializes in open-access fiber network operations. They build and maintain fiber infrastructure that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can lease to connect customers to the cloud, operating across multiple towns throughout Namibia.
Project management is the key to sticking to your budget and deadline, whilst keeping the most important tasks at the forefront of your company.
Without it, you leave the future of your business at the mercy of your teams and employees (which, in case you weren’t aware, is not a good business model).
For such an important process, the project management steps are a little muddy, with sources citing differing numbers of steps, timelines, etc.
Then again, it’s a massive topic with a huge margin for error; how the hell do you convey these steps when the project could be anything from “get winter clothes in stock” to “grow to $220,000 monthly recurring revenue”?
Well, we here at Process Street hate making things complicated, so we’ve simplified the project management steps of any and every undertaking to five easy stages:
If you’re looking to structure your next big push, or you just want to set and track realistic deadlines, then this is the process for you. Then again, feel free to skip ahead to any particular step you’re after.
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The early days of a startup are crazy.
You have a small group of brilliant and adventurous people taking on tasks they’ve probably never done. Tight budgets leave you doing things like building desks out of doors because they’re cheaper. Your whole focus is solely directed at the goal of getting your product out there in front of customers, who probably don’t even realize how much they need your product yet.
Fast forward a couple of years and those brilliant and adventurous people now have job titles and (more or less) set job descriptions. Your engineers are spending most of their time finessing the UI and developing new features rather than building fundamental structures and foundations. You have a solid customer base that’s avid about your product – and just keeps growing.
Except – as brilliant as they are – that small group of people no longer has enough hands to do everything that needs to be done.
It’s time to scale your startup – but you need to do it fast, accurately, and strategically. So where do you start?
To find out, I sat down with Process Street‘s very own head of talent, Rosy Bellorini, to get an inside view on how to get the talent you need to scale your startup.
Let’s dig in!
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Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth…
– Mike Tyson
Which, let’s face it, happens to most start-ups and entrepreneurs. Around 75% in fact.
You have the best idea. You spend days, weeks, and months perfecting a 40-page business plan filled with five-year forecasts, 18-month roadmaps, and in-depth marketing strategies. You confidently pitch it to stakeholders and investors.
And then?
Then you get punched in the mouth.
Potential investors go quiet or “haven’t had time to read it” and you’re left with an expensive, wasted deliverable and a chunk of time that you’ll never get back. Worse still, your product isn’t any nearer launching and you haven’t secured any buy-in or investment.
What. A. Waste. Of. Time.
Traditional business plans are of little use to start-ups, and of no real interest to investors.
But what’s the alternative?
A one-page business plan inspired by Eric Ries’s Lean Start-Up methodology and specifically designed for emerging entrepreneurs: The Lean Canvas.
The Lean Canvas is a living framework that allows you to quickly capture your idea or concept, thoroughly validate it, and then continuously share, improve, and most importantly move on it.
Ok, I know what you’re thinking:
I have the answers to all these questions and more in this Process Street post.
Ready to dodge some punches?
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If you’re moving fast and breaking things, at what point in time do you realize things are broken?
When there is public uproar against your product? Such as the Amazon case in 2019 involving job listings for the role of “union buster” (someone who reports on fellow employees seeking fair labor practices).
Or, when regulators come down on you like a ton of bricks? As was (and continues to be) experienced by Airbnb whose platform has been home to grotesque racial discrimination.
Allow me to introduce the topic of this blog post: The minimum virtuous product (MVP).
It seems the concept behind the traditional minimal viable product (MVP) which prioritizes quick launches and basic feature sets has been replaced by something a little more virtuous. The new MVP, minimum virtuous product, encourages companies to focus on diversity and transparency by building morally sound design principles, from the start.
This post will take a look at what this change in acronym has to do with the way companies grow and scale; along with an eight-question framework that will help start-ups assess the social impact of their products; and finally, it will cover what moving with virtue could mean for future startups.
To skip to a specific section of the post click on the appropriate link below:
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From sprints to cycles, and from product backlogs to …well…no backlog at all. These are just a couple of examples of the differences between Shape Up and agile approaches such as Scrum.
But, what exactly is Shape Up? How does it, when put into practice, differ from Scrum?
Our development team here at Process Street recently made the move from Scrum to Shape Up and I asked them how the two compare. This post outlines the key takeaways from the team and takes a closer look at what Shape Up is as a whole.
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