As anyone who’s done it will tell you, being one of the first employees at a tiny company is a huge responsibility.
As you settle in to your routine tasks, you find you get more and more to do with just as many hours in the day.
It’s not the workload that has to change, because as the company grows you’ll naturally take more on. Instead, you need to tighten up your workflow to make sure you get as much shit done as possible without burning out.
Screencasts are true powerhouses in team communication; they allow us here at Process Street to convey everything in a concise manner with both visual and audial cues, whilst giving the viewer a resource that they can run through as many times as they want.
Unfortunately, many teams put off using screencasts because you have to:
Whilst conversations are more likely to be forgotten or lost, their ease makes them the go-to method for communication (or, at best, a Skype call). This is a huge mistake.
Using just a couple of free screencasting apps you can record your video, spend three seconds saving it and then have it automatically sent to to the right person. Rather than waiting for your time zones to match up or the other person to reply, you can record, save, then get on with the rest of your day.
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Starting and running a business is hard enough without making the same business mistakes as everyone else.
After all, managing a team and keeping the business on track is hard enough without having to worry about running yourself into the ground through hiring too quickly, targeting a bad niche, or just plain overspending until the bank cracks.
That’s why we here at Process Street have scoured the advice of experts such as Paul Graham, Joel Gascoigne, and Sam Altman to highlight the business mistakes you should avoid, and how to do that without tearing your hair out.
Let’s get stuck in!
The following is a guest post by Darren Chait, Co-Founder at Hugo. Hugo is the meeting note platform that keeps your team connected with what your customers are thinking and saying. It enables fast-moving teams to make meeting insights shareable and actionable in their existing tools.
As a startup guy, my world is full of buzzwords. We’re disrupting a space, have pivoted, got our minimum valuable product (MVP) out to our total addressable market (TAM) and even had a ‘.ai’ domain name. Undoubtedly, one of my ‘favorites’ is ‘team alignment’.
While team alignment is not a new concept and certainly not unique to fast-growing technology businesses, I’m fascinated with my peers’ obsession with this utopian concept. It’s understandable. Why wouldn’t you want your team moving forward in unison with precise coordination and execution? Why wouldn’t you listen when experts warn that misalignment kills startups?
In this guest post, I’ll share our story and perspective on team alignment and some easy-to-implement solutions to achieve this ideal state with your team.
The app market is booming and revenue is soaring.
According to TechCrunch, citing a report from AppAnnie:
Global app downloads topped 175 billion and consumer spending exceeded $86 billion in 2017, thanks to growth in emerging markets including China, India, Brazil and Russia…
One of the benefits of targeting this huge and growing market is that the Appstore and PlayStore are largely closed ecosystems. You can promote your apps directly to potential users in the one marketplace they are using to access apps.
The AppAnnie report also notes that app usage is up, with the average user spending 3 hours a day within apps on their phone. This means your app, once downloaded, is competing with the other apps on a user’s phone rather than countless other websites across the web.
So how do we get these downloads?
According to another report co-authored by AppAnnie and Adjust, titled The Complete Guide to Mobile App Marketing: App Store Optimisation, two thirds of all app downloads are organic. This means the app has been found in the store as a result of a user’s search, rather than being directed there by adverts on Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.
To harness these downloads and drive consistent traffic to your app, you need to have a strategy for app store optimization: ASO.
In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:
Documented processes don’t just save you time, money, and give a consistent method for your team to follow. They make everything you do more reliable and efficient, even increasing project success rate by 70%.
Unfortunately, getting started is the hardest part. Whether you don’t feel like you have time to set up your management system or just don’t know what to use for your needs, it’s difficult to get over the initial learning curve.
That’s why I’m going to outline the 9 organizational tools you can use to get started right now.
From their pros and cons and best use guidelines to general tips on what to do with your organizational tools, this post will cover:
It’s time to learn what organizational tools you need to manage your processes, and how to use them.
It’s impossible to run a successful business without taking the time to track your core business metrics.
If you don’t, then good luck knowing:
Having said that, where do you start? There are so many metrics you could be tracking that it’s easy to get stuck tracking and recording everything rather than analyzing and acting on your data.
That’s why I’ve collected 53 core business metrics right here to get you started. Stop wasting time wondering what to track or flicking between 20 different posts going over five stats each – every metric here comes with a brief description and formula or method for easily tracking it.
The following is a guest post from Pascal van Opzeeland. Pascal is CMO of Userlike, software for website and messaging support. He and his team share tips about customer service and communication on the Userlike Blog.
In school, everyone looks forward to the day they can stop learning and start doing. But once inside hamster wheel of working life, many long back to the times in which they had the time to invest in their personal development.
At Userlike, we see this lack of time for personal learning as a serious challenge. The world is developing faster than ever, and the pace is only accelerating. To stay competitive, we need employees to keep up; to keep learning and stay up-to-date with their craft. Other benefits from having a culture that stimulates continuous learning include:
The best employees have an innate desire to grow, but it’s hard to free up time when your daily tasks and duties mess up your schedule. Learning is one of those high importance – low urgency tasks that easily gets pushed aside.
There’s a lot of advice on the internet. Some of it is good, some of it is terrible, and some sits in the gray area between.
Within the fields of tech and startups, a lot of what people do day to day is influenced by what they’ve learned online; I doubt many people reading this article learned in school how to effectively market a product over Instagram!
Sorting the good from the bad is a challenge we all face, and one we have to become better at as individuals and as a society.
Improving our ability to analyze information doesn’t just mean identifying fake news, though we will look briefly at it. It also means being able to take a second look at informative journalism and the reporting of research; the kind of information which you might use to inform big business decisions. We’ll look at:
At the end I’ll follow up with the 10 step process you can use to improve your analysis. This process is pulled from the recommendations of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, and Michael Shermer, and repurposed for your professional needs.
But first, let me tell you a little story…
On August 25th, we launched a library of 1000+ real sales and emails from the top 280 SaaS companies.
The library was hosted on a microsite, Inside SaaS Sales, which allows users to browse the full sales cadences, organized in the order the message or voicemail was sent.
The launch landed us almost 800 votes on Product Hunt, 10,000+ site visits, a mention in Hiten Shah‘s SaaS Weekly, and publicity from the SaaS and VC community.
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