A single Bitcoin in 2010 cost less than one cent. Now, one Bitcoin is valued at about $3,500.

You probably already know about Bitcoin, and that massive jump in value is likely why.

But what about Ethereum which has nearly $30 billion worth of coins in circulation? Or emerging coins like Ripple or Litecoin? Joke currencies like Dogecoin or FedoraCoin? The deeper you dig into the blossoming world of cryptocurrencies the weirder it seems to get.

Don’t let the memes fool you, though. Cryptocurrencies are establishing themselves as the real deal. Their use values are appearing and their massive levels of inflation have already made some people a lot of money!

Given the seeming technological complexities of cryptocurrency, many young people are the forming the public body of participants who are bringing these new currencies into the mainstream. As the New York Times put it:

“Grandpa had a pension. This generation has cryptocurrency.”

In this article, the third of our Process Street Future Finance series after Micro-Investing and Equity Crowdfunding, we’ll look at 3 key areas to equip you with the knowledge to jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon before it’s too late:

• What is cryptocurrency and how does it work?
• What currencies are available and how do they differ?
• What are the steps to getting started with cryptocurrencies?

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Are you a wannabe investor, or an aspiring entrepreneur?

There are now more ways than ever to get those valuable connections to make you and others money. The online crowdfunding world is a network of forward thinking companies and people who want to help them succeed.

In the second installment of our Future Finance series, focused on modern investment and millennial-friendly financing, we’re looking at the particular niche of equity crowdfunding.

In 2012, the total global crowdfunding industry estimated fundraising volume was $2.7 billion. In 2015, this had grown to $34 billion. The industry is booming and growing each year, so it’s about time we picked it apart for you.

In this article, we’re going to look at two key areas:

1. How you can become an investor through crowdfunding opportunities including platforms available to help you along your journey.
2. How you can raise investment for your startup through crowdfunding platforms, with expert advice from FlashFunders’s Evan Markiles.

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For a long time, the world of investing was limited to those with access to significant amounts of capital.

If you wanted to invest, you needed large sums of money. If you wanted investment, you needed someone with large sums of money.

The internet is changing this.

$30 million has been put into one micro investing app, $35 million in another, and a whopping $66 million in a further one. Investors see real promise in these micro investing opportunities, and it’s easy to see why.

These apps aim to open up investing to everyone, no matter your budget.

In the first of our Process Street Future Finance series, where we look at modern tech-driven investment options and how the millennial market is shaping the scene, we’re giving the ultimate introduction to micro investing.

We’ll tell you:

• What it is.
• Why it’s hyped.
• Where it’s going.
• How you can get started.

Hold on to your 401(k)s, we’re going in!

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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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We need to find email addresses for the launch in 2 weeks – about 400 should do.

Damn…

Nobody likes to hear that the next week of their time will be spent researching, selecting, and verifying hundreds of email addresses. It’s boring enough to make you complacent, but any mistakes are costly.

In other words, it’s one of the tedious marketing processes which we all love to hate.

After all, 400 emails are no good if they’re all blocked by spam filters.

I knew there had to be a better way than Googling the target audience, so I tested 9 email lookup tools and managed to find one with 92% accuracy.

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Aside from the raw product you’re selling, company culture is everything.

It’s made up of your work environment, ethics, mission, expectations, and goals. You can have a great product, but without a solid culture to back it up, its development can fall apart.

Buffer, for example, has a notable culture of transparency. All employee salaries are published for co-workers and the public to see. They emphasize working out loud and being receptive to one another.

On the other hand, Amazon is noted for its toxic culture that exhausts employees and holds “unreasonably high” expectations.

Which side of the spectrum are you on?

In software companies, it’s important to promote a culture of communication and transparency. What would an issue tracking system look like for a company with poor culture? Pretty desolate.

In this article, I’m going to give examples of how different software companies bolster their QA efforts with a strong culture, and why that’s so important.

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When starting a new business whether it be a tech company or a retail store you will have many challenges that you will need to face and conquer. Starting a new business has many challenges on its own but when you’re looking to scale many of these challenges will be new to you and you will be unsure on how to face them. They can range from Customer Profiling to Investor Pitching and when your startup begins to scale there are challenges such as onboarding processes that you will need to know to ensure your company runs as smooth as possible.

That’s why over here at Process Street we created the checklists within this startup processes post, to ensure you are one-step ahead when faced with these challenges.

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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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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.

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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.

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