Want to add every post on your blog to your Buffer queue, complete with images and automatically generated hashtags?

Recently I realized I hadn’t added my old blog posts to Buffer, and needed to go back and queue them all up. While I was doing it, I decided I could grab the images and use a free API to generate the hashtags for me!

So, I thought I’d record how I did it so I can tell you, too.

In this post, you’ll learn to:

1. Export a CSV of your posts from WordPress
2. Tidy up the CSV to include only URLs and titles of your posts
3. Automatically include hashtags in the tweet text using Aylien
4. Use import.io to scrape images for your tweets
5. Push the tweets and images to your Buffer queue using Zapier

Oh, and by the way: all the tools used here are used in their free versions. 🙂

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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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What is a recurring task?

Forgetting about your company’s recurring tasks is dangerous, and can put your business in an awkward position if it happens too often. That’s because recurring tasks make up the most important core set of activities.

They’re the duties in your team that you know you’re going to have to do regularly:

• Proof a weekly newsletter
• Turn in taxes
• Schedule performance reviews

Traditionally, this would be managed with a calendar, Outlook, or the shaky memory of whoever’s turn it is to remind the group.

Managing recurring tasks in those kinds of ways isn’t ideal and it has got the job done for businesses of the past, but there are smarter ways that help you conserve brain energy, organize your team’s work effectively and make sure you’re on top of deadlines.

After all, your team all trying to remember what they’ve got to do on Monday morning is enough to get them crawling back to bed with a headache.

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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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The way customers see it, your software release cycle looks like this:

• Take ages developing the software
• Beta test
• Add a few features, fix a few bugs
• Done!

This isn’t real life. Beta testing is only one type of test your software needs to pass to avoid being a catastrophic failure.

If your software is struggling to get into a usable state, it’s probably because you’re overlooking testing.

Testing is important for two main reasons:

1. Tests will reveal flaws in your software
2. Tests will reveal flaws in your software development process

Note: Apart from customer-facing and QA tests, tests are code.

So, keep reading to find the types of software testing you need to make mandatory in your development team, as well as an explanation of how to do it.

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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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Every business uses spreadsheets. For years, Microsoft Excel was the obvious choice, but as
software migrates to the cloud, Google Sheets has emerged as a worthy opponent.

Some of the things both programs can be used for:

• Complex calculations
• Storing, sorting, analyzing and filtering structured data
• Generate code, keywords, or any type of list
• Create standard operating procedures

So, which one should your team use?

At Process Street, we took a deep dive into the features of the two hotly contested spreadsheet programs to determine the victor, once and for all. It all comes down to this: Microsoft Excel vs. Google Sheets.

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