Gelling like magellan!
by Ian Paterson(that's a total non-sequitur, but first thing I came up with when I thought of the word "gelling")
The team is really gelling, with very little "top-down" decision making needed. By that I mean, we set the mission, values and responsibilities early on, hired people who are motivated and independent, and the rest seems to be "falling into place".
Some examples:
- Customer success manager has been responding to support tickets, reproducing and documenting bugs, creating tickets for dev to respond to and ensuring customer happiness... with zero direction.
- Developer has been triaging critical customer bugs, stabilizing the backend and enabling the growth team to have their own dev environment for testing...
Amazing when a plan comes together!
Our Corporate Tech Stack
Adopting a set of new internal tools has been pretty seamless. The two foundational apps are Notion and Slack, with everyone else building on top.
Notion:
"Company-wide" intranet. While each department may have their own system of record (Github for Dev, HelpScout for Support, etc), Notion crosses all departments and houses the corporate-level information.
Slack: Internal communications & notifications "command center". Notifications from all our other applications are funneled into slack, by department, to keep a 'pulse' on the business.
The rest includes:
- G Suite: Email, docs, drive.
- HelpScout: Support queue, knowledge base, and we'll likely add LiveChat functionality down the road
- Github: Code repository and backlog tracking (Github issues)
Recurly/Stripe. Currently using both Recurly for subscription management + Stripe for billing. Need to consolidate into Stripe to save $200/mo on Recurly. - Profitwell: Subscription reporting. This is somewhat duplicative of Recurly for now, but better integrates with Databox.
- Databox: Internal dashboarding and metrics tracking. Databox has been a dream to use (and BI has come a long way since the last time I looked at this).
- Zapier: Corporate Duct-tape.
Separate Accounts & Planning For the Exit
We hold regular meetups with other SaaS business buyers (what's been dubbed "micro pe entrepreneurs") and the consensus from the group seemed to be keeping accounts completely separate across apps/web properties.
That means for each business/product/project:
- separate email accounts,
- separate hosting accounts,
- etc.
The reason given is that in the event of a sale down the road, some accounts are hard/impossible to transfer if they are mingled together.
For example, Stripe has a feature of only being able to change ownership once in an accounts life.
One entrepreneur relayed a story of buying a paid newsletter business which lost 75% of their customers when they moved to a new billing provider.
😬
