As our companies grow, we can’t do everything any more. As our needs become more complex, we end up with data sprawled across a lot of different places and a few steps early in the life of a company saves us a lot of time later down the road. This article looks at how vendors are brought on in large organizations. To see the checklist, check out: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/bringing-on-new-vendors

Successful customers often lead to much larger footprints (or deal sizes) in year two of the life a customer. One of the best ways to grow an account is to grow our footprint within organizations we’ve already closed deals with. This might mean something as simple as a freemium customer we’d like to nurture into a paying customer. Or it might mean a small customer who we think could grow into a really large customer. To read more, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/teaching-customers-to-promote-us-in-their-organizations

A press release is a document that informs the press about an event. A software company might put out a press release that we’ve got a cool new feature. This is usually done in hope that a media outlet will pick it up and run with it. To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of press releases for features or version numbers, but do like doing them to announce an investment, adding a prominent board member, or adding additional rounds of funding. And specifically a new round of investments is a great time to make sure local media outlets receive those. Software updates are rarely worth a press release,…

Before sellers can work on leads, they need a framework to work on sales. There are a number of frameworks used for these, but none should be universally applied. Instead, to meet the needs of most startups, let’s break things down into a few basic points: Mechanics: Managing the sales using the existing technology. A how-to guide could be a simple Confluence page. This helps us all get aligned and be on the same page. That guide should be simple but go through what to put into each field. That should be guarded, so weekly go through the leads a seller is working, check the data integrity, and then review…

The customer journey is the general process followed by a person when becoming a customer. Here we’ll group customers into four primary stages and then dig deeper into managing customers in HubSpot using lead scoring. In the beginning, the lead score and staging will be used to help focus on the leads that are the furthest along. As teams grow, those help define who’s working on a lead, where leads are getting stuck (so we can develop ways to get them unstuck), and ways to automate communicating with leads so sellers can swap out those manual tasks with tasks that require a human. The general stages of a customer journey…

Product management is the function in an organization that plans, organizes, and manages the products the organization makes at each stage of the product lifecycle. In an organization of one, it’s pretty clear who does that job, as it is with every single other job. But as we round the corner to our third or fourth hire, our advisors often start talking about being more deliberate about the product lifecycle and roadmaps. To read more, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/product-management-in-startups

Source code is a collection of computer commands and comments written in a programming language, like Java, C or Swift. When compiled, the raw source code is then no longer human readable but runs very efficiently. Because compiled code isn’t easily disassembled, people cannot create their own versions of the software. To read more on source code escrow see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/source-code-escrow

Once upon a time, we tried to figure out what products and features we should develop on an annual basis. We set a strategy and went forward, coding like a machine for the year. But after Marty Cagan wrote the blog post on Continuous Discovery in 2012, a number of product and UX teams started to think about a better model, if they weren’t already. This emerging model was about constantly looking for ways to improve products based on what customers actually need and using that to feed the product development process. This is the crux of continuous discovery. Many were experimenting, but now they had a label. And companies…

The first time we do most things is usually the hardest. Once we get through one or two repetitions, most tasks get easier. About 400 podcast episodes in I’ve had a lot of failures that maybe just maybe anyone reading this article can avoid. So first, let’s look at why organizations make podcasts: A podcast can help humanize an organization. Despite our efforts to build solid cultures, our work to define our values, and the interpersonal relationships we form within an organization can’t scale with external perceptions as an organization grows. By putting humans from the organization in front of an audience, we are able to allow the audience to…