Podcasts about freshdesk

Justin's migrating off Freshdesk, grumbling about outdated UIs and dreaming of integrated tools. He's knee-deep in Shopify, site redirects, and pondering injection moulding and SMED like it's a lifestyle. Meanwhile, Jem's grappling with KittaParts hardware complexity, designing 19” rack kits, inventing dowel-pivot hinges, and vibing with NotebookLM podcasts about ABB RAPID while secretly plotting to laser-engrave everything.Watch on YoutubeDISCUSSED:✍️ Comment or Suggest a TopicFreshdesk "free" endingDisposable software ꘎ Laura 3D viewerHenry Holsters Tour - Audacity Micro ⠄ BEPNo door APC BrothersSMED (Single Minute Exchang of Dies)Lean stationShipping areaLLM robot programming ꘎Best part of owning business ⠄Urg. Laura says the coffee.Phew Shopify back to normal ꘎PDX CNC DistributorsAPSX PIMChatter Sync update Masso vs MulticamFricken Lasers ꘎ Notebook LM ꘎ - Learn ABB robotsCities Skylines with JustinFactorio - Factorio does not fill the niche. It creates the niche.---Profit First PlaylistClassic Episodes Playlist---SUPPORT THE SHOWBecome a Patreon - Get the Secret ShowReview on Apple Podcast Share with a FriendDiscuss on Show SubredditShow InfoShow WebsiteContact Jem & JustinInstagram | Tiktok | Facebook | YoutubePlease note: Show notes contains affiliate links.HOSTSJem FreemanCastlemaine, Victoria, AustraliaLike Butter | Instagram | More LinksJustin...

At Enterprise Connect 2025, Microsoft's announcement of Microsoft Teams Phone Extensibility marked a significant leap in the evolution of Teams-integrated communications. Among the first to harness this new capability is Luware, whose Teams-native contact center solution, Luware Nimbus Power, was front and center at the event. In a podcast recorded live from the show, John Wright of Luware joined Technology Reseller News publisher Doug Green to discuss the implications of this breakthrough. “Luware Nimbus Power leverages Microsoft's Azure Communication Services (ACS) to enable what we call ‘dual persona' functionality,” Wright explained. “This means agents can manage and receive audio calls through either the contact center console or the Microsoft Teams client—seamlessly.” Wright emphasized that while many competitors took the fastest route to market by simply connecting existing solutions to Teams, Luware made a bold move: they rebuilt their contact center platform natively within the Teams environment using the Extend model. Now, with Power certification, Luware adds advanced capabilities that integrate fully with Microsoft 365 tools like Power Automate, SharePoint, and Dynamics, and allow real-time AI enhancements via Microsoft Copilot Studio. This cloud-native, Teams-embedded architecture not only enables secure handling of calls without rerouting media through third-party infrastructure but also offers deep flexibility for integrations with CRMs, ticketing systems, and third-party platforms. “The call stays within the Teams tenant,” Wright noted. “That's a major advantage for organizations with strict compliance and security requirements.” For multi-vendor enterprise environments or long-standing organizations with diverse tech stacks, Wright sees the Luware approach as a powerful unifier: “You might have different departments working with different systems—Salesforce, Freshdesk, you name it. Luware can centralize communications across those platforms while keeping the user experience rooted in Teams.” Luware's robust partner program also makes this a compelling opportunity for MSPs and MSSPs. “We built a rewarding, intuitive partner program around Nimbus,” Wright said. “You can deploy a full-featured, omni-channel, AI-powered contact center in under 40 minutes.” Luware's commitment to native Teams integration and close collaboration with Microsoft positions it as a top-tier option for modern, scalable, secure contact center deployments. Learn more at www.luware.com

Welcome back to the second episode of the Freshworks series on Stories from the River! Guest host Sam Blum led a discussion with Wes Dudley and Anita Harris, recognized as the CX Executives of the Year, and Alicia Thompson, a River award recipient for 2024. From Freshworks, Patrick Rhodes and Lauren Lee join the conversation.   They discussed the benefits and lessons learned from utilizing Freshdesk, highlighting its positive impact on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Wes Dudley and Anita Harris emphasized the effective change management process, credits to Alicia Thompson, which allowed the organization to seamlessly transition to the new platform before the busy retail season. Anita shared that the new automations have decreased mistakes and improved efficiency, resulting in minimal customer complaints and a positive overall experience for their Memory Makers using Freshdesk. The episode also explored the future plans and potential upgrades within the Freshworks platform, as well as the significance of ongoing partnership and collaboration between Broad River and Freshworks. Alicia and Anita highlighted the exciting upcoming features that Freshdesk offers, such as a knowledge base and a customized customer portal, which aims to enhance problem resolution speed and customer engagement.  Together, they further delved into the importance of a technology solution that is adaptable to the client's needs, ultimately enhancing the customer experience while maintaining a humanized approach. Throughout the episode, there was a strong emphasis on trust, collaboration, and the shared goal of continuously improving the customer service journey with the aid of Freshdesk technology. This episode on YouTube:  Visit https://www.storiesfromtheriver.com for more episodes. Broad River Retail brought this show to you. Visit https://BroadRiverRetail.com                             Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/broad-river-retail 

Welcome back to the second episode of the Freshworks series on Stories from the River! Guest host Sam Blum led a discussion with Wes Dudley and Anita Harris, recognized as the CX Executives of the Year, and Alicia Thompson, a River award recipient for 2024. From Freshworks, Patrick Rhoads and Lauren Lee join the conversation.   They discussed the benefits and lessons learned from utilizing Freshdesk, highlighting its positive impact on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Wes Dudley and Anita Harris emphasized the effective change management process, credits to Alicia Thompson, which allowed the organization to seamlessly transition to the new platform before the busy retail season. Anita shared that the new automations have decreased mistakes and improved efficiency, resulting in minimal customer complaints and a positive overall experience for their Memory Makers using Freshdesk. The episode also explored the future plans and potential upgrades within the Freshworks platform, as well as the significance of ongoing partnership and collaboration between Broad River and Freshworks. Alicia and Anita highlighted the exciting upcoming features that Freshdesk offers, such as a knowledge base and a customized customer portal, which aims to enhance problem resolution speed and customer engagement.  Together, they further delved into the importance of a technology solution that is adaptable to the client's needs, ultimately enhancing the customer experience while maintaining a humanized approach. Throughout the episode, there was a strong emphasis on trust, collaboration, and the shared goal of continuously improving the customer service journey with the aid of Freshdesk technology. This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BCm_iXeXOhw  Visit https://www.storiesfromtheriver.com for more episodes. Broad River Retail brought this show to you. Visit https://BroadRiverRetail.com                             Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/broad-river-retail 

Welcome to the first episode of the Freshworks Series on Stories from the River! To kick off the series, guest host Sam Blum leads a vibrant discussion about Broad River Retail's integration with Freshworks' Freshdesk platform. Sam introduces Wes Dudley and Anita Harris, recognized as the CX Executives of the Year, and Alicia Thompson, a River award recipient for 2024. From Freshworks, Patrick Rhodes and Lauren Lee join the conversation.  The dialogue revolves around the vendor selection process, the decision-making journey, and the implementation of Freshdesk. Anita Harris elaborates on how Broad River is leveraging Freshdesk to manage customer concerns efficiently, making use of its case management ticketing system. Alicia Thompson highlights that Freshdesk serves multiple departments, including sales audit and inventory, beyond the customer-facing sides of the business. The transition to Freshdesk has had a significant impact due to its collaboration capabilities, which align well with the needs of Broad River's various Memory Makers. The episode details the advantageous features of Freshdesk, such as its ease of use, supportive admin side, and collaborative potential, emphasized by Anita and Wes. Patrick Rhodes and Lauren Lee speak to the personalized approach and partnership that Freshworks offered, making them the perfect fit for Broad River. Freshdesk has become a valuable tool in enhancing customer service and adaptability within Broad River Retail. This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-tqzveb9wg0  Visit https://www.storiesfromtheriver.com for more episodes. Broad River Retail brought this show to you. Visit https://BroadRiverRetail.com                             Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/broad-river-retail 

Welcome to the first episode of the Freshworks Series on Stories from the River! To kick off the series, guest host Sam Blum leads a vibrant discussion about Broad River Retail's integration with Freshworks' Freshdesk platform. Sam introduces Wes Dudley and Anita Harris, recognized as the CX Executives of the Year, and Alicia Thompson, a River award recipient for 2024. From Freshworks, Patrick Rhoads and Lauren Lee join the conversation.  The dialogue revolves around the vendor selection process, the decision-making journey, and the implementation of Freshdesk. Anita Harris elaborates on how Broad River is leveraging Freshdesk to manage customer concerns efficiently, making use of its case management ticketing system. Alicia Thompson highlights that Freshdesk serves multiple departments, including sales audit and inventory, beyond the customer-facing sides of the business. The transition to Freshdesk has had a significant impact due to its collaboration capabilities, which align well with the needs of Broad River's various Memory Makers. The episode details the advantageous features of Freshdesk, such as its ease of use, supportive admin side, and collaborative potential, emphasized by Anita and Wes. Patrick Rhodes and Lauren Lee speak to the personalized approach and partnership that Freshworks offered, making them the perfect fit for Broad River. Freshdesk has become a valuable tool in enhancing customer service and adaptability within Broad River Retail. This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZULpOf8quQU  Visit https://www.storiesfromtheriver.com for more episodes. Broad River Retail brought this show to you. Visit https://BroadRiverRetail.com                             Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/broad-river-retail 

Clark Johannson, President and CEO of ClickSpace, board member at Young Presidents' Organization (YPO), and Director at A100, shares his expertise on advanced B2B performance marketing strategies, emphasizing the importance of unit economics, marketing intelligence and customer insights. Through decades of entrepreneurial experience, Clark provides actionable insights into revenue predictability, marketing efficiency and the mindset shift required for true growth marketing success.Key Takeaways:(02:49) The critical role of customer intimacy in startups to make informed decisions due to limited resources.(05:19) The struggle with predictable revenue in marketing due to lack of marketing visibility and misallocation of resources.(06:30) Why marketing tracking is essential because without it, businesses waste time and money on ineffective marketing channels.(16:04) The importance of marketing unit economics for sustainable growth to balance customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV) for financial viability.(24:48) Differentiating inbound and outbound marketing strategies.(28:32) Applying the J-Curve to marketing investment because marketing investments often see an initial dip before reaching profitability.(41:07) Marketers should learn from failed campaigns instead of focusing on vanity metrics.Resources Mentioned:Young Presidents' Organization (YPO) website - https://www.ypo.org/ A100 website - https://thea100.org/The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen - https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation/dp/1633691780Harvard Business Review – "Jobs to Be Done" Theory - https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-doneGoogle Ads - https://ads.google.com/Looker Studio (Google Data Studio) - https://lookerstudio.google.com/HubSpot - https://www.hubspot.com/Freshdesk - https://freshdesk.com/ Productboard - https://www.productboard.com/ PipeDrive - https://www.pipedrive.com/Insightful Links:Know Your Customers' “Jobs to Be Done” - https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-doneWhat Is Market Intelligence? - https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4697-market-intelligence.htmlHow to Calculate Unit Economics for Your Business - https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-calculate-unit-economics-for-your-businessThanks for listening to the “Marketing Leadership” podcast, brought to you by Listen Network. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review to help get the word out about the show. And be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.#PodcastMarketing #PerformanceMarketing #BrandMarketing #MarketingStrategy #MarketingIntelligence #GTM #B2BMarketing #D2CMarketing #PodcastAds

In this episode of the Startup Operator Podcast, Roshan talks to Nivas, a seasoned SaaS marketer, to discuss his journey and insights into SaaS marketing. Nivas shares his accidental entry into the SaaS world, joining Freshworks (then Freshdesk) post-acquisition of his startup in 2015. The conversation highlights the importance of building a world-class product, visionary leadership from Freshworks CEO Girish, and the challenges of educating the market about SaaS in its early days. Nivas also delves into his role at SpendFlo, emphasizing the value of investing in brand from the outset, developing an intimate event strategy for engagement, and managing expectations when expanding into the US market.  Topics:00:00 Introduction00:27 Joining FreshWorks: Early Days and Challenges03:44 Working with Girish: Leadership and Vision08:59 FreshWorks Marketing Strategies14:57 The Shift to Mid-Market and Enterprise17:26 The Zero to One Journey at SpendFlow23:00 Navigating Founders' Ideas24:36 Importance of Brand Investment26:08 Building Trust Through Branding29:18 Event Strategy and Execution36:54 Expanding into the US Market42:01 Advice for Startup Founders on Marketing ------------------------------------- Click here to get regular WhatsApp updates:https://wa.me/message/ZUZQQGKCZTADL1 ------------------------------------- Connect with Us: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator​Twitter: https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup​​ ------------------------------------- If you liked this episode, let us know by hitting the like button and share with your friends and family. Please also remember to subscribe to our channel and switch on the notifications to never miss an episode!

Ashu Dubey is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gleen, a leading generative AI-based customer service solution. As a serial AI entrepreneur, Ashu previously was CTO and Co-Founder of 12 Labs, an early pioneer in AI-powered personalized health recommendations. Ashu led top of the funnel user growth at LinkedIn, where he significantly accelerated user growth and was instrumental in launching innovative products such as LinkedIn Events. Ashu has an MBA from UCLA, attended IIT Dhanbad, and consistently merges technology and innovation to shape industry landscapes.In This Conversation We Discuss: [00:40] Intro[01:47] Bridging Discord and Ecommerce gaps[03:08] The importance of reliable AI in business[04:25] Balancing AI risks and benefits[04:49] Limitations of ChatGPT integration[06:09] Aligning AI abilities with customer expectations[07:05] Improving your AI tool through feedbacks[07:35] Safeguarding customer information[08:35] Editing and customizing AI responses[09:43] Incorporating AI into help desks[10:26] Testing AI exposure levels on customers [11:03] Seamless Setup with Gleen AI[12:10] Gleen's quick turnaround for integration requests[12:27] Unified suite of AI services with Gleen AI[14:17] Gleen's special offer for Honest Ecommerce listeners[15:01] The omnichannel capability of Gleen[15:50] Find Ashu on LinkedIn and Twitter/XResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubeGenerative AI platform for customer success https://gleen.ai/Follow Ashu Dubey https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashudubeyIf you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

How can travel companies better understand the Gen Z traveler and therefore better influence them into using their goods and services? Kathia Alexander is a Mexican American Industrial Design Engineer and Product Designer at Encora with over 4 years of experience in the software industry. She has collaborated on more than 15 digital products, varying from marketplace add-ons for platforms like Jira, Monday.com, Trello, and Freshdesk, to standalone apps that help remote teams carry out their Agile Ceremonies, host video conference calls, and manage their digital assets (Digital Asset Management tools).

Ray Nolan is founder and CEO of eDesk, an innovative customer support platform for eCommerce sellers. Ray has founded, mentored and invested in many digital commerce startups over a period of 20 years; including Hostelworld, Skyscanner and Ding.com. Ray founded eDesk after seeing friends running a high margin eCommerce business and struggling with operational efficiencies and profitable scaling. Today eDesk powers thousands of merchants around the world, using AI to help them provide faster and more personalized support to their customers.In This Conversation We Discuss: [00:44] Intro[02:36] Knowing what your competitors are up to[03:27] Building key differentiators from competitors[04:10] Using AI to simplify customer support processes[05:33] Learning to refine your interactions with AI tools[06:19] How AI helps in ideating and outlining[07:20] Incorporating AI in your workflow[08:19] Maximizing AI for things you're not adept with[08:56] Experimenting with the add-ons[09:09] ChatGPT and the convenience it brings[11:25] Synopsizing ticket history using AI tools[12:41] AI giving a more streamlined customer support[14:23] The importance of continuity in customer support[15:37] Chatbots and SLAs in the Ecommerce space[16:22] Leveraging ChatGPT to categorize tickets[18:01] Advantages of hands-free replies[18:23] Proof that AI still needs human assistance[19:55] Outsourcing mundane elements to AI-assisted houses[20:50] Customers expecting faster response times[21:16] Delivering expected support fast is the key[22:01] What eDesk offersResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubeFaster, smarter customer support for Ecommerce https://www.edesk.com/Follow Ray Nolan https://www.linkedin.com/in/ranolan/If you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

TOPICS: Maintaining CNC machines Process bins! Carbon Fiber tips and tricks Sandvik drills ERP systems managing lead times Freshdesk for customer service

In today's episode one quick takeaway from Freshworks's first investor day since the company went public two years ago, but first a few headlines. Headlines NVIDIA and Reliance Industries, on Sep. 8, announced a collaboration to develop India's own foundation large language model trained on the nation's diverse languages and tailored for generative AI applications to serve the world's most populous nation, according to a press release from the AI GPU maker. Apple's much anticipated iPhone 15 will be unwrapped tomorrow, and it will be nighttime in India. One big change everyone's expecting is of course the USB-C port that Apple's been forced to switch to, after the European Union mandated it for most electronics gadgets by next year. One thing today So last week, Freshworks organized its first investor day, on Sep. 7. Of course, the company has been providing quarterly updates and holding conference calls with analysts and so on since it was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange two years ago. But this was a bona fide investor-focused meet where the company provided some granular data on how it's doing and where it's headed. The one takeaway for me, and probably for many others, was that the company's Freshservice product is growing more than twice as fast as the company's overall growth rate, and not on a very small base either. As many of you know Freshworks was founded in 2010. It has headquartered in San Mateo, California, and CEO Girish Mathrubootham told analysts and investors that 85 percent of the company's 5,000 or so employees are in India. Mostly in Chennai, but also in Hyderabad, Bengaluru and elsewhere. The company has over 65,000 customers and 19,000 of those pay the SaaS vendor $5,000 or more every year in subscription fees of its software. Among its customers are Coca Cola, Honda, Sotheby's, Thomas Cook, Klarna, African Bank, PhonePe and Mahindra Group. This year, as Freshworks pushes to become profitable, it's delivering 10 percent free cash flow margins, Mathrubootham said. Freshworks started with a customer support software, Freshdesk, and today the overall customer support software business is at about $300 million ARR, and growing in the low to mid-teens percent annually, Mathrubootham said. But it's Freshservice, the IT service management software and related products, that's emerged as the most promising component of the company's product portfolio. “Today, that's our fastest growing product with north of $250 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue),” Mathrubootham said. An important reason could be that, especially post Covid, large businesses have been overhauling their IT, moving to the cloud and looking for ways to reduce the complexity of managing a hoard of the technology solutions, including multiple software subscriptions. Freshservice clocked $260 million in ARR as at the end of the June quarter, which is Freshworks's fiscal Q2. It was growing at more than 40 percent at the time, compared with the company's overall growth rate of about 20 percent. The business has a total addressable market of some $20 billion, growing at 12 percent, according to market researcher and consultancy Gartner, including the areas of IT Service Management, IT Asset Management & Software Asset Management, IT Infrastructure Monitoring, AIOps, Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms. In this segment, “our customer is the CIO, or a senior IT leader, and we have a lot of traction in mid-market and in enterprise,” Freshworks's president Dennis Woodside said. The company has some 8,500 customers paying more than $5,000 in annual Freshservice subscription fees, he said. In the coming months and quarters, Freshworks will launch more features to capture adjacent opportunities, Dennis said, with industry specific solutions, such as government agencies, security, operations, governance, risk and compliance.

Guest  Name: Chris Dix https://www.linkedin.com/in/thoughtpost/ Company: ChatStyle.ai https://chatstyle.ai/ Hosts Brian Doyle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandoyl... Robb Rogers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robb-roge... Tim McNeil: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timmcneil3/ Sponsors vCIOToolbox: https://vciotoolbox.com OSR Manage: https://osrmanage.com Chris Dix is the founder of ChatStyle, a software company based in Charlotte, NC, that provides chat and automation solutions for MSPs and their customers. Chris has over 20 years of experience developing software and is a former Microsoft MVP. He is also an author and has spoken at conferences for Microsoft, O'Reilly, ConnectWise, and MSPGeekCon. 3:10 Chris gives an overview of how he started doing MSP. He is a software developer and this gives him the skill set needed in working for MSP. He also discusses what truly is his drive for joining MSP and the challenges he wanted to overcome.  5:15 Brian mentions that there are a lot of tools available in the market with a variety of functions, Chris pitched that his starting point was the lack of consistent communication channels for customers and tech team. 12:01 Chris starts talking about the AI function of the tool.  15:12 Robb asks about PSA integrations with the program. Chris answers ConnectWise and AutoTask to name a few. He also says implementation with Halo and Freshdesk is also ongoing. He also shares some plans they have for this year as well as some improvements, especially on CRM. 18:45 Before closing Robb asked Chris which app has more people, Slack or Teams. Chris explains his answer and shares what struggles and challenges they face to make their program work since these two applications have different focuses.

Join Dr. Michael Troyer and Anna Steinfest as they explore the power of business automation and its impact on small brands. Discover how automation levels the playing field, allowing smaller businesses to outpace larger competitors by reacting swiftly to new trends. In this episode, our hosts recommend a selection of top business automation tools designed specifically for small brands, including productivity software like Calendly and Boomerang, email marketing tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact, billing automation tools like QuickBooks Online and Shoeboxed, and customer support software like Freshdesk and Zendesk. They also introduce Zapier and Microsoft Flow as tools for seamless integration across various applications. Tune in to optimize your business and unlock its true potential with these efficient automation tools.

When you're growing your company, hitting sales goals can be an all encompassing endeavor. It's easy to slap a one-size-fits-all strategy onto a big group of potential customers.But to truly develop your brand and bring in long-term customers, you have to understand and plan for their specific needs.In this episode of the B2B Power Hour, Morgan sits down with business expert and current founder at Blueprint, Jordan Crawford to explore the importance of understanding customer needs and behaviors in driving growth for companies with specific examples from Tidio, Freshdesk, Gladly, and more!Listen in as we discuss:The importance of targeted marketing and understanding customer needsThe impact of customer feedback on target market and messagingThe effectiveness of "selling the job to be done"Insights into how AI can be used to improve customer experiences Follow Morgan Smith on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/morganjsmithFollow Jordan Crawford on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordancrawford/Join the 1Up Club to power up your prospecting. Get access to power plays, special briefings, and even DIY enablement docs that help you prospect better. Learn more at b2bpowerhour.com/join. 

Jem's on a farm but we still delve software and the Katz-Moses ripoff product?! and Portland CNC's experience with imitators. Also, welding!Watch on YoutubeDISCUSSED:✍️ Send Comments on this EpisodePlease note: Show notes contains affiliate links.FarmImportance of Creative ExplorationRanch dressingWelding, that box of parts.Game development distractionsStealing IP - Katz-Moses accused by Lee Valley and Union MFGPDX CNC experience with Stolen IPJustin found a potential Freshdesk successor

In this episode, Dan and Albert break down Freshworks. Freshworks creates cloud-based software solutions for businesses. Founded in Chennai, India, in 2010 as Freshdesk, the company has a product suite ranging from sales CRM software to recruitment tools and customer-support helpdesk software. Leave us a Review! If you enjoy listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to rate us 5-stars on iTunes / Apple Podcasts. Here's a link to leave a review right now :) In this episode we cover: What is Freshworks? (2:10) Why Freshworks has succeeded (10:09) How Freshworks has been performing (25:58) Why Freshworks is focusing on the US (30:28) Follow and subscribe to our content. All information contained in this podcast is for education and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional financial, legal or tax advice. The hosts of Fresh Capital are not financial professionals and are not aware of your personal financial circumstances. Any opinions expressed herein are not recommendations or advice. Please consult a licensed financial professional before you invest. For more information visit our website at https://www.freshcapital.media/ Got feedback or suggestions? Send them to freshcapitalpodcast@gmail.com

Pranay is a SaaS investor at Matrix Partners India. Before moving to investing, Pranay played several key roles at Freshworks including the Director of Growth Marketing at Freshworks, and managed to ramp up the marketing machinery. He has also worked with the CEO's office at Freshworks where he was responsible for ramping the revenues from 5 Million to 100 Million. He comes with tons of knowledge on how marketing used to work in the past, how it works today, and how SaaS businesses should think about marketing for the future. Pranay recommends SaaS businesses find new channels where their target audience hangs out as early as possible. There is no single marketing strategy or channel that will always work. It is necessary for businesses to find their “distribution edge”. The BTS Podcast Episode 10 has Pranay sharing several nuggets of marketing wisdom.Tune in to watch the full podcast.Key takeaways:1:24 - Building a SaaS company: Then and Now3:46 - The challenges that businesses face today4:35 - Optimizing costs for lead-gen7:56 - Worthy SaaS examples9:15 - Lessons learnt from experiments13:45 - Winning the confidence of enterprise customers19:19 - The Experience Roadshow26:34 - How to measure the RoI of non-standard events28:03 - Indicators of Product Market Fit and Business Market Fit33:05 - Founders should become students of sales34:35 - Indian SaaS advantage39:41 - Rapid fireResources mentioned2:34 - How Wiz reached $100M ARR in 18 months? Techcrunch8:02 - Rocketlane's Community Building | The CMO Journal29:55 - Girish Mathrubootam's first blog announcing Freshdesk as a startup in October 2010 while Freshdesk was publicly launched in June 20114 interesting campaigns discussed throughout the podcastThe van that traveled to 11 destinations | Freshworks Experience Roadshow | 2019Going on air to create virality - #Failsforce campaignReports instill confidence in buyers - Freshdesk | Forrester TEI ReportRocketlane's rap song announcing fundraisingKey mentions8:00 - Srikrishnan Ganesan of RocketLane        2. 33:00 - Rishi Kulkarni and Sameer Goel  of  Revv

Girish Mathrubootham is the founder and CEO of India's first SaaS startup, Freshworks — and when he's in his home country, he gets the celebrity treatment. Freshworks' 2021 IPO was a milestone for the country's tech sector, and Mathrubootham has also attracted a “take a selfie with me!” level of fame for trying to change the conversation about entrepreneurship there. “You can be successful in business without doing bad things,” he says. “Being a good person and winning is not mutually exclusive.”In this episode, Girish and Joubin discuss the silver lining of COVID lockdown; learning how to make mistakes and fight for what you want; why Girish started Freshworks after finding success at Zoho;  the challenges of starting a small business in Chennai in the early 2010s; the “modern jail” of being a CEO; immediate job offers; “Indian cowboys”; why multi-product startups should hire in India; why moving to the US was like competing in the Olympics; and why the IPO is not the endgame.In this episode, we cover: Growing up in a “tier-two town” and social norms in India (06:03) Why entrepreneurial people don't always fit in at big companies (13:00) Being a celebrity businessman in India, breaking up biases, and the pressure of being an idol (20:49) 500 crorepatis and generating wealth for employees (24:27) Why Girish started Freshworks, originally known as Freshdesk (28:09) Keeping up morale & being scrappy when Freshworks didn't have much funding (36:35) Nostalgia for the early days and the luxury of time (39:44) “Ripoff or not” and doing battle with a respected analyst (45:29) Growing from one product to many, and the support needed to do that (49:58) Deciding to build a billion-dollar company, and moving from India to the US (58:43) Why Girish has re-committed himself to Freshworks for at least seven more years (01:04:24) Finding happiness in small things and not letting others control your feelings (01:07:57) Links: Connect with Girish Twitter LinkedIn Connect with Joubin Twitter LinkedIn Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

Today I'm speaking with Cassandra Scott, the Director of Laurus Bookkeeping  Based in Brisbane Cassandra is a Registered BAS Agent, Xero Certified Advisor, Xero Platinum Partner, mentor and Director of the Australian Bookkeepers Association. She recently gave a heart warming speech about the importance of the accounting and bookkeeping community at the Brisbane Roadshow, so initially I am going to share that with you. Then after her talk, I go straight into our interview, where we talk about technology, community and leadership in the Bookkeeping Industry. Key takeaways include: The technology she uses in her practice - including the Xero Suite, Microsoft 365, the customer support software FreshDesk and XBert AI driven automated manual checks of your client files, surfacing errors, issues and risks. Successful strategies she's adopted to introduce clients to the new workflow methods and technology solutions. Bookkeeping resources and support, including Bookkeepers in Practice (Australia) community on FaceBook and the Australian Bookkeeper Association. Subscribe to the Accounting Apps newsletter here http://HeatherSmithAU.COM Read about how I strategically partner with Apps at https://EndorsementDisclosure.com I'll organise to have this episode published on EarMark CPE, so if you register on the EarMark CPE App you can earn 1 hour verifiable CPE for listening to this episode.

Vlad Calus is the co-founder @ Planable, the command center of social media collaboration for marketing teams, digital agencies, and freelancers to collaborate with their teammates & clients on the content calendar in the most visual way. Planable is used by more than 5000 brands worldwide, including Mini, BMW, Volkswagen, SkyTeam, Wendy's and many others. Vlad founded two non-profits at the age of 16, then dropped out of college, moved to another country with two 2 his friends, built Planable (Techstars London '17) at 19 y.o and became an honoree Forbes 30 Under 30 at 22 y.o. And he's been featured as a guest writer & marketer by multiple publications including Social Media Examiner, Entrepreneur, WeRSM, Freshdesk, Subsign, Digital Agency Network and many others.

Craig and Andy attended MicroConf and provide a recap. Both left the conference feeling energized, full of ideas, and with a purpose to grow and scale. Whether it's selling, buying, or making an impact through ClickFunnels, community, HubSpot, or Freshdesk, they want to be more effective, productive, and successful.   Craig enjoyed being around like-minded people ... Read more

The guys talk about LB's Lean Day, company culture, Freshdesk, Quotient, Fusion 360 Nesting, Justin's New Kaeser Compressor, and the YCM CF BIN file update. DISCUSSED: Please note: Show notes contains affiliate links. Garnica - Plywood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49p1JVLHUos (10 Bullets - Tom Sachs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoOUBETTyMI (Discipline of Do Easy by Gus Van Sant) LB Workshop Lean - once a month https://www.fastcap.com/content/lean-videos (Fastcap) - 3S Every morning 30 minutes Handoff from Quoting to Production https://pdxc.co/descript (Descript) - Screen capture software Where do you host videos? https://freshdesk.com (Freshdesk) - Team Email and Articles https://portlandcnc.com/help (Portland CNC's Freshdesk) - Use a Team Inbox? https://pdxc.co/quotient (Quotient Quoting) http://paperlessparts.com (Paperless Parts) De-skill Quoting Nesting - Fusion 360 - Compare function Managing staff - Netflix culture deck, challenges, approach etc https://amzn.to/3M6KePj (Powerful - Patti McCord) Book Justin was thinking of: https://amzn.to/3KOIJFe (Radical Candor by Kim Scott) Business Coaching has been helpful for Jem, Justin is jealous. Both are overwhelmed by owning a business Justin's new https://us.kaeser.com/products-and-solutions/rotary-screw-compressors/compressed-air-packages/airtowers/ (Kaeser Airtower 7.5c ) YCM Mill - Run from MEM Card (Compact Flash) is working! (Video coming) SUPPORT THE SHOW https://dept.parts/review (Review on Apple Podcast) Share with a Friend Show Info https://dept.parts (Show Website) https://dept.parts/contact (Contact Jem & Justin) https://dept.parts/tiktok (Tiktok) | https://dept.parts/youtube (Youtube) HOSTS Jem Freeman Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia https://likebutter.com.au?ref=pd-episode-bio (Like Butter) https://linktr.ee/likebutter (More Links) Justin Brouillette Portland, Oregon, USA https://portlandcnc.com?ref=pd-episode-bio (PDX CNC) https://shop.nack.is?ref=pd-episode-bio (Nack) https://pdxc.co/link (More Links)

➡️ For More Episodes, Visit: https://successstorypodcast.com ➡️ Like The Show? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Freshworks (@FreshworksInc) (formerly Freshdesk) has long been the leading light in India's SaaS industry. It was India's first SaaS unicorn, not only achieving massive success, but also ushering in a second wave of new SaaS firms, while on their path to becoming India's SaaS superpower. Today I'll break down how they grew to a 12.2b dollar valuation company & became India's first unicorn and SaaS IPO. Tweet Me: https://twitter.com/scottdclary My Newsletter: https://newsletter.roioverload.com/subscribe

It was about 10 years ago that Shekhar Kirani took a flight from Bangalore to Chennai, and spent the better part of the day talking to a couple of young entrepreneurs before taking an evening flight back. He had been introduced to them by a colleague and the partner at Accel was looking to find out if the VC firm should invest in them. The two entrepreneurs—Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy—came from simple backgrounds and hadn't attended any of India's Institutes of Technology or top business schools. They had experience working at Zoho, a small software products company at the time, which helped but many would have rejected them, Kirani says. There was something about the duo and their fledgling venture, called Freshdesk at the time, that convinced Kirani Accel should go ahead and bet on them. And Freshdesk, which would eventually become Freshworks, got its first million dollars in VC money with Kirani joined the company's board. He certainly couldn't have imagined then, that the little Chennai outfit would go on to deliver Accel's first US IPO from its Indian portfolio—and an India-founder-led software products company at that. Forbes India caught up with Kirani, a day after he returned from attending Freshworks's billion-dollar IPO on the Nasdaq. We spoke about everything from what was going through his mind on the floor of the exchange to how Mathrubootham had matured as an entrepreneur, and what it takes to succeed as a VC investor

Mahesh Ram is a serial founder and entrepreneur and he's currently the founding CEO of Solvvy, a leading SaaS provider of conversational self-service and automation solutions to leading global companies with over 550 million end users. Prior to Solvvy, he was the CEO of GlobalEnglish which pioneered online business English education for learners in over 120 countries. GlobalEnglish was later acquired by the Pearson PLC. He previously held CTO roles at Thomson Reuters.   Questions   Could you just tell us a little bit about your journey? How it is that you ended up in this world of customer experience automation? Can you tell us a little bit about Solvvy? So a big part of artificial intelligence is natural language processing, could you just break down what that really is to our listeners so that they can understand and maybe even get a better connection with maybe how this could work in their business? A business is really looking to try and find a way to have more automation in their business. What's maybe one or two things that you think they could start off doing if they're at ground zero, they have no automation. Where can they start to try to get their business on level one of trying to get automated and have their customers come on board? Could you share with us what is the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business? Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had really great impact on you, it could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but it still has a great impact on you. Could you share also share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? It could be something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people. Where can listeners find you online? Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, because it kind of helps to get you back on track, or just get you going if you get derailed for any reason? Do you have one of those?   Highlights   Mahesh's Journey   Mahesh shared that he thinks the whole area of customer experience is one that always fascinated him, his entire career has been about automating complexity. And by taking very complex things and turning them into easier, better, more frictionless experiences and that's been true for whether that's online education or legal and tax compliance. But when he thinks about customer experience, it's the thing that impacts every single one of us, all of us have great experiences we can talk about with brands and we have those very poor experiences we talk about with brands and we make decisions based on those things. And he's no different than everybody else, than their customers.   And so, when he saw the potential for the technology to truly deliver a better experience at scale, he was hooked. When he saw that the incredibly powerful PhD work that his co-founders had done that enabled the ability to deliver this incredible customer experience at scale, he just couldn't resist because as a CEO, he has often seen that they're just not good enough at this. So that's what motivated him and that's what excites him about what they're doing.   What is Solvvy About?     Me: All right. So can you tell us a little bit about Solvvy? I know you mentioned in your bio that you are currently at Solvvy and Solvvy is about CX automated platforms and basically powering customer experiences. Just in in real word terms so our listeners that are listening, whether they are managers, or business owners of small or medium businesses, they can get a better understanding of what you do could possibly influence what they do to enhance frictionless experiences for their customers.   Mahesh shared that there's a famous book called The Effortless Experience that he thinks described very nicely what they're trying to do, but at Solvvy, they built a powerful SaaS platform, it's a solution that takes machine learning and natural language processing, natural language understanding at its core, but delivers an end user or consumer experience that allows every one of us as consumers to interact with the brand in a way to get self-service automation sometimes, other times get the right journey, be able to get to the right agent at the right time. But the way they like to think about it is allowing any brand in the world at scale to deliver what they think of is like concierge level journey. Imagine if the system understood you, it knows what you want, you just talked to it and it tells you where you need to go. Sometimes it provides you an immediate answer, other times it has to ask you some follow up questions because it needs a little more information from you in order to pinpoint either the right answer or get you to the right agent.   And you can imagine how this can be scaled across a global footprint, across the world. Their customers are B2B and B2C companies that have hundreds and millions of end users. But they're serving two customers, if you will, they're serving the companies that buy and implement them but ultimately, their end customer is their consumer, their end user and can they (Solvvy) deliver an intelligent solution like sometimes it's in the form of a chatbot, other times it's in the form of taking them on a journey and taking them to the right agent. But that's what they do. They made it really simple to implement something that's very complex under the hood, but it's very simple for companies to implement and it delivers an immediate ROI to the business and better experience for the user.   Me: Does your company primarily work with a particular type of industry like retail? Or is it more service based kind of organizations? Could you give an example of maybe one of your clients that has seen success as a result of this approach?   Mahesh shared that first of all they work across a wide number of verticals, both B2B and B2C. But he would say some of their strongest verticals are things like ecommerce, not so much pure physical retail, but oftentimes the ecommerce arm of a retail business, FinTech. So consumer FinTech and banking, a good example would be a consumer finance banking application stash, which many people have used, millions of users use them. They work with brands like Ring - the home doorbell, home alarm, home security company, which is now part of Amazon. These are some of the companies. So it's a wide spectrum of companies but typically it's a situation where he as an end user of a product or service, have adopted that product or service, but have questions about how to get the most out of it. And sometimes that can be simple, that can be he's an ecommerce customer and he has ordered something and he wants to cancel something or he wants to see where it is, he's wondering why there's a delay.   Other times, it might be something like he bought a device and he doesn't know how to make it work with his iPhone, we've all had that experience. And in both those situations, Solvvy can understand the issue as expressed by the user in everyday natural language, and then be able to connect the user to the right solution that could be a stepwise guide an answer, it could be in some cases, collecting more information and giving it to the agent who can then help you 3 to 10 times faster than they could. So that those are some examples of companies they work with, that it's a pretty broad spectrum. They even work in healthcare, they work with Calm, which is one of the leading meditation apps, many of your users, entrepreneurs may be using that to do meditation and peace of mind. Wonderful application, they support their end users. So it ranges across a wide range of industries.   What is Natural Language Processing?   Me: So a big part of artificial intelligence is natural language processing. And I know for the average person, that may sound like really high level, could you just break down what that really is to our listeners so that they can understand and maybe even get a better connection with maybe how this could work in their business?   Mahesh shared that the way to simplify the complex, obviously, natural language processing is a deep science and there's 10s of 1000s of research papers and PhD thesis on this, but he'll simplify it because he thinks at the end of the day, as consumers, it boils down to one thing is the ability to understand, in the customer experience space, it's the ability to understand when a user expresses an issue or what we think of as an intent.   So, you might say, “I bought the jeans last week, they don't fit me, please help.” And if you have enough data about prior examples of that, you can quickly learn, the machine learning can actually learn that the natural language expression in that case is likely a call to say, “Hey, can I return or exchange this?” Nowhere is the word return or exchange used. So he thinks natural language understanding in context of customer experience is about understanding how people in that business or in that problem area express issues, they often don't use the words that the companies use, they may not use the word return or exchange, they say, “I want to give this back.”   So NLU (Natural Language Understanding) is the technology that allows you to move away from that kind of keyword dependency and understand the core intent of what the user is doing.   And the way you do that is you actually train on the prior data, because chances are most businesses have had 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people asking similar questions before. And the machine learning can actually learn how real users express real issues and start to get better at detecting that as soon as they finish typing something in or speaking something.   And we're all familiar with Alexa, and it has a specific set of natural language understanding where you can ask what's the weather and it's been trained to understand those words, is it going to rain today? And it knows to answer you with an answer and tell you to take an umbrella. So that's an example of NLU that most people would understand but in the context of customer experience, it's very much about understanding that businesses specific natural language.   Tips for Implementing Automation in Your Business   Me: So let's say we have some listeners who their business, let me give you an example. Let's say for example, it is a pastry business and she or he may have an outlet where customers can come and pick up little pastries like cupcakes or a slice of bread pudding or whatever the case is. And they're really looking to try and find a way to have more automation in their business. What's maybe one or two things that you think they could start off doing if they're at ground zero, they have no automation. Where can they start to try to get their business on level one of trying to get automated and have their customers come on board?   Mahesh stated that he thinks the first thing he thinks if you think about foundational principles, it's first of all, let's make sure that we collect all that information in a place where you make sure that you answer it, that you keep track of it, that you have some history of what's happened with that user.   And so typically, you would use some sort of a simple support CRM business. They partner with companies like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and others. And those are pretty simple to implement, they don't really require a lot of deep technology to implement a simple implementation.   And that allows you to then say, “Okay, Yanique called me on Tuesday asking about the status of her pastry order. And I need to get back to her.” It keeps track of it and if you come back a week later, he might know that you asked about this last week. And so, he might start his conversation with you by saying, “Is this about the pastry order you placed last week?”, So he has some context.   So he thinks first thing is to put a simple system in place, there's lightweight systems, there's inexpensive systems, they don't cost a lot of money. And typically, you can scale up or down depending on how many resources you have. So that, he thinks is first things first.   Second thing is, he thinks a lot of businesses would just benefit from writing some simple content, and other things on their websites to be able to answer the most frequently asked questions. So pay attention, once you're starting to track what people are asking, you should then be able to go back and say, let me write an article about how do I customize a cake. Or if I order a bulk order of pastries, do I get a discount? These might be common questions that you see in the data that you see, after you see this is coming up over and over. So that would be like a starting point, you'd start with some sort of a knowledge base so people can find the answer for themselves because most people don't want to wait for your team, especially if you have a small team, it might take 24 hours for you to answer that question about a bulk order, well, you might have lost the order by that time.   So you're better off letting the customer get the help they need. And that goes to the third thing, which is then the third thing is they work with OpenTable. You're familiar with OpenTable, people make reservations at any restaurant, hundreds of 1000s of restaurants around the world. And they serve two audiences, as a consumer if you want to book a table at a fancy restaurant, perhaps in San Francisco, but also the restaurant owner who has to then control some of those back end tools. And they provide a whole range of tools.   But imagine an experience where that restaurant owner can interact with technology to be able to change their hours or modify frequently asked questions. So, that's where they often come in is that they end up giving brands a way to automate even more complex things.   So if you say, “Hey, I want to customize my cake.” the Natural Language Understanding can actually understand that or maybe you don't say customized, “I want to order a special cake for my niece. And I want it to say something very unique.” Something like that and nowhere would he use the word customized. I could come up to you and say, “Great, looks like you want to customize the cake. We have these options for you, which one do you want.”   And take you down the path and actually collect all that information and say, “I've got everything I need, somebody will get back to you within an hour with an ETA on when this cake will be ready for you. Does that make sense?”   And imagine that experience in 35-40 seconds, he might have actually gotten your order right. And he'll still handed off to a human being because somebody still has to bake the cake. But at that point, he's such a delighted consumer that maybe he'll order a little extra. Maybe at that point, you present him with an offer and say, “If you want to order a dozen cookies for the other guests, there's a special offer 10% off right now.” So he thinks if you think about automation, it's not about putting a blocker in front of the user, it's about automating things that otherwise they'd have to wait too long for.   App, Website or Tool that Mahesh Absolutely Can't Live Without in His Business   When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Mahesh stated that that's a great question. He thinks for them, because they've gone completely virtual right due to the pandemic, so everybody's virtual. So he thinks it would be tempting to say an online meeting tool like Zoom. But he actually thinks that the most indispensable tool is probably something like Slack because it's a communication vehicle for everyone to share information and ideas.   And what they've done which is nice with Slack is they've used some of the third party bots and applications inside Slack to do things like give praise to someone. It makes it easy to give praise and it shows up in Slack, everyone can read it, it also then writes it automatically to the performance management system. So it's a great way to motivate your employees or help people motivate one another for great work, “Hey, Yanique did a great job today on this, she made it possible for me to help this customer.”   It makes it easy to just go into Slack and give her praise. That's one example. You can share documents; you can even do video calls in Slack. So, it's a pretty powerful tool, he's sure other people use other things like it. But that's one that he would say it's been very, very crucial for them.   Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Mahesh   When asked about books that had a great impact, Mahesh shared that one book is very personal. His grandfather lived in India, grew up in India, he had spent most of his career in the public service. But he's very interested in music and after the age of about 60, he decided to become a music and dance critic. And he started writing and then actually became a well-known critic and musicologist in one of the major newspapers of India.   And at the age of 88, his grandfather decided to write a book. He wrote a book on music and musicians and just his recollections and opinions. And it turned out to be a really, really well received book and got a lot of critical praise at the age of 88. He thinks that to him, it was less about the book and more about the fact that his lifelong passion for learning had never stopped. And so, it's as much the book as the writing of the book as the book itself, it's both. So that was one.   The second one, which he thinks has become more and more relevant as a book he has probably read three times. It's a three volume, very heavy, long trilogy called Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, written by a man named Taylor Branch, and it's kind of the entire lifespan of Martin Luther King and it's probably about 2000 pages total.   So it's not light reading. But it talks about all of the ups and downs of the civil rights movement, the great triumphs, and then of course, later in his life some of his regrets and so on, and so on. And he thinks it really comes home when you think about the events of the last couple of years and what's going on in the world, you realize that these struggles, the great struggles don't have easy answers and solutions don't just emerge and everything is great.   Things have a way of taking far longer and being much more difficult than you ever imagined when you started. Ideals are what carry you through but even, there's a lot of frustration you have to overcome whether that through in business or in social life. So those are two. And then for fun, he thinks one that he always like reading, it's light reading is Calvin and Hobbes a cartoon strip, because he just thinks it reminds him that at the end of the day, we all take ourselves way too seriously.   Me: That's so true. And life is so short, we really have to enjoy laughter.   What Mahesh is Really Excited About Now!   Mahesh shared that they're working on so many incredibly exciting things in the business. He'll choose one or two that he thinks excites him the most. The first thing is what he calls the Omni-Channel experience. Take the example of the pastry shop, he thinks they're just now entering in the United States, the notion of a truly omni-channel experience where businesses have to meet consumers where they live.   It's no longer reasonable to expect customers to come to your website. They live in Instagram, they live in Snapchat, they live in WhatsApp and this has already happened in other markets like in China, you have WeChat and India WhatsApp is very, very strong. And if he wants to order a pizza from Domino's in India, he's just as likely to use WhatsApp as I am to go to www.dominos.com.   But in North America, that's just now happening, it's just happening where brands have to be creating really strong presence but the problem is there isn't one thing. It isn't like he can just build for WhatsApp, on a Monday, he might choose to interact with the pastry shop mentioned on Facebook Messenger. On Tuesday, he might want to go into WhatsApp and place an order for a cake. On Wednesday, he might go to the store brand to the website and try to order it. And it could change if two users might have two different things.   So brands have to be in all these places. But he can't have different things going on in those sites. If he asked you what's the price to customize the cake, and you give him three different answers on three different channels, that's a real problem, consumers get really annoyed.   So he thinks what they're doing at Solvvy, which is really exciting, is they're making it possible for businesses to build the intelligent layer once in the platform, and then deliver on any of these channels they choose with the same consistency. So if you come in on a Monday and say, “I want to return the shoes that I bought on Facebook Messenger.” They'll take you through that entire experience and get to get it returned and connect you to an agent. But on Wednesday, you come back and ask “Where's my order on the company's website?” They'll be able to answer that question just as accurately on that thing. So the consistency across platforms.   So it's consistent and personalized so it knows enough to ask Yanique for her email address and look it up and tell you exactly where your order is, that kind of personalization automated is critical.   And then he thinks that goes to the second piece, which is what excites him more than anything is the ability to deliver a truly personalized experience. Think about yourself or anybody in the audience, when you buy a product or service, the experience you have in the first week, maybe the first 10 days, maybe the first 30 days, if it's a piece of software is so crucial. How well you use it, how well you get acclimated to it, determines how happy you are with it. So they think at Solvvy, how do they enable brands to be able to deliver that kind of support and on boarding and guidance to say a first 30-day user, it's different than for a user who has been with the brand for 6 to 12 months and do that at scale, do that for millions of people.   So a good example would be they work with a very large meal kit delivery service, they deliver meals to your home. And he can deliver a different experience for someone who's ordering their very first meal, that's a little bit more hand holding, a little bit more like, “Hey, did everything come as you expected?” Because they're not used to some of the things about unpacking the ice and doing these things. But if somebody who ordered 12 meals in the last 2 months, he probably don't want to waste their time asking them if they know how to unpack the ice, he wants to ask them if they're looking for new recipes.   So the ability to do that at a massive scale, because you can't do that one by one, but technology allows you to say, I'm going to do that for everybody who's a first 30-day user is going to get this experience. So those are the kinds of things, so personalization and omni-channel are the two things that he thinks really, really excites him about the business.   Me: Two things came to mind when you were speaking just now. So the first thing you mentioned was omni-channel and I personally as a customer, I'm trying to wonder if there's no technology out there that let's say, for example, utilities is something we all have to pay every month, let's say our electricity bills, and you may talk to your electricity company, you may not talk to them very often, but there are times when you do have to interface with them. So let's say for example, you reach out to them on Twitter messenger because there was a power outage in your area and they communicated and said, okay, they've sent their engineers to sort it out and we should get service restored within X amount of time. And then four months later, you may need to contact them because you're trying to pay a bill, you're trying to use their platform to pay the bill, but you're having some challenges and when you call them on the phone, you can't get them, it would be good to know that they're able to connect those experiences. So they would say to you, “Oh, hi, Miss Grant, we haven't heard from you in four months, how have things been?” Because then it shows that they're paying attention to the last time someone was in contact with you, even if it wasn't the same agent that you dealt with four months ago. Is that possible?   Mahesh shared that it's not only possible, they're doing that all the time. There's kind of a divide in the middle, which is whether I know who you are, I don't right. Oftentimes, if you're going to an ecommerce site, you go to www.nike.com, you're probably not identifying yourself, and you may not want to identify yourself, you may not want them to know that it's Yanique.   But if you have an existing relationship with the brand, you still might come to the website of the utility company and not identify yourself but based on the type of question you're asking, they might say, “In order to help you, you'll have to identify yourself.” But he doesn't want to give that to you until he realizes you need that.   So, then he might say, “Can you please tell me the email address or can you log in?” And then based on the login, now he can come back and say, “Looks like you came in last week and asked this question. Are you asking about the same thing?”   And if you say no, then he can pop up and give you the more generic menus and say, “Hey, would you like to be able to do it?” So not only is it possible, they're doing it all the time with brands where they're personalizing the experience, this goes back to his notion of personalization is that sure it can understand prior interaction data and ask you if that's the case. Sometimes that can be intrusive, you may not care about something four months ago, it's not that.   But if you've called three times in the last week, chances are it's about the same issue.   And so at that point, what he needs to do is two things. One is he needs to make sure that every single thing that you told him on the first call or the first technology interaction with Solvvy, for example, it's been recorded properly to the agent, so that the next agent picks who it up, your second call a week later has everything in front of them and that's the key.   The key is not to make you repeat yourself, not make you repeat yourself and that's what technology enables. He'll give you one example. In the example with the meal kit is if you come in and say “Hey, help my mind steak is spoiled. I'm really angry.” Well, first of all, you're probably pretty upset because your dinner just got ruined, that's not a good experience, you might stop using the brand. But if he immediately pop-up and say, “I'm sorry to hear you have a missing or spoiled ingredient, can you just give me the information, this and it pops up your meal and it says which of the ingredients is missing or spoil, tell me what's wrong with it.” And immediately, he'd say he could shoot a credit back to your account. And then you can still talk to the agent if you want and complain more. That's a really good experience.   Unfortunately, it doesn't feed you your meal that night, but it does make you feel like the brand is there for you and really cares about doing something right, they can make an offer and give you two free meals or whatever it might be. But again, even if he passed you to an agent in that case, the agent knows that you called because your steak was spoiled, the ice had melted, that you were expecting to get it with two side dishes and you only got one and they start the conversation with you knowing all this, they're not asking you to repeat any of this. That's what they do.   Me: Brilliant. It's funny you mentioned the meal delivery service for home because I started using one recently and I find the young lady service to be so poor. When you call her she doesn't return your phone calls, when you send her a message on WhatsApp she takes forever to respond. She sends out her menus the week before like on a Friday and then you indicate to her how many days per week you wanted meals and which items you were interested in. And I think for last week I told her I was interested in the meal for Thursday. The meal wasn't delivered, I tried to call her on Thursday afternoon to ask her, “Weren't you supposed to deliver the meal today?” She hasn't responded to my WhatsApp. I called her twice, she hasn't responded to my call, frankly, I don't think I'm going to order from her again because either she's taken on more than she can chew or she's clearly not ready for this level of business because if you're dealing with people, and you're delivering meals to them and they've indicated to you what they want and when they want it, if you can't manage the communication portion, then maybe you need to outsource that for the business.   Mahesh stated that he thinks that's a brilliant point. He thinks that oftentimes people take on more than they can handle but they lose sight of the customer. He thinks it goes back to the customer like how often does she talk to you and ascertain how well you like the service, did she check in with you? Does she have a survey?   Because if she loses you, the thing she probably doesn't grasp yet and he thinks some small business owners don't always grasp this is how expensive it is to acquire a customer, to get Yanique to try it for the first time is a really hard thing. And so losing you is much worse than acquiring two new people, because they already gone through the effort of convincing you and you've already done it.   So this does speak to something that he thinks a lot of entrepreneurs can do better, which is to survey and get feedback from customers, because you may well be sympathetic to her if she was talking to you. If she told you honestly, “Hey, look, I'm really struggling with this but I'm really trying to make it work. I'm an entrepreneur and I want to make this work. I'm so sorry about your meal. Let me see what I can do.” You were probably willing to give her the sun, the moon and the stars to get it right. But if you don't hear from her, you just assume that she doesn't care.   Me: I'm actually thinking of deleting her number out of my phone because I don't think I want to do business with her anymore. Her communication is extremely poor and her food, it's not amazing but it's good and it's healthy and it's a better choice than me having to go and have fast food for sure. But the challenge, as I said, is she needs to work out that aspect of it or she's going to lose more than one customer.   Mahesh agreed and stated that he thinks the other thing that he would say that technology allows us to do with a lot of the brands is to be predictive. So, if for example, Yanique is coming in frequently with questions about certain kinds of issue, they do something that they call category analytics for businesses, where they look at every single question that has ever been asked for that brand and they grouped them into big categories and so they can tell the brand, the food kit company that you're missing ingredient issues have spiked 23% in the last two weeks, something's up, they don't know what it is because they're not in their factory watching.   But they can drill in and they can tap into that, they can double click on it and they can see all the actual expressions by the user and they can do keyword searches, they can say show me everything with the word ice in it. So if the ice is melting, maybe they go back to the warehouse people and say, you need to package the ice better. So those are the kinds of insights that businesses often lack and it's very difficult to do because technology allows you to do it without having to have a human being looked at every single issue, it automatically categorizes all the questions.   Where Can We Find Mahesh Online   Website – www.solvvy.com LinkedIn – Mahesh Ram Twitter - @solvvyinc Twitter - @rammahesh   Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Mahesh Uses   When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Mahesh shared that he actually has a bunch of them. But the one that recently came up as he was reading the book by the very, very famous Roman Emperor, Philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, he had written a book 2000 years ago, so it's a long time. But everything in there so timeless because he's really does a lot of reflection on his life.   The quote that he said, which he thoughts was really great was, “Adapt yourself to the life you have been given; and truly love the people with whom destiny has surrounded you.” And he thought that was just such a nice sort of simple way of saying, we're all given something and it's up to us to make the most of it, we keep looking around for something better, chances are you're never going to find it and the people too. So he thought that was a really nice quote.   Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest   Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners    Links   The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson   The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience   Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”   The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

In this episode, Richard talks to Jon Littlechild, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer at Recursyv. Recursyv is a fully managed integration service that ensures data is visible and usable in all of your apps be they cloud or on-premise – think data where you want it. Jon explains exactly what Recursyv do, how they got into the MSP (managed service provider) space and gives some real-life examples of how they help businesses. They also discuss how the solution is deployed, and how vendors can partner with the company. Jon explains the possibilities for MSPs to offer Recursyv as a product to their own clients, and reassures Richard that they take security extremely seriously. Mentioned in this episode: Hubspot https://www.piesync.com/ (Piesync) https://app.asana.com/ (Asana) https://azure.microsoft.coopener noreferrer" target="_blank">FreshbooksFreshdeskHarmony PSAKeap (formerly Infusionsoft)Visit www.recursyv.com for more information, and check out the 50 tools they integrate with here www.recursyv.com/our-connectors. You can email Jon directly at jon.littlechild@recursyv.com or connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlittlechild/https://www.tubblog.co.uka6bcd24e-2104-4488-aeee-262dab73b32eRichard TubbSun, 18 Jul 2021 18:00:00 +010030:44nofull285In this episode, Richard talks to Jon Littlechild, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer at Recursyv. Recursyv is a fully managed integration service that ensures data is visible and usable in all of your apps be they cloud or on-premise – think data where you want it. Jon explains exactly what Recursyv do, how they got into the MSP (managed service provider) space and gives some real-life examples of how they help businesses. They also discuss how the solution is deployed, and how vendors can partner with the company. Jon explains the possibilities for MSPs to offer Recursyv as a product to their own clients, and reassures Richard that they take security extremely seriously. Mentioned in this episode: Hubspot https://www.piesync.com/ (Piesync) https://app.asana.com/ (Asana) https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/ (Azure) Storage https://calendly.com/ (Calendly) https://www.freshbooks.com/ (Freshbooks) https://freshdesk.com/ (Freshdesk) https://www.harmonypsa.com/ (Harmony PSA) https://keap.com/ (Keap) (formerly Infusionsoft) Visit http://www.recursyv.com (www.recursyv.com) for more information, and check out the 50 tools they integrate with here http://www.recursyv.com/our-connectors (www.recursyv.com/our-connectors). You can email Jon directly a

➡️ For More Episodes Visit: successstorypodcast.com A throwback to when I spoke at the Freshdesk, Refresh Connect Summit. We spoke about narratives... what they are, why they're important and how brands can use them. Tweet Me: twitter.com/scottdclary My Newsletter: newsletter.roioverload.com/subscribe

My name is Girish Mathrubootham and I am the Founder and CEO of Freshworks (previously known as Freshdesk). I am 36 years old, married and live with my wife and two boys in Chennai, India. This is the story of how I quit my comfortable job and launched my own startup. Hope you like it.

From the transcript:Today for Episode 28, I’m delighted to have with me Dr Naras Eechambadi, who’s an expert in the use of data science and analytics to drive marketing. This is relevant because the majority of startups fail not because of poor or inappropriate technology but lack of innovative and creative marketing. But Naras’ personal journey through management consulting and the two startups he founded, grew and exited honorably from, is also very interesting. Let me quickly go through his  bio: engineering at IIT Madras to a doctorate in marketing at UT Austin to a leading ad agency (BBDO) to management consulting at Booz Allen and McKinsey; a senior executive at First Union, and then a successful serial entrepreneur. And an adjunct faculty at Berkeley, U Connecticut, Yale, Duke, North Carolina. On his career journey, the importance of networking, and the common threadMy  network has always been invaluable in helping me either find opportunities or have the opportunities find me… At UT, Austin  I made friends with a number of doctoral students and faculty in the marketing department and they convinced me to change my major from Operations Research to Marketing.   I am really glad I made that shift.   I love analytics and marketing and that has indeed been a common thread throughout my varied career and roles.   How companies are making the transition from services to products/platformsTwo great examples of companies right here in Chennai that have done [that] successfully are Zoho and FreshDesk.   I think we will see more of these in the future.How he managed good exits from both the startups be foundedFortunately for us, the acquiring company was not impacted by the financial crisis and they felt our company fit a strategic need.   So the acquisition driven by strategic rather than financial considerations.    They made us a very generous offer and stuck with it even while the markets were imploding all around us [in 2008] …   The second company i built was in the same space but it was a software platform. The pandemic hit some of our clients hard right at the beginning, which impacted our business.     Fortunately, we were in a very attractive space and were able to generate multiple offers to buy the company and manage a decent exit [in 2020].   On consumer-centered marketing in IndiaBecause this is still an emerging, growth market most companies are still riding the wave through traditional mass marketing and mass media approaches.   Most B2C companies in this market are still not data savvy.   They really do not know who their best customers are, so do not really treat them differently.     Their knowledge is often limited to mobile phone numbers and email addresses.  They use these channels to bombard their customers and prospects alike with often irrelevant offers and messages. Data and customer insight are still an afterthought. Companies that decide to take it seriously will be able to build great businesses in the future.On prospects in India, and Asia more broadlyThere is a palpable energy, positive attitude and infectious optimism among people here, not just in tech but across the board  India and Asia are still at the initial stages of a broader renaissance.  On his immediate future plansI do enjoy mentoring and advising entrepreneurs and senior executives in larger companies. I am starting to connect with the local startup ecosystem in Chennai, particularly those linked to IITM Research Park.   I look forward to engaging actively with them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

Smrithi is a product leader passionate about marrying great user experiences with technology to deliver business value. With over a decade of experience, Smrithi has spent her past 7 years with Freshworks in their product function, working on products like Freshdesk, Freshchat, and Freshcaller, Freshconnect. In this episode, we discussed how do you go about deciding what new products to build? What are the building blocks needed to make these a success? How do you measure the success of new products? When is it right for companies to start exploring multiple products? All this and more with Smrithi on this episode. Connect with Smrithi on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/smrithiparameswar/

More often the customer-comes-first mentality becomes a part of business strategies. A sound understanding of customers is key to outstanding customer service and returning, loyal ... The post 21 Best Freshdesk Apps to Supercharge Your Support appeared first on Help Desk Migration Service.

With the world shifting towards software tools, the general climate is becoming more and more flooded with new entries. Indeed, as soon as there is ... The post ServiceNow vs. Freshdesk — There’s More Than Meets The Eye appeared first on Help Desk Migration Service.

Today's episode is part of our Micro-SaaS Edition of the Trends Series. Micro-SaaS NewsletterWe're going to explore this upcoming trend of Micro-SaaS and talk to a few people who've built Micro-SaaS businesses. What is Micro-SaaS you ask? SaaS is a business that Sells Software as a Service and follows a subscription business model to accrue recurring revenue. Over the last 10-15 years, we've seen some huge organizations being built in the SaaS Industry. Salesforce.com, Hubspot, in the US, Freshdesk, Zoho in India are all examples of giant SaaS companies with revenues in 100s of Millions of dollars and in some cases, even Billions.Micro-SaaS on the other hand is about focusing on a niche and building a software to serve their needs. A small addressable market that has enough opportunities for you to build a high margin, low capital investment business . To know more about Micro-SaaS, checkout our Trends Newsletter. Over the couple of years, entrepreneurs across the globe have built Micro-SaaS businesses with revenues in Millions of Dollars. We have a story of someone who did just that sitting out of India. This is a two part of episode. In the first part we covered Gaurav's journey so far and how he built JustCall. In this part, we go deep into the 20 point Micro-SaaS Playbook that Gaurav has created. Gaurav's TwitterGaurav's LinkedinGaurav's 20 Step PlaybookAt The Indian Dream, we would love to hear from you! If you have any questions or just want to connect with us– please feel free to join our WhatsApp Group Here!

Welcome to the Micro-Saas week at The Indian Dream Podcast. We're going to explore this upcoming trend of Micro-SaaS and talk to a few people who've built Micro-SaaS businesses. What is Micro-SaaS you ask? SaaS is a business that Sells Software as a Service and follows a subscription business model to accrue recurring revenue. Over the last 10-15 years, we've seen some huge organizations being built in the SaaS Industry. Salesforce.com, Hubspot, in the US, Freshdesk, Zoho in India are all examples of giant SaaS companies with revenues in 100s of Millions of dollars and in some cases, even Billions. Micro-SaaS on the other hand is about focusing on a niche and building a software to serve their needs. A small addressable market that has enough opportunities for you to build a high margin, low capital investment business . To know more about Micro-SaaS, checkout our Trends Newsletter. Over the couple of years, entrepreneurs across the globe have built Micro-SaaS businesses with revenues in Millions of Dollars. We have a story of someone who did just that sitting out of India.  Gaurav Sharma has a strong bias for action, you'll always find him building something on the internet. Most of his adult life has been spent building different kinds of technology products. In college, he built a WinX, a virtual stock market software. This spread like wildfire across different colleges and at one point  the product had 2L users. This software led to a job at an Investment Bank that Gaurav ended up quitting fairly quickly. At that point, our man had decided that we was going to choose the entrepreneurship route and going to build products!After experimenting with a few products, he built an Analytics for Pinterest and coined the term Pinfluence. This went viral, literally overnight because a few big media houses covered the app. The global media attention resulted in an attractive offer from Startup Studio in Los Angeles called Science.Inc. Gaurav then moved to LA and worked Science Inc. and lived the good the Sunny LA life building another business that would scale to Millions of dollars in revenue. In 2015, the urge to startup again grew stronger and this time, he moved back to India to build here.Since then, He's built JustCall.io, a Cloud Phone System that allows you to monitor and log all the calls that your sales and service teams do. Over the last few years, he's used his experience to scale this to $5m in Annual Revenue. He has also launched Helpwise.co, a Shared Inbox for all customer conversations across different platforms. he's setup SaaS Labs, a studio similar to Science Inc where he builds and invests in other SaaS companies. All of this while being bootstrapped! What a fascinating journey.This is a two part of episode. In the first part we cover Gaurav's journey so far and how he built JustCall. In the second part, we go deep into the 20 point Micro-SaaS Playbook that Gaurav has created. Gaurav's TwitterGaurav's LinkedinAt The Indian Dream, we would love to hear from you! If you have any questions or just want to connect with us– please feel free to join our WhatsApp Group Here!

In this episode, Richard talks to Andrew Wallace, Managing Director and Chief Product Officer of SmileBack, a customer satisfaction platform for managed service providers and rated the number one integration on ConnectWise.  They talk about how SmileBack’s offerings have evolved since Andrew came on board, how the tool’s simple rating system increases customer engagement, and how MSPs can use the data it produces to make positive changes in their business.  They also talk about supporting staff and customers during times of uncertainty, who’s inspired Andrew in business, and dig into what exactly CSAT and NPS are, and why they matter.  Richard and Andrew mentioned the following companies during their conversation:  ConnectWise (http://www.connectwise.com) Autotask (http://www.autotask.com) Zendesk (https://www.zendesk.co.uk/) Slack (https://slack.com) Zapier (https://zapier.com) Brightgauge (http://www.brightgauge.com) Freshdesk (https://freshdesk.com/) Captain’s Chair (https://captainschairit.com/) Remote Connect (https://blog.smileback.com/remoteconnect/) virtual conference Miro (https://miro.com/) The Art of Learning (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Learning-Journey-Optimal-Performance/dp/0743277465/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+art+of+learning&qid=1602750051&s=books&sr=1-1) by Josh Waitzkin You can find out more about SmileBack on their website: andrew@smileback.com (mailto:andrew@smileback.com). He loves to talk about all things SmileBack.

Sometimes the best way to break into a new career or industry is to do the work for free. Adam Rogers did this when he decided to pivot his teaching career into marketing. All he asked for in return was a testimonial or a reference for his resume. Over a year, he built up his portfolio and he landed a full-time content marketing role at Kayako. Today, Adam does content marketing for Shopify. We caught up with him recently to discuss his journey. Show Notes: 0:40 - How Adam got started in content marketing. 4:06 - Building up a portfolio when you’re just starting out. 8:24 - How to spot red flags as a freelancer to ensure you’re not taken advantage of by a client. 12:45 - From intern to manager in less than a year at Kayako.   16:35 - Learning from other content marketers and advocating for yourself. 22:27 - Why good content marketing can make the rest of your marketing more sustainable.  26:20 - Adam shares how content marketing looks in his current role with Shopify.  32:01 - The strategy of republishing. 34:20 - How to handle link building and spammy backlink requests.  38:24 - Leveling up your content marketing. 42:40 - Thanks for listening! Be on the lookout for next week’s episode. If you have questions or suggestions, you can find us on Twitter @growthmachine__. Links: Boston Content Podcast (0:58) Kayako (3:29) Shopify (17:08) Zendesk (17:15) Freshdesk (17:24) Groove HQ (17:26) Sumo (17:54) NerdWallet (31:13) Find us on Twitter: Adam: @AdamRogersUK Amanda: @amandanat Growth Machine: @growthmachine__

My guest today needs no introduction. In fact, he’d probably prefer it that way. Sure he’s in the Podcast Hall of Fame, runs serval successful podcasts, has helped countless podcasters get their start with his company School of Podcasting, and is pretty much a legend in the space but as you will see he is an advocate for getting into what he calls the “meat and potatoes” — meaning lead with value, not a long introduction.Here are some highlights from the show:Common mistakes with Intros that create a bad first impressionThings that make him throw up in his mouth (just a little bit)Interviewing strategies How to get real feedback, not "mom feedback"How to “fan the flames” and personally connect with your audienceIdeas for monetizationLighting round to get a snapshot into his favorite tools and platformsLinks and Resources:00:15 School of Podcasting00:24 "Live with values, not a long introduction"03:40 Erik K. Johnson07:07 Blue Yeti Mic08:04 Anchor09:30 Conan O'Brien's Advertisers19:01 Eric Nuzum Book - Make Noise19:07 "If you have somebody on your show figure out what's the one question that only they can answer"34:27 Loom Tool35:13 Jessica Rhodes podcast38:25 "Great interviews are based on great listening"42:08 Profit from Your Podcast Book49:05 Membership Academy49:45 Freshdesk 49:57 Geniuslink tool50:45 Buy Me a Coffee Tool51:24 Storyworthy book53:30 Podcast Review ShowDave's new book just released: Profit From Your PodcastHis podcasts:Ask the Podcast CoachPodcast Rodeo ShowPodcast Review Show

Adopting new tools can help you save time, energy, and optimize and improve your business processes.  However, it can also take a lot of time to research, find them and then experiment with how to best utilize them. In this episode, we share the tools that we are experimenting within our business and why we’ve chosen to use them.  Buying new tools is like buying a car. If you learn to drive and pay the maintenance, upkeep, and insurance, that car will take you on adventures. But if you just keep it in your driveway, it’s never going to work. Whatever tools you choose to use for your business, it doesn’t have to be high tech it just has to be effective and a good fit for you and your business.  What new tools have you implemented so far? WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER IN THIS EPISODE: Boom Arm (5:45) Blue Yeti Microphone (7:20) Zencastr (9:00) Squadcast (10:33) ClickUp (11:25) FreshDesk (13:14) CRM (15:46) Good Notes (16:20) Rocket Book Fusion (19:20) Second Screen (21:45) Mophie (23:34) Battery pack (24:58) Black Magic Switcher (25:36) Join the discussion thread for this episode over at The Thought Leaders Business Lab Community Facebook Group. For full show notes and links visit: https://samanthariley.global/podcast/197-experimenting-with-new-business-tools

Intro Randy discusses what he believes to be the best way to get your product or service up and running over the internet. Announcements • Relating to this episode, I have launched my own products and services on my own. • The Video stream portion of the podcast, as you may have noticed, is not every week. Think of it as more of a treat - where you don't see my face every moment! I don't want to see my face that much. It starts with WordPress - Sort of. • First really just need your domain name and webhosting (and of course an eMail host such as Microsoft 365 that I've now mentioned on quite a few episodes of the Manly Hanley Podcast). ○ I recommend to go with a host such as GoDaddy, Bluehost or HostGator ○ All of these hosts will offer some sort of C Panel that makes it super simple to install WordPress on your webserver. § The reason I mention creating your own domain with your WordPress install is because it gives you more control □ For instance, you could sign up directly through WordPress.com, and have them host it for you. But if you decide later that you don't like WordPress, it's not going to be as easy to switch to another platform since you're hosting by them ® The beauty of the WordPress platform is that they allow you to install it on your own web server They describe it in detail on their site, but I've copied and pasted into my notes here so I can just read it for you. However, the link is in the show notes. - https://wordpress.org/about/ - They call it their "WordPress Bill of Rights". I love it. Totally optional Step! - Setup a Ticketing System • Why use a ticketing system when I can just use my email? Because email sucks for efficiency in my opinion. Think of a ticketing system as a great way to centralize the your solutions to peoples' issues that you're hired to solve. Sure, you can search your email box and pull up the email thread, but it's way slower and less-efficient than a ticketing system that's designed to support users, report their issues/metrics, and automate common problems. A ticketing system offers a transparent view of what's happening (like a big picture) for your company, to see where the ball is being dropped, and what you can do as that company to improve things. • I've used numerous ticketing systems and I find Freshdesk to be the best one, as far as customization and reporting. Start Adding (needed) Plugins to Your WordPress Site • Now that you've figured out how you're going to support your users, you can plug those components into your WordPress setup. ○ WordPress is so popular, that it's very-likely that plugin exists for the software that you're wanting to use to support your customers. ○ For instance, I mentioned Freshdesk official widget that you can find in the plugins section of your WordPress site. The plugin is so easy to configure, it'll probably just take you a couple of minutes. Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/freshdesk-support/ § Once I had the plugin installed and filled out the info, a floating widget appeared on my website, that will all me to provide instant support to a user that requests it. WooCommerce is probably the easiest way to build a customizable payment system (on your own site) that I've ever seen. WooCommerce brands itself as "an eCommerce toolkit that helps you sell anything. Beautifully.". Their description makes them sound a little Apple like. I can make any product and call it beautiful. The way I played that drum beat before the chorus, it was beautifully-executed. This iPhone is a beautiful rectangle. No. .. Flowers are beautiful, don't push it. I'd like to thank you for putting time aside to listen to the podcast.

Murali Satagopan is a strong marketer and storyteller who loves communication and solving problems in the web space. He founded a company, got funded, grew it big and then had an unsuccessful exit where he left with no money and lots of experience. He used that experience at Freshdesk to help grow their marketplace. Product GTM, Content Marketing, telling great stories and crafting creative marketing campaigns are some of his many strengths. He is currently Head of ISV Partnerships and Partner Marketing at Freshworks Marketplace where he handles marketing for the Freshworks Marketplace - one of the hottest horizontals at Freshworks.  Murali is also a standup comedian with a strong theatre background. He was invited to the Short+Sweet Festival in Sydney where he performed.  During this interview we cover:  The importance of leveraging strategic partnerships and integrations to grow your startup  How an “unsuccessful exit” was the foundational experience for a successful  Marketplace Working beyond the scope for personal and professional growth  The do's and dont's when building a product.  Trying again to start a business VS joining a company  Why to use Freshworks as a leveraging channel for growth  COVID-19  customer trends and unique approaches to problem solving  How can a SaaS founder or marketer validate whether a partner program will be worthwhile for their SaaS?  The 2 best practices to build better products  Links and mentions: FreshWorks website  Get in touch with Murali:  Murali's LinkedIn Profile  Murali's Twitter Profile  More about Akeel: 

In 2020, we do not only have tools that are competing with one another but also tools from the same vendor competing to be the ... The post What Is the Difference Between Freshdesk and Freshservice? appeared first on Help Desk Migration Service.

PITCHCAMP.in Presents "Sales for Entrepreneurs" Series, where we bring on Founders to share their Sales, Journey. Konark is the CEO and founder of MountBlue Technologies a coding bootcamp based in Bangalore. He also runs sales for his startup. They have ~150 customers, primarily new age tech companies and startups. Some of them are Zomato, Rivigo, Freshdesk, Microsoft, Cleartax, Naukri, 99acres, Exotel, Upgrad, Yourstory, Magicpin, Dailyhunt, Embibe, Mahindra, Instamojo, Belong, Yulu, etc We will talk to Konark on the following areas 1. Why Founders have to be the first Sales person on the team 2. How did they acquire their initial customers and dealing with rejections 3. Lead Gen that worked & important of F2F meetings 4. Pricing, Negotiations & Contracts 5. Impact of Covid to business, trainees and customersHow I acquired 150+ startup customers for my "Engineers Factory" Services --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/web3verse/message

“En mai 2015, lors d’une conférence de Xavier Niel, j’ai décidé de complètement basculer de WooCommerce à PrestaShop et de diviser le prix des produits par trois. Ça a payé ! En 2015, on a fait 180k€ et 1M€ en 2016.”Le nouvel invité du Panier, Anatole Rozan est le fondateur de MaCoque, le leader français de la vente de coques et d’accessoires pour smartphones. Avant même de passer son bac, quand il n’avait que 17 ans, Anatole a créé MaCoque depuis sa chambre d’adolescent et il était loin d’imaginer le succès de sa plateforme. Quelques années plus tard, accompagné par ses deux parents, il réalise plus de 2 millions d’euro de CA et vend ses produits à plus de 400 000 clients. Cette entreprise familiale est auto-financée et propose désormais à la vente plus de 300 nouveaux produits chaque semaine.“On a toujours l’impression qu’il faut être expert en SEO, mais globallement c’est assez simple, il suffit : d’avoir un site rapide, une expérience utilisateur simple et de poster du contenu régulièrement.”Avec Laurent Kretz, fondateur de CosaVostra, ils retracent les prémices de MaCoque, un blog tenu par Anatole et son frère depuis lequel ils lançaient des jeux concours notamment pour gagner des coques de téléphone. Du changement de CMS en mai 2015 au référencement naturel en passant par la volonté de ne distribuer qu’en DTC, Anatole explique tous les choix qu’ils ont fait depuis quelques années pour faire croître sa plateforme. Enfin, il revient sur les autres business qu’il a monté en parallèle et notamment Dealy, une marketplace dédiée à la vente de produits français, et aborde le boost qu’il a connu pendant la crise du CoVid-19 ainsi que ses futurs challenges. Et si ça ne vous suffisait pas, Anatole nous livre ses chiffres et les outils qu’ils utilisent au quotidien comme PrestaShop, Zendesk ou encore Freshdesk. Ils y parlent aussi d’anciens épisodes du Panier :#23 – Wing.eu : 7M€ de CA et 150K colis par mois sur le premier kilomètre#29 – Shapeheart : Youtube, Amazon et influence : la recette pour optimiser son lancement#37 – Merci Handy : Produits cleans, licornes, arcs-en-ciels et 3 millions de produits vendus en 2019Pour découvrir tout ça, c’est par ici si vous préférez iTunes, par là si vous préférez Deezer ou encore ici si vous préférez Spotify.

There are many types of help desk solutions out there and not all of them share the same feature set. Some are created to provide bespoke communication capabilities, others are made with automation in mind from the very start, and then there are those that try both. Two such systems are LiveAgent and Freshdesk. Regular ... The post Can LiveAgent outmatch Freshdesk? — We Know the Answer appeared first on Help Desk Migration Service.

In 2020, we not only have tools that are competing with one another but tools from the same vendor competing to be the very best. And who wins at the end of this competition? Well, consumers of course. Wrong! The thing is if you see two platforms from the same developer, all you get is ... The post The Differences Between Freshdesk vs Freshservice appeared first on Help Desk Migration Service.

Contents The History and Background of Zendesk and Freshdesk The Pricing of Zendesk and Freshdesk The Notable Features of Freshdesk The Notable Features of Zendesk The Main Drawbacks of both platforms What is common? What is different? For rival companies like Freshdesk and Zendesk, the ongoing competition may seem exhausting. But for us, customers, it […] The post Freshdesk vs Zendesk: How to Choose from Two Leaders? appeared first on Help Desk Migration Service.

Tu cliente… ¿dónde está? En las redes, y lo sabes. ¿Cómo no mimar, entonces, este canal como base fundamental de tu estrategia de atención al cliente? Y, para que lo consigas, nuestros faros en lo que a social media se refiere, Sheila Martín, Head of Social Media, y Alicia Medina, Social Media Manager de esta, nuestra casa, te lo ponen fácil. Escucha este podcast y entérate de cómo debes responder a los usuarios, cómo crear un protocolo de actuación y las herramientas que te pueden ayudar a gestionar las incidencias o tickets. Así que pilla tus cascos y deja que la información que va a mejorar la atención al cliente de tu proyecto fluya de tus oídos... ¡a tu empresa! ¡Y también puedes vernos en YouTube! En este episodio hablaremos de: -Cuándo usar las redes sociales como parte de atención al cliente. -Importancia de saber escuchar en redes. -Beneficios para tu negocio de usar las redes como atención al cliente. -Redes que utilizar (y que no) para atención al cliente. -Cómo establecer un protocolo de actuación. Importancia y objetivos de este protocolo. Partes de un protocolo de actuación en redes. -Gestión de crisis en redes sociales. -Herramientas para la gestión de tickets o incidencias en redes. Enlaces y recursos recomendados en el programa: -Artículo de Buffer sobre cómo dos equipos gestionan la misma bandeja de entrada: https://buffer.com/resources/social-media-inbox -Herramientas para gestión de tickets desde redes sociales: Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/es/ Lithium: https://khoros.com/ Chrysalis: http://www.socialmediacrm.es/wordpress/ Freshdesk: https://freshdesk.com/es/ Sprout: https://sproutsocial.com/es/ Conversocial: https://www.conversocial.com/ Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.es/ Zoho Desk: https://www.zoho.com/es-xl/desk/

Today's interview is with Girish Mathrubootham, who is founder and CEO of Freshdesk, an online customer support Saas software solution. Girish joins me today to talk about how to turn customer service into a marketing opportunity/asset. This interview follows on from my recent interview: Most websites fail to facilitate the customer journey – Interview with Mark Lancaster of SDL – and is number ninety-two in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today's interview is with Nick Chater, who is Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School and co-founder of the research consultancy Decision Technology. Nick joins me today to talk about behavioural science, how our brains are hot-wired to make us all storytellers and how we can apply lessons from behavioural science to help us deliver better customer service and a better customer experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview: It's not about the channels in your support, it's about the support in your channels – Interview with Girish Mathrubootham of Freshdesk – and is number ninety-three in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

“Collaboration is the next phase of marketing.” And Vlad Calus knows a thing or two about collaboration. A serial entrepreneur, Vlad’s latest venture is as co-founder of Planable, a social media management tool built around the need for greater collaboration among internal and external marketing teams. We discussed all of this and more on this week’s episode of the On Brand podcast. About Vlad Calus Vlad Calus is the co-founder @ Planable, the command center of social media collaboration for marketing teams, digital agencies and freelancers to collaborate with their teammates & clients on content calendar in the most visual way. Planable is used by more than 5000 brands worldwide, including Mini, BMW, Volkswagen, SkyTeam, Wendy’s and many others. Vlad founded two non-profits at the age of 16, then dropped out of college, moved to another country with two 2 his friends, built Planable (Techstars London ’17) at 19 y.o and became an honoree Forbes 30 Under 30 at 22 y.o. And he’s been featured as a guest writer & marketer by multiple publications including Social Media Examiner, Entrepreneur, WeRSM, Freshdesk, Subsign, Digital Agency Network and many others. Episode Highlights How did Vlad and his partners develop the idea for Planable? “All of us worked in digital agencies before. We were creating spreadsheets and Google Docs. It was so frustrating.” In search of a better tool, they ended up creating one in Planable. How does founding a nonprofit relate to founding a tech startup? It’s all connected and collaborative. “I wanted to solve problems.” This throughline is a part of every aspect of Vlad’s work. What brand has made Vlad smile recently? Vlad pointed to the accelerator Techstars. Specifically, he noted that he was partnering with them to write a new book. “I never thought of myself as an author.” But he does now and that brings a smile to his face. To learn more, check out the Planabale website and connect with Vlad on LinkedIn. As We Wrap … Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you’d like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. On Brand is sponsored by my book Brand Now. Discover the seven dynamics to help your brand stand out in our crowded, distracted world. Order now and get special digital extras. Learn more. Subscribe to the podcast – You can subscribe to the show via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, and RSS. Rate and review the show – If you like what you’re hearing, head over to Apple Podcasts and click that 5-star button to rate the show. And, if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review. This helps others find the podcast. OK. How do you rate and review a podcast? Need a quick tutorial on leaving a rating/review in iTunes? Check this out. Until next week, I’ll see you on the Internet!

For several years, many help and service desk solutions either evolved or ceased to exist. Some of the customer support software got incremental updates, others received a full overhaul. Some get both incremental and major updates for customer management all the time. Two such systems are HappyFox and Freshdesk. Both are considered to be very […] The post HappyFox vs Freshdesk Breakdown appeared first on Help Desk Migration Service.

Our partnership with Freshworks began over two years ago. Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk) offers customer service tools that are easy to use and scale. Help Desk Migration wants to give companies the freedom to use the help desk that meets their needs best. The two worlds collided. Having migrated terabytes worth of customer support data to […] The post Ganesh Balaji on Partnership with Help Desk Migration and What it Takes to Become a Freshworks Partner appeared first on Help Desk Migration Service.

Both Freshdesk and Help Scout are veterans in the help desk industry. As the world population grows, businesses need to keep up with the ever-growing demands. And a help desk is just one of the many requirements for a successful business. Help desks like Freshdesk and Help Scout are made up of several tools or […] The post Here’s Our Freshdesk vs Help Scout Comparison From Top to Bottom appeared first on Help Desk Migration Service.

Vlad Calus founded two non-profits at the age of 16, then dropped out of college, moved to another country with two 2 his friends, built Planable (Techstars London ’17) at 19 y.o and became an honoree Forbes 30 Under 30 at 22 y.o. And he’s been featured as a guest writer & marketer by multiple publications including Social Media Examiner, WeRSM, Freshdesk, Subsign, Digital Agency Network and many others.   Quote To Remember:  "Get into the habit of creating new content every day."     What You'll Learn: Becoming more driven Strategies to get more customers The debate around creating versus marketing content Using LinkedIn to get more business Habits for success   Key Links From The Episode:  Want to see how we can work together? Schedule a free strategy call here. Jobber  Planable Slack Vlad's LinkedIn

Are you tired of dorm food and want to avoid the mad rush of finding a place to live off campus before next semester? There’s got to be an easier way for students to rent houses and apartments. It’s a problem that many entrepreneurs have tried to solve.  Today, I am talking to Dave Spooner of Innago. There are few incentives for landlords to digitize their rentals. Landlord demand for a listing platform is low, but there definitely is high demand for better tools to effectively manage and communicate with tenants.  You’ll Learn... [02:50] Tenant Management Software: Making landlords lives easier with online rental payments, tracking payments, basic accounting, lease signing, and tenant screening.  [04:14] Understanding Innago: Flexible, effective, simple, and intuitive software for landlords and property managers.  [06:05] Learning Curve: Competitors’ software requires expertise and certification. [07:32] Who wants to waste time adopting ugly software?  [08:58 #1 Priority: Intuitiveness in software; speed is love language. [10:20] Different portals for different people to be more productive. [12:16] Find balance, and avoid too fast feature creep. [13:14] Possible future integration with Zapier and other third-party tools? [14:22] FAQs: Access permissions and pricing for landlords and tenants. [17:25] Innago offers unique and unmatched level of support. Tweetables Innago software is flexible, effective, simple, and intuitive. You shouldn't need a certification to use property management software. Choose features that matter, and get the biggest bang for your buck.  Big believers in early success begets future success.  Resources Innago Buildium AppFolio Propertyware Rent Manager.  Jason Fried of Basecamp Zapier 1099 Form Freshdesk HubSpot Intercom DGS 62: Property Management Accounting with Taylor Hou DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to another DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the unique challenges, daily variety, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses, and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.  Today's guest, I'm hanging out here with Dave Spooner of Innago’s. Dave, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. Dave: Hi Jason, thanks so much for having me. Jason: It's great to have you. Dave, we always like to get into our guest first, help us understand who Dave is, and how you kind of got into the space that you're in, and give us a little background. Dave: Yeah, absolutely, I'd be happy to, and thanks for the intro. I graduated from university in 2013. I kind of already had that entrepreneur spirit. Me and a couple other folks got together and we wanted to solve the problem of finding a place to live. We're not the first people to try to solve it, and I'm sure we won't be the last to try to solve it, but we want to make it easier for students to rent houses and apartments off campus. A lot of those markets are still mostly or fully offline, and there's usually a mad rush to try and find a place to live. We recognize those issues and we tried to solve them. As we were going about doing that, we kind of quickly realized that there's not a lot of incentives for landlords to digitize their portfolio. There's not a lot of incentives for landlords in student housing to really do a whole heck of a lot, but helps the students out because they're already going to fill other properties, which is really high occupancy in student housing.  We kind of pivoted, and listened to the market, and realized that there wasn't a huge demand on the landlord side for this listing platform, but there was a lot of demand for better tools to manage tenants, and better tools to manage and communicate with those tenants, and to manage their businesses. That's kind of how I got my foundation. I worked on that listing platform for a few years, learned a lot about the market, and then myself and the CTO of that company started and founded Innago in 2017, and we've been hard at work trying to make lives easier for landlords ever since. Jason: How do you make lives easier for landlords? Dave: Innago is tenant management software, and we call it tenant management software instead of property management software because we really believe that the focus should be on managing tenants, managing those relationships, and managing those personalities. Innago, of course, includes a lot of your classic property management tools like online rental payments, tracking payments, basic accounting, online lease signing, tenant screening, etcetera. But at its heart, it's a communication platform. It's something that makes it easier to interact with and manage those tenants. We believe that having that, having that foundation enables landlords to become better landlords, and property managers become better property managers. Jason: I haven't heard of the software before, is this something that there's a good amount of property managers already using? Is this geared towards landlords, or is this geared towards property management businesses? Help me and the listeners understand Innago here. Dave: Yeah, absolutely. We work with both. We work with landlords as small as one unit, and landlords in the thousands of units. The software is really flexible, it’s effective, but it's also simple and intuitive for somebody who just owns some properties on the side, works a normal nine-to-five, and then manages at nights and on weekends, and for a landlord or property manager that's fully dedicated. We work with both property managers and landlords. We predominantly work in the residential space. We do a lot of student housing landlords, given my background, and my partner's background. We also have some commercial landlords as well. It's a really powerful, and flexible tool, and we work with all sorts of different clients. Jason: Cool, that's exciting. Help people understand, because a lot of the listeners in our audience probably already have a property management software, I mean, probably likely. They're probably already with Buildium, AppFolio, Propertyware, maybe Rent Manager. They're probably with one of these guys. But nobody's ever fully happy with their property management. Dave: Right, of course. Jason: So help those listening, how can they see where you fit into the market in relation to these? Dave: Well, yeah, it's funny you say that. I was actually listening to one of your earlier podcasts with Taylor, and he has the accounting services, the consulting accounting services, and one of the things that he mentioned, they work exclusively with AppFolio users, and kind of what they said is, “We only hire people that have worked at AppFolio, and we will only work with AppFolio at this stage because that's the only thing that we're comfortable with,” because it's this monolithic behemoth that you need expertise to even navigate, right? Jason: Right. Dave: That's definitely true for AppFolio, and it's true for a lot of the other software. There's a huge learning curve there. The first time we hire somebody on Innago, we always sit them down, and we jump on LinkedIn, and we do a little exercise, or research the companies. We're not looking for employees of those companies, or even their company page, we’re actually looking for employees at property management companies that their job title, their role is like the AppFolio expert on T, because you need certification to understand how to use it. That was kind of the initial kernel Innago came out of is, you shouldn't need a certification to use property management software. It should be like picking up Gmail for the first time, or picking up iPhone for the first time. It should be intuitive, and simple, and elegant, and powerful, and flexible to work with a lot of different users in a lot of ways. That's really our difference, in the way that we're approaching the market, putting a lot of time, and thought into the features, and the way that they interact, and the way that the user interacts with those features. We're really proud of the features that we do have. It is an ongoing product, and we're constantly adding more. I think for a lot of property managers, and landlords on the higher end, they're going to find at this stage that it might not be a perfect fit, but for those folks with small to mid size portfolios, it's got a lot of really great stuff that it will work well for them. Jason: Yeah, I'm in total agreement. When it comes to software, the number one challenge tends to be adoption, and ease of use is right there. If something is intuitive, that's the biggest challenge, and hurdle. Dave: Right. Jason: I don't even like them using software that's ugly. Dave: Right. Jason: I just can't bring myself to do it. Maybe it's the designer in me. I don't know, but if I'm going to be living in something, I don't want it to be ugly. That's why I use Apple products because they just… Dave: Right, absolutely. Clean design. Jason: I was around my mom just yesterday, and she had a computer and she was like, “I clicked on Chrome, and it's not loading, and nothing's happening coming up,” and I'm like, “I don't know, that's a PC. I've never had that problem on a Mac.” I just don't have that problem. I just think it's funny. I was like, “I don't know, good luck.” Dave: Yeah absolutely, and a lot of property managers and landlords—many are very tech savvy, there's also many that aren't so tech savvy. It's equally, if not more important, to have something that's not incredibly complex, and incredibly challenging, and opaque, and difficult to enter into. Jason: I'm incredibly tech savvy, and I probably could’ve figured out my mom's computer thing, but it probably would’ve wasted an hour or two of my time and I don't want to waste time figuring out my software at every step of the turn and teaching my team members how to figure out software at every step of the turn. Intuitiveness in software is my number one priority. A lot of people build their whole set up internally in their business, trying to find one piece of software that can do everything, and it's usually really awful at everything in a lot of instances, instead of finding the easiest, and best, and fastest tools. Speed is my love language, I think in business, and I want it to be fast, and want it to be simple, and intuitive. I love that that's kind of a foundational goal with your software, because I don't believe that any of the other property management software, that was their foundational goal, ease of use, and to be intuitive. If it was, they've gotten long far away from it. Dave: Right, yeah, I think you're right. Jason: Yeah, and some are much worse than others, and some of them, they can do everything. They're like the ultimate Swiss army knife. Like I've joked in the past, you're not going to see a handy man carrying around a multi tool to try and do all this hard jobs. Dave: Right. Jason: He's going to have a nice tool box with the best tools. The software’s more intuitive, the software is really easy for people to use, and now you're saying on all parties for like the owners, they want to maybe check reports, is there an owners portal? Dave: There is. Jason: Tenants that want to pay rent, and do their stuff, there's tenant portal. And then for the property manager, they can manage and see their portfolio pretty easily, and know what's available, and vacant. Does this have marketing stuff connected to it yet for listing, and the getting the properties out there in the marketplace? Dave: Yeah, great question. We do not currently have marketing. We plan to roll that out, but as you mentioned, I think one of the problems that's happened with other software packages, the feature creep went too fast. They wanted to get all the features that any landlord could ever ask for out as quickly as possible, and that has not been our approach. We have said let's do this methodically, let's think about ways to integrate this into the way that the rest of the software works. Let's make sure that it's easy to use. We are constantly adding features but we're not necessarily rolling out everything that everybody wants, all at the same time. Market syndication is what we call it. The marketing piece is definitely on its way, but it'll probably be another three or fours months before we have that out there. Jason: Yeah, feature creep is a real issue. I'm a big fan of Jason Fried. He's the CEO of Basecamp. I got to hang out with him on a Skype call for 90 minutes. He cut my staffing costs in half overnight, no doubt. I'm a big fan of him. By saying he cut my staffing costs in half, I should say he doubled our productivity. I didn't just fire everybody. We just became that much more productive because he helped me understand how we had so many interruptions, we had so many things that weren't intuitive, and he changed how we communicate as a company. He has a similar philosophy when he talks about creating their softwares. Basecamp doesn't do a whole lot compared to a lot of other software, it’s pretty limited in its feature set, but it's consistently always at the top of the tools and resources people mention for project management even though I really don't believe Basecamp is a project management tool, I believe it's a communication platform for internal communication, that's how we use it. Everyone's going to ask for features, you have to really be picky in choosing about what are the features that are really going to matter the most and get the biggest bang for your buck and really make a difference without it becoming overly crazy, too cumbersome, unintuitive, and difficult to do. There's always that balance of managing all of the features.  Do you see that you guys will be doing any sort of Zapier integration so that people can create zaps and start connecting and integrating with third party tools? No software has come out with this yet. Dave: Yeah. That’s a really good idea. That is not our road map but I love Zapier. We use it for all sorts of other things, whether it's connecting Wordpress to HubSpot or whatever. It’s a really cool platform. That’s an interesting thought. We hadn’t gotten that far. We might still… Jason: Add it to your list and be the first. I'm waiting to see who is the first property management software the adds Zapier integration because everyone's been asking for it. All these people want it connected to their automation. They want to connect it to their process street processes, or they want to connect it to whatever. I think this would be a really cool thing. Dave: We’ll let you know when we do. Jason: I keep throwing that out usually to property management software that I have on my show and I'm waiting to see who's the first to have Zapier integration. Some people call it [zey-pier], but I think [zey-pier] is weird because it creates [zaps], people, so it’s Zapier. You're not [zey-ping] your business.  What else should people know about this software? What are some of the most common questions that a property management business owner might ask that they're concerned about? Dave: Well, one you hit on was the sub users. Enabling not just the head property manager from accessing the platform, but also giving out who has access to which permissions, who has access to which features. Maybe it's Bob, you want him to handle these categories for these properties, or you want your property owners to log in and be able to handle it themselves. Jason: There's the ability for vendors to leverage and use the system as well? Dave: Not vendors, that would be like a maintenance person that you either have on staff or you have on retainer 1099 or whatever. We do not have a vendor portal at this time. That’s a big one and then the other really common question we get is of course the pricing because of the sector that we’re in, that's at the top of our base mind. Jason: Do you want to tell pricing now? If you're planning on changing, don’t. Tell them to go to your website. Dave: No, I'd be more than happy to jump into pricing. Now it’s pretty unique, we're 100% free to use for landlords. There’s no monthly fee, yearly fee, setup fee, there’s no contract. There's absolutely no cost. Everything that I've mentioned is included. Instead, when a tenant pays rent online, we charge them $2 for an ACH transaction. We charge them $2.75 for a credit or debit card, and that's it. Jason: Totally reasonable. I've been saying for at least over a year to people who have listened to some of my older podcast episodes that free property management software will come and there will be the day that somebody's going to offer it, just like people aren't paying for Gmail, people aren't paying for this sort of stuff and it's making money. It manifested, here it is. Dave: That’s right, we did it. It's 100% free for the landlord. Some landlords see the value in an online payment, they see it so highly to pay actually choose to incur a cost and we allow them to do that if they want to, but for most landlords 90% plus, they're not paying a dime to use Innago. Jason: Very cool, that's really interesting. This would be fantastic then for startup PM's, startup property managers. A question that my team would care about is for the rental listings, the vacant properties, do you have some way of listing the vacant properties in some web based fashion? If they're putting properties into their system, is there some sort of code that we can embed on a website to show their available rentals? Dave: Again, there's nothing on the marketing side just yet. Everything is cotntained within Innago but we certainly see the value in that. Jason: Maybe in the future then. What else should people know about Innago? Anything else you want to throw out there? Dave: Well, we offer particularly in our sector where you do have some of the lower cost platforms out there or some of the simpler platforms out there I suppose. Oftentimes, they don't offer any sort of support beyond a 48-hour email window. With Innago, we’re a little different, we offer full phone support. We also have embedded videos and help section to ease landlords along in the system as they get started and learn the platform. We’re really big believers in early success begets future success. We want to make sure that we’re hand holding for your first month, two months on the platform, and ensuring that you understand how to use it. You can use it effectively and can leverage it to improve your business. Once you do that, then you're off to the races and in really good shape. We offer a unique level of support that many others can't really match. Jason: What platform are you using for support? Dave: We use Freshdesk, and we use HubSpot, and we use Zapier to connect certain things to other things. Jason: Cool. We use intercom for anyone listening, because property managers need some sort of support desk too. Dave, this sounds really neat. How could somebody demo this if they're curious to check out your software and how should they get in touch? Dave: Yeah. They can go to innago.com and they can request access to a free account. We’ll get in touch with them shortly after just to make sure they're a good fit, that we're going to solve some problems for them. We don't want them to waste any time fooling around on a platform that is really not going to work for them. If they request access, we’ll shortly be in touch, and we'll get them into the platform, and they can start playing around with it. Jason: Where does the name Innago come from? I'm a branding guy, I'm always curious. Explain Innago. Dave: We like to think of it as a strong three-syllable word, that's about the extent of it. It's really kind of like Google or Yahoo, there's not a whole lot behind it. Jason: Okay. Maybe we’ll have to make up the story sometime together about it. Dave: Yeah. We’ve thought about it, but we'll take any suggestions. Jason: When did you guys launch this? How new is this software? Dave: We launched the company in January of 2017. We had the product out in the market, kind of like an alpha stage really in March of that year. We've been coming along ever since. As far as a product, we're a little over two years now. Jason: Awesome. How many companies are using this right now? Dave: We have thousands of landlords on the platform and it's growing every day. I would nail that hard number, but it probably changes by the minute. Jason: Yeah. It's probably pretty tempting and pretty easy if it's free. I would imagine you guys will have some success and you guys are making enough money you think to stay healthy just through the transactions? Dave: Yeah. As you know, there's a lot of landlords out there. The majority of them are still self managed or not using any kind of software. There's a lot of tenants that want to pay online. Only about 30% of the market currently pays rent online. That's a huge giant blue ocean that’s ready to be captured. Jason: Yeah. There's a lot of blue ocean that are self managing. If you really want to super attract property management business owners, if you can figure out a way to help connect these self managers so that they can get that professional managers to take over stuff, and partner, maybe create some partners, I think you’ve got a winning affiliate business going on right there that’s good for your company. Dave: Absolutely. Jason: I know there's lots of people listening that would like to get connected to those that are self managing and work with them. Dave, super cool to have you on the show. I wish you lots of success. It would be cool to have you come back maybe in the future after you've come out with even more features if you’ve got something really cool to share. I wish you guys a lot of success with the free software. I've been talking about this for a while. I think it's long overdue. This is really great. Dave: Awesome. Thanks so much, Jason. I really appreciate it, my pleasure being on the show. Jason: Yeah, thanks for coming on. You heard it everybody, free property management software that is intuitive. If they are really intuitive, they're going to have a lot of natural success and growth, and if they're free, they're going to have a lot of growth. If they can make the numbers work which sounds like it would be pretty easy with all the transactions that are going to be occurring, it could be a game changer.  I think other property management software, they're a little bit greedy, and there's too much of that feature creep. I think this will be a competitor. It’d be interesting to watch. Let’s keep our eyes tuned, our eyes peeled and stay tuned to see what they do. Anyway, this is Jason Hull of the DoorGrow Show. If you are wanting to know if your property management website is leaking money because every website is probably leaking money. If you want to see that it’s leaking money because you don't want it to be leaking deals and leads anymore and you want to make more money and cash from your business, test your website out by going to doorgrow.com/quiz and take our DoorGrow Score Quiz that’s going to grade your website on how effective it is at creating conversions. Some of the questions are tricky. There's a lot of people taking the test and then make a bunch of changes to their website, some of them are false positive, so be careful if you're going to do that. Do that quiz and then maybe talk to our team and we can help you improve your website piece because I really don't believe that anybody's better at creating websites that make money than DoorGrow for property managers. Alright, we'll talk to all of you guys soon. Until next time, to our mutual growth.  

In this episode, I'll be joined by Vlad Calus, co-founder of Planable — an incredible tool that I recommend — and he'll talk about auditing your marketing team's productivity and upgrading their results. He will also share his experience on how to succeed as an online entrepreneur, find your first customers, building your own marketing team from scratch, and outsourcing time-consuming tasks that value less. If you've never heard of Planable, here's a brief introduction: Planable is a social media collaboration tool for marketing teams, digital agencies and freelancers. With Planable, you can collaborate with your teammates and clients on content calendar in the most visual way. It's used by more than 5000 brands worldwide, including Mini, BMW, Volkswagen, and SkyTeam. Now here's a short intro about our special guest guest Vlad Calus: Vlad founded two non-profits at the age of 16, then dropped out of college, moved to another country with two of his friends, built Planable at when he was 19 and became an honoree Forbes 30 Under 30 when he was just 22. He's been featured as a guest writer & marketer by multiple publications including Social Media Examiner, Entrepreneur, WeRSM, Freshdesk, Subsign, Digital Agency Network, and many others. He recently self-published his first book, called “Marketing Teams of the Future”. The book navigates content marketing's journey from the early beginnings, then dives into a profound analysis of today's industry, and proposes several solutions on how to prepare your marketing team for the next decade. You can download the eBook for free in the resource section of this description. I'm so excited to share my conversation with Vlad Calus with you. Be sure to take notes! -=-=-=-=- Resources discussed in the episode: Planable Free Trial Marketing Team of the Future by Vlad Calus - Download Link Collaboration Tools Zoom.us to connect with anyone anywhere Airtable for spreadsheets on steroids. Asana for task management Dropbox for assets management Planable for content management creation InVision App for prototyping Frame for creating video content ConvertKit for email marketing tools you need to grow your blog and business Slack for the transparent environment Front App to simply collaborate on email support -=-=-=-=- Follow us on social media: Facebook: facebook.com/99signalsblog Instagram: instagram.com/99signals Twitter: twitter.com/99signalsblog YouTube: youtube.com/c/99signals -=-=-=-=- Visit https://www.99signals.com for more insights on SEO, blogging, and marketing. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sandeep-mallya/message

Social Jack™ Influence Factory Episode 65: Vlad Calus – “Top 10 Content Marketing Trends” Air Date: Wednesday, June 5, 2019 HAVE QUESTIONS? - Leave a comment below and we will get back to you within 48 hours. The Influence Factory is a LIVE webcast that airs every Wednesday at NOON Central (via Zoom and Facebook LIVE). In the #InfluencerNewsUpdate segment… During the Influencer News Update, the team discusses “New Study Looks at Rising Facebook video Trends, Based on 9 Million Uploads”, an article by Andrew Hutchinson via: Social Media Today. Here is what we discussed: -As we recently discussed on the Influencer News Update, the use of stories and the emergence of vertical video. - According to the report, vertical video is now the most used video format on Facebook. This could make it a more significant consideration for marketers based on shifting consumer habits and expectations. - More users viewing more content in vertical format means more acceptance of the option and potentially more expectation of the same. - Instagram TV is also optimized for vertical video, and recently announced support for landscape videos as well. However, that has nothing to do with the popularity of vertical videos. - Vertical videos have been generating more engagement on Facebook and engagement is key to maximizing your Facebook performance. - Something to keep in mind when posting video on Facebook, video length is less relevant. - People don’t mind watching a 10-15-minute video as long as it is relevant and quality content. - The ideal video length is not something that should be determined by a predetermined target. The length of the video should be determined by the content. - Live-streams still see higher engagement than uploaded videos, because people can respond and interact in real time. - If you're looking to maximize your video efforts, or considering adding video into your content mix, its definitely worth taking note of these trends, and factoring them into your thinking View the full article at https://bit.ly/2K3Oi76 This week’s #PowerMove segment was “Being First/Getting Found” In the #InfluencerInterview… This week’s Influencer Guest, Vlad Calus is the co-founder @ Planable, the command center of social media collaboration for marketing teams. Planable is used by more than 5000 brands worldwide, including Mini, BMW, Volkswagen, SkyTeam, Wendy’s and many others. Vlad founded two non-profits at the age of 16, then dropped out of college, moved to another country with two 2 his friends, built Planable (Techstars London ’17) at 19 y.o and became an honoree Forbes 30 Under 30 at 22 y.o. And he’s been featured as a guest writer & marketer by multiple publications including Social Media Examiner, Entrepreneur, WeRSM, Freshdesk, Subsign, Digital Agency Network and many others. Please welcome, Vlad Calus to the show! Register for the LIVE webcast: http://myinfluencefactory.com/ EXCLUSIVE Facebook LIVE: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BusinessInfluencerAlliance/ View ALL Past Episodes: https://app.socialjack.com/podcast Connect with Dean: Twitter: https://twitter.com/deandelisle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deandelisle/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deandelisle1/ Connect with Cait: Twitter: https://twitter.com/CaitHassett LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caithassett/ Connect with Jackson: Twitter: https://twitter.com/JacksonDelisle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksondelisle/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacksondelisle/ Theme Music Produced by Sonixphere Video Production by Social Jack™ Productions Social Media Engagement by Social Jack™ Influencer Team Voice-Over by Laila Wenrich Brought to you by Social Jack™ Are you ready to be an Influencer? Visit us at https://www.SocialJack.com

Girish Mathrubootham is the founder and CEO of Freshworks, one of the world’s fastest-growing SaaS product company, winning the Economic Times Startup of the Year in 2016, and the Business Standard Startup of the Year in 2017. Freshworks now has a suite of products for businesses worldwide - Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales, Freshcaller, Freshteam, Freshchat and Freshmarketer. Girish is part of the Product Council for NASSCOM, the trade association of Indian software companies, and actively works to promote and nurture software product companies. He has invested in several early-stage startups and is passionate about building a global product company. Having set the vision and direction for the company since inception, his focus on Freshworks’ values and its culture have been instrumental in taking the organization to where it is today.

# News * Microsoft Build 2019 * Windows Terminal (Mid-June, oder jetzt selber-bauen) https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18527870/microsoft-windows-terminal-command-line-tool * WSL 2 (Managed VM, Full Linux Kernel, much faster) * Windows Explorer mit Enterprise Search in 20H1 * Fluid Framework * Conditional Access: Setting condition requirements such as trusted network location for registering security information such as MFA or SSPR * What is my TenantID? (whatismytenantid.com) # Die Philosophischen Fünf Minuten * Westworld: https://www.hbo.com/westworld # Azure AD Entitlement Management Nach einem kurzen Check des Features bleibt folgendes anzumerken: * Es gibt keine API für eine Automation (noch nicht, wenn im Microsoft Graph) * Eine Automation macht nur bedingt Sinn, wenn ich nicht alle Informationen doppelt pflegen will * Beispiel: * Verantwortlichkeit für das Lifecycle Management von O365 Groups * 1 SharePoint Comm Site für Enduser Aufklärung (Admin rechte benötugt) * 1 Office 365 Group für das CSV alles Groups * 1 Rolle in Freshdesk als Ticket Author * Problem bei NON AAD/O365 Ressourcen (Es geht AAD Group, SPO Site, AAD App) * Toller Anfang: End zu ende mit mail kommunikation in alle Sprachen * Azure AD P2 * Interessant: Entitlement geht auch für externe, also um sich zu Beispiel für ein AAD B2B zu "bewerben" * Website: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/governance/entitlement-management-overview # Advanced Hunting in MDATP * Mitre Attack: https://attack.mitre.org/ * Sigma Rules: https://github.com/Neo23x0/sigma/tree/master/rules (started by Florian Roth) * KQL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-development/keyword-query-language-kql-syntax-reference # Feedback, Kritik, Lob, Fragen? * Email: podcast@hairlessinthecloud.com * Twitter: @hairlesscloud * Web: www.hairlessinthecloud.com (Links zu allen Podcast Plattformen) * Coverarts & new Audio Intro by CARO (mit Hilfe von pixabay.com)

In this episode, Mitchie and Amaury cover the founder’s basic toolbox, including different resources and techniques to help startup founders save time daily by optimizing repetitive tasks. Pre-order a copy of Amaury’s new book, Startup Without a CTO, and get an early digital version two months before the official launch: http://startupwithoutcto.com/ Show notes How you can document all of your brainstorming process and project planning using some simple tools and techniques How the same tools can help you delegate tasks How Amaury and Mitchie used the same technique in the production of the My CTO Friend courses and AskMyCTO videos Why Amaury hates emails and how he makes replying faster and better What’s even better than videos when it comes to reviewing meetings How you can use this tool for bug management What new tool you can try to optimize video when giving feedback or talking to a new customer What’s a great tool to use to record meetings or podcasts automatically via mobile or PC How to set up a top down camera to make explainer videos or brainstorm without using a PC/keyboard/tablet What’s a super tool you can use for automations (automatically send emails, create folders in Google Drive, copy files in Dropbox, etc.) How Amaury’s clients made 8 million euros building a startup without developers Why follow-up is key, and what tool you can use for regular communications and email newsletters How you and your team can organize your passwords for all your different tools What to do when a team member leaves What tool to use for designing your app when you’re an early-stage startup founder What are some tools and strategies to optimize content marketing How to find the best combination of tools for you and your team What are some more examples for communication, project management, business workflow, team meetings and customer support How Amaury and Mitchie met and started working together What’s the best thing to do when you’re struggling with something How you can apply these strategies to your business, and save time and money Why you should try freelance platforms like Fiverr and Upwork Links  Amaury’s book, Startup Without a CTO – http://startupwithoutcto.com/ Episode 6: Productivity hacks: Brainstorming and project planning – https://myctofriend.co/6 Screenshot – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenshot Screencast – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast Screen-O-Matic – https://screencast-o-matic.com/ My CTO Friend courses – https://myctofriend.co/products/ AskMyCTO videos – https://myctofriend.co/videos/ Specifications – https://outoftech.com/how-to-turn-an-idea-into-a-startup-specification/ Bug management – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_tracking_system Bonojoro – https://www.bonjoro.com/ Zoom – https://zoom.us/ Top-down camera – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_graphics#Top-down_perspective My CTO Friend – https://myctofriend.co/ Zapier – https://zapier.com/ Typeform – https://www.typeform.com/ FollowUpThen – https://www.followupthen.com/ Dashlane – https://www.dashlane.com/ 1Password – https://1password.com/ LastPass – https://www.lastpass.com/ UX – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience_design Canva – https://www.canva.com/ Content marketing – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing Auphonic – https://auphonic.com/ YouTube – https://myctofriend.co/youtube Dashboard – https://en.support.wordpress.com/dashboard/ API – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface Slack – https://slack.com/ WhatsApp – https://www.whatsapp.com/ Microsoft Teams – https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software Trello – https://trello.com/en Jira – https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira Salesforce – https://www.salesforce.com/ CRM – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer-relationship_management ERP – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning Skype – https://www.skype.com/en/ Appear.in – https://appear.in/ Zendesk – https://www.zendesk.com/ Freshdesk – https://freshdesk.com/ Chatbot – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot Upwork – https://www.upwork.com/ Fiverr – https://www.fiverr.com/ My CTO Friend the Podcast – https://myctofriend.co/podcast/ Episode 7: Productivity hacks: The founder’s basic toolbox – https://myctofriend.co/7 iTunes – https://myctofriend.co/itunes  Transcript  https://myctofriend.co/7#TRANSCRIPT

Quali sono i canali attraverso i quali i clienti di un eCommerce vogliono contattarlo? E come può un imprenditore gestire questi canali al meglio?

Mike McDerment, CEO and co-founder of Freshdesk, doesn't expect to get it right every time he jumps.

[et_pb_section fb_built="1" _builder_version="3.22.3"][et_pb_row _builder_version="3.22.3" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="3.0.47"][et_pb_text _builder_version="3.24.1" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat"] . This is a follow up interview with one of the most popular guests I've had on the podcast, and she once again proves why in this episode. When I first interviewed Sarah King back in episode 50 of the Cash-Based Practice Podcast, I was extremely impressed by her knowledge of marketing tools and strategies considering how recently she had opened her cash-based practice. Now, 1.5 years later, I catch up with Sarah about some new additions to her marketing repertoire and why she is now looking to hire a second PT. Sarah has developed both an offline PT business and an online business serving people with Parkinson's and we discuss all the details of how she's done it ... including her strategies for how to build a large Facebook Live audience of current and prospective clients. More specifically, we discuss: What factors Sarah considered before deciding to employ a second physical therapist How Sarah simplified her marketing and USP to attract her ideal patient The power of in-person networking with hard-to-reach physicians and community partners Utilizing Facebook Live to build an online community and consistent audience How to use Facebook Live strategies such as live interviews and video series Resources Sarah and I use to automate our practices and online businesses The success of Sarah's online Parkinson's Program and how it affects her service-side advertising How to network more effectively by providing value to potential referral sources What Sarah has learned about finding good employees and what benefits to offers . Resources, resources, resources, resources! Resources mentioned in this episode: Follow Sarah on Facebook for updates and FB Lives Invigorate PT and Wellness' on YouTube  Email Sarah King, DPT! Sarah's Resource page just for my listeners! Find her Parkinson's Challenge, a Content Marketing guide, and discount for her e-book "How to Start your Dream Practice on the Side: 12 Steps to Your Bare-Minimum Launch" My Cash-Based Practice Mastermind Our Website Designer Daniel Fava at CreateMyTherapistWebsite.Com PatientSites The Capital Area Parkinson's Society Rock Steady Boxing Group Answerthepublic.com to find blog/video topics SamCart for online sales A-Weber for email marketing LeadPages for WP lead generation FreshDesk for customer support Vidyard to record video Loom extension for desktop video recording The Neurocollaborative Follow the Neurocollaborative on Facebook Amy Porterfield's Courses that Convert . Julie Hershberg at Reactive PT (previous podcast episode!) Interested in the cash-based private practice model? >> Click Here to learn how to start your own Cash-Based Practice

Watch the video podcast here. About Matt Matt started out in IT after he left the military but eventually got tired of the corporate world and decided to go out on his own six years ago and start an IT company working as an IT consultant. He had been building websites for years as a hobby and as he was consulting his clients, they either had bad websites or none at all. So being their IT guy they started talking to him about it. Not thinking it would be a full-time thing, he made a few websites and realised he was pretty good at it and that he enjoyed doing it. So 2.5 years ago, he transitioned to web development and hasn’t looked back since. Matt's Companies Matt has three companies at the moment- His first being the web design company Aledor (his surname backwards!) where he builds and redesigns websites for service professionals such as accountants and lawyers. His second company is Tech Site Builder which is a turnkey website platform specifically designed for computer repair workshops. He acquired this company when he was running his own IT consultancy. Through his podcast series, he made a lot of contacts in the computer repair industry. A fellow podcaster had created Tech Site Builder as a WordPress theme and was selling it packaged with tutorials. However, he wanted to get out of the industry and so he sold the theme to Matt. Matt then transitioned it from a theme to a turnkey website. Similar to Squarespace, you sign up for a low monthly fee and you get a starter website template with all the tools and plugins that they need. He has been doing this now for two years and it has created a recurring revenue for him with little input as most of it, including the onboarding process, is all automated. His final project is TurnKey Websites BluePrint which teaches other website consultants how to build their own turnkey website. This will be launched in a couple of months. How Does He Stay Focussed on Multiple Projects? Research shows that multitasking isn’t efficient and you get the best work done when you focus on one thing at a time. So with his separate projects, he likes to focus on it, get it launched and then come up with a process to keep it going with minimal involvement from himself. He has a VA who looks after a lot of things as well. Matt says that he didn’t go out searching for these new projects - they fell into his lap. When you're doing what you love, then this is what happens! Staff He has a part-time VA who works four hours a day as well as a part-time developer. The developer is based in Eastern Europe and the VA is in the States. Matt found her accidentally on Upwork when he hired her to do some photo edits. She had such a great manner that he asked her to be his VA because it is hard to find a good person online. Matt has been through many freelancers and VAs and learned from his mistakes so you need to hold onto a good person when you find them! What is Matt's Sweet Spot? It has evolved over the years and he has seen the common thread throughout everything he has done - he is really good at communicating, breaking things down and being able to explain complex tech stuff. He has so many aspects of his job that he enjoys doing, but he knows this is his strength and so he builds on it. He outsources the tech side of things and is slowly trying to let others take the reins a little bit. He finds it hard to let go of that control but once you find the right people that are even better than you at what they do, then that makes it much easier. What Has Been the Biggest Challenge? His biggest challenge when growing his business has been budgeting and understating how to put the money where it's most useful. Matt has gone through phases of Shiny Object Syndrome and blowing all his money on new tools for the business. So what helped him get over this was the book “Profit First” which teaches you how to budget your business finances. Pricing The key for Matt was finding his niche. The more you narrow down your services, the clearer the pricing becomes as well as the marketing and the message. Once he was able to find his focus, then people were coming to him and he was able to increase his prices to filter out the people who price shop to find the people who are really serious about working with him to get a great result. Through his sweet spot, Matt was able to find his niche. But what about people starting just up and who need to be everything to everyone? How should they find their niche? It's something that comes with time and can't be forced. The key is to know that you will eventually need a niche, but that you will need to be everything to everyone while you're starting out. It has to be something that you learn over time through the type of client that is attracted to you, or by discovering what area you are best at. It seems counter-intuitive to focus on a niche because you have a fear of missing out and won't be able to help as many people. But he said that it has had the opposite effect on his business. Word gets around the industry that is your niche and you are seen as the expert in their industry. Mindset Everyone has times when they're ready to throw the towel in when it comes to running your own business. Matt says that the struggle never ends and sometimes it gets more exaggerated as you get more experience. You need persistence and to stay positive. To get out of any dips in the business he has had to change focus. When he was working on the web development it was a struggle to get clients through the door, so he realised that he needed a different focus that would bring him recurring revenue. When he hits a problem, by changing focus he is able to go back to what wasn't working. With a fresh mind he can then tackle it from a different angle and take it to the next level. Through doing that he changes perspectives and builds mini businesses so that if one crashes and burns, he still has the others to rely on. Matt likes to hedge his bets! Balance So how does Matt balance personal and professional life? He purposely built these businesses to be flexible so he can work anytime from anywhere. He is a big fan of taking an afternoon off to go to the mall or places that are busy on the weekend and then sometimes working weekends instead. He also plays the trumpet, so he has the flexibility to play a gig and then sleep in. How Does He See His Businesses Evolving? Matt doesn’t like to plan ahead too much. He waits for opportunities to come to him. If he had a five-year plan for his IT business he may not have jumped on these opportunities that came to him. He likes to have short-term goals for his business and change them up. For example, subscriber, revenue or retention-based goals. But he keeps his mind open and businesses flexible to allow new opportunities to come to him. Tools Theme: His favourite WordPress theme is the Genesis Framework by StudioPress. Sometimes he builds a custom child theme off that. Plugin: He is a big fan of Restrict Content Pro he has been using it as a membership plugin and also for the sign-up process on his website. You can also use it to sell products online through a login process for the customer. Day to day tools: The stack he uses is Slack, Trello, Freshdesk (for support desk for all of his platforms), Process Street (for processes and checklists), and Active Campaign (for email marketing). He then ties them all together with Zapier. He likes the flexible solutions! Well, there you go... Matt's formula for success! I hope you got some inspiration from today's podcast. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Episode 51 of the Support Breakfast podcast with: - Dave Chapman (Buffer) - Sarah Ley-Hamilton (Timely) - Conor Pendergrast (Expensify) - Lisa Hunt (Geckoboard) This week we're talking about the tools we use to support customers and the pros and cons of each. Links mentioned: * Huel: * Ribena ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IHF3yvSpM0 * NZ commercial with modesty leaves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqZZOb1aJEk * The origin of the Dashboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard * Help Scout/Docs/Beacon: https://www.helpscout.net * Intercom/Educate: https://www.intercom.com * Vanilla Forums: https://vanillaforums.com/en/software/ * Front: https://frontapp.com * Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com * Freshdesk: https://freshdesk.com * Reply: https://buffer.com/reply/ * Statuspage.io * Uservoice: https://www.uservoice.com * Wistia: https://wistia.com * JTBD: https://jtbd.info * Chase: https://m.signalvnoise.com/a-new-approach-to-feature-requests-21bea562c083 * Ask Nicely: https://www.asknicely.com * Looker: https://looker.com * Write The Docs (Prague): http://www.writethedocs.org/conf/prague/2018/ hello@supportbreakfast.com supportbreakfast.com @supportbrekkie @davechapman @conorp @sarahleyh @gentlethorns

Gmail, Boomerang for Gmail, Unroll.me, and FreshDesk.

The good and the bad of my very first info product...   What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to the best podcast on planet earth in my opinion and in reality of course. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now here's your host, Steve Larsen. Hey, you guys... Hey, I'm excited for this episode. This is something that's been on my mind for probably four weeks now. I've just not ... I don't know. I haven't had the time to actually make it, but I've been making this list and I've been writing this list for a while. I keep walking into my office, my home office, and I look over to the right and I've got whiteboards all over the place and quotes stapled to my wall. A huge black sheet stapled from the top of the ceiling down to the bottom of the floor. I've got big flood lights and film equipment. I've got a whole set up in here. I got a whole studio, but all over on the side of the wall over there, I've been writing this big list down. Weird as it, whatever it is in the morning, my brain turns on real fast. What's been on my mind for the last sort of while is kind of lessons from my first info product. When I first started coming up with this product idea, my little girl was about to turn four years old. Super excited. She's a cutie, a lot of fun. Love hanging out with her. It's fun though. As she gets older and older, it's not that she wasn't fun before, but even now we can have like more conversations, which is crazy. She's only four almost, which is nuts. When I look at her too, I also remember weirdly enough this first info product that I launched is around the same time when we found out that she ... That my wife was pregnant with her. My wife came running out of the bathroom one day and we were excited... We were trying to have a kid. She ran out and she was like, "Oh my gosh. We're pregnant. Ha, ha." I was like, "Wow. Yeah. I'm so pumped." We were so excited. We're so excited. I have, how should I say this, almost the bitter taste in my mouth also during that moment. It has nothing to do with my excitement for the kid. I was so excited for my little girl, so excited for her to come, had nothing to do with that. What the bitter taste comes from still is that I mean we were just broke. I mean broke, broke. I didn't know how to pay for the birth. I don't know how I pay for those. I mean it's one of the reasons I joined the army. I mean I always wanted to anyways, but it is one of the root reasons. It was like, "Crap. I had not figured out how to sell stuff," despite the fact that I have been constantly trying. Up until that point I had been doing real estate, both commercial and residential, door to door sales. At that time I was getting into like eBooks and I was writing a lot of stuff, which I never launched one of them by the way. It'd be kind of cool to show and actually finish that one one day. It's cool how on point I was four years ago when I was writing that thing. It's like right on point. All of it's still valid. I was like, "Oh my gosh." Anyway, different subject. It was hard because like I really just didn't know how we were going to live, how are we going to eat. I was trying to be fiscally responsible.... We didn't have expensive habits. Thankfully neither my wife or I we really had like super expensive taste. It's not that we didn't want to, but we were okay with the fact that we didn't have the money to... Neither of us have really ever been concerned about the other spending a whole bunch of money randomly. You know what I mean? That's not ever been us, but at the same time, we just didn't have any money. I was in school. I did great in school. After a while when I learned how to learn that I started getting straight A's every semester almost, which is awesome. I was deep into school. I was trying to learn. I was trying to outdo my other peers. I'm very competitive on purpose. I was trying to beat them on everything. I was trying to beat my professors even, my marketing teachers. I was trying to show them that they were wrong on a few things. I mean it's just my personality. I run. I'm a sprinter. I know that. Anyway, this product idea though came at a moment when I was really needing something the most money wise. Not almost the most. There was one more intense time than that. I remember I was sitting on the couch at 2:00 AM and it was freezing. I was in our cold apartment. This is in Eastern Idaho, Southeastern Idaho, which if you don't know in the wintertime and even during the summer, like the wind just always blows there. I don't know what is going on over there, but it always blows wind. I'm from Denver. My wife and I are both from Denver. It doesn't blow like that over there. Anyway, I had this idea and it's not like it hit me all at once. The core of it did, but it continued to develop over the course of several weeks. The idea was to create this info product that I could not find anyone else in this particularly industry creating. No one else had done it. No one else understood ClickFunnels enough to pull it off as far as I could tell. ClickFunnels was pretty new. I'm sorry. Let's see. Yeah, okay. This was about three and a half years ago right after ... Timeline wise, ClickFunnels had just opened up, so not quite four years ago then. It's amazing how much has happened in that amount of time. That's crazy. Holy crap. Anyway, I had this idea and I was excited and I didn't totally know what I was doing, but I figured that I needed to go create this product and then start to sell it because it was a blue ocean. No one else had really done it. There was enough people that I could go funnel hack to get kind of an idea of the thing that I should create, like what would be accepted content wise, but I was going to deliver it up in a completely different way than that market had ever experienced before. I was like sweet. Cool. I mapped the whole thing out many times. I wrote out the value ladders. I literally went page by page through Russell's DotComSecrets Ignite program. It was a workbook that he gave for free. After the DotComSecrets book on the thank you page there, he was like, "Hey, I don't want you to sit around, wait around just being bored, so here's three days of this event and the workbook with it." I was like what? Oh my gosh. I took the workbook. I printed it out. It was like a hundred pages. I got it spiral bound and I started hiding in the basketball ... On campus, the basketball stadium box office seats because you could jump through the front window and it was kind of like dark, really fast internet up there. No one would bother me. I would just kind of dodge security when no one was looking and I'd jumped through the window. That's literally how I learned this stuff you guys. That's how I did it. I was just hustling my brains out. It hasn't really stopped. I just haven't stopped since then. I learned it around this entire product. This product was how I learned funnels. That's why it was so near and dear to me. Now I had created stuff before, but not like this. I promise I'll get to the good stuff here in just a moment. Here's the back story with the whole thing, okay? I went and I created the product and it took me eight months, eight months to make the thing, right? I was in school. At that time we had our kid. I had family life with a kid that had just started. I had started with the army. I went away for six months to basics training and all this other stuff and other trainings, pieces like that. Six months I was gone. Anyway, in total, actually creation, took me eight months to make the thing and I launched it and I was so proud. I was so proud. No one else really understood what I was doing, but I was so excited to just have ... It was my first info product to really put out there and it was good. I knew it was good. Nobody else was doing what I was doing and I knew that. I was very proud of the full thing, but the problem was a lot of stuff. There was just so many things. Oh my gosh. If I could go back and just like shake my three and a half year old ago self, I would. What's been on my mind the last few weeks here and now has been lessons from that first product launch. I think the reason it's been popping back up is because I'm about to launch another info product here early January and I know there's another soul in planet that's doing what I'm doing. I know that there's no other one who's even pulling it off closely or even remotely similar to how I'm doing it. I know it's a blue ocean. I have tested the crap out of it for the last year and a half to two years. There's on one else. I'm excited. Very similar scenario as that first info product I launched. When I launched that very first info product though, nobody bought it. I had not even thought about traffic. Looking back, so juvenile and now I'd be like, "Why on earth would I not think about that now?" I just didn't know. I had no idea. It ended up making me like 50 grand just through like one or two traffic sources and it was awesome. It was great. Really, really cool. Well, now I'm about launch a second one and I'm so excited about it, but I wanted to go through a list of kind of some of the ... I wrote them all down here and I'm sure that there are others, but these are like the most stark lessons that I have gathered from that first info product launch and it's totally different this time. 100% different. Like completely day and night different the way I've been handling this thing. Anyway, you know what's funny is I actually go through these with two comical coaching students as well and definitely did this with the latest fad event as well. Went through a few different strategy on how you could pull off. Here's the number one lesson from the whole list. There's about five or six things. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to go through them real quick and I'll explain them as I go. I want to go through these because I need you to understand that if you're about to launch an info product and you feel stuck, I almost guarantee that it is because of one of these reasons. Here's number one, lesson number one is create the revenue before you make the product. This is huge and it's totally counterintuitive to anything else you would ever expect. All right? Even in my marketing classes, like even some of the early mentors I had, they were always like, "Look, go create something brand new. Create this cool thing and then go try and sell it." I was like no. It's totally the opposite. First, you sell it and then you create it. You're like, "Steven, that makes zero sense." Let me tell you how to do it... The reason why is because I spent eight months creating this thing that was amazing, but I did not get paid a dime for it forever. Luckily I created something that was cool enough people could pay me for eventually. I mean that was straight luck. I guessed my whole way to profits. Here's how you do it though. Let's say that you're selling an info product or even a physical product. You can start selling the thing. I mean think about Kickstarter. That's exactly what that thing is. You are buying something that may not even be done yet. What does that tell the entrepreneur? It tells the entrepreneur it's a good idea, right? You currently as the entrepreneur do not create the creativity. You do not create the ideas. You do not have them inside of you. You do not have inside of your own being right now what it takes to make a million dollars from the market. None of us do and I wish I had understood that ahead of time. What you do is you create the product with the first buyers. You create it with them. What I've been doing is I've been spending all my time. I mean I've created cool stuff. I've created workbooks. I mean I've created lots of stuff that goes with it, but I still have not created or filmed the actual thing yet. It's because I am waiting all my time, all my attention, all my focus is on creating pressure, the actual sales message before I start to sell it. I'm not creating the actual thing first. Now if you see the way that Russell rolls things out, if you see the way Russell Brunson and ClickFunnels in general roll products out, a lot of times the way we do it is we sell the thing, we prove that it was good and then we start to ask campaign the buyers. We prep them ahead of time, so it's not like a bait-and-switch. You know what I mean? There's certainly room where you could be really shady with that and we're not. What we do is we say, "Hey look, classes start in two weeks. Buy now for your early bird ticket to get in cheaper," right? Then on the very first module or the very first training, you could do this for physical products too, whatever it is, then we start saying things like, "Hey, what's the number one question or challenge you have with X, Y and Z," and that's just for module one. Well, now we know what to create. They told us what to make. Does that make sense? What's going to blow a lot of people's minds is when you realize that the product rarely sells itself. Rarely ever do you have a product that's so good that it sells itself without any sales copy, without you even trying, where their word of mouth is so strong that you don't need any sales message. What's funny though is when people focus all their time on creating the product and no time creating the sales message, right? They think the product alone is what sells the product. That's not true at all. I have watched Russell sell products he doesn't even know what the product is. It's because he knows persuasive. He knows how to sell. He knows how to create offers. He knows how to stack things. He knows how to create new opportunities. He knows how to invoke that kind of emotion from an individual, right? It's because he's gone through and he creates the actual new opportunity. He creates the sales message. It does not matter really what the product is. It does obviously. It can't be crap. It's got to be amazing. It's got to deliver. It's got to be the coolest thing on the planet earth. You know what I mean? You're creating a brand new opportunity. It better deliver. It better be awesome. Do not deliver junk. That is not my culture. It should not be yours. Okay? What I'm telling you is that you can sell and make money before you actually start creating the product. Then what you do is you create the product with them. You create it as you go. That's all we do. That's all I've done... I have created so many freaking member areas in the last like year. It is ridiculous. My role at ClickFunnels has somewhat shifted. I'm not so much of a front end funnel builder anymore. We're not creating them any front end funnels anymore. My role has shifted. I'm more like a members area, content creating, fulfillment guy now. I don't know why it's totally shifted, but I think that's why is just because we don't create that many front end funnels anymore. It's all about delivering these massive awesome members area. It's all built in ClickFunnels. I mean everything I do and everything I build is in ClickFunnels, but anyway. That's the first lesson is that oh my gosh, biggest thing, why did I wait eight months to collect any check? Honestly, it took a while for word to get out because I hadn't thought about traffic, so really it was like a year. That was rough. Why did I do that? Don't do that. I'm begging you not to do that. Anyway, number one, please know that you should spend most of your time on actually creating the sales message. Focus on getting paid before you make the product as much as you possibly can. Then what you do is that first round through, that first group through who bought your thing, you create the product with them and you say, "Hey, guess what? It's all going to start in two weeks. Go ahead and get your ticket. Go ahead and buy now, so you can get the early bird pricing. It starts in two weeks. When you get in there, very first module, there's a little stop in there, go ahead and answer that questionnaire so that we know we are covering the things that you need most." It's just an ask campaign... Then when we're one week out, "Guess what guys? It starts in one week. Go ahead and get your ticket or go and buy. Then the very first module, get in there, make sure ... Guess what guys? It's starting today. It means you don't have to wait like the people who wait had to wait two weeks ago. Go ahead and get in. I'm going to extend the early bird pricing. You can go ahead. In the very first module, you can go through and make sure you fill out the survey so we can make we're answering it and filling the products to your needs so we can make sure we're helping you the most. Guess what guys? It only started a week ago. That means you don't have to wait. That means you don't have to wait. You can get in there and you can start right now, but go ahead and go to module two and to let us know what is it you're most struggling with. That way we know we can make sure we tailor the product to ..." You know what I mean? It's that same thing. "Guess what? It started two weeks go. Guess what? It started three weeks ago." Then whatever it is, let's say you have six modules and something, that first group through, they're creating it with you. You're making money. You're seeing what works and what doesn't and you're no longer just guessing, creating an entire product, spending all this time and actually wasting a lot of time and frankly probably money that you could have been getting that you didn't. Does that make sense? This is like one of like six lessons and I'm spending a ton of time on it because I just want you to know that. For the love, sell the stuff. Do a great job fulfilling on it. Don't be shady. Let them know that they're the first ones through. You know what I mean?... Let them know that they're going to be creating with you and then a really easy thing to do is let's say you go create module one. At the end of module one, let's say it's on a Saturday. Let's say you released module one on a Monday. Friday do a live Q and A call with everybody. Put the recordings back into the members area. That becomes a value-add. You can toss that in at the end of your stack. That lets you know what holes you didn't fill. That lets you know where the people are not able to understand or follow what it is you're actually doing. Does that make sense? Anyway, what is that? 18 minutes for number one? Let me go a little bit faster here, but I hope that makes sense though, okay? That's one of the biggest lessons I ever learned. Number two, here's the second lesson, let's say that you're hiring out support. Let's say you have a support person or you've got support people or whatever it is. Let's say it's someone who's not totally vested in what it is you're doing. Let's say it is and they just don't understand what your product is. One of the worst things that can happen is when someone starts to ask a front line support person about your product because they may not know about it. What I try to do, what I'm trying to do now is I'm trying to separate support where they are mostly transactional style questions, "Hey, I can't find my login. Hey, I didn't get my receipt. Hey, does this include this?" Right? It's more factual and transactional. I'm trying to leave support to do that stuff while I handle the question on my live Q and As about the actual products and how to use it and how to get the most out of it and how to go crush it. You know what I mean? I'm trying to create that split right there and there's really a few things that I've been doing. I got this awesome guy. I want to interview him so you guys can all meet him sometime. He's so cool. He's awesome. He's been going through and he's been taking a lot of the Q and A questions that I get, support questions that I get and he's making a knowledge base with the most common questions. I think we're using Freshdesk. He's creating a knowledge base with like the most questions and it's not a perfect process yet and it's not a perfect system. I know that and I apologize if some people have gotten confused or frustrated if there's something that's been weird in there. We're still making it better. It'll be awesome. Anyway, that's where the knowledge base is sitting and a lot of transactional questions, a lot of like what things come with what questions. All that stuff is I'm trying to separate that and put that to support and I'm trying to take the other questions about the product and how to use it, how to actually be successful with it. I'm trying to put those in a live Q and A that I'm going to be doing with this new info product starting January. I'm going to be doing that every single week live with a group of people. I'll share my screen and we'll go through stuff. I'll take those things and I'll put them back into the members area so that people know what's going on with there. You know what I mean? That's the plan. The reason why is because there's been a few times where much earlier support people who were with me ... This new guy I have is amazing. His name is Luke. Shout out to you, buddy. I want to introduce him to everybody sometime. He's been amazing. Anyway, very much earlier support people, they weren't as passionate about my stuff as I am, which you can expect. That's totally fine. They might make customers a little bit mad or whatever it is because they may not understand a strategy. That should be something that I handle, not the support person. Anyway, okay, that's kind of a long answer there. Here's another lesson, well, I was originally funnels on SalesFunnelBroker.com for $100. I think they're still out there right now, but that's been changed. I just want you to know that. When I originally was selling that stuff, there's a lot more stuff I had on there for sale for a hundred bucks also. When I was selling funnels, when I'm selling share funnels, things like that, and even with this other info product, when I was selling stuff for a hundred bucks, I did not like the customer that brought. That was way too intense of a product. A whole share funnel and how to set it up, that's way too intense to be selling for only a hundred bucks. That's holy crap. This is lesson number three. Lesson number three is more money equals a better customer. Now I can understand having smaller physical products on the front end of your value ladder. That's a lot cheaper. It's because it doesn't take as much to fulfill on that... Not nearly at all. It does not take nearly that much to fulfill on it. That's a hard thing to screw up. You know what I mean? Like a book or something where it's cheaper and smaller and it's self-explanatory. That's way easier for a customer, any kind of customer, to come through and actually understand. When I was selling stuff that was cheaper that should have frankly been more expensive, that brought a kind of customer that was a little bit more needy. Not that it's a bad thing, but there's a level of self-solverness. They are people who solve a lot of issues or problems on their own. Entrepreneurship is a self-solver kind of a game, right? If you're not in love with solving problems, you're probably not going to make a great entrepreneur. Does that make sense? It's a big deal. All this game is going from one problem set to the next problem set, to the next problem set. The reason why Russell Brunson sometimes doesn't listen to a lot of stuff or go to a lot of other events anymore, he doesn't go to a lot of other people's things anymore, he doesn't read a lot of other people's books, the reason why is because he's on a much higher level problem set, right? He's not trying to figure out how to go from zero to a million or 1 to 10 or even 10 to 100 anymore. He's trying to figure out how to go to a billion dollars. That really ups the kind of person he's trying to learn from. It's the exact same thing with this whole ... Look, more money you charge equals a better customer. I could dive into that a lot deeper for other things too and show some other examples, but I'm going to move on. First lesson, make money first and make the product with the customer. That's huge. Massive value bomb right there. Number two, the live Q and As should be ... Anyway, I wish I had been doing live Q and As about how the product works rather than leaving that to support. That was a dumb decision on my move. Support should be more transactional stuff and creating a knowledge base. Number three, when you charge more money, you get a better customer typically. Number four, I wish that I had first funnel hacked a really hot market and then created a new niche out of that hot market. A lot of times it gets confusing for people... Hey, go funnel hack someone... Model them totally. Then hacks for secrets comes out which says, "Hey, create a brand new opportunity. Totally new niche. Something that's never been created before." You're like, "Wait a second. What? Where does funnel hacking come in and where does creating a new niche come in?" Right? Luckily, I guessed right on my first product. Number one, you go find a really ridiculously bloody, bloody red ocean, right? Something where tons and tons of money is being spent. You find out what they're all doing, then you create a new niche out of one step out of that really hot market. That's one of the easiest ways to ensure a big win. I wish I had done that the first round I've been more purposeful with that, but I frankly wasn't. I just didn't know. Next lesson, nevermind. That one doesn't make sense. Here's the next one, this is going to sound self-explanatory as I say this, but I just didn't understand this either. I wish I had created traffic sources prior to launching my first info product. I didn't even test anything. Nothing... I talk a lot about Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Workweek and it's simply because it's really good, but if you know the story of how he actually wrote that book and put it out there, it took him like a year of planning and preparation and writing. He would drip out a little bit of it here and drip out a little bit there and write little pieces here and there. He did it over the course of like a year. When he came up with the title, The 4-Hour Workweek, what he did is he brainstormed a ton of book title headlines, lots of ideas, a lot of book title ideas and he created an ad for each one of them and he threw them all out to the marketplace and he looked at which one had the highest click-through rate, which was The 4-Hour Workweek, and that's why he chose the title The 4-Hour Workweek. That's why that book is called that. He tested like crazy. He PR'd himself like crazy before he ever, ever launched the thing. He primed the pump way before he ever put it out there, which is awesome. I love how the product Software Secrets was launched. If you hadn't seen the Software Secrets launched, it's amazing. They made tons of money. It's amazing product. I personally use it. I personally bought it. I absolutely love Software Secrets. I think it's so cool, but what's cool about Software Secrets is that for almost a full year, in fact it might have been a full year, they had this podcast where all they did was document the creation of the product. They included their customer in the actual creation of the product. Now when there was this new feature that popped out, they said, "Oh yeah. You guys remember the story behind this feature?" Then they talk about it, right? That's cool because when they actually launched the thing, now they know the stories behind how hard it was to create this thing and the trial and challenge behind this one over here. It's cool because they brought us on the journey. They basically were selling everybody before they actually sold the thing and that's why they did it. That's how they did it. I wished that I had done that before. I wished that I had created pressure and traffic sources prior to actually launching the product. Oh my gosh... Guys, if you can make the event of you launching the product feel like an event, it's like one of the easiest ways to ensure success with this whole thing. Anyway, I have been talking like crazy and I know this is kind of a long podcast. The last few have been kind of long, but I'm just excited to share a with you guys a few of these things that have been going on my head. Anyways, if you're making a product, you're making something that's good, that's ... It could be the first one. It could be something that's also maybe not even your first one. Maybe it could be whatever it is you're about to launch something or you've already launched it, think through ... Okay. I'm just going to recap these lessons real quick. There's one, two, three, four, about five things here. Number one, figure out again how you can actually make money before you start creating your thing. That's going to ease your pain like crazy because the guess work's not going to be on you. The market will tell you what it wants you to create, right? I just went over that. You don't have that inside of you of really knowing what it is to create. You got to ask the market. You might as well get paid while you do it and you can. Start selling before it's ready. That's number one. Number two, separate what support's roles are with your roles. Your role is to sell the thing, make it awesome, help people learn how to use it, help people learn how to consume it. Support's roles in my opinion is more transactional. You know what I mean? It's more let's make a knowledge base. Let's do the things. Let's answer the questions you're answering all the time, Steven. Let's answer all the questions. You know what I mean? It's that kind of stuff and again I'm going to introduce you to a cool guy here shortly. Stuff starts to roll out with this thing. The third thing, charge more money. More money equals a better customer typically. More money typically equals someone who's willing to take more action. If someone spends more money, usually they're willing to do what you say rather than blame random stupid crap on you that it's not your fault, rather than just their own fault for not actually taking action. You know what I mean? Anyway, more money usually equals a better customer. Fourth lesson, find the hot product where lots of money is, then take one step out of that as you create a new niche, right? Don't just create something new willy-nilly. Find out what's actually selling before and go create something new from it. Then the fifth and final thing is create some pressure before you start to sell something. Find the traffic sources... Do some testing. Figure out what is actually selling. Your job is to sell. Just sell. Don't worry about stupid stuff like business cards or office space. That stuff doesn't matter. Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Sell for a while and prove what the market wants, then we can kind of automate stuff because the market told you what it wants. Anyway, I've been talking a long time. That was a freaking 30 minute podcast and I'm sorry that it went that long, but honestly, I just hope that you understand more of like ... Gosh, like so many headaches. I can't even tell you how many headaches would have been relieved if I had just done this. I mean this is over the course of like two years of me learning that. Okay? I hope that that 30 minutes cut down two years of you learning how to do this stuff. You might even be amazing at selling that stuff and I hope that you and you probably are, but just the way you structure stuff with your support, with all the different things, all the different pieces, just know that like is ... Those are for me the five huge lessons when launching an info product or products in general. When it comes to selling it, just ... It eases the pain like crazy. I kind of jumped into a lot of that stuff too with our last fad event and it went really great, but anyway. I'm excited to launch this thing. I think it'd be great. I've got a lot more structure in place this time as far as the business wise goes, which usually I don't care as much about, but I'm trying to take you to a lot of the lessons I learned for the first info product. I'm excited to launch it. It'll be early January. Anyway, it's going to be awesome. Anyways, get out there. Launch stuff. Just sell stuff and I'm excited for you and what you're launching. It's cool to hear all the stories. I love when you guys reach out and share with me what you guys got from these things too. It's really fun. Anyway, you guys are all awesome. Get out there... Create products... Put stuff out there... Time is a ticking... Don't waste it. I'll talk to you later. Bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to SalesFunnelBroker.com/freefunnels to download your prebuilt sales funnels today.

My Favorite Tools From 10 Years Social Warfare Plugin - The best tool for sharing things. I love that I can specify the tweet text and the image for Facebook, Pinterest, etc. This is once I don't wince when the subscription payment comes through Convertkit - I like MailChimp, Aweber, but I switched to Convertkit last year, and I love the marketing tools that I can use and the ability to make my own landing/sales pages. Siteground Web Hosting - 10 Years ago I would've sung the praises of Hostgator, and I thought Bluehost was OK. I do not recommend them at all, and I like Siteground. Their support is so much better. I also love Godaddy support, so I created coolerwebsites.com which is my GoDaddy reseller account Divi Theme (Elegant Themes) - The most flexible WordPress theme I've used and still fairly easy to use (there is a bit of a learning curve, and you probably won't use all of its features). I DO NOT recommend Appendpipity themes. They were awesome, but from what I can tell, the lights are on but nobody is home. I am interested in checking out Thrive Themes, and Themify (very divi like) Speaking of Websites and Wordpress Management, I LOVE ManageWP and recommend it to everyone who has a WordPress site. Bonjoro Is a cool Video Email service that pays for itself every month I have someone share how cool it was that I sent them a personalized video Kit.com is a great way to bundle Amazon products. I tried Fresh Store Builder and it was OK. My favorite is EasyAzon for Amazon Tools. ( I use this on bestpodcastinggear.com/shop ) Acuity Scheduling is the best tool for Scheduling Appointments. I love that it works with Freshbooks so I can have people book consulting time, get paid upfront and have an invoice in my billing system. For Membership Websites, if you are using Wordpress I loved Digital Access Pass. If you want your membership site separate from Wordpress I love Thinkific. In regards to project management, I love todosit.com For automated Tweeting, I like Social Jukebox If I was creating an Affiliate Program, I would use iDev Affiliate For Chat on a website, I love https://www.tawk.to/ Nimble is my favorite contact management Tool Optin Monster continues to reign as the king of Pop-Ups and Opt-ins Freshdesk is a GREAT Support tool if you want a ticketing/FAQ all in one My Typos were decreased by using The World's Best Grammar Checker  which is Grammarly For Webinars I use Zoom.us My favorite Affiliate Network (their new interface is AWESOME) is shareasale.com The Last Episode of This Version of Weekly Web Tools On July 28th, 2007 I started Weekly Web Tools as I was doing web design using Dreamweaver and I just started using Wordpress. I was my target audience. I was a person who wanted their websites to Get more traffic Convert When people arrive Look Good doing it Communicate better with our audience I use to run into tools all the time, there were new things happening on a regular basis, and I could find great tools from companies (not marketers) and creating the podcast was pretty easy. Fast forward 10 years later and instead of companies, tools are being launched by marketers who often would release a tool for a small period of time, and either pull the tool, go out of business, offer no support, raise their price, and in the end it was hard to find solid tools that I could recommend to you and be able to sleep at night. My last episode was the straw that broke the camel's back. I found what appeared to be a cool tool, only to find to "Companies" who appeared to have stolen the code from each other, and one didn't work (its has since been fixed). So I spent the better part of two hours trying to figure out if I liked the tool. To put it into a single question, after 10 years, I think I've found all the tools that I like, and I don't see a lot of creativity to make new tools that grab my attention. I always thought I would get more input from the audience on what tools they used, and I did from certain people, but all in all, it was a very, very low percentage. Plans For The Future I don't plan on releasing any new episodes for the rest of 2017 unless something crosses my path. I plan on rebranding the podcast to be called "Small Business Tools" and it will be moved to a "when I have something to say" schedule. I'm also shutting down the Patreon account. I could switch to a patron account, where I am paid when I put out an episode but I've decided just to close it down. Thanks to My Patrons Josh Rivers from CreativeStudio.academy Ileane Smith from www.ileanesmith.com Scott Johnson from Computer Tutor Podcast

Jake and Michael return after a few weeks' hiatus and discuss Michael's new role as a lead developer and the slightly softer focus for the podcast moving forward.

Mathilde Collin. She’s the CEO of Front, a SaaS company working on redesigning email for teams. She started with Y Combinator in the summer of 2014, and today has 20 employees and 1700 customers. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Zero to One What CEO do you follow? – Patrick Collison Favorite online tool? — Slack How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8 and a half If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “People that are struggling should be super motivated because that’s what everyone go through”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:04 – Nathan introduces Mathilde to the show 01:33 – Mathilde was in Episode 413 of The Top 01:43 – Back then, they had 1200 customers, $13M raised, around a million in revenue in 2015 01:53 – An average customer pays 200 a month leading to an MRR of $240K 01:58 – Gross churn was 3% 02:10 – Front now has 40 team members 02:13 – “We tripled our revenue” 02:15 – The number of customers didn’t triple because they had bigger companies using Front 02:43 – Current MRR is around $750K 03:02 – Front still has 80% of what they’ve raised last year 03:13 – Total capital raised was $14M 03:45 – Front is burning $250K a month 03:50 – Mostly from head count 04:29 – Churn has always been low 04:35 – Net churn has always been negative which -10% monthly 04:50 – User churn is around 3.5 - 4% 05:04 – MRR churn is low 05:30 – The teams that are paying Front more per month tend to be very sticky 06:10 – Gross margin is 88% 06:22 – Front APP is the easiest way to manage a shared inbox as a team 06:29 – A sample of shared inbox is support@contact or a social media account 06:37 – Front simplifies everything in one place 06:54 – For Front’s growth, they lend it and extend it 07:00 – Net negative churn is coming from existing customers 07:04 – Existing customers have been upgraded to new plans or added teams 07:10 – HubSpot started with 1 team and now they have 13 teams with Front 07:26 – Front now has a marketing team with 3 people 07:35 – Front has now done more advertising and content 07:41 – The most effective for Front is AdWords 07:52 – Monthly CAC is around $15K 08:03 – Front tracks sales qualified leads 08:26 – It takes 7 trials to get 1 new paying customer 08:38 – After the trial, the customer will be categorized as an enterprise or SMB and mid-market companies 08:50 – The goal is for the sales people to get the trial set up 09:02 – The sales cycle is 3 weeks 09:20 – 95% of the customer is going through 3 weeks than the offered 2 weeks 09:26 – People are using Front than Slack because Slack is usually for before synchronous communication 09:34 – Front is for a synchronous communication 09:40 – A synchronous is every communication that is done externally should have an upfront 09:49 – Slack messages can also be distracting with the team 10:13 – Front competes more with Intercom than with Slack 10:25 – Intercom is usually better for customer communication while Front is for general communication 10:43 – Front is an email client 11:40 – Customers are buying Front to replace email 11:46 – In other cases, Front replaces helpdesk solutions like Desk, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, etc 12:12 – Mathilde won’t sell Front now even for $95M 12:25 – “I think I will sell when I’m not as confident as today” 12:37 – Front makes Mathilde happy 13:04 – Mathilde is now 28 13:15 – Front was launched in early 2015 13:29 – Mathilde wanted people to be happy at work so she made Front 15:07 – Mathilde has always been happy and confident that they can do a series B 15:56 - “I do have some inbound” 16:30 – Mathilde was part of an article in Entrepreneur.com 19:10 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Growth can be measured by several different metrics—the important thing isn’t the metric, it’s the important thing is consistency. Stay with what makes you and other people happy. People love reliability—if you can deliver that in a product or service you’re on to something.   Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

For most SaaS startups, there comes a point when expansion to new markets seems like the logical path to faster growth. Arun Mani is Managing Director for Freshdesk's efforts in Europe, and his approach and philosophy towards this (and career growth in general) is something we should all pay attention to.

Back in 2010, Girish Mathrubootham was a pretty successful tech guy, having risen up the ranks of a company to VP of Product Management. But that didn't mean he was immune to bad customer service. After spending months and months going back and forth with a company on an insurance claim, in the end, all that was achieved was Mathrubootham feeling helpless and frustrated. He took to a popular online forum to air his frustrations, and that was when he got his first taste of what it means to harness social power. His post went viral, with others airing their own frustrations at the same company, to the point where the president of the company stepped in to personally apologize to Mathrubootham. He began to understand just how antiquated the systems for customer service were, and just how important social media had become in giving a voice to customers who previously had nowhere else to go. He realized that modern companies needed a help desk that not only tracked complaints through traditional channels like email and phone, but also those that came through on social media channels. The result was Freshdesk, a company that now employs more than 950 people around the world, and has raised more than $150 million in capital from top VC firms. One more super-impressive thing about the story of Freshdesk—it started out as a tiny company based in India, and Mathrubootham had to overcome the challenge of gaining a foothold in the US. That seven-year journey had its own share of setbacks, but Mathrubootham has managed to rise above each one that the cutthroat tech world has thrown his way, through a mixture of knowing exactly the right kind of person to hire and his own tenacity and savvy for PR. In this week's episode you will learn: What it means to truly harness social power What to look out for when you're studying your competitors How to turn an attack into the best PR move you'll ever make The key to raising millions of dollars from the top VR firms in Silicon Valley Why you need to hire based on potential and not on academic credentials & much more!

For Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshdesk, entrepreneurship is not a one-off fling, but more like a habit, or “a sport he dearly loves.” “Being an entrepreneur gives an opportunity to dream and go after it. It’s about doing what I like doing,” he told me in this episode of The Outliers Podcast. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Michael Gerber scarcely needs an introduction, however, if you haven't heard of him before he is the Author of the small business classic The E-Myth and he has just published his latest and last book Beyond The E-Myth This Michael Gerber interview explores why the vast majority of small business owners are on a fool's errand. So, he's on a mission to turn them from a bogged down company of one, to an absolutely brilliant company of one thousand. How's this for a scoreboard, since The E-Myth was originally published over 20 years ago it has: Over 5 million copies sold In 2011, The eMyth was named the best selling business book of all time Sold in 145 countries, translated into 29 languages and taught in 118 universities Sold in 145 countries, translated into 29 languages and taught in 118 universities INC magazine calls him “The world's #1 small business guru” Michael has a dream to transform the state of small business worldwide. He's been doing that for the last 40-years, and now (at age 80) he's about to launch his newest book titled Beyond The eMyth. But that's not all. In this episode of your favourite marketing podcast: We cover plenty of ground in this chat including: What's missing in the way most small businesses are run? How Michael stumbled upon the world of small business and some of the back story behind his books How to go from a company of 1 to an enterprise of 1000 And the hierarchy of growth to get to 1000 I share another low cost marketing idea for you to implement immediately in our new segment loving called What Have You Got To Lose? And we revisit a past episode in which I spoke to Siri, the REAL Siri Karen Jacobsen. Yep, you guessed it, another big episode, so let's get stuck, right in.  EPISODE TIMELINE 00:00  Two marketing insights 00:45   Teaser 01:24  Welcome & overview 04:02  Today's guest introduction - Michael Gerber 05:54  Interview with Michael Gerber 58:10 Insights into  WebCentral & DesignCrowd 01:00:10  My Top 3 Attention Grabbers from my chat with Michael Gerber 01:01:54  What Have You Got To Lose? #4 01:06:55  Wrap-up and an insight in to both a past guest & next week's guestMY TOP 3 MARKETING ATTENTION GRABBERS Read The E-Myth! After you've read the E-Myth read Beyond The E-Myth. They should be required reading for all small business owners ... and their children! Start with a blank Canvas. The idea of sitting down and asking yourself what your New Co. would look like based on Michael's E-Myth model sounds like a worthwhile exercise. Have a dream. To start with the end in mind is a good thing. I've got a great interview coming up with the owners of Canberra Airport, all about starting with the dreaming and working backwards to make the dream a reality.RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED Michael Gerber's official website The E-Myth Book  Beyond The E-Myth What Have You Got To Lose? - Add Live Chat To Your Website Check out Zopim, ZenDesk, FreshDesk to get started WebCentral's Online Conversion workshops October in Sydney and Melbourne - use promo code TIMBO16 for 10% discount Create Freedom Through Outsourcing Tour #3  EPISODE SPONSORS WebCentral - Exclusive listener offers Get your online marketing sorted with these exclusive listener offers. DesignCrowd – The world's #1 custom design marketplace Save $100 off your first design.  OVER TO YOU … What was your biggest marketing learning or ah-ha moment from this episode? Leave your comment below. My guest and I respond to each and every comment.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1:00: Topic introduction Full-time job vs. consulting How much money is possible or likely? 4:30: Discussion of the money Cost of living (Israel vs. USA) Can a solo consultant make $300K/year? Reality of what it takes 11:00: How to make a lot of money as a solo consultant What do you enjoy doing? What are you good at? Find a successful niche 15:15: How to get people to trust you Referrals Networking Example: Redmine Blog/Podcast/Other media 21:45: Understand your customers’ problems Conferences Meetups 24:30: Emotional fortitude to command a high rate Guilt Mindset Getting out of the low cash-flow cycle 31:00: Offering a mix of services Avoiding dry spells Systematic way to attract leads Picks: Family Vacations (Reuven) Portugal as a vacation destination (Reuven) RentalCars.com (Reuven) Dev Shop Marketing Briefings (Philip) The Secret of Selling Anything (Philip) TrustVelocity.com (Jonathan) Million Dollar Maverick (Jonathan) ScheduleOnce (Charles) FreshDesk (Charles)   Sponsor: Hire.com

1:00: Topic introduction Full-time job vs. consulting How much money is possible or likely? 4:30: Discussion of the money Cost of living (Israel vs. USA) Can a solo consultant make $300K/year? Reality of what it takes 11:00: How to make a lot of money as a solo consultant What do you enjoy doing? What are you good at? Find a successful niche 15:15: How to get people to trust you Referrals Networking Example: Redmine Blog/Podcast/Other media 21:45: Understand your customers’ problems Conferences Meetups 24:30: Emotional fortitude to command a high rate Guilt Mindset Getting out of the low cash-flow cycle 31:00: Offering a mix of services Avoiding dry spells Systematic way to attract leads Picks: Family Vacations (Reuven) Portugal as a vacation destination (Reuven) RentalCars.com (Reuven) Dev Shop Marketing Briefings (Philip) The Secret of Selling Anything (Philip) TrustVelocity.com (Jonathan) Million Dollar Maverick (Jonathan) ScheduleOnce (Charles) FreshDesk (Charles)   Sponsor: Hire.com

1:55 - Public Service Announcement: Moving past RC5 4:40 - Advice for an easy transition 9:40 - Modules and smaller apps 14:15 - Process for moving folders and modules 16:30 - Sharing code between projects 19:40 - Ahead Of Time Compiler 27:00 - Non-Javascript back-end systems 29:25 - Functions of the NgModule 31:00 - Components and Templates Javascript Jabber episode on Rollup.js 36:40 - Providers 38:50 - Ordering Components 41:50 - Building a small app with no use for modules Picks Stranger Things on Netflix (Joe) Game of Thrones (Jules) Angular 2 Class with John Pop and Dan Moleen. Use code “AIA” for $200 off registration (Joe) Gboard for iPhone (Jules) Factorio game (Steve) Electric Knife Sharpener (Ward) IdeaBlade (Ward) Freshdesk (Charles)

1:55 - Public Service Announcement: Moving past RC5 4:40 - Advice for an easy transition 9:40 - Modules and smaller apps 14:15 - Process for moving folders and modules 16:30 - Sharing code between projects 19:40 - Ahead Of Time Compiler 27:00 - Non-Javascript back-end systems 29:25 - Functions of the NgModule 31:00 - Components and Templates Javascript Jabber episode on Rollup.js 36:40 - Providers 38:50 - Ordering Components 41:50 - Building a small app with no use for modules Picks Stranger Things on Netflix (Joe) Game of Thrones (Jules) Angular 2 Class with John Pop and Dan Moleen. Use code “AIA” for $200 off registration (Joe) Gboard for iPhone (Jules) Factorio game (Steve) Electric Knife Sharpener (Ward) IdeaBlade (Ward) Freshdesk (Charles)

1:55 - Public Service Announcement: Moving past RC5 4:40 - Advice for an easy transition 9:40 - Modules and smaller apps 14:15 - Process for moving folders and modules 16:30 - Sharing code between projects 19:40 - Ahead Of Time Compiler 27:00 - Non-Javascript back-end systems 29:25 - Functions of the NgModule 31:00 - Components and Templates Javascript Jabber episode on Rollup.js 36:40 - Providers 38:50 - Ordering Components 41:50 - Building a small app with no use for modules Picks Stranger Things on Netflix (Joe) Game of Thrones (Jules) Angular 2 Class with John Pop and Dan Moleen. Use code “AIA” for $200 off registration (Joe) Gboard for iPhone (Jules) Factorio game (Steve) Electric Knife Sharpener (Ward) IdeaBlade (Ward) Freshdesk (Charles)

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to co-host ExCom 2016, a conference focused on how customer experience, customer engagement and eCommerce were converging, and the future direction this convergence is pointing to. And mobile devices and apps have been at the forefront of this convergence. Although there is no disputing the role of mobility in bringing commerce and customer experience closer together in a digital world, businesses have to have a strong digital foundation in place to create the kind of experiences modern consumers expect when they engage on various channels from those devices. During the keynote conversation I moderated, Dilawar Syed, president of customer support platform Freshdesk, shared why businesses of all sizes need to have a service-first culture in place in order to be successful engaging customers through a growing number of channels via their mobile devices.

Chris and Brock manifest an idea that can help any podcaster, app developer or producer of multimedia content to consolidate their link sharing efforts. This episode is brought to you by Freshdesk. FreshDesk is the customer support software companion for your business. Stop dealing with customer support through your cluttered inbox and start using the powerful ticketing system provided by Freshdesk. With Freshdesk, you can ensure that every customer issue is resolved and that every customer gets the support they need. Plus, with powerful features like Canned responses, scenario automations, and a self service Knowledge Base, you can free up more time from your busy day. You can’t go wrong with FreshDesk, the support software used by huge companies like Honda, Cisco, and Elon Musk’s, SolarCity. With plans starting $0 a month, there is no reason you shouldn’t start decluttering your inbox, and start using Freshdesk to support your customers. Go to startupideaspodcast.com/freshdesk to start your free 30 day trial of FreshDesk. FreshDesk: Customer Happiness, refreshingly easy

Episode 118 “Crapalytics” 2:00 And we’re live! Josh apparently is cracking the whip on Derick. Derick is doing the brunt work on researching for marketing and he i working on the persona or avatar for the course he is building.  6:40 Derick mentions he has 254 plus people signed up the webinar launch. Derick hope to gain customers from the webinar. Derick is looking for a guess speaker for the webinar, so he can focus on the marketing.  10:00 Derick says he wants to tie in the Watch Me Code projects into the webinar and continue the questions in for the products in the Slack channel. Derick mentions the webinar will be available on YouTube. 16:00 Chuck talks about how to understand an avatar for marketing purposes. Josh explains the demographics of an avatar and how to marketing to this particular type of person.  22:00 Derick talks about how working on the marketing material such as emails are sharpening his marketing skills other areas. Like marketing for his new bundle. 26:00 Josh talks about how getting into ‘the work’ will trigger something for you to understand the actual experiences and pain points of your audience or customers. EntreProgrammers talk about the Myers Briggs Test.  Derick talks about how this help you understand your preferences and should not to be taken to seriously.  30:00 Derick share a book he is reading by Alex Harms at: leanpub.com/littleguide. Derick shares that this will help understand empathy on a technical level.  35:00 Josh helps Derick with the analytics for projected sales of the annual passes to Watch Me Code. Josh talks about maybe speaking with people who bought the all access pass and those who were on the fence about buying. Josh says that this would give Derick huge insight to the customers ideas about the product.  46:00 Derick says he has to much to work on for the business and does not know where to start. Chuck talks about gaining more clarity on the project. Derick talks about working his ass off to get the marketing email right after a years worth of understanding the market.  54:00 Derick talks about picking the right story to tell for a marketing strategy, but and things just don't fall together easily for him. Derick mentions having a difficult time figuring out what to do with the emails and creating marketing material. Derick says he has no time to create the marketing material. 1:02:00 Derick asks how he could find the balance to find customers in the next few weeks and also do research.  Josh shares what he thinks the process Derick should take for the Watch Me Code. Josh thinks that doing a webinar once a month could increase sales on the full access subscription.  1:08:00 Chuck talks about the frustrations he has with creating his Rails Clips material, and getting overdue projects out of the way. Josh shares that Simple Programmers sales have finally picked up.  1:12:00 Josh shares that he is doing a marketing project for Dan Martel. Josh talks about interviewing John, as he talks about failed attempts an an entrepreneur.  1:17:00 Josh talks about doing an email via Java Code Geeks. Josh says that LeadPages has fail him again. Josh talks about writing over an thousand word email for the competition.  1:24:00 Derick ask about the live chat system.  Josh mentions FreshDesk and Olark. EntreProgrammers discuss the types of chat system they could integrate on their sites.  1:30:00 Josh talks about where the fall off was on the Simple Programmers Site. Derick shares that he might have to reverify that the registration page is working correctly.  1:35:00 Chuck asks for some advice on paid traffic, and maybe using Facebook for the traffic. Josh talks a how paid traffic works and that you have to spend a lot over time for an ROI. Josh does not think it is time worry about this project.  1:45:00 Josh says Chuck should focus on emails and growth instead.  Thoughts of the Week Chuck -  Keep your head above water!  

Brock and Chris relinquish another amazing Silicon Valley startup idea that blocks spoilers for movies and tv shows from ever penetrating the sanctity of your social media feeds. This episode is brought to you by Freshdesk. FreshDesk is the customer support software companion for your business. Stop dealing with customer support through your cluttered inbox and start using the powerful ticketing system provided by Freshdesk. With Freshdesk, you can ensure that every customer issue is resolved and that every customer gets the support they need. Plus, with powerful features like Canned responses, scenario automations, and a self service Knowledge Base, you can free up more time from your busy day. You can’t go wrong with FreshDesk, the support software used by huge companies like Honda, Cisco, and Elon Musk’s, SolarCity. With plans starting $0 a month, there is no reason you shouldn’t start decluttering your inbox, and start using Freshdesk to support your customers. Go to startupideaspodcast.com/freshdesk to start your free 30 day trial of FreshDesk. FreshDesk: Customer Happiness, refreshingly easy

A niche coffee shop idea that helps people decompress and blow off some steam. In this episode of StartUp Ideas, Brock and Chris talk about how putting a twist on a regular cafe can help people tap in to their inner animal nature and pay us for that experience. This episode is brought to you by Freshdesk. FreshDesk is the customer support software companion for your business. Stop dealing with customer support through your cluttered inbox and start using the powerful ticketing system provided by Freshdesk. With Freshdesk, you can ensure that every customer issue is resolved and that every customer gets the support they need. Plus, with powerful features like Canned responses, scenario automations, and a self service Knowledge Base, you can free up more time from your busy day. You can’t go wrong with FreshDesk, the support software used by huge companies like Honda, Cisco, and Elon Musk’s, SolarCity. With plans starting $0 a month, there is no reason you shouldn’t start decluttering your inbox, and start using Freshdesk to support your customers. Go to startupideaspodcast.com/freshdesk to start your free 30 day trial of FreshDesk. FreshDesk: Customer Happiness, refreshingly easy

With so many tools and communication channels available to us, choosing how you support your WordPress product can be a real head-scratcher. Luckily, in today's episode, Devin and I are here to explain the best methods we've found that work in our respective businesses. If you've been in the WordPress product business for a while now, you know how interesting support can get. Depending on your product, your support channel can span fairly broad spectrums. From supporting agencies that are using your plugin for client work, all the way to first-time WordPress users that just purchased your theme. Bridging that gap is always a challenge. Our products are expected to work in an ecosystem that we have very little control over. Think about the various hosts, versions of WordPress, and conflicting plugin code a user might be running. It's actually quite scary when you think about it. Recently the team at Yoast wrote about their headaches launching a new version. A good read for anyone considering pushing out a major update. Support channels mentioned in this episode While it's best you listen or watch the video, here are the areas of support Devin and I discuss: Documentation Blog post Seminars/webinars Helpdesk (like Helpscout, Freshdesk, intercom.io, etc) Forums (BBPress, Discourse, etc) Ongoing training videos (like an “academy”) Live chat plugins (Zopim, Olark, etc) Provide a solid upgrade and development path Provide industry knowledge relative to your client Automation (for segmentation and follow-up) Content marketing in the form of blogs & educational shows/podcasts Listen to the audio [smart_track_player url=”https://soundcloud.com/matt-report/how-to-support-your-wordpress-theme-plugin-customers” title=”11 Ways to support your WordPress theme & plugin cusotmers” artist=”Matt Report” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_gplus=”true” ] Watch the video   Like the show? Consider joining the newsletter. ★ Support this podcast ★

* ZipGo работает. Все хорошо, но кажется, что сервис ухудшился * Ola – индийский Uber. Беспилотные автомобили не для Индии * Метро в Бангалоре и меры безопасности в общественных местах * "Здесь каждый делает свой стартап" * India Startup Report: проникновение интернета 10% и 41% всех стартапов в Бангалоре * Как Бангалор стал стартап столицей? Университеты и офисы глобальных IT-компаний * Flipkart – индийский Amazon * Zoho тоже из Индии * Zendesk жалуется, что Freshdesk пытается выехать на их популярности * Zomato похож на Yelp * Леша рассказывает о том, как он болел лихорадкой Денге

Dilawar Syed, President of Freshdesk, talked with us about how they've scaled globally form their headquarters in Chennai, India. He shares his personal passion for helping people outside of Silicon Valley achieve the dream of a global entrepreneurship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this month’s podcast, Katie Zulanas from MediaTrik walks us through the steps her company takes in a web project. Tune in for Episode 44 of the Business Catalyst podcast! Listen to this month’s podcast: Simply click the play button below to stream the podcast via your browser. player AudioPlayer.embed("player-nov132", {soundFile: "http://www.businesscatalyst.com/LiteratureRetrieve.aspx?ID=126652", noinfo: "yes" }); Alternatively, you can download the podcast in .mp3 format for offline listening. In this episode: Congratulations to the BC App of the Month developers and prize winner Interview with Katie Zulanas from MediaTrik Business Catalyst Quiz Question Stop Losing Clients. Once you do business with MediaTrik, you aren’t going anywhere. And, that isn’t by accident. Katie has put a lot of thought into creating a process where clients are quickly entered into MediaTrik’s system. This process happens quickly and efficiently. And, once your project is complete you’ll find your new team continues to support you. And, there is good reason MediaTrik is so attentive to your needs. Katie and her team know if you feel like they are a part of your team, you are more likely to buy into their other services, like SEO. To find out more, listen to Katie’s interview. Scott B Reynolds - Thrise Resources mentioned in podcast: Ugurus - http://www.ugurus.com/ Liquid Markup Lessons - http://businesscatalyst.com/bc-blog/liquid-lessons-special-offer Cross Browser Testing - https://crossbrowsertesting.com/ Freshbooks – http://freshbooks.com Freshdesk - http://freshdesk.com/

Tony says that 20 years in the industry has taught him how to sniff out BS… Tony also talks about ID’s new fuel pump controller and how it’s going to change the game. He speaks on software he uses in his business: Wrike for project management, Gmail and Freshdesk for email.  Stay tuned at the end for a candid conversation between Reid and Tony about the tools he uses to handle the hundreds of emails he gets.    

Highlights of my conversation with Tejasawi Raghurama Growth Save 300 administrative hours per month Automates accounting for ecommerce stores Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India Increasing monthly recurring revenue and reducing churn Transcript Heather:    Hello. It’s Heather Smith here. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you are doing well. Today I speak with Tejasawi Raghurama which I’ve probably pronounce incorrectly but I refer to him as Tej. Tej is a growth hacker at ZapStitch. ZapStitch is a data integration platform for small business to automate data flow across cloud business solutions. They are automating accounting for a thousand plus e-commerce business from North America, Australasia, Europe by integrating Shopify, Bigcommerce with Xero. ZapStitch automatically imports sales orders into your accounting application’s invoices. Discounts, taxes and shipping rates are sync’d seamlessly which is something he emphasises in the show. An average business using ZapStitch saves 300 plus hours every month spent in manual accounting, freeing up their time so they can spend it with the customer and family. ZapStitch is the number one ranked and rated accounting add-on in the Shopify app store. Tej believes no human should do a machine’s job and small businesses can grow huge with automation. He places part by educating and working with customers. When not learning from business, you’ll find him watching South Park. He joined ZapStitch in February 2014 as one of the first employees there. He was inspired by the vision of the founders, the fundamental impact the way businesses manage tedious processes. I started by asking Tej who was his favourite South Park character and why. Tejasawi:       Awesome. That’s a great question to start with. I think Cartman because I’m fascinated by climatic and realistic people. I always look at the world around me, “That is good.” “That is bad.” But there are people who actually recognise it and live through it. I would see Cartman in South Park as being the most pragmatic and he is who he is. He doesn’t mould himself according to the people around him and he has his originality intact. Yes, he is cruel, I don’t recognise that spirit but I think he’s on his own. Heather:        Sensational. I don’t watch South Park so I don’t know the character but I thought that our listeners might find that interesting. I know that my son watches South Park but I don’t. Tejasawi:       Okay. So Tej, can you tell me a little about ZapStitch. Tejasawi:       Sure. ZapStitch automates accounting in commerce stores. In simple English, what we do is we create platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce with accounting apps like Xero, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       ZapStitch enables seamless data syncing between those apps. We sync data for all the customers and anything related to the invoice and sales tax automation. What we enable at the end of the day is exponentially faster reporting in accounting and accurate data and peace of mind. I mean the most common feedback we get from our accountants and from business owners who use ZapStitch is peace of mind. At the end of the day, accounting shouldn’t be an intimidating step in the process, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       That is one feedback we often get. At the company level, our vision is to automate business apps across verticals. When we were founded … we are a cloud integration platform, so our long term two year or three year future is to integrate at least 300-500 business apps on the cloud. Heather:        Oh okay. Tejasawi:       We are starting with e-commerce and accounting because we believe there are immediate gaps in between them, and we want to solve as many problems in accounting as possible, and go in depth in accounting automation. Who are your typical customers? Tejasawi:       Typical customers are twofold. One is an e-commerce business owner or the business team of a 10-man or 15-man e-commerce team. The second end user is the accountant who has multiple e-commerce tools as clients or is working part time as the bookkeeper. Those are two end users but our business is somebody that’s doing let’s say a $2 million dollar revenue per year and who actually feels the pain of data entry, right? A typical business of where we work with spends at least 500 hours in accounting per month. If we can solve that pain point, I think that’s where our end customer is. Heather:        That certainly makes … if you can resolve 500 hours at your price point, then that certainly is of benefit to the client. Tejasawi:       Exactly. Where about are you actually based? Tejasawi:       We are based out of Bangalore in India. It’s called the Silicon Valley of India, so it’s the Bangalore start-up hub in India, yes. Where about are your servers based? Where are the data for your company based … for the client data based? Tejasawi:       We are based … we built it on EWS, the server side across EWS in Singapore if I’m not wrong but I need to get some technical knowledge there. The servers are on EWS and we don’t locally store data. Heather:        Okay, so it’s not locally stored. It’s always a question that people ask us. Tejasawi:       Yes indeed. Heather:        It’s an unpleasant question I guess but the customer is always going, “Well, where is my data?” “Is it in the clouds?” “Where is it?” So it’s important to know. Tejasawi:       Yes, just to add to that point, ZapStitch believes in transparency, so we don’t store any local data on any server for that matter. We only move data from A to B. there will be apps and I’m sure you’ve interviewed and talked to some where they’re stored locally and in the app they show the data, right? We enable seamless syncing of data and not storing of data. Yes, that’s a belief we are in right now. Maybe going forward when we add features like reporting inside the app we will look at storing data but right now we are only moving data and storing metadata like number of orders … Heather:        I thought it might be like that. What’s your internet connection like in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India? Tejasawi:       Internet connection is a problem maybe sporadically but we have good broadband speeds in Bangalore. We have a speed of let’s say 22/30mps. That serves our purpose and we haven’t felt the pain of internet speed at all. But sometimes the sporadic connection is due to the team load rather than the internet speed. When we grew as a start-up, there were logistical issues which were solved of course but yes, there is no problem with the internet. We are not consciously aware of the speed, yes. Heather:        Tej, you describe yourself as a Growth Hacker.  What does that mean? Tejasawi:       I mean that’s something I’m figuring out. Heather:        It sounds very impressive. I actually like that title, ‘The Growth Hacker’. Tejasawi:       Right, so how growth hacking works, it’s a term by an accounting marketer called Sean Ellis who is inbound marketeer and he has a start-up. What he says is like when you build a start-up, that is a predictable good … you can achieve. You can draw a straight line which is not a hockey stick but is like a 45 degree angle, right? What a growth hacker does or growth marketing is like it recognises certain bursts in the marketing cycle and exponentially recreates it. If the growth hacking is successful, you find an unconventional way of growing and you make it repeatable success. So that’s how you differentiate your start-up from the rest of the competition. You actually blow the competition off because you have tested and repeated success with an unconventional method. That’s what growth hacking, the term is coming from. Heather:        That’s interesting. I should mention in there … I’m guessing I’m right, you’re referring to grass hockey rather than ice hockey for our North American listeners which is … actually would he be referring to ice hockey rather than grass hockey? Tejasawi:       He’s an Australian guy so I don’t know. Heather:        Because they’re two very differently shaped sticks, I know that. Tejasawi:       Indeed. I think I get your point now because … Heather:        So I think it’s actually the ice hockey stick he’s referring to isn’t it because that’s the one with the 45 degree angle, whereas the grass hockey stick is actually quite … very, very short. Tejasawi:       I know it looked like that. Heather:        I’ll go and Google it and see if I can work it out afterward. You have, in the first year of launch, you managed to attain 250 paying customers with inbound marketing. How did you go about doing this? Tejasawi:       We have an install base of 1,000 stores but when the free trial ends, that’s how the paying customer starts. We are a SASS based B2B company, product company. At the beginning we were very clear that we were targeting certain markets where these platforms have good penetration. For example, US, Canada, Australia and UK, right, where the amalgamation or the integration can serve a purpose immediately. We targeted those and we founded the channels which were the app stores. As a company, we didn’t invest in a sales asset team. We didn’t hire any sales persons. We only invested in customer success. When I joined as a third team member in February of last year, I was straight away sent to customer support as a role. I didn’t go to marketing for the first four months. So what we learned from that is if you actually delight your customers from day one, they sell the app themselves. They write reviews. They talk about you. They recommend you to users and the Shopify system is pretty vital in that sense. People talk about their issues. So we actually focused on two things. One was the forums, community forums, across the business apps and the second is to actually get good reviews on the platform. People read reviews before they read features actually, often. Heather:        I completely agree with that, yes. Okay, let’s examine that a bit further. In terms of the forums you were looking at, what forums were you looking at? Was there a specific Spotify forum? Tejasawi:       Shopify and Bigcommerce … Heather:        Shopify sorry. I said Spotify. Shopify, yes. Tejasawi:       No, they’re very similar. Shopify has a very active business forum which is Shopify.comforums. Even we actually got the business idea thanks to those forums because customers were talking about specific data, manual data problems, manual accounting problems. When you go to the forums, there will be these customers who talk about, “How do I move my data from Shopify to Xero?” “How do I manage accounting?” “What are the best practises of accounting?”                         We position ZapStitch as a thought leader in those forums saying, “We know your pain point and we know how accounting can be a pain sometimes and how our solution solves it.” So rather than out-selling, we out-educated our competition in the forum. That’s a philosophy we believe in is that if you related the pain point, we talked about how you can move data seamlessly between Shopify and Xero, and automate the reporting and just focus on business reports rather than actually entering data. The forums were a great place where people were actually talking about the problems and we just plugged in ourselves as somebody who knows what they’re talking about and we can solve it. Heather:        I think going on the forums is very smart. Also as well as it being authentic, I think it also probably gives you really good SEO because people go … I know I personally, I go in and search there, and I know people who have a high level of credibility and if they’re supporting a particular product I’ll go, “Okay, I don’t need to do extensive research on it because this person has said it’s okay, so I’m sure it will be okay.” Tejasawi:       Right. How did you encourage your clients to give you reviews? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good question. Many companies, product companies especially, have a way of irritating the customer in terms of reviews. They keep bugging the customer saying, “Why don’t you write a review?” “Give a link,” all those things. What we did innately or subtly was have a live chat support in our app. When the on-boarding happens, and TradeGecko is a great example where the onboarding is seamless, but when we started as a company we didn’t have that leverage of a beautiful design, an amazing out of the box design. We focused on simple and subtle design, and when the onboarding happened, the user got delighted and our automatic chat would plugin, “How did you find the experience?” “Do you need any help?” “What is the next setting you want?” All those things. As the engagement happened in the live chat, we started to see the customers delighted and we can actually ask for review. It’s about instant gratification rather than sending them mail or calling them and saying, “How did you like the app?” The live chat client helped us a lot. I would recommend it to any product company starting out because that’s a great way to learn from customers on the spot and also solve the problems instantly and also, of course, write a review if the user is delighted. Heather:        Yes, it sometimes amazes me that some of the companies are not as receptive to talk to an individual person. They’re like, “If you’re not a partner, I’m not going to talk to you,” and you’re like going, “Well, I need to talk to you before I consider becoming a partner.” Now, in terms of reviews, it sounds like you’re not focused on getting reviews on other sites. I know that Xero has an add-on marketplace and actually encourages people to review there. Are you directing people to go and review there? Tejasawi:       Yes, so with Xero, we just launched that Heather. We want to get as many reviews there but it’s just two to three weeks old and we actually started getting paying customers as well from Xero. I mean review becomes a natural … Heather:        Progression in the cycle. Tejasawi:       Yes, by-product of success. We want to ensure product success with Xero first and then the review I’m sure will be there but we are not biased in any platform as such. Heather:        So for our listeners, we’ll just share with them that ZapStitch is now on the US Xero marketplace but you’re also looking for approval on the other country marketplaces. Is that correct? Tejasawi:       Yes. I should give credit to Xero because they are one of the most active developer support forums out there. They’re very transparent in how they deal with partners like us. Heather:        That’s sensational. Tejasawi:       So unless customers actually say that sales type automation works with ZapStitch, they will not approve it. We have seen other apps which you are aware of, where community is like … you like your app, the customers like your app, okay you’re globally approved. Here it’s more like every country has a specific use case and unless you actually meet them practically and the customer talks about it, you are not approved. We had beta customers from the US and UK, so we got approved and UK should be very soon right now, and we want beta customers from Australia and New Zealand which is the biggest Xero user base, to approve it as soon as possible. That’s our main focus in February. Heather:        Yes, sensational. How many customers does ZapStitch need to be successful? Tejasawi:       As a B2B company we are focused on two metrics, right? One is MRR  monthly recurring revenue, and second is to reduce churn. Rather than talking about the number of customers, we’re talking MMR in at least our philosophy, so we want to get to at least 100,000 MMR by end of year or by next year, early next year. That’s how we are growing and our month on month, at least to reach that, would be 35, we are at 38 this moment. We are going at a good speed but that’s how we look at our growth. Heather:        Excellent. You’ve targeted multiple markets to penetrate the cloud based software specifically in e-commerce and accounting, what have you observed through that and what have you learnt through that targeting of the different markets? Tejasawi:       Right, so when we actually launched the beta product in 2013 end which is like December or November if I’m not wrong, I was not onboard. The founding team had tested it with Indian customers. The problem with Indian cloud or cloud eco system is they’re not very progressive or they haven’t understood the impact a cloud app can bring to their business. We still are believing in manual bookkeeping or CD based software of accounting, Excel sheets. The penetration was getting harder and harder so we naturally went to the most progressive marketplace which is the US. They already know the pain points they have and they do actually look to build a multi-million dollar business within one or two years. The e-commerce stores there are built on Shopify or Bigcommerce were looking at, “How do I grow faster?” Accounting needs to be fast, needs to be painless. “How do I find the solution?” “Okay, ZapStitch is there.” We got our first paying customers from the US, then Canada, so we started progressing in those geographies first and then UK and then Australia. So in terms of progressive eco systems for cloud software, we thought and we have analysed that US is by far the leader. Heather:        Oh really? Tejasawi:       Yes. In terms of multiple processes … they don’t look at one process to automate, they actually want to automate the whole business and focus on customer success, focus on sales, marketing, and the data is a burden to them. Right? They look at multiple apps to automate multiple sites of their business. Australia was a close second to that and Canada is very close to Australia. Heather:        I would have thought from speaking to people, and I don’t have any stats behind me, it would have been New Zealand. Tejasawi:       Yes, in terms of user base I’m talking. Heather:        Okay, so in terms of user base, I completely agree because they’ve got such a bigger number. Tejasawi:       Indeed, yes. I appreciate that because I was talking not in philosophy of approach to the business but in terms … I meant that, yes. Heather:        The user base number, yes. As soon as you get the US buying into anything, you expand exponentially don’t you. Tejasawi:       Yes, and I’m sure with Xero, we would test the New Zealand market much better because with Shopify and the other accounting app, we didn’t have much user base in New Zealand so we couldn’t get real data measured with that. But I’m sure Xero … I have seen the data that Xero is more in Australia and New Zealand already so that should be good data to work with. Heather:        Yes. How can customer service be a differentiator for start-ups in a competitive market? Tejasawi:       When you look at cloud based business, there’s no geographical limitation. For example: we are an Indian company but working seamlessly for a US audience, right? We work in their time zones. Our support team works at US and UK time zones. When you come to a company … company to a marketplace, you have to find a differentiator. It cannot be price always. You can’t be the cheapest solution out there. That’s not a good business model to work with. Heather:        Absolutely. Tejasawi:       What you want to do is you want to delight your customers and if your app is not at the self-serving mode in the initial days, customer success or customer support is the easiest way to get that because as I said, businesses want to talk to a human at the end of the day. They don’t want to just write them email and get a response. They want to talk to a human. They want to relate to their problems. They want to talk about their problems. Our initial days or initial growth has to be credited to seamless customer support and of course a great product which enables delight.                         I think from our learnings we can safely say that if you actually put in place tools to automate customer support, to have things like live chat, email automation, and then actually have a product which is centric to the user and not to a developer. You don’t need to be a scientist to use an app. If you look at those three verticals as customer success, you are already in a good path to grow outwardly so that would be our learning in that space. What tool do you use for your live chat? Tejasawi:       We use Olark. We have been a huge fan of Olark. Heather:        Olark, okay. What email automation do you use? Tejasawi:       For customer support we have two things. One is the support which is on Freshdesk and for customer interactions we use Intercom. What Intercom does is it gives you the app usage of every user, you know, “Has he done a sync? What type of data did he sync? Is he actually happy with the product?” All those customer analytics. We use Intercom and we send trigger emails based on the actions inside the app. That’s how our customer support cycle works, onboarding works. If you’re dealing with people during business hours in the US, it sounds like you’re not getting much sleep over there. Tejasawi:       No, we don’t work 18 hours a day. How we divide this is like the marketing and product team works in Indian hours and the support and the customer success team works in US hours. Heather:        Okay. Tejasawi:       As we expand into markets, I’m sure the whole team will find a challenge in the one or two weeks but we are a global company so we should act like one. Heather:        Yes. Do you have staff outside of India? Tejasawi:       No, we are a 15 member team in Bangalore in India. Heather:        That’s really large. That’s a really large team. Do you attend any of the Xero roadshows or Xerocon events, the big Xero conferences? Tejasawi:       Yes, we would love to because there are these industry specific events. I know as you mentioned people like you hang out there but right now we are not focused on that. That’s one differentiator we have … Heather:        Your support is online rather than showing up at those events. Tejasawi:       Exactly, we don’t have a sales team. Yes. Heather:        Sensational. Can you share with us some of the businesses using your solution? Tejasawi:       Sure. One of the most successful businesses who was an early adopter of Zapstitch  is Bolder Band. They won the Shopify build a business competition last year. Do you know about the build a business competition? Heather:        No I don’t. Tejasawi:       Okay, sorry. I’ll give a brief … what they do is Shopify promotes businesses who grow to a million dollar business every year. Heather:        Oh, and of course they’d know wouldn’t they. Tejasawi:       Exactly. It’s like a cross promotional activity. Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       What the build a business does is like you need to sell as much as you can in year one of your business, after launching your business. So whoever sells the most in that calendar year becomes the winner. Bolder Band is a Shopify store who launched in late 2013. When they adopted us, we were just one month old. Heather:        Wow. Tejasawi:       They had at least 200 orders per day, right? We were like blown away. Okay, this is a great store. This is a large store. They also became our product evangelist and they gave active feedback how to make our product better. How they function is like they have a very niche segment of customers. They sell head bands for people, you know, gyming and sports personalities? Heather:        Okay, yes. Tejasawi:       Who like anything – jogging, hiking and everything. They sell headbands and they grew to a million … I think they are now $3-$5 million dollar business within one and a half years. Heather:        Wow, I didn’t know headbands had come back in … had made a comeback. Tejasawi:       Yes, so they were one of the most successful lead customers and then Pop Chart Lab is one of the most creative businesses we have. They create charts on any topic. For example: how did Nike involve their shoes? How did [Wine? 00:27:15] evolve from 1800 to 2000. Heather:        So people then buy the chart from them? Tejasawi:       Exactly. Heather:        Oh okay, that’s interesting. Tejasawi:       So these two were the most [ugliest? 00:27:29] and biggest customers. There are many but as customer successes, these are the first two that come up to my mind. Heather:        Did you find yourself in the developer stage reacting to their needs? Tejasawi:       No. Heather:        They said, “Okay, we need this,” and you were able to implement something like that? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good question. As a product company building a cloud app, we necessarily don’t go by feedback from just customers. What we go by is data and market need. When we talk to let’s say five or six customers and they want sales tech automation, we build sales tech automation. But it’s not like building a customer solution for big clients or working with them over time to see what do they want and going in depth to their needs. We want to serve collectively as an ecosystem for Shopify users, Xero users rather than just a multi-million dollar business. Heather:        Yes. So if someone has your product in place, they’ve got Shopify, they’ve got Xero and they’ve got ZapStitch in place, what additional financial information can they attain through having that integration? Tejasawi:       Good question. How ZapStitch works is we don’t store any local data. We don’t generate reports in the app but what we do for example is let’s say … I think this is one of our differentiators is that the sales tax, the other apps, don’t go to specific sales tax and invoices. What these apps do is they have one sales tax rate and they apply it to all the invoices they sync. What ZapStitch does is it actually breaks down the taxes as is from the invoice and maps it to the Xero accounts for those sales taxes. That is automated and an accountant or a business owner just needs to go to the sales tax or account in Xero and just generate a report within a second. If you go to the manual side of things or non-automation, it would take at least five minutes to do for every invoice: entering the sales tax, mapping it to the right account and everything. So maybe one or two minutes is saved on every order. If you look at a growing business like let’s say Bolder Bands, they get 300 orders per day that would be 6,000 minutes, right? If you click a button, we can automate the data sync in ZapStitch, so they don’t even have to login sometimes. That happens seamlessly and the accountant just focuses on generating reports and accurate data and non-duplicated data. Heather:        Excellent. Tell me what the start-up scene is like in Bangalore. Tejasawi:       Bangalore is a hub of start-ups in India. It’s maybe the most popular city in India in terms of start-ups and of our national capital New Delhi is a close second if I’m not wrong. Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       How Bangalore works is a lot of product companies exist here. Product companies need investment early on, right? There’s a huge oversea and [internal? 00:30:58] investors community here that is eco systems like incubators and accelerators. We are still learning in the entrepreneurial eco system globally but in India at least, Bangalore is very progressive for start-ups and there are lesser challenges I would say. I’ll put it like that. Are venture capitalists coming from India or are they coming from overseas? Tejasawi:       Venture capital firm is mostly Indian who invest in Indian start-ups. They have global investors who are in contact with them and they actually scout talent but they don’t actually actively invest in Indian start-ups directly. As in an early investor but if a huge Indian venture capitalist has invested, then they see the talent, they scout it and the foreign investors come in. Heather:        Yes. I think you’ve told me this but I’ve forgotten. How old is your company? Tejasawi:       We launched our product of February 2014 and we launched our company in December or November if I’m not wrong. Heather:        So you’re coming up to your one year anniversary. Tejasawi:       Yes, my own and companies as well. Heather:        That’s amazing growth for a company that’s been around for a year. What have you learnt in that time of growing the start-up in India? Tejasawi:       One of the central things is if you want to build a fast growing or any growing start-up which doesn’t die in the first year, you need to focus on customers. One skewed emotion any start-ups have is they want to build a perfect product, right? What we had learned very early on thankfully is that if you actually build a minimum viable product for, let’s say, our market, actually the customer will do the rest of the thing. They will give it the requirements. The market will drive your product rather than you building the perfect solution. If you focus on customer success and actually giving a damn about them basically, they actually give you back and more than you actually ask for: so in terms of advocacy of the product, advocacy of your customer success, giving active feedback in terms of their product needs. I think that is one major learning and second challenge and learning is the marketing side of things. You want to build a repeatable engine of bringing customers, bringing progressive e-commerce businesses who want to try automation, who want to solve this problem. That has been one major challenge, you know, where do these guys hang out? Where do these guys talk about their problems? So building an inbound channel of customers is a challenge and we are still figuring it out but I think if we do our thing right, it’s just another start-up challenge. Heather:        That’s certainly interesting. I totally agree with you in what you’re saying in the focus on the customer. It does seem to be what a lot of people are saying these days is, “Focus on the customer.” I know sometimes I’m speaking with people, like I’m going into the start-up places and I’m like, “Have you sold this? Is anyone using this?” “No, no, I can’t show it to them until it’s perfect.” It’s like, “Aww, that looks like you’re putting a lot of money in that.” Tejasawi:       Also one thing is like no assumptions. We don’t assume that your customer is happy. You need data. You need customer interviews. You need everything to consolidate and, you know, actually generate actionable data rather than assuming you know customers are happy or you know they like this feature. Tools are important to measure everything actually inside the app. Heather:        Can you explain what some of those tools are that you’re using? Tejasawi:       Sure. For example, a classic case is Intercom. Intercom helps us analyse the product functionality: What is the customer actually doing inside the app? For example, let’s say our early customers came into the app, they set up the sync settings but they never ran the sync. If we see that the data shows that there is a time of login, there is a time of sync, and if their time between those two events is let’s say 15 minutes, we are on the wrong side of things. We want it to be less than 3 minutes or 4 minutes. He sets up that account and runs the sync.                         So the product team looks at the data and wants to change the design, and then the design team comes along and says, “Okay, this is the button that’s not very inherently …” Heather:        Intuitive. Tejasawi:       Yes. “So let’s make it intuitive. Let’s iterate on the design and make the onboarding time less than 3 minutes.” Heather:        That’s really smart. Tejasawi:       Also one thing it allows you to do … any such tool like Intercom, it triggers emails or contact touch points with events inside the app. For example, let’s say you have an error in the app, a chat will automatically come and say, “Okay, I saw you had an error in the app, how can I solve it? I am your customer success manager.” So rather than relying on the customer to get back to you, you have to be proactive in customer support. These apps let you do that because they can trigger events based on customer actions. Do the customers freak out that they think big brother is now watching them? You know, “Oh, I’ve made a mistake and then you’ve sent me an email telling me I’ve made a mistake.” Do they freak out about that? Tejasawi:       No. I mean it’s complete contrary. The most successful of our customers actually understand that we are thinking for them, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       Because when you deal with data integration, it’s sensitive data. If something goes wrong, you have to fix it immediately. So they are happy to let us fix it immediately rather than worrying about transparency or how did they know about it? Our customers are actually surprised in a pleasant way that as soon as they get an error, they are figuring things out and we are right there the solution. Are you able to actually jump in to actual individual accounts and sort things out if necessary? Tejasawi:       No. we don’t log into any accounts. What we do is we look at the metadata. For example, let’s say in an order case, the order didn’t sync. The development team looks at the metadata and sees okay, this is the date the order came from, this is the shop the order came from, so let’s read on that sync. That’s all we do from the backend. Heather:        Sensational. That’s really interesting. I think people will find that really interesting to listen to. I completely agree that it’s good to have the automated identifying of errors. I just know that some people are like, “Oh my goodness, they’re in my data, they’re in my data,” and their freaking out. So it’s good to have that conversation and be open with them but like I say to a lot of my clients, I just say as part of the sign up, “I’m letting the company automatically access your data.” But it’s not accessing your data, it’s accessing … if there’s a problem it will get sorted out a lot quicker than if we actually have to go through that manual process of getting it out there. Tejasawi:       Yes, but the more ideal case would be like … and that is a very common case. An ideal case is, for example, let’s say you are selling in multi-channels. You have multiple sales taxes across different regions, so you don’t know which setting to have in the app. What you want to do is like you are figuring out settings and you can ask the live chat support saying, “Okay, how do I solve this business problem with integration?” That’s the automation we have built in rather than just error resolution because that’s a very common case. The support is more proactive in business cases, how to integrate for your business rather than just broadly integrate to apps. Heather:        Yes, sensational. What does the future hold for ZapStitch? Tejasawi:       We were born as an integration platform. Our vision is to build a cloud integration platform across business verticals. For example, the next logical would be CRM or marketplace automation, for example: Amazon and EBAY. We want to logically progress through the verticals and integrate the most progressive apps and the most popular apps in those verticals. In a two year, three year time line, we see integrating 200-300 business apps across email marketing, CRM accounting, e-commerce. Heather:        It would be interesting to see because I know some of them … like I know I’ve worked with Amazon and it kind of works in an interesting way in that 10 of the transactions are normal and then one kind of like is a summary transaction and it never comes across properly and you’re going … and the client sets it up themselves perhaps and they come to you and they’re like, “Wow, 90% of it looks fine but then 10% of it looks like it’s going to take me hours to fix up.” Tejasawi:       Exactly. You know, you’re coming to the exact problem which ZapStitch is solving, is the reconciling of data. When you have different types of invoices, reconciling becomes a pain. What ZapStitch wants to do with Xero is become one of the very few solution providers which actually enable faster reconciliation and not just data automation. When we talk to one of our biggest customers, he had an Amazon store as well. This was the first point that he brought out that, “Bring support for summary invoice when you build integration because that is one of the major use cases in Amazon.” Heather:        Yes, absolutely. As soon as you have something in place that makes it easy to sell, it means you can sell so much more. Tejasawi:       Exactly. Heather:        Like when I was dealing with this client, I was just like, “Stop selling stuff because this is a nightmare.” It was just like creating this bigger and bigger and bigger mess. Definitely installing a solution that simplifies the accounting process means you have the capacity to sell more which is exciting for the business. Tejasawi:       Yes, and we know one of the … I followed the name of the customer once, this guy sells iPhone batteries. Most of the successful businesses we have are niche businesses: iPhone batteries, headbands, wine collections. Heather:        That’s the joy of the internet, isn’t it, that someone can go out and go, “I think headbands should be brought back into fashion and I’m going to sell them.” Tejasawi:       Yes, so this guy told us that his accounting team is spending money on watching Netflix movies more than accounting. He was very happy that we solved this problem but he was pleasantly not happy that his accounting team is now having a lot of fun which is good but … Heather:        Oh okay, so they’re under capacity now. Tejasawi:       Yes, he was saying, “I don’t want to fire people but this is how our team is, they’re having fun, I’m spending more time with my family.” I think the data is just a part of the business end. It shouldn’t become the business. When you actually integrate well, your customer should do what he likes doing, selling, customer success, or spending time with the family. Heather:        I think this is part of the integration process when it goes in. I’m not sure whether … do you have cloud integrators come in and assist with the integration process or are you doing that yourself? Tejasawi:       We have partnered with Shopify and Xero, so their APIs allow us to pull in and integrate any data we want for our customers. There are limitations of course. There are API limitations in terms of business use cases. Heather:        But would a consultant like me come in and do the integration or would a consultant like me come in and watch you do the integration and just sort of sit in the background? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good point actually. As a strategy of building the right product, we want to onboard experts and consultants but when you actually run the thing, use the app, it’s like the click of a button. But in the backend when we build features, for example summary invoice, we can’t know about the requirement unless I talk to somebody like you. We bring experts when building the product but not when using the product. The using is like click a button . Heather:        And they should be able to do it on their own. Yes, fair enough. Tejasawi:       Yes. Heather:        Thank you very much for speaking with me today Tej. I really appreciate it. Tejasawi:       My pleasure. Heather:        I’m sure our listeners have gained a lot from hearing you talk, especially if they have a Shopify client or are considering a Shopify client as something they’ll definitely look at. Now, I need to ask you before you go to see whether you know, what are the birds making all the noise in the background? Do you know what bird types they are? Tejasawi:       No, actually not. My mum is a bird enthusiast but I’m not. Heather:        They sound like seagulls but I didn’t want to be that bland and suggest that they would be seagulls. Are you near the water? Tejasawi:       No, so how Bangalore works, it’s a bustling city. Heather:        Okay, so it’s not going to be seagulls. You can send me an email sometime and let me know what the birds are. Tejasawi:       Sure. Heather:        It’s normally when I have these sessions my birds are noisier than anyone else’s birds. Tejasawi:       Yes, I think I heard in one part, yes. Heather:        My birds stayed quiet today and your birds went off on a racket. Thank you so very much for speaking with me today and I’ll leave links for how to get in contact with you in the show notes. I really appreciate it. Tejasawi:       My pleasure Heather. If I’m not pronouncing correct – Heather? Heather:        Heather. Tejasawi:       Great. I mean you are an inspiration. I want you to know that because when you maybe record and publish the podcast, very few people actually talk to you about it, right, I mean physically. So I wanted to thank you that you’re an inspiration to all of us and our team actually looks up to experts like you, your stories and the podcast is an inspiration. I wanted to make that very clear. Thanks a lot of taking the time out. Heather:        Thank you very much and hopefully it gives you an opportunity to hear the other add-ons and perhaps connect with them and learn from them and to move you from sort of cold to warm with these guys. Tejasawi:       Indeed. Heather:        Because we’re all in it together. Tejasawi:       Thanks a lot Heather. Heather:        Thank you. Cheers. Tejasawi:       I hope the seagulls were not too noisy. Heather:        No they weren’t. I like birds. They weren’t too noisy, I just wondered if you knew what they were. Tejasawi:       No, I’m sorry. I’ll get that. Thanks a lot Heather. Bye. Heather:        Thank you. Tejasawi:       Have a good day. Heather:        Same to you. Cheers Tej. End of Transcript Mentions ·        ZapStitch - http://www.ZapStitch.com ·        Bigcommerce - https://www.Bigcommerce.com ·        Xero - https://www.Xero.com ·        Shopify - https://www.Shopify.com ·        TradeGecko - http://www.TradeGecko.com ·        Sean Ellis http://www.startup-marketing.com/ ·        Emera ·        Olark - https://www.Olark.com ·        Freshdesk - http://Freshdesk.com ·        Intercom - https://www.Intercom.io ·        Bolder Band - http://www.bbolder.com   Contact Heather Smith Click here to sign up to my newsletter http://bit.ly/SignUp4Newsletter Listen to my podcast : http://cloud-stories.com/   Read my latest blog post : http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/blog/ Visit my website : www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com  Book time with me heathersmithau.gettimely.com/book    Subscribe to XU Magazine : http://www.xumagazine.com/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel : https://www.YouTube.com/ANISEConsulting Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU Join my FaceBook page : https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU  Connect with me on LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/HeatherSmithAU    

Brent Leary Interviews Girish Mathrubootham of Freshdesk by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends

I just discovered Freshdesk. This is a SUPER EASY support system. It offers SO MUCH. I was looking for a basic FAQ program found this system that not only does FAQ, but it provides live chat, forums, satisfaction surveys and much much more. I looked into it. I saw they had a free version and I had it setup in less than 10 minutes. I love that they have mobile apps to help you stay in touch. Right now they have an android app, and a soon to be iOs app (they do have an html5 version). Prices are not based on the amount of users, but on what services you need. If you are a solopreneur you could get by with the free version. I love that if someone mentions you or direct messages you, you can pull that into a system and determine if you'd like it to be a ticket or not. - very cool. Likewise you can set up an app so your private  support is on your facebook page. It integrates with EVERYTHING so now you can not only track tickets but tie it in with your billing system (I LOVE THIS FEATURE). The beauty of the system is it is hyper rich in features but they have a tone of documentation and videos to make sure you don't get stuck. Check it out at www.weeklywebtools.com/freshdesk For more information go to freshdesk.com

Justin, Alex Gemmell & Peter Cooper talk about various Hacker News stories including The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars, What really happened aboard Air France 447, More Paypal nonsense, Don't Be A Free User, Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe, 17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing nanoparticle , Zendesk CEO calls Freshdesk a freaking rip off - Freshdesk responds.