Posts related to business category

10 Content Marketing Experts Share Their Secrets

Vinay Patankar
24 Aug, 2014
Business

Here are some great content marketing tips, make sure to check them out. Content Marketing Tips If you're digging into business, you'll probably also enjoy How to Make a Video for your Website on a Budget. If you're digging into business, you'll probably also enjoy How to Make a Video for your Website on a Budget.

Vinay Patankar
10 Dec, 2013
Business

This was originally a guest post I wrote on The Productivity Blog **_Bad process documentation can kill your business dead. Here’s how:_** # 1\. Quality of Work Documenting your processes is proven to improve quality of work. Dr. Atul Gawande in his bestseller, the Checklist Manifesto, presents facts that show using checklists in surgery has significantly increased success rates, resulting in tens of thousands of lives saved. He also shows how a wide range of industries from construction to venture capital have improved quality through documentation. Poor quality work can destroy your reputation sending your customers running. No customers, no business. # 2\. Employee Turnover We all know staff come and go. Keeping on to the good ones is important, but sometimes there is nothing you can do. When a key employee unexpectedly ups and leaves it can have a crippling effect, especially on small businesses. This pain can further be accelerated if you, the business owner, has non-work related issues to deal with. If this unfortunate circumstance is ever to happen to you, make sure you have your documentation in order and you just might get through it. > **You may also be interested in this: Process Street: The Simplest way to Document and Track Business Processes** # 3\. Rapid Growth Growth is the most exciting phase of business. It’s the reward for all the blood, sweat and tears. But growth is a double edged sword. With big ups come big downs, and if you are not prepared to manage the growth, your business can implode on itself. Hiring and training new staff, processing larger order quantities, supporting more customers and opening new offices are highly complex processes that if done incorrectly can cost you lots of money or even collapse your business. Ensuring you have processes in place to manage these growing pains is of the utmost importance. # 4\. Acquisition If you ever want to sell your business, having proper documentation is of the utmost importance. A prospective buyer wants to know the business they are buying is going to run effectively on its own, without you, the former owner having to be there. Having your standard operating procedures documented can help you close the deal and even get you a sale price. While poor documentation could cause the deal to fall through. If you still need more proof on the importance of process documentation, check out this book by Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. So what are you waiting for? Document or die. If business is relevant to what you're working on, this is worth reading next: The Most Important Rule in Business.

4 Tips to Not Get Screwed on Elance

Vinay Patankar
21 Feb, 2010
Business

For those who don’t know, elance.com is a site where people can sell their services. Basically like an ebay for services instead of goods. The way it works is you can post a job for anything from web design, data entry, marketing, ghost writing to virtual assistance and relevant service providers can pitch for your work. You then select the provider who you think best fits your request and they start working away. Funds are placed in an escrow holding service and released once you mark the work as satisfactory. Anything that can be done remotely can be organised over elance. The key benefit of this system is the ability to take advantage of currency differences. You can pay someone market rates in India or Eastern Europe and have it come to a fraction of the cost in a western country. But using this service to complete tasks does not come without complications. I’ve done a few projects on elance now, some better than others. Here are a few tips from my fails: ## 1\. DON'T BE A PUSHOVER LITTLE BITCH Seriously, this is important. Treat your freelancer like your boss treats you – there is a job to do, no exceptions. For people with no management experience, this can be tricky. I learned quickly as I saw a project expand from 2 weeks to 2 months! Setting rules is important as discussed below, but enforcing rules is equally if not more important. Don’t listen to excuses like “the work was harder than we thought” or “you had too many change requests”. They shouldn’t have bid if the work was too hard. If they think your change requests are going to push out milestones, they need to request milestone changes. If they don’t, tough luck. You’re not the expert they are. ## 2\. Make rules Make rules for everything. How, when and in what format you want the work delivered. Ask for periodic updates and set deliverable dates. Tell them if things are not up to your expectations you will pull the project or have them restart. Be specific in your rules. If for example you’re having a website done, tell them if you want the site up and running on your host or if you just want the files sent. Tell them if you want social media integration, testing or support. These should all be laid out before the job is accepted. > **Check out: The Best FREE Tool for Managing Freelancers and Outsourcers** ## 3\. Punish rule breakers Set penalties for rules being broken. As an example a 5% penalty for every milestone not met. That means, if they update you in 4 days instead of 3, hit them with a 5% penalty. Make sure you do this the FIRST time they miss a milestone. This will discontinue a pattern of abuse. Again, don’t be a pushover little bitch. Highlight punishments clearly in the rules before the project starts. ## 4\. Don’t give feedback until you are completely happy. This means that everything is up and running and you have tested everything. Don’t get conned into providing feedback after you see the site working well on their host, or you have a general brand theme without all items complete. Elance workers like eBay sellers live for feedback. And once you leave feedback, you can’t change it. Many suppliers would prefer a 5 star review and 50% of the money over 100% cash and a 3 star review. ## The verdict? There is no doubt elance can provide quality work for cheap over a secure and reliable platform. But if you let people screw you, they probably will. The success of the project still rests on the project manager - you! One more post that complements this topic is How to get Asana (and other web apps) onto your Taskbar, especially around get.

Abstract Income: How to Support an Abstract Lifestyle

Vinay Patankar
24 Oct, 2010
Business

Recently I have been participating in the Niche Site Duel, more as an experiment than anything else. But the reason I have been playing around with things like this is I am trying to build myself a strong income stream. A stream that comes from multiple sources and ideally that can be eared from any country in the world. To do this, I have been setting up income businesses. An income business (versus a value business) is a business that you can set up for relatively low costs, that will bring in consistent income. While many income businesses are now forming online, they dont have to be online. An example of an income business would be a cafe, restaurant or convenience store. They are never going to turn you into a billionaire, but they allow you to earn your income yet still have more control over your life (at least that's the idea, doesn't always work out that way as im sure many restaurant owners would argue). Currently here in Vancouver, I am exploring the possibility of a value business. A business that has the potential to make lots of money but comes with high risk, more stress, less flexibility etc... While I have been travelling though, I have built one online income business that has managed to make me a decent profit and is continuing to grow. This business has been an ecommerce business. The model I followed was the same as the one given in the 4 hour work week by Tim Ferris, and truly does work. While it can be a bit of work initially, it does pay off in the long run. I am launching a new site in the next couple of weeks that will be a free course to show people exactly how to build an online store. Its going to be AMAZING! No seriously, I already have 4 hours of video content, with loads more coming. It will show you how to go from absolutely nothing, not even an idea (although if you already have a product or idea that will help) to owning your own ecommerce store. It will include product research and selection, domain research and selection. Build the back end of your store (don't worry, you don't need to be a techie!) including setting up tracking and payment processing. Designing your store. Building the content. Plus building a marketing and customer retention strategy. So make sure you subscribe over to the top right as this site is going to kick ass and be totally free! A useful follow-up on abstract is 99 Abstract Life Hacks - Make your Life Easier Today!.

Abstract Job Hunting - Using Google Adwords to land your Dream Job

Vinay Patankar
03 May, 2015
Business

As an ex recruiter I know a thing or two about how to get a job. I've seen a whole bunch of crazy techniques people have used to land themselves their dream job. Some pretty cool, like creative web-pages, some completly idiotic like calling everyday saying "I have job". I came across this video the other day of a SUPER-EPICLY-AWESOME way to get your next job. The guy was looking to get senior job at one of 4 or 5 firms, working for one of the executives. What he did was create a Google Adwords campaign, with the keywords targeted to the names of the Executives he wanted to work for. If you dont already know, Google Adwords are the sponsored advertisments you see on the top and side of a Google search result. Its basically how they make all their cash. Take a look at the example below: The areas in the red are the areas you can "rent" from Google for a price per click. Usually in the 10c - $2 range. Oh and sorry about the funky language, I'm in Budapest at the moment and Google tracks your location to display advertisments close to you. This guy bought the space for the executives names, so when they Google themself, his advertisment popped up on the top of the search and took them into his website of some sort, which I am guessing was a sales page / resume of him asking for a job. Check the video he made of the experiement: (click here if you cant see the video) For all his efforts (probably 1 days work) and money invested ($6) he ended up with two job offers! Genius! Think of all the cool stuff you could use this for. Tim Ferriss used it for choosing the title of his book. Next time your struggelling to get past that gatekeeper consider the option of putting up a Google ad and see what happens. Now thats abstract living! Related reading on abstract: Abstract Income: How to Support an Abstract Lifestyle.

Accel, Atlassian & Salesforce Leads $12m Series A for Process Streets No-Code Workflow App

Vinay Patankar
23 Mar, 2020
Business

2020 – San Francisco… _Read more about this announcement on Business Insider, Crunchbase and Forbes._ I’m very proud and excited to announce that Process Street has raised a $12M Series A from Accel, Atlassian, Salesforce Ventures and other amazing investors. The funds will go towards our vision of building the GitHub of no-code; where teams around the world can find and use checklists, workflows and automations to improve their productivity at work. Our mission is to make recurring work fun, fast, and faultless for teams everywhere. Having experienced investors and leading SaaS partners will put us in a powerful position to achieve this mission. ## The Process Street story so far Process Street started as an internal tool to document and track simple checklist-based processes. We were running a distributed marketing agency with contractors all around the world and were struggling to keep our repetitive processes on track. Spreadsheets and project management tools were causing more problems than solutions. We needed a tool to provide structure and manage internal workflows, so we built Process Street. We’ve grown that simple tool into a fully-fledged no-code workflow builder with an easy-to-use interface that can handle almost any type of business process, from client implementation to employee onboarding and content approvals. We are proud to service over 450,000+ registered users including enterprise customers like Colliers, Accenture, Spotify and Airbnb, as well as institutions like Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. Process Street continues its distributed roots as a fully remote team with 45 members spread across North America and Europe. It’s a popular tool for remote organizations, and we use it heavily internally, but we’ve found an even greater market in distributed enterprises; large organizations looking to standardize and automate work across vast geographical areas. ## Why Accel, Atlassian & Salesforce Ventures? We chose to partner with Accel because they believe in product-led growth, understand the SaaS space, and know-how to deliver maximum value at scale. The experience built within Accel from investments in Atlassian, Slack and Dropbox means they’ve been on this journey before. Rich Wong, Partner at Accel will be joining our Board. Rich has been an investor and Board Member in fast-growth SaaS leaders such as Atlassian, Checkr and UiPath, and we look forward to leveraging his wealth of experience and expertise to further our growth. Salesforce Ventures and Atlassian were obvious partners. Salesforce Ventures has the leading global portfolio of enterprise SaaS companies and brings access to the Salesforce platform and their customers. Process Street workflows are tightly integrated with other SaaS products and rely on the data and activity happening in these systems to automate work. Our customers integrate with hundreds of different SaaS products, but Salesforce, Trello and Jira are among the most popular. ## What’s next for Process Street? The future for Process Street is to be the no-code workflow solution for teams everywhere. We want to expand how and where teams can manage their work. To make this happen, we’ll be launching a mobile app, a redesigned experience, and building on our recent improvements to enable manager approvals on-the-go. Process Street has a giant library of plug-and-play process templates created by our team, customers and partners. We’ll continue to grow this to be the largest repository in the world for all workflows and operational playbooks; the GitHub for knowledge workers. We’re going to be launching further enterprise features for improved reporting and analysis, while opening up greater API access to let teams control their data and build custom automations. We’ll also look to deepen existing partnerships and forge new ones. This will mean greater alignment between Process Street and the other products you already rely on, furthering our seamless integrations. We are beyond grateful for all of your continued support and can’t wait to keep working with you in the years ahead. Many thanks, Vinay Patankar, CEO. Read on Process Street Blog. To go deeper on app, check out App Idea - Turn iPhone's into Public Hot-spots.

Affiliate Summit West #ASW11 - Recap, Video and Photos

Its been more than a week since I have gotten back from **Affiliate Summit West 2011** (#ASW11) and wheels are turning. I am thinking it may have been the most productive few days of my life, even though all I did was get wasted all night and wake up at 5pm each day. Here is a video of my time in Vegas. (click here if you cant see the video) You may notice there is very little of the 'actual conference'. That's because I didn't really go to much of the 'actual conference'.... Hell I didn't even use my free breakfast's, lunches and I think I used about 2/10 of my drink vouchers... Some people may say that I wasted the time there because I didn't go to any of the sessions and didn't learn anything (which I know is what many of the others who entered Shoemoney's Contest wanted to do. But I beg to differ. I learned HEAPS. But what I learned, will never be told at a session or keynote. Its the real shit. I also made some deep relationships. I went to Affiliate Summit knowing nobody. Like literally nobody. But I have gotten very used to rocking up to places knowing nobody and quickly making friends. It is kinda necessary when you are a solo traveller. I left ASW with a bunch of new contacts. But not just business cards. Real projects that are in the works. On top of that I made new friends. It is really hard to really befriend someone when you meet them during the day at a networking event. Sure you may have things in common, sure you may have an interesting conversation, maybe even go for lunch or something. But it is still surface level. To build a relationship and you need to have shared experiences. There is almost no way around it. So how do you do this? Well... going out partying until 8am is a good start. Doing stupid shit helps too: My goal at ASW11 was to make some solid connections. I didn't want to come back with a bunch of business cards and no follow up plans and I didn't want to come back having not met anyone but listed to a bunch of speeches which I could learn in a few hours of research on my own (no disrespect to any of the speakers). But hey, that was just my strategy going in knowing nobody. Next time it will probably be a little different as I will arrange to meet people in advance now that I know a few people. What is your general conference strategy? \[gallery orderby="rand"\] One more post that complements this topic is A Day at Affiliate Summit West 2011 #ASW11, especially around affiliate.

Building Cora: Our AI Compliance Agent

When we started Process Street, our goal was simple. Help teams run recurring work without mistakes. The world didn’t need another task manager. It needed a system that could enforce standards, catch skipped steps, and give teams confidence that what should happen actually did. So we built it. A process management platform that made SOPs executable. A no-code workflow engine that turned policy into action. A tool that teams could actually use without calling IT. Over time, our customers pushed us further. Regulated industries brought their toughest workflows. Financial controls. Risk reviews. Policy certifications. Audit procedures. And that’s when it became clear. We weren’t just in the business of process. We were in the business of proof. **From Process Management to Compliance Operations** It wasn’t enough to help people document what to do. We needed to ensure it was done, every time, by everyone, with evidence. That’s where compliance operations come in. Compliance operations is what happens when you connect policies to workflows, workflows to monitoring, and monitoring to real-time action. It’s the difference between a checklist and a control system. Between paper compliance and actual enforcement. That’s where Process Street is today. Docs is where policies are created, governed, and versioned. Ops is where those policies become workflows, executed with full audit trails. And now, we’re building the intelligence layer to tie it all together. **Enter Cora. Our AI Compliance Agent.** Cora (which stands for "**C**ompliance **O**rchestration and **R**isk **A**gent) is not a chatbot. Cora is not another assistant with a cute name. Cora is a system of enforcement. It watches how work gets done. Flags when it drifts from policy. Suggests updates when regulations shift. And generates the proof teams need to pass any audit, without the scramble. It’s not here to make compliance easier. It’s here to make it automatic. **Why We’re Building Cora on AWS** You don’t build a compliance-grade AI system on weekend infrastructure. Cora runs long sessions. Monitors real workflows. Triggers real consequences. We needed scale, security, and performance without compromise. That’s why we’re building on AWS. AWS AgentCore gives us exactly what we need. - Long-running agents that can observe and act in real time - Secure, isolated sessions that respect data boundaries - Deep integration into the services that power enterprise operations This is not a prototype. This is the foundation for the next generation of compliance enforcement. **What’s Next** We’re starting with the high-stakes use cases, capital markets, risk teams, and audit-heavy ops. But Cora is not a one-off. It's a system. A platform. A new layer for how compliance gets done across every industry. Process Street is now a Compliance Operations Platform. Cora is our intelligence layer. AWS is our partner in making it real. If you’re building the future of AI, compliance, or operations, let’s talk. No more missed steps. No more compliance theater. Just policy, executed. You can compare this approach with Cacoo - Cool Tool for Process Diagrams for more on business.

App Idea - Turn iPhone's into Public Hot-spots

So you already know that you can turn your iPhone into a hotspot, but a PUBLIC one? that anyone can use? Here is the idea. Its an app that allows you to create a public hotspot that anyone can access with NO password. But for the user to access the hotspot, they need to watch a 10 second video advertisement. Video ads pay anywhere form $30-80 CPM (cost per thousand impressions). The app provider can organize rev share with its users, so that they get a percentage of the advertisement revenue (say 50/50). This could be a great additional revenue stream for cab or bus drivers, or just a great way to offset your phone bill costs. A useful follow-up on idea is Idea - Thoughts to Extend the iPhones Battery Life.

AppCampus Application

AppCampus, a unique pre-seed funding program that was announced on March 26th and created by Microsoft, Nokia and Aalto University, today opens its gates for grant applications. The program is open for both teams and individuals from any field of expertise. AppCampus is a global program from the very start: it will fund projects based on merit, irrespective of their geographical location. The program is looking to fund unique, innovative and high impact mobile applications that utilize Windows Phone and Nokia platforms. To enable these fresh ideas to materialize, Microsoft and Nokia will invest up to €18 million over the next three years into the AppCampus program. Find more details on their Facebook and Twitter. Check our our AppCampus Application Below: Related reading on application: Start-Up Chile Application Video.

Best 5 Talks from #500Distro

If you are interested in getting traffic for your startup, you should definitely watch the videos from the recent 500 Distro. 500 Distro is a conference where they gathered some of the greatest minds in customer acquisition, retention and growth hacking to do 20 min sprint presentations on a number of different topics. Below are my favourite 5 talks from the day. If you're digging into business, you'll probably also enjoy Tools to Build you a New Life.

Bring on the Controversy

Vinay Patankar
03 Jan, 2011
Business

Electron plumber just released a post on his blog ripping into me for using Amazon Mturk as a marketing tool in the Shoemoney Affiliate Competition. Its true, I wont deny it. I did it. And kudos to him, we all gotta do what we gotta do to win and attempting to eliminate the competition is an age old strategy to win a fight. But the truth is, I didn't really have much of a choice... I worked VERY hard on this competition, not only on the entry post but also on gathering votes. I spent the good chunk of my New Years Eve and every waking moment hustling for votes until Jan 2nd untill I saw this... Those are tweets coming from a post on John Chow's blog. For those who don't know, John Chow is a very successful blogger in the Internet Marketing space whom I greatly admire and whos blog I regularly read. The only problem is, he has 118,000 readers!!! 118k wtf? that's like more than some celebrities. El Plumber was right. I am not a super star, I don't have the Alexa rankings to control the masses. I thought I had a compelling entry that would naturally attract votes, but in a situation like this that means jack. After all the work I did, blasting out to my lists, hanging on Facebook asking everyone to vote for me for 2 days straight, asking friends to post on their walls, pulling thousands of emails from every conversation I've ever had on Gmail and of all my social network connections. Even asking random girls in bars to vote for me on their smart phones. I thought I was doing pretty well and used a number of interesting marketing methods that I will post about later. While I cant see my votes, I can see the clicks from the links I was marketing and things were going pretty well. But now that a post had gone out to 120k readers the competition had been taken to a new level. After seeing the tweets, I started doing some investigation. Oh and by the way, its not just tweets, there is syndication and a whole bunch of other ridiculous stuff that happens when someone posts on a blog of that size. I wasn't sure if this was a legitimate friend-helping-a-friend-out post or if it was a brilliant paid advertisement (which I am not against by the way). I had read last years winners post as he talked about how he won the competition. He too had **bought** a post on John Chows blog to help him win votes. Here is his excerpt: > ### Enter John Chow > I’ve been following John and Jeremy for a long time. I’ve watched them compete against each other (to see who cold get the most RSS subscribers in an allotted time frame) and promote ZK in the Internet Marketer of the year contest. > It only seemed natural I enlist the services of John Chow and so I contacted him about the possibility of a sponsored post. It seemed like a good fit, the Shoemoney and Johnchow audience is similar and John Chow has a big following (71000 RSS subscriber and 51000 twitter followers). > I felt it would be a solid investment as it would likely bring in a lot of votes. I figured if I lost there would still be some value in the links from John Chow and some of the attention it generated. > Five bills later I had a post up on John Chow promoting me and I was feeling pretty good. > I almost when onto sponsored tweets and tried to buy a tweet from Shoemoney himself but I assumed he would decline in for conflict of interest reasons. Probably should have done it for the potential attention/linkbait anyway. Not sure if 5 bills was $500 or $10k but either way, that's lots to spend. And since John Chow's following is up significantly from last year, it would probably be even more expensive this year. I still wasn't sure if Donny had done the same thing so I dug up his post on John Chow's blog. ### This is what it looked like: ### Now see Donny Gamble's Post: **Look familiar?** After seeing this I thought F\*(%... I cant win this doing what I'm doing. As El Plumber said, I simply don't have a big enough following. But it seems that a media buying frenzy was about to begin. Technically speaking, if I had the funds I should have been able to buy advertisements all across the internet. Make Facebook ads with the criteria of "ages between 10-99" and plaster them up. Create PPC campaigns on every keyword and buy the front page of MSN. Buy spots on Google TV, hire a professional producer to make me an emotionally stimulating, NLP filled commercial causing people to emotionally connect with me and have a strong call to action to resulting in votes on promise of donating a billion dollars to starving children if I won... Unfortunately for me, I don't have those kind of resources.... There was no way I was going to win without some form of paid marketing approach so I started looking around at the different tools and marketing channels I have at my disposal as an internet marketer. I looked at various media buys, sponsored posts, sponsored tweets etc... But if I am going to be spending money on advertising, I am going to look for the channel that is going to bring me the best return on investment. The tool I chose is one that I have used a few times provided by Amazon. ### Enter Mturk Mturk or Amazon Mechanical Turk is basically a service where you can find people to complete a small task for a small price. You can have them do things like comment on a blog, bump up a post on Digg or vote for you in some competition. I thought about running a PPC campaign and paying anywhere from $0.10-$2.00 per click and not be guaranteed a vote. Sure if I threw enough money at it, I would get the same results but it didn't seem like something that a smart internet marketer would do. Why pay more for the same results? With Mturk, you can have an action completed for you for a set price. Depending on the difficulty of the action, you might pay anywhere from $0.05-$2 per HIT (Human Intelligence Tasks). Since this task was a very simple one "go to a web site and click vote" I created a campaign paying $0.05 per HIT. Not sure what Donny's ROI will be on his John Chow investment, say he paid $1000 and got 1000 votes (less than a 1% conversion) its still pretty expensive. I figured 118k readers, even if he had a 1% conversion that would be 1180 votes. So I structured the hit to be 909 votes, with fees that worked out to be exactly $50. Pretty good investment I thought plus I felt I had already done pretty well in the natural voting part, I just needed something to counter the big influx of votes Donny would get from John Chow. ### The Results? Firstly, nobody knows where they stand so its all very exciting. It's completely up to Shoemoney and his staff on how they choose a winner. I didnt do anything illegal, there are no rules stating what marketing tools can and cannot be used. But this isn't a democracy that is going on here so my fate and that of the other marketers lies in the hands of Shoemoney and his staff. I'm sure if someone had access to Oprah they would ask her to do a shout out for them. If that were the case all the Mturkers in the world probably wouldn't help. It is clear that the final portion of a competition like this is not about the quality of your entry, but about who you know, your ability to leverage marketing channels and the resources at your disposal. Much like business in the real world. All I can say is that I really want to win this competition. I needed a paid marketing channel to stay in the game and this was the most financially viable channel to use. Good luck to the other contestants, I hope your marketing efforts don't work as well as mine, but if I don't win, I hope you post about how you did so I can learn and grow. If you're digging into business, you'll probably also enjoy Social Network Shopping.