Posts related to featured category

Cacoo - Cool Tool for Process Diagrams

So haven’t updated this blog much lately, went a bit crazy for a while last year but have been camping out in the Dominican Republic, in Santo Domingo working since New Years. I’ve been working on a number of projects, but one of my main focuses has been on building systems and outsourcing a lot of my tasks. Try and streamline everything that is going on with my income businesses. I have been training my Virtual Assistants using a variety of tools. I have created a little training area using wordpress, uploaded videos and training documents etc, but they were still having trouble grasping certain tasks, it was at this point that I started looking for an easier way to map out the processes needed. I remember in university having to do process diagrams and thinking how silly they were, never again, these things are awesome, and an amazing tool for training virtual assistants (any staff really). The best tool I found do to this is Cacoo. It also allows for collaboration so multiple people can work on documents at the same time and you can see who is editing what and the history of changes to the diagram. Process documents are the easiest way to document a process (duh..) and Cacoo is the easiest way I have found to make, store, share and collaborate process diagrams. One more post that complements this topic is Cool Trick to Manage Too Many Open Tabs, especially around cool.

How we Rebranded our Company in 3 Months

This post was written by Benjamin Brandall and originally appeared on the Process Street blog and is the story of how Cameron and I rebranded our startup Process Street. In the lifecycle of every startup, there comes a tipping point. For companies focused on aesthetics and creating something beautiful, there's a time where the founders need to shift towards their product — look inward and think deeply about the problems it solves, who's it for and how to refine user experience. For product-focused startups like Process Street, a necessary early shift is _towards design_. Just look at Apple — that's a company which thrives on making quality design and usability available on the mass market. ### Apple 2016: Would their product be as influential if their website still looked like this? ### Apple 1999: The simple answer is no because **the brand evolves with the product**. This is article tells the story of how Process Street rebranded itself. We've included lots of useful resources and tools to help you along the way if you're thinking of doing the same doing the same. Let's go! ## It started with a product, not a logo or a brand Our CEO, Vinay Patankar, had the idea to build Process Street from his own frustrations with workflow management software. While running a global team he found that there wasn't software out there which would let managers write process documents, create checklists, assign their team and track activity easily. While touring the world after leaving Australia in search of the entrepreneurial dream-come-true, he met Cameron McKay. Cameron is our CTO, a computer science graduate who built Process Street from the ground up and, alongside Vinay, took the company from idea to AngelPad in less than a year. Here they are in Argentina, where they met and started building Process Street. In this picture from 2014, you'll notice the logo isn't the same as it is now. And what's with those blues? The thing is, at the dawn of Process Street, branding and design were the last things on their minds. Based on past failures, Vinay knew the most important thing is to get a usable product together as soon as possible. Focusing on other areas before you've got something that can be sold or funded is a way to burn money, not make it. Here's what Process Street used to look like when it was a Bootstrap WordPress theme: While it's good enough for a first pass, there were some inherent problems with it. The most serious being that the light blue chosen for the main brand color didn't work inside the app. As user experience improved and the app became more visual, the light blue contrasted badly with the rest of the design. For the favicon, the P and S were condensed into a square — a pretty clunky and unmemorable way to do it, but the founders simply weren't designers. ## December 2014: Major app overhaul, minor site adjustments After graduating from AngelPad, Process Street had the time and money it needed to start redesigning the product to increase user retention. As for the marketing site, the changes were minor. We added a full-width product image above the fold, a more 'contrasty' blue (I'm also not a designer...) and a cleaner design. The logo stayed the same. While a great product can make up for bad presentation, great design doesn't fix a crap product. To stay hyper-focused on UX and building features, Cameron rebuilt the site in a day or two before returning to codeland. While Slack has its IRC hashtag, Trello has a board with lists, and Intercom has its... smiling microphone, Process Street had just a block with letters. Our latest redesign came when we decided to get rid of our logo and make something more recognizable. Here's how that happened... ## A logo idea came in the middle of the night I was talking to Vinay about where he got the idea to change the logo, and he said it just sort of... came to him while he was on his laptop in the middle of the night. This is the image which sparked it all off: It's the logo for Designmodo's Flat UI Pro, so we weren't going to use that, but Vinay wanted to go with a flat diamond for a few reasons: 1. Diamonds are the symbols for a decision in a flow chart. This is something integral to the app. 2. Diamonds are a sign of quality. Process Street is a quality product _and_ helps with quality control because it ensures teams execute tasks by following a procedure. 3. The app and landing page is designed flat. The logo had to fit in with it. So, we cashed in our $100 discount from Tim Ferriss' promo code ("Tim") and headed over to 99Designs to post a competition! Here's the brief: **Create a new logo \[Modern/Flat/Fun\] for business software startup @ProcessStreet** We got some fantastic entries! We narrowed the pool of over 200 designs down to just 6, shown below: While none of them were spot on, they provided the ideal basis for a concept we could present to a designer. ## Working with Koombea design agency One of our investors, Jonathan Tarud, invested a combination of cash and service credit for his design agency, Koombea. They assigned us a brilliant lead designer, Mario Rocchi who took our logo, started creating iterations and uploading them to Basecamp. And, as you can probably see from looking anywhere on our website, we chose this one! Tada! 🎉 The logo formed the entire basis for the next step — a complete overhaul of our marketing site. ## From logo to landing page Deciding on a logo was important because it gave us two solid elements we knew would be included in the rest of the site — the blue, and the font (Cabin). We presented Mario with an overwhelming selection of sites we loved and wrote down what we loved about them. Keeping all of this in Basecamp gave us a place to have a group discussion while pinning everything in place. We added Mario to our Slack team as a single-channel guest and integrated the channel with Basecamp, so every time activity happened there, it would post a message in the channel. Here's a selection of sites we loved which inspired Process Street's design: ### x.ai We loved x.ai's super-minimalist landing page and the amount of whitespace. ### Freckle We loved the immediacy of the product and the fun color scheme Freckle use. ### Trello We loved Trello's use of icons, the large, easily readable font, and their bold, cartoonish colors. ## Prototyping the landing page in InVision Mario came back to us with _loads_ of possibilities based on these recommendations. Here's a few we had a tough time deciding between. Eventually, as you'll see if you check our landing page, we settled for the top right option and then worked with Mario as he perfected in InVision. InVision lets designers work with clients and present them with interactive prototypes. Clients can comment on elements, then designers can make iterations and resolve the comments. It worked so well for us, we'd highly recommend InVision for anyone working with a designer. Finally, we decided that blue can get a bit too blue sometimes. Enter Process Street Teal and Process Street Red — incidentally two of my most favorite colors in the world. Check it out on our pricing page! ## We had 100 glyph icons designed See that little paintbrush icon in the header image? Mario designed that. Thanks to Koombea, we have more than 100 new glyph icons to use in header images, demo videos, landing pages and product demonstrations. Since he gave us the Sketch files, they're easy to manipulate even by us non-design folk. ## We blew our whole budget on design Process Street employs 5 full-time technical employees but 0 designers. We didn't need Koombea to implement the site, just design it. From there, Cameron got it up and running quickly. It would have been silly to ask Koombea to spend time on that -- instead, we spent everything on their design services. This meant we got graphics for social media, header image templates and graphics for features that hadn't even been released yet. Forward thinking, eh? We updated our AngelPad profile, Google Apps Marketplace, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Here's our shiny new Facebook profile: And some future feature graphics (as a sneaky way of telling you to hold on for all this good stuff): Woo. Looking smooth. And as for the blog header image graphics — Koombea cut about an hour a day from my workload with those little beauties, and I must say, they look fantastic. :) Check out the final designs in action: Homepage - Product page - Featured templates - Colors applied in the app - I hope this has given you some insight into our redesign, and shown you the steps we went through so you can take the ideas and apply them to your own company rebranding. What do you think of the design? Let us know in the comments! One more post that complements this topic is Startup Idea: Evernote for Spreadsheets, especially around business.

A Look at The SaaS Stack in Our Tech Startup

What keeps an innovative startup ticking over? At Process Street, we’re a huge fan of using the software other SaaS startups put out there in conjunction with the ever-dependable big names. Here are the 18 SaaS products we use at Process Street, and why we think they’re the best options out there. ## **Analytics: Mixpanel, Google Analytics & Jetpack** For analytics, we use 3 different products for slightly different purposes. Mixpanel is for in-app analytics. We use it to track trends, user engagement and sign-ups, getting an overall picture and week-by-week comparisons and helping us reduce churn by noticing patterns. Google Analytics is our go-to source for tracking conversions and referral traffic. This means we can measure the effectiveness of the content and the promotion separately. Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that simply tracks the views on pages. The only time we use it is to get a current view of page traffic since Google Analytics can take 24 hours to update, but Jetpack does it instantly. ## **Project Management: Trello & Basecamp** Trello is used by marketing, development, growth and support teams as the main home for tasks, attachments and status updates. During the employee onboarding process, we add new hires to the team boards and make a personal board for them which contains their first round of tasks and helps them get into the habit of using Trello. Basecamp is the tool of choice when collaborating with designers. When we had our site redesigned by Koombea, Basecamp was the ideal tool to neatly store resources and collaborate over designs until the iterations were moved into InVision to be prototyped. ## **Personal Productivity: WorkFlowy & Evernote** WorkFlowy — a tool for taking quick notes — is the best way we’ve found to make both simple notes and complex plans. Project proposals and plans go into WorkFlowy, where it’s easy to structure complex ideas because of the way the app’s designed: Evernote is where we keep everything from rough notes and screenshots to entire blog posts. With its Zapier integration, it also turns into a way to add text to any other app just by tagging the note. TaskPaper is a fancy text editor disguised as a to-do list app. Anyone who has kept their to-do items in a TextEdit file will like the added functionality, including tags, smart search syntax and projects. Other popular choices include Any.Do, Wunderlist and Todoist. 1Password is a password manager that keeps every password you use safely encrypted in a vault protected by a master password. It lives up to its name because one password is all you have to remember. While Chrome’s ‘remember this password’ feature is good enough, 1Password is usable cross-browser, OS and device. ## **External Communication: Intercom & Close.io** Intercom is our favorite customer support tool. All of our support conversations and in-app messages to users goes through Intercom. It’s easy to keep up with the tickets, loop in other departments and get notified when high-ticket customers reach out. Close.io is an awesome CRM. It’s built around search, meaning that you can create complex search queries and narrow down lists of hundreds of thousands to exactly what you’re looking for. We use it for sales and marketing outreach, as well as managing all content communications. ## **Internal Communication: Slack & Appear.in** While Trello is great for storing and organizing tasks, Slack is our main tool for internal communication. Its IRC-like interface makes it easy to chat with groups and individuals. Plus, the integrations with Slack, Intercom and the other tools we use. Appear.in is a permanent video chat room, which means you sign up and get a fixed URL your team can pop in and out of at any time. It’s much better for us than Skype, because you don’t need accounts or to initiate/end video calls at all. ## **Workflow Management: Process Street** Process Street is, of course, the tool we use for workflow automation, business process management, employee onboarding and content promotion. We break projects down into processes and assign these processes to teams and individuals. As they progress with the project and automate their workflows, we can easily get an overview by just looking at the Process Street dashboard. ## **Email Marketing: MailChimp** MailChimp is the home for all of our automated and one-off email campaigns. Every blog post email and product update goes through MailChimp, where we can track opens, clicks and trends. For me as a content creator, opens and clicks are a great signal that a topic has resonated with our readership. Since these readers came into our product and read our content, there are parallels across a few topics, like productivity and processes. ## **Content Promotion: Mention & Buffer** Mention scours the internet for brand mentions and backlinks, which means that when we’re linked to we get a notification and can then promote the post, both as a ‘thank you’ to the author and to maximize the exposure of a piece we’re being featured in. When we’re linked or mentioned, we then add the post to Buffer. Buffer lets you tweet the same link across multiple accounts (we have 12 linked up in there) in one click, and queues the posts up so they go out at the best time for your audience to see them. Content Writing: Google Docs & WordPress The Process Street blog is built on the perfect blog builder, WordPress. WordPress is ideal for drafting in a visual editor with a preview — much better than working with pure HTML. For guest posts, or collaborative work, we use Google Docs. In-line comments and suggestions make it great for working with writers as an editor. When you’re done you can copy a shareable link and forward it to the target publication for review. I haven’t found an easier way to collaborate and share articles. Alternote is an Evernote plugin that makes it bearable for content writing. Since I like to have all of my resources nearby, I can create a unique tag for each blog post, then use the Web Clipper to save sources with that tag. Here’s an example: Data Management: Airtable There’s probably over 100,000 records in our Airtable database. Everything from keywords to contacts lives there, and that makes it easy for us to reference and link together everything related to Process Street. We moved to Airtable after the frustration of managing data with Google Sheets set in. Spreadsheets littered between accounts, with random titles and dodgy permissions were making for a terrible data management experience. With Airtable — especially when you link it up to Zapier — you’ve got a far more efficient user experience. SEO: Ahrefs, Moz & SEO Spider Ahrefs an SEO powerhouse. You can use it to research keywords, monitor backlinks, and, what we love most about it — track every keyword a URL is ranking for. When we’re running campaigns to rank specific keywords, like we did with employee onboarding, Ahrefs provides the single best status update on that project within a few seconds of checking. Moz is a tool we only use for bulk keyword difficulty checks because Ahrefs is the better tool for us. In addition to keyword difficulty, I personally have Mozbar installed for Chrome which lets me quickly check Domain Authority (a rough guide as to how much weight a backlink holds from that domain). SEO Spider crawls URLs and looks for broken domains. Even with a free account, you can get 500 results from just pasting a domain in. You get to see how many 4xx errors are on that domain, and which links are broken. Then, you can start doing broken link building (as detailed in our marketing processes guide). File Management: Google Drive Google Drive is where I keep my Google Docs, graphic assets like SVGs, and upload any large file to share with my team. Its Trello integration means you can attach any file that’s already inside Drive, saving you from uploading it in multiple places. To see why we use Google Drive instead of Dropbox, check this comparison. App Integrations: Zapier Zapier connects every app I’ve listed here together. Impressive, right? Every app linked together means you can transfer data between them and automate a ton of boring work. For us, it’s a better version of IFTTT because it has more features. Here are some of my favorite examples, featuring apps like Evernote and OneNote: Copy Evernote Notes to OneNote Post Trello Activity to Slack Send a Slack Message for Checked-off Process Street Tasks Development: JIRA JIRA is the home of our planned features, user stories and dastardly bugs. Developers can add, track, prioritize and assign issues to their team, then feed that information to a live Slack channel. For example, whenever a new feature is pushed to the live server, a Slack channel gets updated with the feature’s new information and we can do a short write-up to announce it and test the feature to hunt bugs. When we’re linked or mentioned, we then add the post to Buffer. Buffer lets you tweet the same link across multiple accounts (we have 12 linked up in there) in one click, and queues the posts up so they go out at the best time for your audience to see them. ## **Content Writing: Google Docs & WordPress** The Process Street blog is built on the perfect blog builder, WordPress. WordPress is ideal for drafting in a visual editor with a preview — much better than working with pure HTML. For guest posts, or collaborative work, we use Google Docs. In-line comments and suggestions make it great for working with writers as an editor. When you’re done you can copy a sharable link and forward it to the target publication for review. I haven’t found an easier way to collaborate and share articles. Alternote is an Evernote plugin that makes it bearable for content writing. Since I like to have all of my resources nearby, I can create a unique tag for each blog post, then use the Web Clipper to save sources with that tag. Here’s an example: ## **Data Management: Airtable** There’s probably over 100,000 records in our Airtable database. Everything from keywords to contacts lives there, and that makes it easy for us to reference and link together everything related to Process Street. We moved to Airtable after the frustration of managing data with Google Sheets set in. Spreadsheets littered between accounts, with random titles and dodgy permissions were making for a terrible data management experience. With Airtable — especially when you link it up to Zapier — you’ve got a far more efficient user experience. ## **SEO: Ahrefs, Moz & SEO Spider** Ahrefs an SEO powerhouse. You can use it to research keywords, monitor backlinks, and, what we love most about it — track every keyword a URL is ranking for. When we’re running campaigns to rank specific keywords, like we did with employee onboarding, Ahrefs provides the single best status update on that project within a few seconds of checking. Moz is a tool we only use for bulk keyword difficulty checks because Ahrefs is the better tool for us. In addition to keyword difficulty, I personally have Mozbar installed for Chrome which lets me quickly check Domain Authority (a rough guide as to how much weight a backlink holds from that domain). SEO Spider crawls URLs and looks for broken domains. Even with a free account, you can get 500 results from just pasting a domain in. You get to see how many 4xx errors are on that domain, and which links are broken. Then, you can start doing broken link building (as detailed in our marketing processes guide). ## **File Management: Google Drive** Google Drive is where I keep my Google Docs, graphic assets like SVGs, and upload any large file to share with my team. Its Trello integration means you can attach any file that’s already inside Drive, saving you from uploading it in multiple places. To see why we use Google Drive instead of Dropbox, check this comparison. ## **App Integrations: Zapier** Zapier connects every app I’ve listed here together. Impressive, right? Every app linked together means you can transfer data between them and automate a ton of boring work. For us, it’s a better version of IFTTT because it has more features. Here are some of my favorite examples, featuring apps like Evernote and OneNote: - Copy Evernote Notes to OneNote - Post Trello Activity to Slack - Send a Slack Message for Checked-off Process Street Tasks ## **Development: JIRA** JIRA is the home of our planned features, user stories, and dastardly bugs. Developers can add, track, prioritize and assign issues to their team, then feed that information to a live Slack channel. For example, whenever a new feature is pushed to the live server, a Slack channel gets updated with the feature’s new information and we can do a short write-up to announce it and test the feature to hunt bugs. You can compare this approach with Looking for a Co-Founder for New Startup - UI/UX for more on startup.