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Nicole Rashied, customer success manager at Intercom: Customer success – every business wants to invest in it but only a few know what it actually entails or how to do it well.

Basecamp has a nice collection of philosophies and day-to-day practices that help guide how they communicate with each other at Basecamp.

Entrepreneurship can be a long, arduous, and gruelling journey, but if you ever wanted proof that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, look no further than Manny Padda. Padda is an entrepreneur, educator, angel investor, and philanthropist. He is the founder of New Avenue Capital https://www.newavenuecapital.com/as well as the founder and managing director ofPM Search Partners http://pmsearchpartners.com/. A self-made entrepreneur who built his first multi-million-dollar company at a

You’ve probably heard this before: “What gets you to your first $50 million is not what’s going to get you to $100 million.”

Ryan Singer https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-place-of-ux/: Debates continue to rage about the role of UX designers, user research, and how far knowledge about the user should permeate the organization. On one extreme, UX is seen as a specialized pocket of knowledge that informs the definition of projects and sets requirements. On the other, UX is something for which the entire organization should somehow feel responsible. A few concepts can facilitate a deeper discussion by drawing meaningfu

Derek Skaletsky, writing for the Intercom blog https://www.intercom.com/blog/product-engagement/: If you have followed us over atSherlock https://www.sherlockscore.com/, you will likely have heard us say many times that product engagement is the lifeblood of any SaaS business. This is because the entire SaaS business model is dependent on people using (and getting value from) your product consistently over time. The entire model is dependent on product engagement. In short, creating a me

Frank Landman, writing for ReadWriteWeb https://readwrite.com/2019/02/21/you-have-a-great-tech-idea-now-what/: There are seemingly countless stories of tech innovators who simply woke up with a brilliant idea, got investments to build it out, and ended up becoming billionaires. Of course, these stories are extremely rare, but they are exciting to think about—especially when you wake up with a brilliant tech idea of your own. You don’t need much experience in the tech field tohave a good t

Dan Kim on “The Bezos way https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-bezos-way-sleep-puttering-and-three-high-quality-decisions-a-day-8c86505df06e “: Jeff Bezos has always been one of those people whose ideas and thinking make a lot of sense to me. When he talks, I listen. So when I recently came across a fantastic interview with Jeff Bezos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3NBQcAqyu4, I jumped right in. The entire interview is great and I really think watching the whole thing is worth your time. But

​Do the ends justify the means? Is it worth lowering your standards and giving up your principles in order to find a better outcome? Many times, the meansarethe ends. How we choose to act changes who we choose to become. The way we choose to get to where we’re going defines what it’s going to be like when we get there –Seth Godin https://seths.blog/2018/09/the-ends-and-the-means/

Devon Campbell https://css-tricks.com/an-intro-to-web-app-testing-with-cypress-io/: End-to-end testing is awesome because it mirrors the user’s experience. Where you might need a ton of unit tests to get good coverage (the kind where you test that a function returns a value you expect), you can write a single end-to-end test that acts like a real human as it tests several pieces of your app at once. It’s a very economical way of testing your app. https://www.cypress.io/ Cypress https://

Des Traynor: Spending money is very easy. Spending money effectively is very hard. There are lots of dodgy people & service providers out there who will promise the world, send the invoices, and deliver mediocrity six months late. Or worse. It’s helpful if you can eliminate these chancers from your considerations early on, to make sure you’re only talking to people well equipped to solve the problem you have. This is where the Orange Juice Test comes in. What follows is a brief extract from

Claire Lew: Looking at the clock. Staring into the distance. Short, nondescript answers. A CEO recently told me how he’d frequently see this body language from an employee during their one-on-one meetings. Flat. Disinterested. Preoccupied. It felt lousy to witness, but it’d always been this way. He’d silently concluded that he was wasting both of their time. “I want to know what’s on his mind and how I can help, but these one-on-one meetings just aren’t working,” this CEO admitted to me. “I

Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes: Mention “tech jobs” and thoughts typically turn to developers — the programmers and engineers who translate great ideas into working technology and keep the platforms we all use humming along. But the reality is that it’s impossible to scale and sustain most software platforms today without a highly capable, highly trained sales team. Indeed, at many of the most successful cloud software companies, the sales squads are just as big as the technical teams. I’ll repe

Drago Crnjac: Breaking things and fixing them again is one of the best ways to learn. I learned this lesson early, thanks to my younger sister and her Japanese robotic toy dog. Somehow, I convinced her to let me take apart her robodog so I could see how it works. “I’ll put it back together. Don’t be such a baby!” How wrong was I? It would probably have been easier to put back together a Volkswagen Beetle than this toy dog. There I was, sitting clueless on the floor, surrounded with plasti

Andy Raskin: Last month, I was enjoying the remarkably good crab cake and poached eggs at Just for You Café in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, when I overheard a mentoring session taking place at the next table. I recognized the mentor as the famous, fifty-something ex-CEO of a household-brand Internet company; the mentee, I pieced together, was the twenty-something CEO of an app on my phone that had raised over $70 million in VC cash. “My leadership team just gave me anonymous feedb

Claire Lew: I was running a leadership training a few months ago, when a CEO said this to me… > “I think I know why it’s so easy to become a bad manager, even when we don’t mean to be: It’s because of the little trade-offs.” I nodded and smiled. I knew exactly what he meant by “the little trade-offs.” I’d made so many myself as a leader, across my own career. The little trade-offs are the moments when we succumb to what feels most pressing in front of us, at the expense of what our com

It’s spring, so we’re making a updates to our home page and blog. First thing you may notice, we’ve brought our blog inside our main site. Where the blog was originally reachable at https://blog.flybase.io, it is now https://flybase.io/blog/ https://flybase.io/blog. We decided to do this to make everything more unified, it seemed fitting. We’ve been hard at work on several updates over the past month, and this is the first of a number of updates that will be getting pushed out. This site

Seth Godin: Back when Superman used to change into his outfit in a phone booth, the question was: where does he put Clark’s shoes? Because even if he could compress them with his super strength, they’d be ruined. Organizations that need to adopt different personas often get into trouble. On one hand, most of the time, they’re invisible. They’re a boring bureaucracy, optimized for stable jobs, predictable if not low-cost processes, mediocre customer service and average (or below average) use

Remember Pokémon GO? Of course you do because it was all you heard about for a few quick months in the summer of 2016. With millions of people downloading and playing the game, retailers and restaurants leapt at the opportunity to sponsor in-game experiences. Players flocked from location to location to virtually battle one another or to catch new Pokémon, and numerous companies were able to cash in on quick marketing wins. There’s a lesson here https://www.forbes.com/sites/baininsights/201

Ohans Emmanuel: I have heard lots of developers say they hate CSS. In my experience, this comes as a result of not taking the time to learn CSS. CSS isn’t the prettiest ‘language,’ but it has successfully powered the styling of the web for over 20 years now. Not doing too badly, huh? However, as you write more CSS, you quickly see one big downside. It is darn difficult to maintain CSS. Poorly written CSS will quickly turn into a nightmare. Ohans makes some interesting points about about

Christian Heilmann: A browser needs to enable people of all different abilities to reach what they came for. And ability isn’t a fixed state but fluctuates with environment and external influences. We don’t give browser makers enough credit for this amazing experience, as it is — like all good UX — invisible. Christian gives us a good example of all browsers do, they do get underestimated as the main tool that is open every day.

I love Gary Vaynerchuk dearly. So much of his message about patience and perseverance is completely in line with how I view the world. But I can’t take any more odes to “the hustle”. Like most banners, it either dies in obscurity or lives long enough to become perverted. In the early days, I chose to interpret “the hustle” as a way for those with very little to outsmart those with a lot through clever steps. Finding leverage where you had none. Doing things that weren’t supposed to scale or e

Geoffrey Keating: You might have have heard the story of Buridan’s Ass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass (no laughing down the back), the story of a donkey stuck between two identical stacks of hay. Because the donkey lacks any reason to choose one over the other, it cannot decide which one to eat, and so starves to death. Our setting isn’t the farmyard but the meeting room. Picture the following scene: eight people in a room endlessly debating over a whiteboard, weighing up on

Nathan Kontny: My 2011 startup with Y Combinator imploded, largely because we couldn’t get enough traction. What was I going to do next? And more importantly, how was I going to avoid repeating my mistakes? .. It’s happened for me. I went from that miserable failure of a startup to realizing I needed to get better at audience building before my next venture. And so I practiced my craft of writing and storytelling on my blog. One article a week. Tell a good story. Me or someone else figuri

When was the last time you got completely unfiltered feedback? Do you dread presenting your big projects to your team because you fear their harsh critique? With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that so many people choose to play it safe rather than to take a risk. The problem is, playing it safe leads to work that’s average at best. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Research into feedback abounds, and countless companies are stepping forward to share what works for them. Ed Catmull, co-fo

As an entrepreneur, I know you are not in business just to make money. You’re also in business because you think it will make you happier. With this in mind, you may be interested in the following true story. Albert Einstein is known as one of the smartest guys in history. And one of the wisest. (They don’t always go together) In fact still today, decades after his death, his brilliant quotes about life appear worldwide.

Jason Fried https://m.signalvnoise.com/inactionable-advice-72a6c5828589: Enough with the actionable advice, already. Let’s see some questionable advice instead. Rather than guide with steps, stump with challenges. Fewer answers, more questions. Less following, more foraging. More wonder, less known. Figure it out yourself.

Even the best products with the most passionate users will have these “success gaps” – a disparity between your product and the user’s desired outcome. It’s easy to respond to these feature requests with a generic “Keep an eye on Twitter for updates” response or a pre-canned “We’ll pass your feedback onto the product team” message, but we’ve found that it’s valuable to mine these feature requests for deeper information so that you fully understand what the customer is trying to achieve. That

Claire Lew: I was on the phone with a CEO the other week. He wanted my advice for how he could cultivate a more open, transparent company culture for his team. This CEO seemed to be already doing a lot of the right things. He held monthly all-hands meetings to get everyone on the same page. He also regularly asked questions to his employees about what could be better in the company. However, when I recommended one question that he ask his employees, he was a bit taken aback. > > “You want