#leanstack

[collinjames0n]

Why Most Remote Startups Fail (And How TDZ Pro Scales Using These SaaS Tools)

Remote teams are burning cash and collapsing silently. Here’s how TDZ Pro scaled sustainably using a surprisingly lean set of SaaS tools.

Slack for speed. Zoho for systems. Google for collaboration. TDZ Pro created the ultimate lean setup.

[tommaxwelll]

Lean Canvas

To continue yesterday's discussion of cheap or ridiculously free products that may be useful to fledgling startups, today I'd like to talk about one more focused on the business side -- Lean Canvas. 

Lean Canvas is a product that makes it super easy and quick to write out your business plan in a way that's visual and easily digestible by all your constituents -- coworkers, investors, etc. 

This product is great for several reasons. First, it throws out the hours of sweat it takes to make a detailed business plan because with Lean Canvas you're just filling out a simple outline that holds your hand through the whole process. But at the same time it requires you to cover every base of your company -- problem, solution, key metrics, etc -- and distill that down to bullet points and short sentences. Like people say, writing is clarity of mind. 

Finally, Lean Canvas is great because most people starting their first company have never written a business plan in their lives and will probably suck at it. For whoever is on the receiving end of one of these canvases, the clear structure and brevity is probably pretty nice. 

The first 30-days is free, so go give it a try. 

[hipmob]

How Hipmob Was Built

We recently shared our early days (and a few later ones) with Yonas Beshawred from Leanstack. You can read through the interview in it's entirety here, but here are a few highlights: "we realized we were probably losing a ton of customer engagement because people would discover us through a review or the app store but a subset would come in over the web. And we thought “well if all these people are coming in over the web, how much are we not seeing over mobile?” And there was nothing out there that allowed us to talk to our mobile customers." "So any interaction you have with a customer should be in-app, whether asynchronous or fully synchronous, whether you need voice or they actually need to stare at you. All the channels should work together to save your team time and money, which is why we focus so hard on the integrations." "It doesn’t make any sense for it to be that way. You don’t kick shoppers out of your shop when they need help. You don’t kick visitors from your website when they need help. The reason we’re making an in-app knowledgebase, and in-app chat, is so that your mobile users don’t have to leave either."