Operations

If you are anything like our team here at Visible, you bookend your days at the office with StrictlyVC and the Mattermark Daily. Over time, both have proven to be extremely useful sources of startup content – StrictlyVC opens things up with the day’s funding news (and great interviews) and Mattermark closes things out with thoughtful pieces from investors and operators for the ride home. Related Reading: Business Startup Advice: 15 Helpful Tips for Startup Growth Mattermark’s founder, Danielle Morrill launched the newsletter almost 2 years ago aiming “to provide a weekly rundown of interesting events, data, and insights from the startup world”. It has since turned into a daily publication that has featured over 1500 different articles from founders and investors sharing tips and insight on everything from designing products to dealing with the difficulties of running early stage companies What the Startup World Writes About | Create infographics We utilized Import.io to comb through the Mattermark Daily archives and analyze the headlines of all of the articles from over 190 editions of the Daily. Not surprisingly, words like ‘Startup’ and ‘VC’ were among the most common while the remaining words on the list paint an interesting web of all the things people in the startup ecosystem (some would say echo-chamber) think about and discuss on a daily basis. Markets and Models | Create infographics Building a company is uncharted territory for first-time founders, people early in their careers and those entering new markets or exploring new business models. Luckily for advice seekers, especially those hoping to understand and grow SaaS or Mobile businesses, there was plenty of great content to choose from. 50 Shades of Green | Create infographics How can we raise, spend and eventually make money? How come you keep asking me for money…and why aren’t you a unicorn yet? These are some of the things that founders and investors, respectively, focused on as hundreds of posts throughout the Mattermark archives feature thoughts on raising funding, exit opportunities and everything that happens in between. People | Create infographics If there is one thing we learned with this exercise, it is that VCs have a bit of a tendency to talk about themselves. Some of it is navel gazing, sure, but most provide an interesting peek behind the VC curtain or words of advice for founders looking to raise money, make key hires or scale their businesses. PG & @pmarca | Create infographics It is no surprise, with the ubiquity of YCombinator and the continually growing relevance of A16Z, that Paul Graham and Marc Andreesen share the top spot for most mentioned individuals. Add that to the list of examples showing how much weight people in the technology industry place on the opinions of top investors. Women in Tech | Create infographics Women in technology, one of the most important issues facing the industry, featured heavily in Mattermark’s archive with a primary focus on profiles and interviews of women in technology leadership positions working to inspire the next generation of female CEOs, investors, hackers and painters. Companies | Create infographics People loved writing and reading about the companies that make up the technology world, either as examples to follow or in response to various controversies or product launches. The posts from the last couple years heavily feature companies leading the growth of the early stage ecosystem (Y Combinator, Angellist, A16Z), ones embroiled in controversy on their way to massive growth (Uber & Snapchat) and one-time darlings that have since fallen on harder, or at least less rocketshippy times (Square & Foursquare). Attention Grabbers | Create infographics Want to get into the Mattermark Daily? Your best bet is to go with a ‘How to” headline. The other apparent way in is by being Tren Griffin, whose posts on lessons learned from leaders in Technology (Sheryl Sandberg & Jeff Bezos) and Finance (Warren Buffett & Ray Dalio) offer instructive frameworks for how to make decisions and build better companies which at the end of the day is what most people in the startup universe care about.

Using Software for Customer Success After a year with Visible, we’ve changed up a few pieces to work best with our team and to help scale. It’s interesting to see, over time, how the platforms change Checkout my updates below each section in Red. Something that makes me throw money at people/products/services, is the experience I have with them. Over the past several years, I have noticed the little things companies do for their customers, and own employees, to increase satisfaction via experience. What most people don’t see/understand/have patience for, are the platforms used to provide the service and experience. A great example of this is the ‘legacy’ US banking technology (which I could rant your ear off about as much as architectural facts of buildings along the Chicago river) that manages your account. This system, graciously provides the ‘awkward phone silence’ when a rep is waiting to access your account, going through level upon level of access to view your details. Over time, they have learned to fill this void with trivial conversation/up sell, to make you feel comfortable, and feel like a person who is valued. Building a smooth customer experience is not easy, so I’m going through the important factors of what [a non-engineer] calls their ‘full stack’ to provide great customer experience & service. Monitor: Customer usage is key, tracking your customer’s usage allows you to segment specific users for engagement, testing, up-selling, advocacy, etc. Monitoring usage is also one of the key pieces of information to prevent the all-commanding ‘churn’. Platform: We take this data from our back-end and plug it into our CRM (HubSpot) to filter, segment, identify, assign, etc. We also use Intercom to monitor users for ‘automated’ engagement with a personal voice. Analytics: When you’re scaling, you’re gaining lots and lots of users from your targeted funnels, and then some. Product managers are important in making sure you’re exceeding customer needs and continuing to build the envisioned features, versions, etc. Marketing managers need a ways to identify the best funnels of customer conversion and best ‘cost per acquisition’ price. Having an analytics management product allows them to find the sweet spots and make your user base grow, and stick, like crazy. Customer Success pulls these analytics to further monitor and segment users. Platform: We’re still looking at best fits, but some good ones are RJMetrics, MixPanel, and KissMetrics. Ideally will have this connected in or around our CRM. CRM: Email is something I want to get away from as fast as possible when working with customers. Yes I do sound insane, but what I mean is the traditional email platform (gmail, outlook, whatever Apple mail is called) because there is no good way to mange the customer’s account (and expectations) easily and quickly (Streak is making a hybrid that looks interesting). A good CRM makes all the difference in keeping customers engaged and happy as well as managing a team of account managers. This also keeps Sales and Account Managers from asking too many questions, creating breaks in service, on-boarding, experience, and team happiness (you know what I’m talking about). Platform: HubSpot’s new CRM is pretty slick and customizable, we’re eager to keep customizing it to fit exactly how our business model defines our customers. Engagement/Voice: This section is probably one of the most interesting and emerging of recent years. In times of past, being able to create engagement or a voice inside your software (who is old enough to remember Clippy) you would need a designer and front end developer to hash out several iterations until you had enough and waited to raised more money and hire people to complete this task. Engaging customers keeps them happy while on your app, makes them a sticky user or what I learned as a “Happy Prisoner”. This starts with the welcome, goes through on-boarding, and continues as the ‘Voice’; providing valuable content from specific triggers, advising on product/industry specific news, and providing education through knowledge base, blog, or even surveys (check out an amazing project by Brett @ Visible, the Early Stage Confidence Index for Investors). Platform: We currently use Intercom for our Engagement and Voice, we haven’t found a perfect solution for an on-boarding wizard, we’ll update when found. Incident Management/Customer Management: Most people know this part as your standard customer service platform, having a service like Zendesk to manage your inflow of customer queries and conflicts. There has been a movement away from this as an ‘additional’ product with Intercom or having it hosted in your CRM (stay tuned to see my future post “Why Account Managers should not use their email app”). The important parts are being able to reply quickly, collect customer response data, create reporting, and make better decisions (something that Intercom is currently lacking). Platform: Zendesk is known as a major player here, but others are Desk.com, Happy Fox, Fresh Desk, and Help Shift. Knowledge/Education: The tool to help scale and educate, and even more is to create advocates and emerge as an industry leader (more on this in Advocacy). You want to have something that provides easy searching, great UI, syncs really easy to your app, and is super simple to maintain (non-devs will manage this). Platform: Still looking for a good fit here, most Knowledge Base systems are normally packaged with Customer Management, so we want one piece of the package without paying for the whole thing. Advocacy/Marketing: Creating a strong following of users brings a company from ‘cult-like following’ to ‘industry leader/expert’ (Product Hunt is an amazing example). We started with content on our Twitter page and have now pushed forward with our Blog. We’re pushing through great side projects to continue our vision to bring visibility between investors and company founders. Platform: We’re using Buffer to manage our social media posts and have our blog hosted on WordPress Over time, we expect to change a few platforms, build internal tools, and condense the amount of 3rd party applications we use to keep our customers happy. I will say that a secret sauce for a non-technical operator is Zapier (saved this for the readers who actually made it this far into my ‘essay’) which makes me scale my processes like never before.

At Visible, we talk every day with founders and early-stage investors from around the world and have found a few key themes emerge in our discussions: Founder frustration with investors who don’t deliver on their promises – the connections they say they will make and the expertise they say they will offer Investor frustration with founders who go off the grid, only to emerge and make “asks” when it is too late to save a project or company Blame being placed by people on both sides of the table instead of analyzing the root cause of the relationship breakdown Fortunately, the venture platform model (also called network or community model in some places) has become more and more pervasive, indicating an increasing desire by investors to put more “walk” behind their value-add “talk” and a desire by companies to work with investors that embrace this strategy. The success of firms like First Round and Andreessen Horowitz, in both returns and mindshare, is a testament to this trend. For the uninitiated, Frontline VC’s Kim Pham recently wrote a great primer on the subject. At its core, the venture platform model is focused on helping companies and investors get back to building businesses by using transparency as a tool (TaaT) to unlock growth that would have otherwise not been possible. In many ways, it means proactively opening the network communication bottlenecks that can prevent strong venture communities from coming into existence organically. Companies want engaged investors and investors want to stay up to date on a company’s progress in order to make good on the expertise and connections they promised prior to wiring the money. So if both sides understand the importance of keeping lines of communication open and subscribe to the idea of the venture platform model as a way to accelerate growth, why is the ball still being dropped time and time again? Not realizing that habits form early – in companies and in their relationships with investors Term sheets are signed, money is wired and the company building can begin in haste. Unfortunately, a lot of investors and founders forget to set up front expectations for how the relationship will work apart from “please help me return capital to my LPs”. When there are one or two investors on a cap table, inbound requests don’t seem so daunting. When you raise your seed round and add 6 more investors, then a Series A with 3 others, the inbound requests become extremely distracting and pull you away from things like product, sales and hiring. Spending a few minutes each month putting together your investor updates can help you get some of that time back. Better yet, they tend to gain momentum as positive reinforcement – in the shape of more intros from the network and expertise assistance from investors – starts pouring in. Thinking it is too late to start When investors see a portfolio of 10, 20, 50 companies across multiple funds it can be easy to start thinking that things, from a portfolio communication perspective, are too far gone. They prefer to “wait for the next fund or accelerator class” to get started which sounds a lot like the way people who need to get back to the gym sound after their new years resolution wears off. Biting off little pieces – again, same principle as getting back in shape – is a great way to start. As an investor you have inbound requests to meet your companies and outbound desires to make the right introductions. Having all of your key investment data in one place pays huge dividends by saving time and mental overhead and truly leveraging the power of the network you have built up. The oft-used proverb about the best time to plant a tree comes to mind here. Visible: More time for more important things That means less time spent copy and pasting messages to three four or different investors. It means not having to dig through a Dropbox, email and Excel each time someone needs info on one of your portfolio companies. It means getting back to the business of building businesses. If you need some inspiration, our reading list is a great place to start. We’ve collected some of the best advice from around the investor community and continue to update it as new posts and content roll in (Note: everything you see there – reporting metrics, templates, etc. can be setup and tracked quickly and easily through Visible). If you have any questions about getting started, feel free to get in touch.