Startup tooling: our product management, sales, and marketing stack
rosslazer.com
rosslazer.com
I'll usually just close the tab.
If I have to talk to sales to understand your product and pricing - your product/pricing are bad.
And I'm saying that from lived work experience - the products we integrate with that don't provide open signups are sitting in the first, second, and fourth spots for outages and downtimes across the 80 some products we integrate with (and those 3 are the only ones not open to signup).
If you’re selling a SaaS product and you can’t let me go in and play with it without talking to sales about my budget, timeline, and favorite color first, I’m not buying your product. Full stop.
I doubt it works on Safari (it won't let me talk). If you ask why I'm on Safari, it's because I couldn't grant it microphone access on Chrome (for unknown reason).
In the UK Microsoft Teams has become the de-facto business video call standard, but aware this is different in other parts of the world.
And you will need Word and PowerPoint anyway if you want to easily and properly interact with other companies without compatibility issues (try sending contracts with redline back and forward with comments and tracking between Google Docs and Word!). Sure you can operate with Google Docs using LibreOffice as well, but in my experience it's just not as friction-less as O365 and actually for what you get it's great value.
On the other hand, I find Teams video conferencing to be pretty good for video meetings. Once you get to a certain number of people, Zoom starts to do better interface-wise, but for a useful number of participants Teams has been relatively friction-free for me.
Also, if you have a slightly older workstation, your tab on which teams run will definitely crash. Mostly.
Also what “upstarts” did you not consider over JIRA?
Good things:
- it's pretty fast (it does automatic partitioning of your data based on usage patterns, which is sweet)
- it integrates with your cloud storage pretty transparently
- the SQL dialect is pretty full-featured (it even has about half of PostGIS, which was useful to me recently)
- it's pretty fast, without custom tuning (which is annoying)
- the docs are pretty comprehensive, and they have a set of tutorials which are great (even if I only found them by accident).
Problems:
- No SparkSQL. Spark is super, super annoying, but the notion of PySpark and sparkr were pure genius. Why yes, of course I want to write my ETL in a real programming language (can define a function to remove 100+ case when statements.
- It's very, very expensive, and their purchasing model seems designed to prevent people from realising this.
- It's proprietary.
Not the OP, but this is why I like Snowflake (and I've been using solutions in the distributed SQL space for almost a decade at this point).
>It's very, very expensive, and their purchasing model seems designed to prevent people from realising this.
How is it expensive in a way that's not transparent?
The real trouble is that they don't show the credits used anywhere in their SQL interface (there's a table, but you need to go looking for it). If they wanted to help you keep costs down, they'd show you how many you'd used without needing to jump through hoops.
As I said, great product, but pricing could be a lot more transparent.
– Ability to ingest 100s of terabytes to petabytes of data per day, and store those for months to years.
– Ability to provide a delightfully interactive user experience, despite managing terabytes of data.
– Ability to work efficiently with semi-structured data (i.e. the messy slop you find in logs).
– Ability to efficiently execute the kinds of band-joins and window analytic functions needed for us to realize efficient queries on Resources.
– Unit economics that make sense for the Observability use-case.
Invoicing is built in, with a payments option you can turn on. Easy to set up and decent API and starter apps.
I would also add Carta if you have or want investors. Keeping good records of the cap structure from the start is so much easier than trying to fix it later.
It's from the same folks behind ERPNext.
I used it at a startup for two years and was so much better than anything else I used before.
Also if you are interested for mrr and other subscription metrics i recommend Chartmogul.
Personally I would say something reasonable. But I know this is not the audience to state that one turned their back on the Apple and never once looked back.
So if you are fully a Mac shop your solution actually works. In my experience not as good as it could, but given the price tag quite a great way to save the money.
Office 365 is OK but collaborative working together still feels a bit clunky coming from Gsuite. But on the other hand as stand alone tools all MS Office Tools blow Google out of the water in terms of features. Esp. Excel. But Teams - well better than Hangouts. That's for sure. But compared to slack abysmal.
I would love to like it. Because I like the idea of keeping documentation/documents and communication aligned in the same place with project management tied in the mix.
But it is slow, has strange user experience behavior and PM with Ms Planner is limited to say the least.
The problem for me is not having a good alternative.
Imho this is something a startup should worry least about in the early stages. Use what is there and only optimize if the pain becomes (financially) unbearable.
If your team embraces agile mindset, you don't need to formalize processes that much. Product Backlog is in Numbers (no Jira etc). Shared workspace is basically a Pages document (as Confluence alternative).
Only sad thing is, that iCloud drive does not support shared folders where people can dump some files in it.
I often have to colab on a Keynote and that in the browser when everything is designed with custom fonts and what not is not quite a great experience.
These are the moments that I get a temp Mac from user helpdesk do the keynote stuff without a compliant device and keep on working with Win on my other machine for everything else.
If I need to incorporate stuff from existing presentations into mine I upload to iCloud and export to PowerPoint. I actually told everyone when I switched that I am sure I will miss Keynote. But in the end I learned how far PowerPoint has come.
But as said. I just do what is necessary. I think one can work with most tools. And I don't care that much if my hammer is *nix, Mac or Windows. I use what I have and be done with it.
Notion is always good