#communication
Chapters and interviews tagged with ‘#communication’
Related Book Chapters & Interviews

Brennan is a co-founder of Right Message. In this episode, we talk about the path he’s taken that led him to create Right Message and what he’s learned about building and launching SaaS applications based on his experiences with his various products.

Mathias is one of the original founders of Travis CI. In this episode, we talk about the difficulty of leaving the company he helped start, and the challenges of moving on.
When you eventually make a mistake that affects customers, you’ll be tempted to sugarcoat the problem. This is a terrible idea. Honesty and transparency are best, combined with a clear and well-documented explanation of your path forward to prevent it from ever happening again.
It can be intimidating to see large companies that seemingly have more bandwidth and can eat your lunch without trying, but it’s important to remember that being small gives you strengths those other businesses wish they had again.
It’s easy to forget when you’re focused on shipping, but you have to keep your customers in the loop. Tell them what’s coming, and help them prepare for transitions. Let them know when you have to go offline for emergencies and other planned downtime. Always strive to keep the lines of communication open and honest.
Chargebacks will happen. Hopefully you won’t have many, but when you do, it’s important to understand what it means and what you can do about it, if anything.

Scott Nixon is the co-founder of Meal Mentor, a subscription-based vegeterian meal planning service. Scott handles the technology side of the business and works to keep the operational side of things humming with software.

Matt and I talk about running a SaaS business after acquiring it, the mistakes they made early after taking over Churn Buster, and the common ways that SaaS businesses get dunning wrong and how they can do better. We also talk about the value of iteratively improving automation for tasks and how important it is to clearly document and explain manual process.

Natalie and I talk about bootstrapping, learning that marketing is a necessary part of growing a software company, and the transitions that led Wildbit to be a family-focused company. We touched on the benefits and challenges of running a multi-product company, the inspiration for the various products, and the difficulties of hanging in there as a business gets older and the responsibilities grow and change.

JD and I talk about buying and selling SaaS applications and share some details from the process of selling and transferring Sifter. JD shares what it’s like juggling multiple businesses and how he makes it work, and he dives into the attributes and insights he uses to decide whether a SaaS application is a good opportunity or not and how he does business a bit differently. This is an episode that’s near and dear because I feel like it shares some of the less-often seen aspects of transactions like selling businesses. I really hope you enjoy it.

Format had seven people on the payroll before Tyler even got paid. We talk about bootstrapping in Canada, the amazing story of how they acquired the Format.com domain name, and what it’s like transitioning from a survival mentality to a growth mentality as a business grows.

Anthony built dnsimple on the side and didn’t come on board full-time until after there were two other full-time employees. We discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of running a complex infrastructure product, marketing a complicated business with comics, and fighting domain fraud through it all.

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