No, I am not going away and this is not my farewell speech. Just thought that writing the title in past tense seemed to make sense.

After switching from a service company back in 2006/07, a large chunk of my life revolved around DeskAway. An inspirational article I read made me look at the things that I have learnt in the last 3-4 years growing and scaling a SaaS business.

Quick, rapid decisions: You can easily change things around if something does not work out. Don’t ponder and wonder if something needs to be done. Just do it and if it doesn’t work, switch gears and try something else. Try out different tools, policies, management styles, testing procedures, website design and keep only the ones that work. Move fast.

Measure early and often: Everything on the web is measurable. Initially, we were too engrossed in building software that we completely ignored analytics and measuring the customer acquisition funnel. This was back in early 2008. Once we realized that we could learn so much more about our users and business, we built an internal dashboard to track everything - sales, free signups, conversion funnel, upgrades, downgrades and other important metrics. Today, key business indicators are a click away. This is needed to make quick, rapid decisions.

Hire attitude first, then skill: Hiring the right people is a huge challenge. We learnt our lesson early on when we were doing website design and development. We hired an expensive designer who we had to fire after we found out that he was freelancing from within our office. I am not a fan oft hiring experts - they are generally very expensive for startups. Look for good attitude and a willingness to learn. Get the right people on your bus, the wrong people out.

Make time for play: I enjoy each day. Work does consume a large part of it but I generally take out time to pursue my other passions (like tennis, golf and traveling) and spend a good amount of time with family. I guess the family part is well rooted in our Indian culture. Life is too short to spend it away on all work and no play. Also, make sure you take care of your health - without a healthy mind/body there is no work.

Don’t chase success: In 2008 we concentrated on building good software and listening to our customers. This automatically gave us a decent amount of recognition on international blogs, print and TV. This was huge for our small business. The beauty of it was that everything happened so organically - maybe we were doing the right things and enjoying it while at it each day. Too much greed for success gets in the way.

Manage your time: When you are short on resources and need to wear different hats you better know how to manage your priorities. Be aware of where you spend your time. Learn to say no. Keep a certain alloted time for reading and social networking. These things can so easily consume you that by the time you know it, it is already time to go home.

Think purpose & brand: Features and pricing are not really differentiators. The real differentiator is your purpose and the perceived value within your customer’s mind. They should join you because of the message you are giving out. Do you stand for something important? Your purpose, brand and culture should be bigger than your product. This is something that I think about each day.

I am sure there are several more things that I have learnt and am learning each day. I will pen them down on another post soon. It has been an exiting journey so far and looking forward to some fabulous announcements in the next couple of months…

Webbright is a Richmond, Virginia company that provides web design and Internet marketing services for small businesses and membership organizations.

‘‘ DeskAway is my everyday keeping-my-sanity tool. ’’

Lamees Abourahma, Bright Founder.

How are you using DeskAway and what value is it providing your team?
I came across DeskAway more than a year ago as I was looking for a project collaboration tool to use with other teammates long distance. I reviewed a few options and summarized the results in this blog post.

Currently, Webbright uses DeskAway to track customer support issues, manage time and tasks, and design systems.

DeskAway is my everyday keeping-my-sanity tool.

Were you using any other tool before DeskAway?
No.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
The video tutorials and help faqs were very sufficient to get started. DeskAway is very intuitive and have a simple and slick user interface.

What features does your team use the most?
At Webbright, our goal is to provide consistent outstanding experience to our customers every time, on time. This can be accomplished by systemizing our services. DeskAway has the ability to turn a project into a template. This is a great feature for designing systems. You can start a project, add tasks, details and milestones then save the work into a template to use for a future project.

Are you emailing (sending tasks, attachments etc.) less because of DeskAway? How has DeskAway helped in lowering project costs, profitability or improving efficiency?
DeskAway is keeping me organized and efficient by giving me the tools to manage my tasks and my time.

Are there any other thoughts that you would want to share with us regarding our service, product etc.?
Innovation is a big part of Webbright business. DeskAway has been a great tool for this innovation. I highly recommend it for small businesses looking to manage and organize their everyday activities as well as their long-term goals.

Thanks!

How do You use DeskAway? Let us know @himali(at)synage(.)com

Sharp End Training is an online training company. It provide training for small business and small business owners with dedicated sites for different countries and parts of the world. Content can be adjusted to suit different market conditions.

At the moment, they have dedicated country leaders in India, Malta, the USA and Singapore.

Jonathan Senior,  Founder & CEO.

This is how they use DeskAway,

How are you using DeskAway and what value is it providing your team?
We use DeskAway to keep track of the projects we are working on. As a project manager, I love the flexibility it gives me to allow and disallow access to certain people and projects. It has stopped totally the flow of emails with attachments and the inevitable confusion and version control.

Were you using any other tool before before DeskAway?
We looked at bug tracking software, both hosted and self hosted. We looked at other solutions but they were far too technical. We pride ourselves on making things which are complicate, simple. We had no need to share code or other technical data.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
No learning curve. One team member remarked “Oh so it’s like facebook. It emails me when there is a message and I delete the email and go read the message.”

What features does your team use the most?
We tend to have one “thread” per topic, that’s either an issue or a task. We don’t use the file storage much because we share big video and sound files. We can hotlink to the url in DeskAway easy enough though…

Are you emailing (sending tasks, attachments etc.) less because of DeskAway? How has DeskAway helped in lowering project costs, profitability, improving efficiency or just simplifying work?
Sending email attachments has stopped totally. When a new associate comes on board, we have a definite methodology that we work with and that is part of the deal.

Thanks!

How do You use DeskAway? Let us know @ himali(at)synage(.)com

Hats-off to all those company that have accomplished growing their businesses in the pre-web era. Today, it almost seems impossible a run a startup without the use of web apps - to help you check your mail, answer support requests, send out newsletter and accomplish several other functions. What we find interesting in using web apps is that they are inexpensive, easy to setup and automate a lot of processes that were othervise done manually. Automation allows us to free up valuable time that we can pour into working ‘on’ our business rather than ‘in’ it.

Here are some of the tools we use at our workplace. We wanted to say a big THANK YOU for helping us grow our business…

Google Apps - email and document sharing

DeskAway (obviously!) - project collaboration, planning and messaging

Zendesk - support

GetSatisfaction - online community

iContact - email marketing

Google Analytics - tracking visitors on our site

Crazy Egg - heatmaps for pages on our site

Pingdom - monitoring uptime on our servers

Wordpress - blog platform

Twitter - customer support and outreach

Screenr - quick 1-minute help videos online

Dropbox - sharing files across home, office

Skype - communications and demos

DeskAway has been mentioned in the Mint (web as well as the print edition) as one of the tools that can help you become fitter, happier and more productive.

Learn how to ignore the World Wide Web’s many distractions and get down to work…with the help of the Web.

This might sound familiar: You’re at your desk, finally having dispelled every distraction to the corners of your mind, and just about to get some actual work done when someone pings you on chat. Intrigued, you change tabs—and there are three new emails waiting for you, including a comment on a photo you’d just uploaded on Facebook. One tab leads to another, and soon you’re neck deep in three IM conversations about the contents of your lunch box.

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