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jamesdeer

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I used to lead Counter Strike 1.6 teams in my teens- I often reflect on how that was some of my early leadership "training".

Good memories of motivating my teams of 15/16/17 year olds to get online at 6/7am in the morning to work on our skills before school, and for epic days during the summer.

Ah, simpler times.

We use Recurly, Stripe and FreeAgent. Recurly creates the invoices required for customers (so thats nice and simple).

Our book keeper creates an invoice for each day within FreeAgent, we then attribute the amount that came from Stripe in to it.

We then download the CSV data from Recurly and work out how much VAT should be attributed to the specific invoice.

We also work out currency gains/losses as well here.

FreeAgent lets you add a VAT item to the invoice.

It's a bit of a pain but gives our customers what they need, and it gives us what we need from an accounting perspective.

Recurly stores all of the transactional data if we ever need to go back and audit it for any reason.

Hope this helps!

Sponsored Pics.

One email per week sent is an ad (on a random day). Build up as much data about each user as you can which you can then offer up to advertisers. E.g. Email all women who like jeans with a sponsored pic.

$lowXX to remove ads.

Also offer backup service for small additional fee.

Partner with a service like blurb to send Instagram photo books to users of their old pics. Perhaps suggest the images that should be used in a book?

Back to beer.

I've read a preview version of the book and it's worth at least double what he is charging for it.

You'll save yourself so much money in the long run by grabbing it for $79. Work smarter :)

I did it, well sort of.

My wife and I own a digital agency (deerdigital.com). We found a pain within the agency, built a product around it, and 6 months later we have a new start-up that has a few hundred paying customers and is growing about 7% week on week (gathercontent.com).

We decided to continue with the service business by giving more responsibility to employees, and having one of them buy in and becoming the CEO. We're no longer involved in the day-to-day ops and meet once or twice a year for high-level strategy planning. Best decision ever.

I enjoy hacking email copy so I rewrote this for fun trying to make it a little easier to take in:

----

Hi John,

I'm Joel, the founder of Buffer. Thanks so much for signing up.

It's probably not every day you sign up to something new so I want you to know that my team and I are here to make you happy, 24/7.

You should try out our awesome browser extension. It'll help you share amazing content to your friends and followers twice as fast.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

Have an awesome day.

Cheers! Joel

P.S. You can catch me sharing interesting content on Twitter, @joelgascoigne and the team and I usually respond to emails within a few hours.

Yeah, we knew we wouldn't really be reaching many potential customers.

I did get a few interesting emails from potential investors, and people who work at other tech companies who saw integration potential.

I'd never spend a penny on outsourcing PR. Ever.

It was a great little boost for the team. Everyone felt really proud. Why? I don't know. It just felt good to have a wee bit of recognition after all the hard work everyone put in to launching the product.

Sure, I'd be happy to write something about that, and I love the idea of comparing the TC "results" with the other, more targeted places that wrote about us.

You are right, all I did was pitch them in a certain way. I wouldn't call us an Enterprise focused start-up yet and I wasn't trying to come across as revolutionary— just sharing an experience of how I managed to achieve something :)

I didn't really spend a huge amount of time doing it to be honest. A little research, a few emails and Skype call, half a day tops.

We've actually been talked about in a number of trade blogs/magazines/sites and conferences. We saw some really good results from those as well, and yes, obviously a higher percentage of converting customers came through those sources.

I'm not in any bubble. I'm working really hard. We've got some really healthy revenue and within a month or so based on our current growth, we'll break even. Not bad for only launching a couple of months ago.

I appreciate your comments none-the-less :)