thomasknoll

seems inevitable now that I know about it.

Thank you for sharing Chuck!

Thank you for sharing that draker! Digging around for other gems I can steal!

We also tend to execute daily on the concept of "Done is Better than Best." We would certainly look into some kind of self hosted option if/when we need to set up our own wiki. Hackpad was simply faster and "done."

For each area of the business we have two boards: planning and current. The planning board gets pretty messy, and is the place where we capture all the ideas that come to mind, comments and input are added to help prioritize those ideas as a must-get-to-next-week, or someday-this-would-be-nice. And the current board is the chunk of cards we are committing to getting done this week "no matter what". So, the current board stays pretty clean, and people work real hard to get everything cleared out of there each week, because then we can go to the planning board and grab some of the other high-priority things and check them off.

It isn't perfect, but it does keep us making forward progress. And sometimes those things that just don't ever make it to the current board are things that don't really need to get done.

I was trying to decide whether to add, "and you won't believe what happens next!!?!" to the end. But, I decided to keep it simple.

I certainly don't mean to be misleading. But, it definitely feels as extreme as completely banning email. At least for our team, all our past experience with hating email at a company was tied to internal email culture and the inability to actually do work.

I answered something similar generally below to exelius. But, to answer a few of your specific examples:

- 90% of customer conversations occur via Intercom.io our hello@primellop address and all reply-to’s point there. And, generally the other 10% that come directly to me where it makes sense to have the rest of the team available to help, get cc’d into hello@ in my response.

- currently all our recruiting is inbound (mostly through angel.co) and I follow up with people there to schedule a call. Certainly some amount of external email around that.

- on the sales front we are definitely using email. Happy to play in their world and make it easy for them. But, again, most next actions and internal collaboration/communication moves to trello/hackpad/relateIQ

- all the services we use obviously send a bunch of email, that we sometimes need to respond to. But all of that is in a group email that most of us can dig through if we need to.

And, FWIW, I’ve had the opposite experience with email. I can handle the external communication OK… it’s the mess of internal email that has caused the most headaches.

Good point. And we do still use email for external communication. But, even on those messages that then require internal communication and decision making or any next-actions, we shift the communication over to slack/trello/hackpad to get the work done and then reply back externally.

Thank you! Checking it out now.

Slack is the main “channel” for all of that type of information. And/but, I would say, 80% of the time, it is a link to a longer post in hackpad with more details, and a request for comment.

aaand we’ve never been happier. =)

What do these look like live? have an example?

I’m curious what questions would come to your mind if your company decided to implement something like this?

"a smart yet inexpensive piece of technology can take some of life’s burdensome weight off our shoulders"... of, you know, things like talking to your loved ones.

Favorite line: "A company’s brand is its “most important asset,” more valuable than technology or patents or manufacturing prowess. But brands have never been more fragile. The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos."

Favorite line: "getting enough honest, heartfelt, sincere and organically earned impressions that offer the necessary audience reach is a pipe dream for most brands"

Accidental community builders are my favorite.

There is a followup from the OP that is even more interesting: http://alexshvartsman.com/2014/02/13/fair-and-square/

Absolutely agree! That’s why this is a time boxed experiment outside the normal workflow. This isn’t how we work everyday, it is how we are working for one month.

A lot of startups go into a crazy mode like this after they run out of money. We’re just trying to do a little more of the crazy up front.

What exactly makes us a bunch of monkeys?

We’re in the middle of the 3rd hackathon, so still need more data to justify this tactic. But, as of right now, we would definitely do this again.

Culture is at least 2x more important than you ever think it is. Especially when hiring. I love this, Thank you Rich.

not that lowly...

It's hard to remember to tiller the rudder and trim the sails at the same time. It's easier to wait until there is a problem and then scramble to fix it. I mean, that's what we're best at right? Fixing problems?

Could sum this up with Steve Martin's quote from the Charlie Rose show:

    Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it's not
    the answer they wanted to hear. What they want to hear 
    is "Here's how you get an agent, here's how you write 
    a script,"... but I always say,

    "Be so good they can't ignore you."

These rough times are automatic reminders to ask this question... what can be even more dangerous is when things are going really well according to external measurements and an entrepreneur doesn't feel like they can ask that question.

I cannnnnnnnot wait to utilize these new features.

In 14 years of customer support, it was always frustrating to me how many customers would be more than happy to help provide better information to track down an issue, but can't because the process is just too difficult for them to understand. I love hearing about tools that make that process much easer. It's like a win win win (win).

I think both positions (Mark's & brendanib) are oversimplifying (and hyping) the issue. End of the day, what matters are the relationships formed between people and brands. And like all advertising, paying to get in front of people is how the game works. If you'd rather pay money to initiate those conversations, then pay for them If you want to be engaging enough to draw people into those conversations, then invest in that.

Awesome, thank you! The native aspect of this is so important since it is usually so difficult to be in touch with customer support through apps.