Posts related to business category

A Good Mystery Never Cheats. Neither Should Your AI.

Vinay Patankar · 13 Jul, 2026 · Technology · Business

The best mystery novels follow a rule most readers never notice. Every clue you need to solve the case is already on the page before the detective names the killer. The golden-age writers even wrote it down: play fair with the reader. No secret twin sprung in the final chapter. No poison no one could have known about. The pleasure comes from a twist you could have seen, not one that was kept from you. Break that rule and the reader feels it instantly. A mystery that pulls its answer from something you were never shown does not feel clever. It feels like a cheat. You do not think "I should have caught that." You think "that was not fair." I keep coming back to this rule when I watch people build with AI agents. An agent reaches a conclusion and acts on it. Sends the email, updates the record, moves the money. And when you ask why, the honest answer is often that you cannot tell. It weighed something it never put in front of you. The reasoning is real, maybe even right, but it lands like the last chapter of a bad mystery. The ending arrived without the clues. That is the moment trust breaks. Not when the agent is wrong. When it is right in a way you cannot retrace. A good mystery and a good agent are held to the same contract. Show the clues, then the conclusion. Let me arrive at the same answer from the same evidence. The surprise is allowed. The hidden card is not. This is why the agents I actually trust are the ones that fail closed and show their work. When they act, I can walk the trail backward: here is what it saw, here is what it decided, here is why. Nothing was slipped in during the final paragraph. The instinct when you build these things is to hide the machinery and present the answer, clean and confident. It looks smarter. It reads worse. Confidence without the clues is exactly the twist that makes a reader throw the book across the room. Write the mystery your reader can solve alongside you. Then let the ending land anyway.

The Three Things I Got Wrong Running My Company on AI Agents

Vinay Patankar · 12 Jul, 2026 · Technology · Business

90 days ago I handed most of my company's daily work to AI agents. Three things I got wrong. None were the ones I braced for. 1. I thought the hard part was the tools. It wasn't. I wired up plenty. The wins never came from a better model. They came from writing down the calls my team makes on instinct, the ones nobody had put into words. An agent doesn't need more tools. It needs your judgment, made explicit. 2. I gave it access before I gave it boundaries. I optimized for speed, so the agents could reach almost everything. That is how you get a confident action nobody asked for, aimed at something that matters: a customer, production, real money. The fix was boring. Make the agent fail closed. When it isn't sure, it stops and asks. Slower some days. Safer every day. 3. I assumed knowledge would travel. It didn't. Each agent was sharp at its own task and blind to what the last one just learned. Context doesn't carry itself. The real project was never smarter agents. It was the memory layer underneath, so what one learns, the next inherits. That last one is the real lesson. I stopped building better agents and started managing them. An agent is a new hire who never sleeps and never learned your judgment. Most of the work is management, not magic.

When the Assistant Became a Colleague

Vinay Patankar · 11 Jun, 2026 · Business · Technology

For about two years I worked next to an AI that could only talk. I would ask it something, get a sharp answer, and then go do the actual work myself. Pull the numbers. Write the message. Update the record. It was the most capable thing in the room and it was not allowed to touch the room. What I had was a brilliant advisor with no hands. Useful. Also strangely lonely, because advice is not the same as help. A colleague does not just tell you what they would do. They go do part of it. That changed for me the day an assistant of mine stopped describing the work and started doing it. It read the thread, drafted the reply, sent it to the person who needed it, and updated the system that tracked it. Not a suggestion I had to carry across the finish line. The actual thing, done. The shift was not that it got smarter. It was already smart enough two years ago. The shift was that it crossed out of the chat window and into the place where my work actually lives. That is the real line between a chatbot and a coworker, and almost everyone draws it in the wrong place. People think the difference is intelligence. It is not. The difference is participation. A chatbot sits in its own box and waits for you to bring it problems and carry away answers. A coworker is in the building. It talks to the rest of the team. It can talk to a customer. It moves through the same tools everyone else uses, and it reaches outside the company when the job requires it, to a vendor, a partner, a filing somewhere. It does what any colleague does. It works with people and systems, not just with you, and not just in conversation. Once you frame it that way, the thing you actually have to solve becomes obvious, and it is not a technology problem. It is the same problem you have with any new person on the team. Can you trust them with real access yet. We know how to answer that, because we answer it constantly. You do not hand a new hire the keys to everything on day one. You give them a clear job. You tell them where they can act alone and where they stop and check with you. You let them earn the dangerous parts slowly, one good decision at a time. Trust is not a vibe. It is a structure. It is a set of steps and checkpoints that lets someone do real work without you holding your breath. So a real AI coworker is not a chatbot that finally got clever enough to be dangerous. It is capability placed inside a structure: a defined job, a place where it pauses and asks a human before doing something it cannot undo, and a record of what it did so nobody is guessing. The intelligence was never the missing piece. The structure around the intelligence was. That pause, the gate before the irreversible thing, is what turns raw capability into a teammate. The chatbot era was the demo. It was the part where the technology got to show what it could say, with nothing real on the line. The coworker era is the part where it gets a real seat, real access, and real rules. A place to start, a place to stop, and someone to check with before the thing that matters. I am not nervous about an AI that can do real work. I am nervous about one that can do real work and has nowhere to stop and ask first. Give it that, the pause before the irreversible thing, and an assistant quietly becomes a colleague. Everything before that pause is a conversation. Everything after it is the job.

The Last Mile Assistant

Vinay Patankar · 20 May, 2026 · Business

The most underrated job in the next five years is not prompt engineer. It is the human who runs errands for someone else's AI. I noticed this watching my own setup. My agents handle email triage, calendar holds, research, drafting, CRM updates, follow-ups. They can do the cognitive 90% of an assistant's job, sometimes better than the assistant could. What they cannot do is pick up the dry cleaning. Sign for a package. Walk a passport into the consulate. Test that a Slack app actually reinstalled cleanly. Drive a check to the lawyer. Touch a thing in the physical world. So the assistant role inverts. The AI does the planning, the writing, the reasoning. The human does the in-person follow-through. The agent says "this needs to happen by Friday" and the human is the one who physically makes it happen. That is a new job category. Not "assistant to a CEO." Assistant to a CEO's agent. The pay model also flips. Today an EA's value is mostly judgment, prioritization, and writing on your behalf. Tomorrow that value sits in the agents. The premium shifts to the people who can execute reliably in the real world on behalf of the agent, with the trust and discretion to act on the AI's call without supervision. It sounds dystopian if you read it cold. It is not, really. It is just specialization catching up to the tools. We already do this with logistics, with Instacart shoppers, with TaskRabbit. The new version is a dedicated person whose entire week is shaped by what your AI needs from the physical world. The companies that figure this out first will not hire it as "assistant." They will hire it as a service. A team of operators on retainer, dispatched by your agent, doing the things software cannot reach. The next assistant job is not less human. It is more human, and less cognitive. The brain is the agent. The hands are the person. That is the shape of the next five years.

Got Laid Off Friday, Had a Bartending Job Monday

Vinay Patankar · 28 Mar, 2026 · Business

I got laid off on a Friday. By Monday I had a bartending job. I was 20, working as an IT sysadmin at Educom in Sydney. Youngest CCNA in Australia. Thought I had a career path. Then I didn't. Here's what I did. I got my bartending certificate the following week. Printed 100 resumes. Walked down George Street on Monday handing them out to every bar and restaurant I passed. Had a job the same day. Starbar as a glassman (busboy). Washing glasses and cleaning ashtrays for people who still had office jobs. That doesn't sound like a career move. It wasn't. It was a survival reflex. The gap between "I lost my job" and "I have a new one" was measured in days, not months. I didn't sit down and make a plan. I just moved. A few years later, I read The 4-Hour Workweek. And something broke in my brain. Not the "work from a beach" fantasy that most people take from that book. The idea that you could build something from anywhere. That geography was a choice, not a constraint. Every excuse I had for staying in Sydney disappeared in one chapter. In December 2009 I packed my entire life into grey Coles garbage bags. My mum told me to put mothballs in everything because my stuff would be packed away for a long time. She was right. I drove to Bendigo with my brother. Flew out of Melbourne. One-way ticket. No return planned. No job lined up. No savings worth mentioning. My income went from $150K in corporate to $30K in year one. Then $50K in year two. I built SEO sites, e-commerce stores, lead gen businesses, anything that could run from a laptop. I lived in Hong Kong, Panama, Mexico, Barcelona, Singapore, and eventually San Francisco. Twelve years of that. Twelve years of building small things, failing at a few big things, learning what actually works when there's no safety net and no boss and no one checking if you showed up. Then I built Process Street. A real company. Venture-backed. Accel, Salesforce Ventures, Atlassian. The kind of company that 20-year-old me in Sydney could not have imagined. But here's the thing. The muscle I use every day as CEO is the same muscle I built walking down George Street with 100 resumes. The speed between "something broke" and "here's what I'm doing about it" is still measured in days, not months. A customer churns, I have a save play running by lunch. A team member leaves, the role is restructured by end of week. A market shifts, we're already building the new thing. That's not strategy. That's a reflex. And I learned it bartending. The same bias toward fast response shows up in how I build now, including the AI systems that turn messy work into operational leverage. The lesson I'd give my 20-year-old self: the thing that feels like a setback is actually training. The speed you develop when you have no choice becomes your superpower when you have every choice. Twenty-one years later, I still pack light and move fast. The garbage bags are gone but the instinct isn't.

Building Cora: Our AI Compliance Agent

Vinay Patankar · 18 Jul, 2025 · Business · Document-management

When we started Process Street, our goal was simple. Help teams run recurring work without mistakes. The world didn’t need another task manager. It needed a system that could enforce standards, catch skipped steps, and give teams confidence that what should happen actually did. So we built it. A process management platform that made SOPs executable. A no-code workflow engine that turned policy into action. A tool that teams could actually use without calling IT. Over time, our customers pushed us further. Regulated industries brought their toughest workflows. Financial controls. Risk reviews. Policy certifications. Audit procedures. And that’s when it became clear. We weren’t just in the business of process. We were in the business of proof. From Process Management to Compliance Operations It wasn’t enough to help people document what to do. We needed to ensure it was done, every time, by everyone, with evidence. That’s where compliance operations come in. Compliance operations is what happens when you connect policies to workflows, workflows to monitoring, and monitoring to real-time action. It’s the difference between a checklist and a control system. Between paper compliance and actual enforcement. That’s where Process Street is today. Docs is where policies are created, governed, and versioned. Ops is where those policies become workflows, executed with full audit trails. And now, we’re building the intelligence layer to tie it all together. Enter Cora. Our AI Compliance Agent. Cora (which stands for "Compliance Orchestration and Risk Agent) is not a chatbot. Cora is not another assistant with a cute name. Cora is a system of enforcement. It watches how work gets done. Flags when it drifts from policy. Suggests updates when regulations shift. And generates the proof teams need to pass any audit, without the scramble. It’s not here to make compliance easier. It’s here to make it automatic. Why We’re Building Cora on AWS You don’t build a compliance-grade AI system on weekend infrastructure. Cora runs long sessions. Monitors real workflows. Triggers real consequences. We needed scale, security, and performance without compromise. That’s why we’re building on AWS. AWS AgentCore gives us exactly what we need. - Long-running agents that can observe and act in real time - Secure, isolated sessions that respect data boundaries - Deep integration into the services that power enterprise operations This is not a prototype. This is the foundation for the next generation of compliance enforcement. What’s Next We’re starting with the high-stakes use cases, capital markets, risk teams, and audit-heavy ops. But Cora is not a one-off. It's a system. A platform. A new layer for how compliance gets done across every industry. Process Street is now a Compliance Operations Platform. Cora is our intelligence layer. AWS is our partner in making it real. If you’re building the future of AI, compliance, or operations, let’s talk. No more missed steps. No more compliance theater. Just policy, executed. Related read in Business: Process Diagrams.

Accel, Atlassian & Salesforce Leads $12m Series A for Process Streets No-Code Workflow App

Vinay Patankar · 23 Mar, 2020 · Business

2020 – San Francisco… Read more about this announcement on Business Insider, Crunchbase and Forbes. I’m very proud and excited to announce that Process Street has raised a $12M Series A from Accel, Atlassian, Salesforce Ventures and other amazing investors. The funds will go towards our vision of building the GitHub of no-code; where teams around the world can find and use checklists, workflows and automations to improve their productivity at work. Our mission is to make recurring work fun, fast, and faultless for teams everywhere. Having experienced investors and leading SaaS partners will put us in a powerful position to achieve this mission. ## The Process Street story so far Process Street started as an internal tool to document and track simple checklist-based processes. We were running a distributed marketing agency with contractors all around the world and were struggling to keep our repetitive processes on track. Spreadsheets and project management tools were causing more problems than solutions. We needed a tool to provide structure and manage internal workflows, so we built Process Street. We’ve grown that simple tool into a fully-fledged no-code workflow builder with an easy-to-use interface that can handle almost any type of business process, from client implementation to employee onboarding and content approvals. We are proud to service over 450,000+ registered users including enterprise customers like Colliers, Accenture, Spotify and Airbnb, as well as institutions like Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. Process Street continues its distributed roots as a fully remote team with 45 members spread across North America and Europe. It’s a popular tool for remote organizations, and we use it heavily internally, but we’ve found an even greater market in distributed enterprises; large organizations looking to standardize and automate work across vast geographical areas. ## Why Accel, Atlassian & Salesforce Ventures? We chose to partner with Accel because they believe in product-led growth, understand the SaaS space, and know-how to deliver maximum value at scale. The experience built within Accel from investments in Atlassian, Slack and Dropbox means they’ve been on this journey before. Rich Wong, Partner at Accel will be joining our Board. Rich has been an investor and Board Member in fast-growth SaaS leaders such as Atlassian, Checkr and UiPath, and we look forward to leveraging his wealth of experience and expertise to further our growth. Salesforce Ventures and Atlassian were obvious partners. Salesforce Ventures has the leading global portfolio of enterprise SaaS companies and brings access to the Salesforce platform and their customers. Process Street workflows are tightly integrated with other SaaS products and rely on the data and activity happening in these systems to automate work. Our customers integrate with hundreds of different SaaS products, but Salesforce, Trello and Jira are among the most popular. ## What’s next for Process Street? The future for Process Street is to be the no-code workflow solution for teams everywhere. We want to expand how and where teams can manage their work. To make this happen, we’ll be launching a mobile app, a redesigned experience, and building on our recent improvements to enable manager approvals on-the-go. Process Street has a giant library of plug-and-play process templates created by our team, customers and partners. We’ll continue to grow this to be the largest repository in the world for all workflows and operational playbooks; the GitHub for knowledge workers. We’re going to be launching further enterprise features for improved reporting and analysis, while opening up greater API access to let teams control their data and build custom automations. We’ll also look to deepen existing partnerships and forge new ones. This will mean greater alignment between Process Street and the other products you already rely on, furthering our seamless integrations. We are beyond grateful for all of your continued support and can’t wait to keep working with you in the years ahead. Many thanks, Vinay Patankar, CEO. Read on Process Street Blog. For another Business angle, read App Idea - Turn iPhone's into Public Hot-spots.

The Checklist Manifesto Summary

Vinay Patankar · 21 Jun, 2019 · Blogging · Business · Business-process-management · Standard-operating-procedures

###### Checklists are for everyone What do Johns Hopkins surgeons, anonymous big-time investors and World War II pilots have in common? This isn't the set up for a terrible joke but a demonstration of how widespread an often-overlooked tool is - they all use checklists to avoid disaster. For surgeons, disaster is a lethal infection caused by straying from proper precaution. For pilots, it’s crashing a plane that was deemed far too complicated to fly – the Boeing B-17. For investors, checklists avoid what is sometimes known as ‘cocaine brain’; the drive to make snap decisions on high-risk investments that often result in huge losses. For more information on a similar process, see Warren Buffet's Investment Checklist. It details the steps taken by the man known as the world's greatest investor prior to parting with massive sums of money. The Checklist Manifesto, written by writer/surgeon Atul Gawande, is proof that checklists really work (whether anyone wants to admit that or not). Check out the the Checklist Manifesto Review I wrote for more details. In his words, if another solution that could be even a fraction as effective would be a new drug or piece of technology it would be backed by billions of dollars, sponsored by the state and be the only thing the worldwide medical journals talk about. A case he cites is the development of robots to perform tricky laparoscopic surgery. It was widely backed and implemented in many hospitals around the US to the great excitement of the medical community. Positive results? Next to none. Checklists, however, are deceptively simple. The Checklist Manifesto is the tale of how Gawande took an idea first popularized by pilots into the operating theater and then out into the hospitals of the world, with the help of the World Health Organization. Not only does the book document his own research, but implementations of similar strategies, from hugely complex construction projects to Walmart’s innovative yet highly organized approach when dealing with Hurricane Katrina. ###### Providing a solution to human error One of the main problems with checklists is that some feel they are above them, unable to make silly mistakes in routine procedures and not subject to human error. Gawande references a 1970s essay by Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre that boils down all situations to find the only two reasons for human dilemma: > “The first is ignorance – we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop. The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude – because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. This is the skyscraper that is built wrong and collapses, the snowstorm whose signs the meteorologist just plain missed, the stab wound from a weapon the doctors forgot to ask about.” In practical terms, ignorance can be corrected by answering the question "what do I do?" and ineptitude with "how do I do it?". Checklists can solve both of these issues. They are great teaching tools that can be used to convey information simply, such as our Podcast Publishing Checklist, as well as highly practical, no-frills documents such as the B-17 checklist, one of the most famous of all time. An example that's likely more useful to our world comes from one of the stand-out passages in the book where Gawande meets with three high-powered directors who meet to make venture capital investments in companies that have a slim chance to make a huge breakthrough. Since these investments are usually nothing short of gambling against terrible odds, this exclusive group of investors implement one very simple tool - a checklist. For them, this checklist is worth millions. That's how much it has probably saved them by helping to avoid bad investments. This quote explains how Mohnish Pabrai, managing partner in Pabrai Investment Funds in Irvine, California, has taken the idea from medicine and aviation to use checklists in his work. > "Pabrai made a list of mistakes he’d seen—ones \[Warren\] Buffett and other investors had made as well as his own. It soon contained dozens of different mistakes, he said. Then, to help him guard against them, he devised a matching list of checks—about seventy in all. > One, for example, came from a Berkshire Hathaway mistake he’d studied involving the company’s purchase in early 2000 of Cort Furniture, a Virginia-based rental furniture business. Over the previous ten years, Cort’s business and profits had climbed impressively. Charles Munger, Buffett’s longtime investment partner, believed Cort was riding a fundamental shift in the American economy. > The business environment had become more and more volatile and companies therefore needed to grow and shrink more rapidly than ever before. As a result, they were increasingly apt to lease office space rather than buy it—and, Munger noticed, to lease the furniture, too. Cort was in a perfect position to benefit. > Everything else about the company was measuring up—it had solid financials, great management, and so on. So Munger bought. But buying was an error. He had missed the fact that the three previous years of earnings had been driven entirely by the dot-com boom of the late nineties. Cort was leasing furniture to hundreds of start-up companies that suddenly stopped paying their bills and evaporated when the boom collapsed." ###### Are checklists for egomaniacs? This cautionary tale shows what happens when a formal procedure isn't in place when it really should be. The fact that the human brain is not so great can be proven by the amount of productivity tools, to-do lists, products like this, this and - when was the last time you forgot your baby in the car? - this. These are tools for the simplest things! Brain surgery, alongside rocket science, has the anecdotal title as being among the most complex and difficult tasks in the history of the world. What makes people think they don't need tools for remembering the proper procedure? The thing is, people in these professions likely have genius-level IQs. This can result in what is known as intellectual arrogance, the features of which are: - They have a "my way or the highway" attitude since only their views are supposedly the right way to think. - They regard themselves as experts in a particular field or subject. - They refuse to see the big picture or another viewpoint, especially of those they consider "ignorant". - They like explaining, theorizing and dictating; basically they like hearing the sound of their own voice. - Their mood can become very nasty if their ideas and views are contradicted. - They regard any question as an insult or a doubt on their intelligence. - They are not above creating proof and arguments to defend their theories vehemently. - They are very confident in their own knowledge and do not want to learn anything new. - Sometimes they can come across as very wannabe and attention-seeking. - They can get very smug and snobby, especially if they are actually right about something. - They pretend to be very broad-minded but actually are very narrow-minded as they feel they know everything and in the right way. (Source) A man who fits the above description nicely. Does this sound like the sort of person who would be open to the idea of being told what to do by a checklist? That was the main problem Gawande ran into with the first large-scale implementation of checklists into hospitals worldwide. He notes how that the egotistical nature of surgeons plus the fact that checklists had to be read out by a subordinate created a large amount of friction among colleagues. He intended the checklists to promote teamwork in the same way we created our app to promote and streamline collaboration. One of the first stages of the process was a friendly introduction to help everyone get on and work as efficiently as possible, knowing each others names and duties; you'd be surprised at the amount of surgeries performed by teams who have never met prior to the operation and leave the theater none the wiser as to each other's names or positions. It was basically through the process of long trials and repeated exposure that Gawande managed to create success for his checklists. After a while, people started to see results that were undeniable - checklists worked! > "More than 250 staff members—surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and others—filled out an anonymous survey after three months of using the checklist. In the beginning, most had been skeptical. But by the end, 80 percent reported that the checklist was easy to use, did not take a long time to complete, and had improved the safety of care. And 78 percent actually observed the checklist to have prevented an error in the operating room. Nonetheless, some skepticism persisted. > After all, 20 percent did not find it easy to use, thought it took too long, and felt it had not improved the safety of care.Then we asked the staff one more question. “If you were having an operation,” we asked, “would you want the checklist to be used?”A full 93 percent said yes." ###### The Checklist 'Eureka!' Moment The penultimate chapter of the book ends on a powerful note, summing up the unlikely turn of events that led to widespread checklist usage in the aviation industry. Nothing sums up the point of the book more effectively: > "We are all plagued by failures—by missed subtleties, overlooked knowledge, and outright errors. For the most part, we have imagined that little can be done beyond working harder and harder to catch the problems and clean up after them. We are not in the habit of thinking the way the army pilots did as they looked upon their shiny new Model 299 bomber—a machine so complex no one was sure human beings could fly it. > They too could have decided just to “try harder” or to dismiss a crash as the failings of a “weak” pilot. Instead they chose to accept their fallibilities. They recognized the simplicity and power of using a checklist." If you enjoyed reading the Checklist Manifesto, take a look at our checklist software built on the book's great ideas. If you haven't read it yet, you can buy the book on Amazon here. If you have, let me know your thoughts in the comments. I'd love to hear your opinion! Process Street is more than just checklists - check out the different ways it can be used: - Workflow software - Business process management software - SOP software - Onboarding software - Property management software Related read in Blogging: Due Diligence Checklist Restaurant.

How we Rebranded our Company in 3 Months

Vinay Patankar · 28 Sep, 2016 · Business · Business-systematization · Featured

This post was written by Benjamin Brandall and originally appeared on the Process Street blog and is the story of how Cameron and I rebranded our startup Process Street. In the lifecycle of every startup, there comes a tipping point. For companies focused on aesthetics and creating something beautiful, there's a time where the founders need to shift towards their product — look inward and think deeply about the problems it solves, who's it for and how to refine user experience. For product-focused startups like Process Street, a necessary early shift is towards design. Just look at Apple — that's a company which thrives on making quality design and usability available on the mass market. ### Apple 2016: Would their product be as influential if their website still looked like this? ### Apple 1999: The simple answer is no because the brand evolves with the product. This is article tells the story of how Process Street rebranded itself. We've included lots of useful resources and tools to help you along the way if you're thinking of doing the same doing the same. Let's go! ## It started with a product, not a logo or a brand Our CEO, Vinay Patankar, had the idea to build Process Street from his own frustrations with workflow management software. While running a global team he found that there wasn't software out there which would let managers write process documents, create checklists, assign their team and track activity easily. While touring the world after leaving Australia in search of the entrepreneurial dream-come-true, he met Cameron McKay. Cameron is our CTO, a computer science graduate who built Process Street from the ground up and, alongside Vinay, took the company from idea to AngelPad in less than a year. Here they are in Argentina, where they met and started building Process Street. In this picture from 2014, you'll notice the logo isn't the same as it is now. And what's with those blues? The thing is, at the dawn of Process Street, branding and design were the last things on their minds. Based on past failures, Vinay knew the most important thing is to get a usable product together as soon as possible. Focusing on other areas before you've got something that can be sold or funded is a way to burn money, not make it. Here's what Process Street used to look like when it was a Bootstrap WordPress theme: While it's good enough for a first pass, there were some inherent problems with it. The most serious being that the light blue chosen for the main brand color didn't work inside the app. As user experience improved and the app became more visual, the light blue contrasted badly with the rest of the design. For the favicon, the P and S were condensed into a square — a pretty clunky and unmemorable way to do it, but the founders simply weren't designers. ## December 2014: Major app overhaul, minor site adjustments After graduating from AngelPad, Process Street had the time and money it needed to start redesigning the product to increase user retention. As for the marketing site, the changes were minor. We added a full-width product image above the fold, a more 'contrasty' blue (I'm also not a designer...) and a cleaner design. The logo stayed the same. While a great product can make up for bad presentation, great design doesn't fix a crap product. To stay hyper-focused on UX and building features, Cameron rebuilt the site in a day or two before returning to codeland. While Slack has its IRC hashtag, Trello has a board with lists, and Intercom has its... smiling microphone, Process Street had just a block with letters. Our latest redesign came when we decided to get rid of our logo and make something more recognizable. Here's how that happened... ## A logo idea came in the middle of the night I was talking to Vinay about where he got the idea to change the logo, and he said it just sort of... came to him while he was on his laptop in the middle of the night. This is the image which sparked it all off: It's the logo for Designmodo's Flat UI Pro, so we weren't going to use that, but Vinay wanted to go with a flat diamond for a few reasons: 1. Diamonds are the symbols for a decision in a flow chart. This is something integral to the app. 2. Diamonds are a sign of quality. Process Street is a quality product and helps with quality control because it ensures teams execute tasks by following a procedure. 3. The app and landing page is designed flat. The logo had to fit in with it. So, we cashed in our $100 discount from Tim Ferriss' promo code ("Tim") and headed over to 99Designs to post a competition! Here's the brief: Create a new logo \[Modern/Flat/Fun\] for business software startup @ProcessStreet We got some fantastic entries! We narrowed the pool of over 200 designs down to just 6, shown below: While none of them were spot on, they provided the ideal basis for a concept we could present to a designer. ## Working with Koombea design agency One of our investors, Jonathan Tarud, invested a combination of cash and service credit for his design agency, Koombea. They assigned us a brilliant lead designer, Mario Rocchi who took our logo, started creating iterations and uploading them to Basecamp. And, as you can probably see from looking anywhere on our website, we chose this one! Tada! 🎉 The logo formed the entire basis for the next step — a complete overhaul of our marketing site. ## From logo to landing page Deciding on a logo was important because it gave us two solid elements we knew would be included in the rest of the site — the blue, and the font (Cabin). We presented Mario with an overwhelming selection of sites we loved and wrote down what we loved about them. Keeping all of this in Basecamp gave us a place to have a group discussion while pinning everything in place. We added Mario to our Slack team as a single-channel guest and integrated the channel with Basecamp, so every time activity happened there, it would post a message in the channel. Here's a selection of sites we loved which inspired Process Street's design: ### x.ai We loved x.ai's super-minimalist landing page and the amount of whitespace. ### Freckle We loved the immediacy of the product and the fun color scheme Freckle use. ### Trello We loved Trello's use of icons, the large, easily readable font, and their bold, cartoonish colors. ## Prototyping the landing page in InVision Mario came back to us with loads of possibilities based on these recommendations. Here's a few we had a tough time deciding between. Eventually, as you'll see if you check our landing page, we settled for the top right option and then worked with Mario as he perfected in InVision. InVision lets designers work with clients and present them with interactive prototypes. Clients can comment on elements, then designers can make iterations and resolve the comments. It worked so well for us, we'd highly recommend InVision for anyone working with a designer. Finally, we decided that blue can get a bit too blue sometimes. Enter Process Street Teal and Process Street Red — incidentally two of my most favorite colors in the world. Check it out on our pricing page! ## We had 100 glyph icons designed See that little paintbrush icon in the header image? Mario designed that. Thanks to Koombea, we have more than 100 new glyph icons to use in header images, demo videos, landing pages and product demonstrations. Since he gave us the Sketch files, they're easy to manipulate even by us non-design folk. ## We blew our whole budget on design Process Street employs 5 full-time technical employees but 0 designers. We didn't need Koombea to implement the site, just design it. From there, Cameron got it up and running quickly. It would have been silly to ask Koombea to spend time on that -- instead, we spent everything on their design services. This meant we got graphics for social media, header image templates and graphics for features that hadn't even been released yet. Forward thinking, eh? We updated our AngelPad profile, Google Apps Marketplace, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Here's our shiny new Facebook profile: And some future feature graphics (as a sneaky way of telling you to hold on for all this good stuff): Woo. Looking smooth. And as for the blog header image graphics — Koombea cut about an hour a day from my workload with those little beauties, and I must say, they look fantastic. :) Check out the final designs in action: Homepage - Product page - Featured templates - Colors applied in the app - I hope this has given you some insight into our redesign, and shown you the steps we went through so you can take the ideas and apply them to your own company rebranding. What do you think of the design? Let us know in the comments! A strong follow-up in Business is Startup Idea: Evernote for Spreadsheets.

Meeting Strangers: How to Prepare for an Effective Cold Meeting

Vinay Patankar · 26 May, 2016 · Business

Ever been nervous meeting a stranger? Nerve no more! Impressing a stranger on first encounter can literally change your life. Interviews are a good example. Others include sales pitches, freelance consultations, partnerships, supplier agreements and even dates. They’re a necessity in life. So why not get good? Here are some tips to get you started. Research: If you know who you’re meeting, take 10-20 min to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter them. Ideally you’re looking for information related to the topic of your meeting. But you’re also looking for personal information such as achievements and common interests. Look for media interviews & charity support. Do you both rock climb? Have they recently been promoted? Have they achieved one of your goals? Also do company searches on the web, Google News, Twitter and in your CRM if you have one. Agenda To Agenda or not to agenda? An agenda is contextual. You wouldn’t do it in an interview, but you’ll never have a consultant from McKinsey or KPMG book a meeting without sending you one. My general method is for every meeting ask these questions: - If I set an agenda, what would be in it? - Will I remember to do all of the above without writing it down? - Will it benefit my prospect if I send them a copy? – If it will, send one. Consider adding a photo so they know who you are. Basically the agenda should add value to your stranger. Usually, more complex meetings have agendas. This gives your stranger time to prepare. On Arrival Once you arrive at the meeting location - 10 minutes early - wait around the corner for 5 min then head to reception or the cafe to be seated. Arriving more than 5 minutes early can look disrespectful as opposed to eager. But most importantly DON'T BE LATE! If you think there is a 50%+ chance you’ll be late by even a few minutes, call and notify someone. It looks way better to call and say you may be 5 min late, and arrive on time, then if you arrive 5 min late without calling. The Lobby After reception calls my stranger, I will stay standing until they arrive. Warning – if you take this road, be prepared for some long stands. But I feel it looks better than kicking your feet up on lobby couches. Sweaty palms? I hold my folder with my left hand and keep my right hand in my pocket –dodges the slimy handshake. Remember eye contact and a smile on greeting. Stand tall, chest out, firm handshake. If you’re in a busy lobby and you don’t know your strangers face, finding them can be awkward at times. Try and make the first approach, (it may take you a couple of times to get it right). Your stranger will be thankful for the awkwardness removal. Look for people looking for people. Exchange some short pleasantries then ask where they would like to go (unless there is already a plan). The walk During the walk from the point of meeting to room or cafe, aim to walk side by side, and ask a few standard open ended questions like: “Thanks for taking the time to see me. How has your day been?” Don’t worry what they say - you’re just trying to keep them engaged until you arrive at the sitting location. Try to find an anecdote (maybe something that happened on the way in or earlier that day) or common topic (the offices, building, location, current event or last resort – the weather) to keep them chatting until the sitting location. Just try and avoid a long walk of silence. Also, avoid discussing any important topics during the walk, interruptions are common and will kill your flow. Personal Note: I like to treat all my strangers like a first date. I open doors, hold elevators and offer them the first seat. Don’t take this to the extreme but if the opportunity is there, unleash the chivalry (that goes for you too ladies!). This shows you’re attentive and will put in the extra effort if they partner with you. Sitting Down Once you arrive at the meeting table, wait for the person you’re meeting to sit down first (unless they offer you a seat – then just take it). If you’re already in a cafe waiting for them, stand and shake their hand when they arrive. Again, watch the sweaty palms, smile, eye contact etc. I usually like to sit at a 90 degree angle avoiding the formal face to face arrangement. This is not always possible but it makes it easier to look over documents together or to describe while writing on paper or using your laptop. Once seated, give a business card to each person so they know who you are, how to spell your name (useful if you have a weird name like mine) and how to contact you after. Then you’re off. Do you do things differently? Related read in Business: How to Integrate @Intercom Support Messages with Close.io #CRM.

How to Integrate @Intercom Support Messages with Close.io #CRM

Vinay Patankar · 14 Jan, 2016 · Business · Business-process-management · Business-systematization · Sales-and-marketing-standard-operating-procedures · Technology

I have been wanting to sync my support system Intercom with the CRM we use at Process Street - Close.io (which I have written about before). The reason for this is when we are looking at a customer in the CRM we want to be able to see not only the sales emails but all the support conversations they were having too. This can be done quite easily with other Help Desk Tools or via the API but I wanted to build something quickly that didn't require developer time. I first setup a Zap using Intercom's "New Message" Zap that triggered an email to my inbox which then Synced using Close's 2 way email sync, which worked fine but only worked for the first message that was sent, it didn't track the whole conversation which can last for days and contain lots of valuable information for sales. This basically meant sales still had to open both Intercom and Close.io to get a full picture of the customer. ## Integrating All Intercom Support Tickets with Close ### Step 1: Create a Webhook Zap in Zapier and get Custom Webhook URL Create a new Zap in Zapier and add the Webhook integration, click next until you see the custom URL ### Step 2: Create a Webhook in Intercom Go to Settings -> Integrations and click "Add Webhook Integration" Here are the topics I am passing in the Webhook: New Message from a User Reply from a User Reply from a Teammate Note added to Conversation Conversation assigned to Teammate User Unsubscribed From Email User tagged User untagged New events ### Step 3: Configure rest of Zap in Zapier Here is a screenshot of my Zap click for full image. Here is the text export (I assume you need to swap out my ID numbers): Subject: \[Intercom {{6451100\\data\\item\\type}}\] {{6451100\\data\\item\\assignee\\name}} <> {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\_name}} Body: Email Subject: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\_subject}} Conversation Message {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\parts\\conversation\parts}} Conversation Link: {{6451100\\data\\item\\links\\conversation\_web}} Other Action Data: Data Item Assignee Name: {{6451100\\data\\item\\assignee\\name}} Data Item User Name: {{6451100\\data\\item\\user\\name}} Conversation Message Author Manaul Tag IDs: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\manual\tag\ids}} Conversation Message Attachments: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\attachments}} Conversation Message Author Created At: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\created\at}} Conversation Message Author IP: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\ip}} Data Item conversation Message Author Ua: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\ua}} Author Email Domain: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\email\domain}} Data Item conversation Message Author IP: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\_ip}} Original Message Body: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\_body}} And that's it! This was just my first attempt, it will probably get cleaned up a little but at least the core data is being passed. If you have any tweaks' I'd love to hear them. If this Business topic resonated, continue with Abstract Income: How to Support an Abstract Lifestyle.

Start-up idea: Marketplace for mechanics to help buyers purchase used cars

Vinay Patankar · 18 Aug, 2015 · Business · Technology

I am thinking about a marketplace that would help buyers who know nothing about cars evaluate if a second hand car is a good buy or not. You could create a profile and post the 3-4 cars you are considering. Post details of their make, model, price and pictures or a video of the car and the engine. You could then post a bounty for a mechanic to help you out, with a reward of say $50 (or whatever you choose). Then similar to 99 designs, mechanics from all around the world could submit their reviews and advice on the cars. Giving you questions to ask, feedback on your pictures and prices, links to other cars or whatever you may need to help you make a decision. At the end of the process, you reward the most helpful mechanic the $50 prize. I imagine this would be a great way for mechanics from all around the world to earn some extra cash and an easy way for buyers to protect themselves from getting ripped off on a shitty car that could potentially cost them thousands. If you know of anything like this or are interested in building it let me know in the comments :) Check out my real startup here. You can see a few of my other startup ideas here, here and here, learn about why my first startup failed here. A strong follow-up in Business is Start-Up Idea: TailSearch - Search for Retail Stores.