Nice. But there is so much more work to be done. From a customer perspective, it's great. However, really feel as the entire developer experience is in need of an overhaul (And it seems pretty clear that they know that too). In saying that, even if things don't change, it's still the best option for a lot of merchants.
What's Zoho like these days? My last company heavily relied on the entire Zoho suite for just about everything except email, spent half of my time putting out fires and migrating them to other products. The only thing that didn't cause too much trouble was their CRM product, but even then it had its issues.
Anything outside of Mail, CRM, Expense, Recruit, and maybe Desk is hair-pullingly terrible. They promise that all of their "apps" are interoperable, but these integrations are either half-assed to the point of uselessness or so full of bugs you can't rely on them.
Zoho Projects is the worst of the bunch—most of our teams are keeping secret Asana boards on the side just to avoid using it.
We use Books, it's okay, if you're relatively small, it will do the job.
Their biggest issue is that they focus on too many products, and interoperability between them. Necessary features take forever to be implemented years after they should have been.
Apparently Microsoft keeps the domain for contoso.net and contoso.com registered and its mx receives a vast quantity of mail from misconfigured things out in the wild.
Depending on your industry, SEO can be crucial part to scaling your business. These days provided you have the technical aspects right, site speed, mark up, structuring etc - you'll have a solid framework to build from. It's harder to pull those black hat tactics that we've all heard of, so it's best you just focus on providing quality content, and ensure Google is indexing it. Developing a strategy isn't too hard, utilise tools like Answer The Public to develop out your strategy, monitor search console for changes and adjust as needed.
From experience I've seen clients who've hired a SEO agency years back, and have never stopped paying them due to the fear their traffic will bottom out. I do believe SEO agencies offer value, however base level offerings such as technical suggestions and keyword strategy don't get businesses far. Typically the people who pay for the base level offerings don't have the in house talent to write solid blog posts / action the suggestions. Plus most base level offerings could be augmented by paying for a tool like SEMRush yourself, and letting the automated reports run.
Long tail searches with little competition are the easy wins. Popular keywords will take time and effort, but usually with alot of work involved.
I was in a similar position and found the following quite useful:
- Leaverage your existing professional network to find your first client. Go above and beyond to ensure they see the value of what you offer.
- Build your portfolio and testimonial base from day one.
- A referal client is going to be alot easier to land than an organic lead.
- Develop your processes, standard operation procedures etc as soon as possible.
- Stick with your current job until it's just not possible to manage both / it's clear you have enough income to sustain yourself / you're confident in your business to the extent where you are comfortable living off some savings for a bit.
- Keep your costs low, don't subscribe to every saas. In saying that, don't try to save a few bucks by forgoing something you actually need. Rule of thumb is to sit on something for a week before committing to a new subscription. Audit your subscriptions on a monthly basis.
- Get something like Xero to make accounting easier, keep on top of your invoices, outgoings etc to make the accountants life easier / cheaper at the EOFY.
- Finding clients is a mixed bag. Depending on your target audience, happy clients might refer more clients your way.
- Bad clients are most likely going to refer more bad clients.
- Once you are taking off, a proposal software tool like Better Proposals is going to be very useful.
- Poor scoping / agreements will bite you in the ass in the long run.
- Allowing scope creep will set a precedent for all future conversations with a said client. Alot harder to walk it back once it's been said.
- If you agree to something out of scope, it's now your problem. Ie if it's not up to scratch, you can't come back and say well it was out of scope, we did our best.
- Having a "gap" in your quotes will help you with scope change conversations. Ie. Sure we can help you with that, but that will eat into your gap. A gap is an extra % charged upfront, that is deducted from the final invoice if unused.
- Go for something like Office 365 for Business for your emails etc. Explore all of its features. Most people don't even know the half of what a ~$8 subscription can get you. Emails. Cloud storage. Client booking systems (Like calendly but better). Teams. Automated forms.
- Setup your Google My Business to collect reviews.
- SEO for your website. Very important. Not too hard to get right if you are not in a competitive space. Write relevant blogs with long tail keywords your clients might be searching, especially if there isn't much competition on Google.
- Find clients who will have multiple projects for you. Whether it be an agency, or large client.
- Try locate avenues for monthly reoccurring revenue as soon as possible.
- Working 7 days a week for extended periods of time isn't going to do you any good.
- Don't buy your domain name until you have registered your legal business name. Make sure you you can try get the dot com + your local tld.
- Most client emails can wait until Monday. Don't set the expectation you're there 24/7.
- Don't get bogged down in a persuit for perfection. We are a web development agency and our website sucks, the rebuild keeps being pushed back because we get bogged down in client work. Our new rebuild is alot simpler and will be done way sooner.
- If this is your first time in business, try find a business mentor. Doesn't need to be in the same field as you, although that might help. Just someone who knows how to run a business
Either way, that's my 2 cents. Classic case of do as I say, not as I do. Alot of these have stemmed from my learnings running a web development agency for a few years. Good luck!
^^ + At least in the case of Australia, you can't have the same trading name as another business. We've had a few clients jump the gun, buy a few domains and then realize they can't operate under anything remotely similar to the domain/s they've just purchased.
I’ve recently been experimenting with various ETL / SAAS connector tools for my upcoming SaaS, and so far with the AirByte trial I’ve been really impressed. The pricing on alternatives (Albeit slightly different but work for my use case), such as Paragon seem a tad prohibitive. Has anyone else had experience with AirByte so far, and what are your thoughts?
I haven’t experienced using AirByte yet but based on the use case I believe you’re mentioning (user-facing integrations in your product), I think hotglue (https://hotglue.xyz) may be a good fit.
Disclaimer: I am one of the founders but thought I’d jump in here in case you hadn’t heard about us yet!
I haven’t heard of HotGlue! I did a pretty exhaustive search and I don’t think it turned up in my contenders list. For our use case, your product hits the nail on the head, however the pricing structure is a tad prohibitive upfront - especially when this is more of a side project right now. Your $5 or so per seat, which comes down to $1 per seat once we hit 1000 users makes sense to us based on our own pricing models and projections. It’s just the initial $499 upfront that we’d need to be spending while building out our product that’s the real turnoff. However I’m assuming you might have a higher barrier of entry to curb abuse / tyre kickers. If you’ve got any flexible options, and are open to it - feel free to reach out at kurtis [at] tensq.com.au - I’d love to run you through what we’re building and see if we can work something out.
Has anyone put forward some theories as to how they are pulling this off? Are they tapping into iMessage Metadata, scanning crash logs, or something along those lines? While I totally understand the need for them to keep how they are doing this private, I do find it slightly concerning. Unless they are just flagging suspicious iCloud login attempts. If it’s relating to crash logs, it would be nice to know as I’m sure a bunch of privacy focused users have that disabled.
I assume they have iMessage metadata on what accounts the NSO accounts talked to. The contents are E2E encrypted, but unless they have explicitly promised not to keep logs, they probably have the metadata logged.
Apple claims in their lawsuit that they have over 100 false iCloud accounts that were created, and is confident in their identities to the degree they are going to use them for standing to prove that NSO signed a legal agreement in the lawsuit.
In which case, NSO f!@#ed up and left iCloud Messages Backup enabled, which stores unencrypted copies of the End-to-End messages and makes it trivial for Apple to alert any person that these accounts messaged to. That's one possibility.
