Our ONLY asset is our people!

We love helping people launch their own endeavors - but we are also learning a lot about starting a business as we are doing it ourselves.  One mantra we are trying to live by is "own nothing".  We literally have no assets, except for our team!  This idea began with our individual technology needs.  Instead of giving employees a laptop or other tech, each employee can expense up to $2000 to purchase any computer or mobile equipment they need and are given $100 per month to cover mobile phone/data costs.  All of the computers, phones, and plans are owned by the individuals!

As much as people loved this model, applying this concept to our production systems has been even more powerful.  We own no servers or networking equipment - we live entirely in the cloud!  Not only has this helped us lower our fixed costs to starting the business, it's also given us a lot of flexibility to try out new and useful tools to help our business.  So, what are we using?

• Heroku. Great platform for running a scalable web service.
• Google Apps.  Best email and collaboration platform out there (according to a slightly biased team ;)
• Zoho CRM and Campaigns). Simple CRM with a nice API and an integrated email marketing tool.
• Expensify. Simple expenses.
• Docusign. Very helpful for managing signed legal documents.
• GitHub. Simple, effective code repository.

And we recently implemented to new tools that have been a great help in connecting with our customers.

• Olark is a real-time chat tool for your website.  It took maybe 5 minutes to have it set up and running on our site - could not have been simpler.  Half of that time was customizing the colors and text to match our site.  We love being able to answer customer questions in real-time, right inside our favorite IM clients.  And when we're not online, we get an email to respond to.  We have a seen a large increase in communication with our users from this tool alone.
• Helpjuice is a very simple tool for creating a Help Center.  We wanted to allow our operations and bizdev team to manage our FAQs without needing help from the product/eng team - something we couldn't do while they were a static HTML page on the site.  We tried using some broader tools but they were more complex than we were looking for.  Helpjuice does exactly what we're looking for - and we love their philosophy of simple software.  Check out our new help center!

We are loving moving quickly, trying out new tools, and sticking to the mentality of owning nothing and just paying for what we use.  If you have suggestions for other great tools we should be trying - let us know!

Posted by Jeff Keltner, Head of Business Development (and occasional IT guy...)