Certainly one of the things that surprised me most about parenting was having to distinguish between toys that were designed for the children (that are actually fun to play with) vs toys that were designed for the parents (which are aesthetically pleasing but dull as ditchwater to play with)
At 20 months you’re still a bit early, but some of the games for younger ones make a nice transition from ‘playing with blocks’ to puzzle solving. Plus they go up through the ages nicely - our oldest is 7 and there are plenty of good ones for him.
Also they serve as a good gateway drug to board games…
Thanks for the recommendation, those look good. For the gateway to board games, we're planning on getting the my first orchard game from haba when he's a few months older. Later on, I stocked up on the discontinued lego board games :)
And in this alternate past history, how would they have generated an income? I think your clarification is spot-on, and the debate around whether they could or would have been out-competed is an interesting one, but fundamentally they need to be able to generate revenue somehow.
I totally get open-source for libraries/components/building blocks/etc, and strategies like “commoditise your complements” have been mentioned elsewhere. But I’m struggling to see how open-sourcing the actual end-user product isn’t just literally giving away everything for free?
We use Calendly all the time (and love it) and usually present it as 'grab a time that suits you' (or words to that effect). I think that makes it sound like please choose what you'd like, rather than please fill in this form and maybe I'll speak to you. I think that also allows you to avoid the 'or just send me some times that suit you', which I try to avoid because it just ends up in several rounds of diary tennis which is exactly what Calendly solves!
I'm married with two kids, and my wife and I run a SAAS business together. While we try to automate/digitise as much as we can, you just can't get away from paper - there's always masses of it. We've come up with a filing system that is low-touch and works for us.
You need a proper filing cabinet with two drawers [1]. You then set up the document holder inserts like so:
Top Drawer: Urgent, Important, and then months: Jan, Feb, March etc for two years
Bottom Drawer: One section for each category you want. Just make them up as you go along - Mortgage, Car, <Kid 1> Health, <Kid 2> Health, etc etc. Don't overthink it - you can always just relabel them if you change your mind. We also colour code a bit, so e.g. company stuff is red and personal stuff is blue.
The System:
When receiving a new document (usually when opening the post, but obviously could come from school/doctor/whatever):
1) Is it something you need to act on? If so, put it in Urgent
2) Is it something you'll need imminently (e.g. a doctor's letter that you need to remember to take to an appointment in two weeks' time)? If so, put it in Important
3) Do you need to keep it? If so:
3a) Does it have an obvious and immediate home in one of the categories in the bottom drawer? If so, put it there
3b) Put it in the current month
4) Can you just bin it? If so, bin it.
5) Not sure what to do? Just put it in the current month and move on with your life
Once a day/week/whatever works for you:
1) Is there anything in urgent that you can act on? If so, do it. You'll likely then either post it, move it to Important, or put it in the current month
Where the hell is that stupid letter / form / aargh I'm supposed to be leaving in five minutes
1) It should be in Important or Urgent
2) Look back through recent months, you'll probably find it there
Once a year / once every two years (we do this in the gap between Christmas and New Year)
1) Go through all the months, and either move them to a category in the bottom drawer, or bin them.
Because you only do The Big Chuck Out once a year, you can put the time into getting it professionally shredded. For this reason, I often only chuck proper rubbish (flyers, ads etc) and file everything else so it gets shredded.
We had various combinations of ring binders / document wallets / etc etc and eventually they fill up or you run out of them and don't get around to buying more (plus they start getting bulky once you have a lot of stuff). The filing cabinets are a lump, but they hold a LOT of stuff. Since using it, going through post / being given forms is quick and painless, and we haven't lost anything.
Marketing Automation - you can create email campaigns (send this, then in a week send this, and then if they clicked on email A then send email C, otherwise email D, etc etc). I know you asked for sales stack, but this does the first two bullets in your list.
This lets you manage your sales funnel, move things from stage to stage as you get closer to closing, and so on. Also has automations where you can e.g. change properties on a deal automatically when it moves to a new stage
The other big part is Zapier - in my experience there are TONS of sales/marketing tools and sooner or later you end up using a few and then glueing bits of your process together using Zapier (if they don't have the integrations built in). There are also big, all-in-one platforms like HubSpot, but they tend to be dauntingly expensive for small companies.
In general, we've found that we've needed to experiment a bit to get the internal process right, and then figure out which tools fit us, rather than starting with the tools and bending what we do to how they're set up.
In our case, the basic idea is that if someone interacts with our site and signs up for a newsletter, say, they get put into ActiveCampaign so we can send them an email campaign. If they do something a bit more meaningful (e.g. request for pricing, or fill in a form for a sales enquiry) we might automatically then add a deal to Pipedrive which the sales team can then follow up on.
@nikoraisu so you use Pipedrive in addition to ActiveCampaign for the kanban aspect of managing deals through the sales cycle? @rishabhkaul1 also mentioned that he's trying to figure out how to manage his funnel process and looking at adding Pipedrive. I'm just curious why you don't use the kanban-style deal tracking pipelines in AC for this rather than bolt on additional software? You can trigger stage moves, status changes, etc or have those events as goals in automations that trigger emails/slack messages/etc. Do you gain some other benefit by adding Pipedrive to your stack vs. just using the native AC functionality for this? Given that both of you mentioned it maybe I'm missing something...
Thank you so much! These are very helpful. I am quite familiar with Integromat which works similar to Zapier so it should be simple to glue the rest of our tools together.
