Collaboration in the Wild: See How 47 Degrees Strides

Ever since our launch back in March, we’ve been amazingly fortunate to have support from people all over the world helping us to refine our product and prioritize new features.

The guys at 47 Degrees were no exception.

                     

After we released collaboration, we wanted to hear how our users were actually using the new features. So, we reached out to our friends and 47 Degrees to hear what they had to say.

Here’s some of the highlights from our chat with Aaron Regan, their Director of Business Development.

47 Degrees looks awesome, what do you guys do?

47 Degrees is a creative software development company located in Ballard, WA.  We were founded in 2010 by Nick and Justin Elsberry, Derek Punsalan, and Raul Raja.  Our focus is mobile app development for iOS and Android, but we do take on some larger web projects as well.

How did you find Stride, and were you looking for a deal management service when you found it?

We actually went looking for something like Stride.  We had Salesforce in the past (before I was in position) and I had used similar large, and bloated tools at my previous company that were more work than reward.  We wanted something that was free of the clutter and was something we could utilize without feeling like it was another task we had to complete.  When we found Stride in your beta phase, we knew we wanted to be a part of your launch and it’s been great.

How have you integrated Stride into your daily workflow? 

I am the Director of Business Development so Stride’s main purpose in our office, is for me to communicate my interactions and process with our customers and prospects, to our Founders and development team.  Those guys are busy, and I don’t need to forward every email response, schedule state of the business meetings, or bog them down anymore than I have to with multiple communications.  With Stride, I simply have a place to keep my side of the business organized, and they can log in to see the progress and keep up to speed.

As a small team, how has the collaboration features in Stride improved your sales process?

The simplest way to put it is that Stride allows all of our team to be part of the conversation.  We are able to communicate internally with ease, allowing all of us to know the state of our prospective business.

Awesome-sauce. To check out Stride and our new team features for yourself, sign up here.

The Invisible Interface

When people think of design, often they think of visual design: how things look. When I’m designing Stride, that’s a big part of my job, but design isn’t fundamentally an aesthetic exercise — it’s a functional one. 

The part of Stride’s interface that I’m the happiest with right now is the interface for choosing your timezone. You’d expect that to look something like this:

It’s not too bad, and it’s far and away the easiest solution to implement, but we’re asking the user to make a decision. As a user, each decision I have to make while using an app, however minor, is keeping me from using the app for whatever inspired me to sign up for it in the first place. It’s metawork.

Our solution on Stride is to have no visible interface at all. We do a bit of magic to find your computer’s timezone (by politely asking your browser), and we use that.

Traveling? Not a problem: it’ll be updated automatically the next time you log in. No matter where you are, your reminders and weekly emails will be waiting for you at the start of your work day.

We’ve removed the burden of decision from the user, and given them a little more time to be productive using the app. It’s the easiest thing in the world to fill your app with checkboxes and radio buttons, but each one has a cost.

As the guy in charge of making sure Stride is easy to use, my honest hope is that you’ve never given a moment’s thought to how your emails show up at 7am every morning. I am in total agreement with inestimable Dieter Rams: good design is as little design as possible.

Sept. 10th Downtime

Hey everybody,

As many of you are aware, we were down for quite some time yesterday while our DNS servers were unavailable. I wanted to give a little insight into what happened, and what we’re doing to prevent something similar in the future.

First, a little background - nearly every computer on the Internet is identified by what’s called an IP address, which looks something like 74.207.247.186. This address is how you identify the server that you want to get to. These would be pretty hard to remember, so there’s a system called the Domain Name System, or DNS, that converts a domain name (like strideapp.com) into a corresponding IP address. These servers are called nameservers. This is a crucial part of the Internet’s infrastructure, and when it goes away, lots of bad things happen. Wikipedia’s got a great entry if you’d like to read more.

Enough background; what did we do wrong?

All of our nameservers were with the same provider. A domain has multiple servers to handle DNS, which should be totally separate; that way, if one goes down, your browser can just use the another one. Unfortunately, ours were all with the same provider, and so when that provider failed, there was no fallback. Going forward, we’ll be using both Amazon’s Route 53 and DNSimple - two independent providers, in separate parts of the world, with much better historical uptimes than our previous provider. We started the process for this yesterday, and it should be done within a day or two.

Our Nameservers were hosted with our domain registrar. Normally, you set the nameservers for a domain through your domain registrar. In our case, both our nameservers and our ability to change them went down at the same time, so even though we were able to get new nameservers working quickly, we weren’t able to use them until our registrar came back online. We’ve added nameservers independent of our registrar now, so we’ll still have the ability to manage things if our registrar goes down.

We take a lot of pride in making sure Stride is there when you need it. It was a frustrating afternoon for us, and we’re sure it was for you too. We screwed up, and we apologize to each and every one of our users. We’re working to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

As always, we’re available on Twitter and email - please reach out if you’ve got any questions or concerns. We always love to hear from you.

You may have noticed a new feature in Stride. It’s subtle, but it’s powerful. This weekend, we quietly rolled out Collaboration functionality to all of our beta users, allowing anyone on Stride to invite other folks to team up with them on any of the deals they’re working on. It was something that we heard a need for loud and clear, so we delivered.             Assign tasks, comment on activity, switch between multiple teams, it’s all there. But we took a different tact than most. Instead of charging you per user, we thought it made more sense to allow you to collaborate with as many people as you’d like, without running up the tab. With all of our plans, users are unlimited. Many minds are better than one. You’ll also notice that with the new collaboration features that we are officially out of private beta, meaning that anyone can sign up and use Stride, no invite required. So feel free to spread the love. To all of our early beta users, thank you for all of your support and feedback. Let the journey continue!
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You may have noticed a new feature in Stride. It’s subtle, but it’s powerful.

This weekend, we quietly rolled out Collaboration functionality to all of our beta users, allowing anyone on Stride to invite other folks to team up with them on any of the deals they’re working on. It was something that we heard a need for loud and clear, so we delivered.

           

Assign tasks, comment on activity, switch between multiple teams, it’s all there. But we took a different tact than most. Instead of charging you per user, we thought it made more sense to allow you to collaborate with as many people as you’d like, without running up the tab. With all of our plans, users are unlimited. Many minds are better than one.

You’ll also notice that with the new collaboration features that we are officially out of private beta, meaning that anyone can sign up and use Stride, no invite required. So feel free to spread the love.

To all of our early beta users, thank you for all of your support and feedback. Let the journey continue!

Our Promise To You

It’s still early in the history of Stride. Really, we’re only getting started. Before we get too far along, we wanted to take a step back and reflect on our core beliefs and what we promise to you, our users.

On our About Page, we refer to a few core beliefs, but they really only touch the surface of what we believe and want to achieve through Stride. So, we thought we’d elaborate.

Here’s our promise to you.

Sales Shouldn’t Be Intimidating - Every business has to sell, but sales can be a scary thing to most people, especially if you’re not a salesperson by trade. We want to take the intimidation out of the sales process and more importantly, the software that you use to grow your business through sales. No matter who you are or what you do, you’re welcome on Stride.

Exceptional Customer Service Is Your Right - When you need our help, we’ll be there. As a user of Stride, you should demand amazing customer service, and it’s our job to make sure that we provide service that is filled with awesome. Like this. Customer service is our obsession.

Software Should be Simple, Powerful and, Beautiful - Simplicity is at the core of everything we do. With every feature addition we first think about how we can add it to the product without adding complexity. The market is filled with ugly, complex, and clunky tools; we want to be different, and we will be.

Your Time Is Valuable - We know your time is your most valuable asset. It’s our job to make you as efficient as possible, while maintaining a high level of production. We want to help you get back to the things that matter most.

Transparency Means Everything - It’s a priority of ours to be radically transparent: in the features we develop, in our vision for the future of Stride, in the decisions that we make. As our user, you deserve to know what’s happening at all times.

At the end of the day, Stride is just as much yours as it is ours — you, our users, are the ones that make us tick. Thanks for joining us on the ride.

Why Are We Still Using CRMs?

As small business owners, we’ve been bred to believe that we need a CRM. In fact, one feels almost irresponsible if a CRM isn’t part of their lineup of 3rd party tools. 

Why?

Seriously, let’s take a step back and look at what a CRM is actually for. The primary function of a CRM is to manage contacts. What that means for you is a lot of manual contact entry and database management.

Someone changes jobs; back to the CRM. Someone changes their email address; back to the CRM. Someone swaps phone numbers; back to the CRM. You get the point. The saddest part about it, those contacts rarely get used, because who has time to keep a database of contacts up to date when you’ve got a business to run?

Think about all of the amazing tools out there that exist for contact management. Linkedin is updated in real-time. Rapportive pulls rich content directly in your inbox. Even the newest entrant, Brewster, blows any CRM out of the water, in terms of contact management.

The need for small business owners is a focus on growing their business, but instead, most are wasting their time setting up tags and figuring out what the heck the difference between an “opportunity” and a “case” is.

Enough is enough.

We went through the same issue. Tool after tool, the problem remained. So we built something better. A product that’s built explicitly for small business owners, not salespeople — with a sole focus on tracking new business, not contacts. It’s where we think the need lies for the majority of folks out there.

Needs vary business to business, and you know better than anyone what you need to succeed. For us, as freelancers and small business owners, the decision was simple.

Branding Stride: What’s Behind A Logo?

It took us about two weeks to agree to a name for Stride; it look less than two hours for the logo. The naming process was tough, but by the end of it we had such a strong shared vision there wasn’t much room for disagreement throughout the rest of the process.

We all agreed we wanted a relatively straightforward wordmark to support our brand value of simplicity. I also knew we’d need some sort of secondary icon for social media avatars, mobile app icons, and secondary applications. 

While perusing typefaces (glass of single malt Scotch in hand, as all with all fine design), I quickly settled on SugarPie. It’s friendly and approachable, but what really sucked me in was the fantastic sense of motion it has. The lean and flow seemed made for the word stride. 

                                                 

From there, it was as easy a logo design process as you’ll ever see. I spent an hour tweaking and customizing the font to make it our own and tighten things up. I knocked out a few concepts for the secondary icon, got feedback from the whole team, and by the time is was time to queue up a new album on Rdio, we had our final logo.

You might like the logo; you might not. The more important thing, though, is that it communicates a lot about Stride as a company. It embodies our values of friendliness, positivity, and simplicity. 

Branding Stride: The Name

When you’re creating a company, you’re going to screw up a lot of things—some of them badly. The one thing you make sure you get right (after choosing your co-founders) is the name.

Think about it. The average lifespan of a website design is in the ballpark of three years, and usually less for startups. The lifespan for a logo is, at best, two decades. Even iconic logos like Ford, ATT, and General Electric evolve over time. But Ford has been named Ford since 1903. 

Changing your name isn’t impossible, but it is hard, and it can create a lot of confusion. 

This seems like an appropriate place to interject a disclaimer: I’m not what most people would consider a branding expert. I’m not going to give you tips on how to name your company; I’m only going to talk about why we named ours what we did. (If you want to know what to name yours, consider reading 17 Mutable Suggestions for Naming a Startup by the inestimable Dharmesh Shah.)

So. Back to Stride. It wasn’t always called that; the working title of the project for much of its early life was Aqueduct, a sort of cheeky allusion to the concept of a sales pipeline. There are worse names out there, but it was problematic. It’s a little weird. It’s tricky to spell. And we knew we wanted the product to be inviting, and vague puns about Roman engineering might not be the best way to achieve that. More than anything, we knew we could find something better.

We discussed at least fifty possibilities over a few weeks, and nothing was right.

Dabble? Sounds amateurish. Huntr? Too aggressive. MinimalTrack? Too long, too literal. Modest? Doesn’t communicate anything about our product. 

By the end of the process, Andrew was about ready to kill me. I don’t blame him. Every day he came up with a handful of new ideas, and every day I found a reason why none of them would work.

Finally, we really took some time and refined and codified what we wanted from the name and the brand: friendly, positive, purposeful. It was a reaction to our personal experiences with sale tracking, which had been frustrating exercises that felt like busy work. (We need to talk about your TPS reports…)

With those three words in mind, we had clear criteria to evaluate any potential name. The very next day, Andrew texted me just one potential name: Stride. 

I loved it then, and I love it now. It feels so natural for the product build, I can’t imagine it being called anything else.

The one lesson I keep learning again and again (and always the hard way) is that strategy is key in design, and particularly in branding. Until everyone in the room agrees on where you’re going, no one is going to agree when you get there.

Never Forget That Follow-up: Task Reminders Are Here

One of the hardest things about keeping up with all of your active deals is remembering to follow-up and stay on top of outstanding tasks. That’s why we’ve been working so hard to bring you task reminders.

                   

Available for all Stride users, task reminders provide a simplistic tool for staying on top of your tasks for each deal. Here’s how to set your first reminder:

  1. Enter in a task
  2. Hover over that task 
  3. Click “Add Reminder”
  4. Put in a date or abstract timeframe (ie. next week)
  5. Hit save

As that date comes around, you’ll receive an email reminding you of the task. Simple as that. 

Enjoy!

Contact Info and Deal Description: Come and Get It

Since our very first day, we’ve heard that some folks wanted to have the ability to add contact information (phone number, email address) and a description to the deals they create. 

Our perspective was (and still is) that we didn’t want Stride to become a contact manager. We believe that contact management is better suited on social networks like Linkedin or Twitter and in contact managers like your address book or Google contacts. Thus, we left it out from creating a deal. 

As we’ve been using our product over the past months, we’ve realized that associating simple contact info and deal descriptions helps in the management process and should in fact be included in the deal creation process.

                    

Today, when you create your next deal, you’ll be able to added your preferred contact method and deal description. All of this information will then show up every time you view the details and notes of a deal.

As always, keep the feedback coming (we’re listening)!

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