Tag: startup

Track Our Startup: iOS Mobile App Released + Stripe + Dreamforce!

August 25, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Dasheroo's mobile app for business dashboard

Go to the Apple Store and download your free Dasheroo iPhone app now!

Releases abound here at Dasheroo! The all-new Stripe dashboard feature released and we couldn’t be happier. Our Dasheroo iOS business dashboard mobile app is finally released as well. Now you can easily view your dashboards on your iPhone. Android to come soon. Get to the Apple Store and download it free! I told you about the 6 new projects we’re working on and we’re still working those. I can’t even keep up…

Sales are starting to roll in since we launched billing a short time ago, while Mimi closed a few larger deals.

We’ve been writing like crazy. My new business.com article is out: How The Power of Conversation Can Grow Your Business. It’s a great example of how actually talking to people makes great sales. Startup Lessons Learned: Be Fluid and Pivot! is out. I talk about the importance of being able to change on a dime in any business, especially startups. Janine writes another good one for Inc.com; When To Inject “Fun” Into Your Customer Experience.

We’ll be exhibiting at Dreamforce in a few weeks, that’s Salesforce.com’s annual event. Josh and I are busy getting together our presentation since we’ll be demoing theatre style at the conference!

We’re going to Las Vegas for OneCon, a three day event in October where Constant Contact Solution Providers and Authorized Local Experts from all over the world are invited to network and learn from each other, Constant Contact executives, and small business experts. And since we’re an integrated partner where you can get your Constant Contact dashboard free right in your Dasheroo account.

In our never-ending attempt to gain placements in the SERPS we’ve got a new landing page for the keyword “small business dashboard”. We’re making pages for all of the keywords we want to be found for.

John at Dasheroo

Startup Lessons Learned: Be Fluid & Pivot!

August 19, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

These days it’s important to be able to “change course fast” especially if you’re in a nimble startup environment. Don’t get me wrong you need to set your course and nail a roadmap, but if something comes up that’s going to make you grow faster than normal, you need to think about doing it. These onStartup Lessons Learned week I’m focusing on the right way to pivot the team for a big opportunity.

There are a few questions to ask yourself when considering a pivot:

Am I doing this for just one potential customer or will many customer benefit from a pivot
Does it mesh with our strategic plan?
Will it help us grow faster and gain traction?

If you answered yes to all of these good for you, a pivot is likely in order.

At Dasheroo we’ve been marching down a 5 pt. strategic path to get us to where we’d like to be. The plan did call for some partnerships but they don’t happen when you want them to, they don’t happen over night and they usually happen with a lot of luck coupled with your hard work at seeking them out. One such potential partnership is on the horizon so we had to pivot our team and their time and put some development and marketing effort into this partnership earlier than anticipated.

The first thing on your to-do list is to get your team around it. If you’ve got a great team and the pivot makes sense then they’ll follow the strategic marching orders to the end. So I gathered the team and talked to them about it and we went through it together. As a team we wanted to make sure that pivoting for this partnership:

Will benefit this customer or partner and all that come after, and it does. The work that Alex is doing for this partnership on OAuth gets us working with other partners quicker!
Goes along with what we need to do to grow. We don’t want to spend a ton of money on advertising on Google so getting our product distributed through partnerships is what we need to do and this one could be big.
Hopefully gets us to where we want to be faster and better. If this partnership works the way we’d like it to, we could potentially have a nice pop in growth.

It was important for me to include everyone in on the decision since the entire team will be doing a all of the work. And this team fortunately gets it. There’s no guarantee that it will work wonders for us but everyone understands that giving it our best shot is all we can do.Got a potential pivot coming up? Make sure everyone is on the same page! More on this partnership as we launch.

Startup Lessons Learned: SEO, It’s a Journey Not a Destination

August 13, 2015 by John Hingley·1 Comment

We’ve been plugging away at making our product the best it can be. We want people to love it and tell all of their friends about it so we don’t need to spend a ton of money on Google AdWords - been there, done that. Not at Dasheroo.

This week’s startup lessons learned is all about SEO. We’ve been focusing on our search engine optimization strategy. Janine and Alf have been putting a ton of time into getting above all of the search engine noise. Going up even a point for your Moz page authority and domain authority is NOT easy and takes time. Our focus isn’t just to only win at one big keyword, but to win at dozens of other keywords as well. Only a diversified SEO strategy (ranking high for lots of relevant keyword searches) wins in the long run.

We decided to start with Moz’s pie chart of what goes into Google’s search algorithm. This chart was created by insights from a ton of SEO experts, and focuses on key efforts that are going to really move the needle.

1. Inbound Linking - We put a concerted effort into inbound linking since that makes up almost 21% of the ranking factor. And it ain’t like the olden days where you could stick a link on a million sites and get ranked #1. Here it needs to be from quality sites that have a good domain authority. We use the Moz bar when we’re looking at sites and if they’ve got a killer domain authority, they make the list.

2. Page Level Linking - Since this makes up for almost 20% of the ranking factor, we took a look at our website and our blog and found we were not really doing enough linking from page to page and we were just doing one word linking instead of entire phrases. So we changed that. Instead of just linking “Dasheroo” to our blog, we link phrases like best free dashboards a business can find to our site. And we don’t mind linking people off of our site, say to the Moz Bar tool page since it makes total sense for this content you’re reading.

3. Page Level Keywords & Content - This makes up almost 15% of the Google ranking factor. So we took a look at our site and decided that for every app integration we do, we’re going to make the focus be long-tail keywords. Instead of “business dashboards” all over the site, on these specific pages we may focus on the specific integration. For instance we have an integration with Google Sheets where you can take your Sheets data and create great-looking dashboards. So we have a specific Google Sheets dashboard landing page where the URL reads: https://www.dasheroo.com/google-sheets-dashboard. We put the keyword right in the URL and use the keywords in the description and the content so we hopefully will someday be found pretty easily, we’ve already risen out of nowhere to page 2; page 1 here we come!

SO WHAT HAPPENED AFTER A MONTH OF FOCUS?

Our page authority went up 2 whole points and our domain authority went up 3 (the more important one IMHO). Like the headline says, it’s a journey not a destination. We’ll keep you up to date on how we’re improving and what we’re doing to get there.

Startup Lessons Learned: Have Your Investors & Advisors Work For You

August 6, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

So you raised your financing and brought a couple impressive folks on as advisors or board members. That is awesome! But, it’s more than just money and names - your investors and your advisors are there for you beyond that initial commitment, and they need to be. But not necessarily if you don’t ask, as these are very busy people juggling tons of different priorities. If they’re good, they should be juggling, right?!

We’re very fortunate to have an A-Team supporting us here at our business dashboard startup, Dasheroo. Sharp investors, and seasoned and insightful board members and board advisors. Plus they are all fun as hell to work with! In this Startup Lessons article I want to show you the diversity of our advisors and investors and what they provide depending on what we need at specific times.

Just a sampling of their many contributions over and above their money:

Matt Holleran - General Partner, Cloud Apps Capital Partners (Board Member): Cloud Apps is our lead investor, and Matt is our board member, along with me. Matt is the ‘King of Connections’. The ‘Open Sesame’ of strategic business contacts. He seems to knows everyone, and everyone has huge respect for him. When I needed an intro to one of the largest social media publishing platforms, well, he was visiting with the CEO that weekend! Plus he is excellent at helping position our value within the perfect context of each potential partner we discuss. Thay type of value you just can’t buy.

Judy Loehr - Venture Partner, Cloud Apps Capital Partners (Board Advisor): Well, where do I start? Judy could be the CMO at damn near any company in the galaxy. So it’s more of a ‘where’ do I ask for input issue. Early on, it was helping establish and vet out our Go-To-Market strategy and pricing approach. Now it’s helping navigate the waters of a very large CRM company we’re beginning a strategic relationship with.

John Jantsch, Founder & CEO Duct Tape Marketing (Advisor): John regularly speaks at social media and marketing conferences around the world. And writes lots of great books. OK, so what does John do for us? He continually provides us with proven, down to earth, practical ideas and feedback. Recently, he advised us on our soon-to-be-released agency pricing (we listened to every word), and we are busy working on ways to have a tight Duct Tape - Dasheroo relationship. We love John because of his never vague, always immediately valuable and pretty easy to implement ideas.

Walter Kortschak, Managing Partner Kortschak Investments (Investor & Advisor): Walter is a large investor and advisor. We’re starting to scale, plus I need advice on the metrics and growth we need to show for a potential B-Round of financing in 2016. Who better to get insight from than a guy like Walter? He was an original investor in MacAfee and helped them achieve super stardom, and has also invested in big-scale companies like Twitter, Evernote and Lyft. So he knows the ins and outs of scaling a successful global business. And again, no ‘pie in the sky’ where it’s not warranted. He has decades of experience and no ego. As we grow, Water will be an even more valuable go-to on building enterprise sales and overall growth of our business.

Maurice Werdegar and Rob Glasser, Western Technology Investments We are honored to count these guys in as an investor in Dasheroo. I liked these guys from the get go; they have a no B.S. attitude and pragmatic approach to helping create successful businesses. We caught up a couple days ago, and they are now going to introduce us to a bunch of their portfolio companies. And if we decide to consider venture debt, they are the highly respected firm in the industry.

Janine Popick, board advisor and Dasheroo CMO. Well, first she grew leading email service provider and SMB darling VerticalResponse into a 1,000,000+ SMB success before she sold it. So she knows a thing or three about the SMB market - how to acquire and retain them. And, I mean this in a good way, lots of ‘in the trenches, here’s what NOT to do’ lessons that only a long-time successful entrepreneur can teach you.

Bottom line: each of these folks has played a huge part in Dasheroo’s growth and we’ve benefitted from quantifiable, measurable value out of them so you need to incorporate them into your business:

Have a monthly or quarterly meeting with them with a shortened version of your board deck talking about all of the things you accomplished with one slide: Where You Can Help.
Include them on a weekly or monthly progress email so you’re “in their face”. We add all of our investors and advisors on a weekly email called Track Our Startup. Maybe they read it and think “hey, I can help this week.”
If you’re coming up on a big decision (like pricing or a legal issue) where one of them has expertise or experience with it, reach out on that specific item.
If you need to meet someone very strategic to your business look them up on LinkedIn and see if they’re connected. Then ask for an intro! They can’t read your mind, you have to do the research.

So remember - it’s easy to do all the work to get an investment and advisor team together then go about your business and forget to reach out for help to grow and make their time and money pay back to the largest extent possible. And these people are B-U-S-Y, you cannot expect them to have you top of mind, you have to be the one reaching out.

Now all of that said, we are truly fortunate at Dasheroo in that all the folks I mentioned above DO proactively reach out to help!

Startup Lessons Learned This Week: The Power of ‘No’

July 30, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

As I mentioned in Startup Lessons Learned in the past couple weeks, we’ve launched our pricing and our billing solution. So now that we can actually charge people, we’re getting into sales discussions with agencies and larger companies who are interested in our business dashboards solution. It’s exciting!

That said, we just launched Dasheroo on May 5, so we’re still early on and we don’t yet have all the features and functionality that more advanced users like agencies or consultants want. Features like co-branding our app, dashboard exports, and user roles and permissions.

So, just this past week I’ve been in the unenviable position of having to say ‘No’ (more on that below) to several excellent prospects. “Do you have co-branding?”, “Can I export your dashboards to a PowerPoint?”, “Can I make this dashboard read-only?”

‘No’, we don’t have any of those features yet. Years ago I would have freaked out to not have a pocket full of “Yes” to respond with. I would have felt like a loser, and the pressure to close a sale now would have been immense.

But there are benefits of this powerful, and sometimes feared, word. Let’s take a closer look at ‘No':

It shows some real honesty & confidence; people appreciate that.
You can sometimes turn a ‘no’ into a thank you, when the request sounds reasonable but you’re just not sure if you’ll ever get around to it. Occasionally we’ll receive feature requests than actually sound great, but not for the near term. So it’s not a ‘no’, it’s a “Thank you for your suggestion. This feature isn’t on our near-term roadmap, but I’ll get it in front of our product folks to review…”. And we do review each feature request we receive.
‘No’ can often be communicated as ‘Not yet or ‘No, but…”, if that is an accurate statement. For instance, co-branding, dashboard exports, and advanced user roles and permissions are in fact on our near-term product roadmap. People will be patient if they believe that your goals are aligned and you’re open with them.
Sometimes a firm ‘No’ is warranted. In the case where one customer may be forcing feature demands on you that will not value the balance of your users, or is just something you feel strongly is not in your best interests. Jason Freid of Basecamp wrote a great article a few years ago, where he noted that a customer requested they provide Gantt Charts as part of their Basecamp project management offering. He duly noted that many other companies already provide Gantt Charts and it’s not something they will ever consider.

After several agency and larger company meetings the past week or so, the results are interesting and encouraging. People genuinely like our user interface, ease of use and pricing. That’s the core of our value proposition. So when we discuss upcoming features and functionality with these folks, we’re driving toward a mutually beneficial solution and inviting them to help define that solution. Plus, we’re often able to provide some short term workarounds in the meantime.

So can forms of ‘No’ actually get you to a yes? It’s looking promising, plus it ensures that we stay true to our product vision, which hopefully will benefit all of our users for years to come.

What’s your take on the pros and cons of ‘No’? Let me know!

Startup Lessons Learned This Week: Setting Our Pricing

July 23, 2015 by John Hingley·1 Comment

Last week in Startup Lessons Learned I discussed the importance of establishing sales strategies on both ends of the business spectrum - from a strong ‘auto convert’ for the SMBs all the way up to big ‘ol enterprise types. What that means is this - folks that will pull out their credit card for a $19 purchase when electronically prompted, all the way up to negotiated contracts in the several of thousands of dollars.

So when deciding on your startup pricing strategy, there are so many important items to consider. But I’m going to focus on the 3 biggies we drilled into when setting our initial ‘auto convert’ pricing, as I feel they establish the foundation of a good pricing strategy. Here we go:

1) Your costs. Evaluate both fixed and especially variable costs. For us, the incremental costs of supporting each new user is relatively low. Our incremental costs get down to efficiently scaling the backend server and database costs, being very efficient with API calls to the 3rd party applications we connect to, and customer support. With a business freemium model like we have, incremental variable costs must remain low. For yours? Who knows, but start with your cost basis, and make sure you are very realistic on your costs now, and how they will change over time, especially if you grow.

2) Your competition. You need to be mindful of the competitive environment. Businesses are very cost-sensitive. Does that mean you need to undercut your competition? Not necessarily. First, try to understand your competitor’s pricing approach. What are they basing it on? Is it per user or per ‘widget’? Figure out their pricing metric(s). If you can understand that you can shape your pricing to be a greater value. And that is really what it comes down to, to win the long term race. Value.

Note: Don’t get too crazed by just one competitor’s pricing. You could whip yourself into a frenzy trying to compete with it, and then they change their pricing the next day!

3) Your value. Here’s where your pricing strategy culminates into a successful business. Answering the question “What do users derive the most value from?” You can’t trick, cajole, or hold important stuff hostage, in order to drive long term profitable relationships with your users. And although price points are a huge consideration, if they are not based on ‘value realized’ it won’t matter.

Bottom line, here’s what we did for our SMB auto-convert pricing (I’ll talk agency and larger company pricing in a future post.)

Ou just launched business dashboard pricing

Our just launched business dashboard pricing!

Free! We call this our “Tall” pricing tier. We feel business freemium reduces the risk a business takes, and allows for rapid global adoption. Sharp folks like Mailchimp, LinkedIn, Hootsuite and SurveyMonkey have all proven this out. Otherwise, users are forced to make a pay/flee decision after a 14-30 day trial, and often these busy users need a longer period of time to derive value from a product. We felt that leading with a 100% risk-free offer satisfies my three considerations above, provides a huge value, a competitive advantage and fits within our cost structure.
- We’re big believers in really providing great value in the freemium edition. No stripped down bait-and-switch type stuff. At VerticalResponse (where a lot of us have experience from) we re-tooled the traditional 30-day free trial into a freemium.

No ‘per user’ pricing. We really deliberated on this one! Debated. Argued. Hell, I think I argued with myself on this decision! But at the end, we all came to agreement that our pricing should be more like Basecamp’s pricing for project management than Insightly’s per-user pricing for CRM. CRM tools like Insightly naturally lend themselves to a per-user pricing schema, but with business dashboards, you get some users that may casually log in once per month, others that log in daily. So why make people hesitant to invite that casual user?
Great conversion price points and clear value triggers. So, the next pricing tiers are Grande and Venti, tipping a hat to Starbucks. You want to achieve a couple things here. First, there are natural price points that tend to drive a conversion. As in our $19 Grande plan. Sure we could have priced at $23 or $16. But we’ve done enough testing in our (long) lives to know that we’ll get as many folks to pay us $19 than $16 (I’ll take an extra $3/month to invest in innovation), and probably drive 30%+ conversions than pricing a couple bucks over the magic $20. Same goes for the Venti pricing. Secondly, our value-add (triggers) are clear. It’s completely usage based. You consume more Insights, we hope it’s clear that you should budget a little more per month for that additional usage, and a couple more bells and whistles.

A guarantee? We’ll most likely change our pricing at some point. As we learn, instrument (we love Mixpanel!) usage, get feedback from our awesome users and add more features and functionality we’ll adjust our prices. But we plan on always treating our current users well, and offer ‘grandfather’ plans to them.

Oh yeah, why the caffienated pricing? It just seemed catchy and fun. Hopefully it’s clear to people, otherwise we may change those labels as well!

Track Our Startup: Billing + GetResponse Email Marketing Dashboards Launched

July 21, 2015 by Dasherooer·1 Comment

Ok, so we’ve been talking about our huge billing project for months. We’ve been trying to think of any scenario and corner case that might happen as we ask for customer’s money, because we want to eliminate any potential confusion. So……

Billing Launched!

For any startup, the ability to bill a customer is a huge milestone. Anyone can offer a great product for free, but will users pull out their credit card to get access to more features & functionality? We’re sure going to find out.

We feel that our free Tall pricing plan is great for many small businesses and non-profits who need a quick data fix. For more advanced users and maybe larger small businesses that may need more bells and whistles, we offer the Grande Plan (virtual branding hat-tip to Starbucks) which gives a growing business more dashboards and more insights they can track. Hey, we feel that the more access to actionable data, the more you should be growing right? Let’s all share the wealth!

A big up to Josh for PM-ing the crap outta this project, and to Andrew and James for their awesome ability to think through all things billing and then code this stuff. And to Alf for getting ready to answer the myriad of questions that may arise, as well as making the site understandable (huge user interface stuff going on here). Everyone had input on how to price our offerings, and we went back and forth as you might imagine.

We’re starting to think about how referrals are handled from a billing and payment perspective so stay tuned on that. We’ve had lots of interest in this area.

What else did we do? GetResponse email marketing dashboards launched to round out SEVEN email marketing providers.

Dasheroo Google Analytics dashboard of Sessions

Look at the Yellow part of the Dasheroo Google Analytics Insight, crazy good!

Marketing - READ THIS!

As you know Janine Popick came on as CMO, happy to have her! Check out her article: 5 Reasons I Decided to Dive Into a Startup on Inc.com. It’s pretty cool.

Check this out: this past week we were lucky enough to get an article written by @SteveStrauss CEO of @TheSelfEmployed. He mentioned us in his USA Today small business column. That’s great.

And it gets better…

What was weird was a few days later we got a huge spike in Google organic search traffic. Weird because we weren’t spiking for any of our keywords. Sooooooo….

Dasheroo featured on USA Today on an elevator screen!

This is proud Art taking a pic of Dasheroo in an elevator on wife Jenny’s first day at Dasheroo!

Here’s what we found: our own Jenny’s husband Arthur, was on an elevator here in San Francisco and saw Steve’s mention of us running on Captivate, those TV screens that hold your attention in elevators. It was on the screen for 2 minutes at a time over the course of three days and we GOT FLOODED with users. Whoa. People took pictures or remembered and searched for us on Google and signed up. Incredible!

One more thing, we have a listing on GetApp and we need reviews, can you give us one? It won’t take long, promise!

Board Meeting

I’ve got my monthly board meeting this Thursday, and it won’t be BORING. I’ve been getting slides ready for that one since it’s been 6 weeks since our last one. For a change we’ll be having it in a hotel lobby that doesn’t get used. We’ll see how that goes.

Side Note - One of the Coolest Tools Ever

Alf found GifGrabber which is a FREE way to make a video (no sound) that replays. It takes about 20 seconds to understand and create a video. So you’ll see these gifs of how-tos in our help. Awesome, thanks Alf!

Platform First

Not to geek out here but James and team are building out a pretty significant part of Dasheroo, our Developer Console. This is “the app that builds our app integrations and insights” so to speak. What’s very cool about this is that if a business doesn’t see an app they want to make a dashboard of, they can build it themselves (or get a developer to do so.) Point is, the team has done a lot of work behind the scenes to get this up and running and we got an awesome demo of it this week. More on that as we plan to launch, but we’ve had a plethora of inquiries about this from various business that want access to our API. It’s coming.

Whew, more next week, check out my Startup Lessons Learned if you’re up for it!

John at Dasheroo.

Track Our Startup: Dasheroo’s New CMO + Your Custom Data in a Dashboard

July 14, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

This past week has been another record-breaking week here at Dasheroo. We’ve been bringing our newbies from last week, up to speed and finalizing our monolithic billing project. Plus we worked on new hire on-boarding information.

Three More Newbies!

Dasheroo's new CMO and co-founder, Janine Popick.

Janine joins Dasheroo!

OK I’m very excited to announce that we brought on Janine Popick as our Chief Marketing Officer! You may know of Janine from VerticalResponse, the company she founded and ran for a whopping 14 years. She grew VR from zero to over 1 million users, and pivoted to a freemium model before she sold the company to a big ‘ol public company a couple of years ago. She is also a contributor for Inc.com and will tell our story there as well. As you can imagine, we’re pretty happy to have her. Disclosure time: I’m super lucky she’s also my wife

Read all about why she decided to come on in her newest Inc.com article: 5 Reasons Why I’m Diving Into a New Startup.

Her first to do is improving our content strategy. Since we’re now officially launched, we decided to make this blog more product centric and talk to what we have to offer. From time to time we’ll also weave in how to use this amazing data we surface for you.

We’re attempting to have either of us write for outside publications. So perhaps this blog post might begin to appear on another site. This establishes us as experts at what we do (cuz people say we are!) and provides inbound links from quality sites. And that leads to improved search engine (SEO) results, so more people can find Dasheroo when they search for terms like ‘business dashboards’.

On top of this news, we’re also jazzed to announce that we’re bringing on the amazing Jenny Noyes who will be an awesome Customer Success Manager. She’ll be looking at how users interact with Dasheroo and how we can make that experience the best possible. Jenny has a ton of experience working with small business owners for the last 8 years and knows the team well.

We’ve also got Derrick Reedy who is currently interning for the group working on getting us listed on a ton of quality sites as well as helping Mimi identify sales leads.

As a result of all of these hires (we’re up to 13 right now!) we’ve learned a bit about the importance of employee on-boarding .

New SEO Strategy

We’ve taken a good hard look at our SEO strategy lately. We try to get noticed for the keywords “business dashboards” when someone searches on Google and now we’re going to take it to another level and try to get noticed for a myriad of keywords like social media dashboard and Google Sheets Dashboard.

We’re also looking to add a few more pages to the site and change-up our internal linking strategy as well. As many of you know SEO is a journey, not a destination.

New Video

Alf put yet another amazing video together all about getting your internal custom data and shoving it into an insight on your Dasheroo business dashboards. Check this one out, we have 3 or 4 dashboards that take data from our database and we rely heavily on it to track progress.

Billing

We’ve been thinking of every which way a user may or may not pay us beyond our free (‘Tall’) version of Dasheroo, and we’re closer than ever. And to make a billing path seem simple is a ton of work, thanks to Josh, Andrew, Court and James for killing it! This Friday we’ll launch billing for any new person that comes to the site. As you know we’re business freemium so we always have a free plan for folks that don’t need too many bells and whistles but for those who do we’ll be charging a nominal starting fee of $19/month.

Cheers, John

Startup Lessons Learned: Hiring in Another State

July 9, 2015 by John Hingley·1 Comment

OK, this may not be the sexiest post in the Startup Lessons Learned series, but it’s about one of those things that’s so easy to ignore, or in my case, not even think about when bringing on new team members in different U.S. States - registering your business to do business in that state!

I casually mentioned in a recent board meeting (remember that post about productive board meetings?) that we were building our presence in the lovely city of Austin, Texas and my lawyer’s ears perked up. “Are you registered in Texas?” Emma asked. And semi-confidently, I replied that yes, although we are based in San Francisco, the great folks at ZenPayroll had prompted me to fill out some various forms when I was adding my Austin-based folks to payroll (BTW, we love ZenPayroll, it’s super easy to use, very complete and just a very well done & affordable app.) So I thought I was all done. Not so fast, she said.

I also had to file a form to be ‘qualified’ to do business in the great state of Texas. It’s an Application for Registration of a For Profit Corporation (the TX Version). It’s an easy form to complete, and just asks for basic info like your business name & address, EIN #, names and addresses of company officers, and the address of the office (even if it’s a home office) in Texas. Oh yeah, plus $750 filing fee. And in about a week, Dasheroo was ‘legit’ to do business in Texas:

Signed, sealed & delivered - we’re now legit to do business in Texas

We now have our first team member in Georgia. And now I know! Even though ZenPayroll does an awesome job of prompting me with any new payroll-oriented forms to complete, including Department of Revenue (need that payroll tax income!) and Department of Labor forms, there’s still that business registration form that needs to be filed with the Secretary of State.

So especially if you’re building a distributed team for your new business, remember to always check to see if you’re required to register your business in that state. I’m pretty sure every state requires it. It’s more of a housekeeping task than anything else, but take care of it at the get-go, right when you’re adding your next team member in a new state. Plus you’ll avoid potential fines down the road. Who needs that?

Track Our Startup! Austin digs & Eventbrite business dashboards

June 30, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We’ve been keeping busier than ever, especially since our Dasherooers have kids that just got outta school. Lots of us have been traveling and will continue to this summer. It’s pretty cool being in a distributed company.

Eventbrite Business Dashboards Launched!

We’re pretty happy about this. If you’ve not yet seen the brand new Eventbrite insights they’re pretty cool especially if you’re tracking tickets and event sales and trying to get those butts in seats. Add them to your Dasheroo dashboards pronto!

Bigger Austin Office

Our previous Austin office in TechRanch was big enough for 2 and had no windows. So since we hired 3 new people making it 5, there we had to get a bigger spot. James and team now all fit into the office with enough space to breathe and wait for it….WINDOWS!!

Billing

We are another week closer to billing. We are trying to think of every possible corner case before we launch it. Our latest issue is when someone cancels or downgrades their subscription they bought annually, what do we do? On one hand a big company like Salesforce keeps your money and doesn’t let you downgrade for the duration of your annual subscription. Then there’s Docusign (aren’t they cool?), they refund you the difference. We’re still trying to figure it all out.

P.S. We’re still knee-deep working on pricing scenarios.