How to Generate an Infinite Supply of Ideas for Your Blog
Vinay Patankar · 04 Jun, 2017 · Blogging
Writer’s block is a terrible thing. You know that you need new content to fill up your calendar and keep your audience engaged, but you can sit at your desk for hours, resulting in nothing but tearing your own hair out in frustration. The good news is that even the best writers get writer’s block. The bad news is that you’ll never solve it by forcing the issue - it’s the equivalent to repeatedly slamming your head against a brick wall instead of just using the door. After hitting that wall many times, I decided to do something about it, resulting in the following system that I (and the rest of my team) now use to generate great ideas for content month-in-month-out. # First, understand your enemy Writer’s block is caused by one (or both) of the following: - Lack of inspiration (your mental cup is empty) - Outside sources (stress from physical illness, bereavement, the end of a relationship, etc) Outside sources are largely beyond your control, and so shouldn’t be worried about too much. Not only that, but it’s also the lesser of our two factors - even a calm mind will struggle to generate ideas if there’s nothing to draw from. So the problem we’re left with is one of resources. Think of your mind as a furnace, with knowledge as coal and ideas as your flame. With nothing to fuel your fire it will (at best) produce mediocre results, but with a stockpile of knowledge you can fan the flames and produce something truly spectacular. Still, if lack of knowledge is the issue then how the hell do you go about it? There’s almost so many ways that it’s difficult to start, and all seemingly use up valuable time which you just don’t have in your 9-5 life. Don’t worry - I was in the same situation, and I’ll tell you exactly what worked (and still works) for me. # Listen to podcasts By far the easiest way to top up your mind while keeping your current schedule is to listen to business podcasts when you’re otherwise stuck with naught but dead air. For example, all of the following are great opportunities to fit in an episode or two of a podcast without spending any extra time to do so: - While exercising (daily workouts are also brilliant for productivity in general) - During the daily commute (be careful if driving while listening) - Toilet breaks - While cooking - When traveling (airport queues? That’s a good 3 podcast episodes right there) Essentially, any time where you’re not listening to anything or require a lot of focus on other tasks (such as researching/writing a blog post) you can make more productive by listening to podcasts. I honestly can’t count the number of ideas I’ve gained from just listening to an episode while walking around the shops every couple of days! As for recommendations of which podcasts to listen to, that would depend on your purpose, type of content, and niche. However, these are a good place to start: - ProBlogger (Darren’s 31 day challenge is awesome for new and experienced bloggers alike) - Business Systems Explored (a deep dive into the systems you can use to improve your business) - The Productivity Show (an all-around great resources for tips on how to be more productive) - Almost any high-quality marketing podcast # Use an RSS feed So, you’re taking in information through podcasts - that’s great, but it’s not enough. You need to be keeping up to date in your niche in order to know which ideas are best to follow up on sooner rather than later. This is where your RSS feed comes in. If you’re anything like me, then you’ve probably subscribed to a next-to-uncountable number of blogs’ email list in an attempt to keep up to date. The problem with this is that people (myself included) are sooner or later going to slip up, especially if a distraction is available. A distraction such as, I don’t know, the rest of your inbox? RSS feeds, meanwhile, collect all of the posts published by the blogs you subscribe to and put them all in one place, ready for you to blast through whenever you have the time. My team, for example, tends to check their feeds in the mornings and evenings, noting down their ideas as they go. There are obviously many ways of setting up / tracking your RSS feed, but as Drew Hendricks recently pointed out, Feedly is an incredible app for doing just that. By attaching your RSS feed to a mobile app, showing stats such as the number of upvotes / shares, highlighting the most popular posts, and generally making it easy to read several posts in rapid succession, Feedly is our app of choice. # Record ideas ASAP The amount of ideas you generate is completely irrelevant if you have no way of recording them when inspiration strike. I can tell you from experience that unless you record your ideas as soon as possible you’ll forget them, and if you forget them they will very rarely surface again. So, how do you make it easy for yourself to jot down ideas the moment that magic lightning hits? Well, there are a couple of ways: - Use a note taking app on mobile - Integrate apps to automatically create notes - Record everything in an easily navigated location For note-taking apps you can use pretty much anything, but I’d recommend either Evernote or Do Note (by IFTTT). Evernote is a strong contender from how easy it is to create a note, and the flexibility in terms of integrating with other apps, but Do Note is the ultimate in simplicity. Integrating your apps essentially means that any notes you make will be detected, categorized, then pushed automatically into another program. This pairs up nicely with recording your ideas in an app like Trello or Airtable. For example, you could use Zapier to integrate Evernote with Trello. Then, when a new note is created in Evernote with the tag “idea”, Zapier could be told to push a link to that note into a new Trello card in your “Ideas” column. It may sound like a massive undertaking, but everything I’ve talked about in this post can be achieved in your “dead time” - I’ve even found that having a podcast episode at the beginning and end of work is a great way to firmly stamp out your work/life balance, and ease into each side as needed. How do you generate your own ideas? Have you tried anything I’ve talked about? I’d love to hear from your in the comments below! A strong follow-up in Blogging is SEO for Freelancers: 4 Key Tips to Attract Clients on Autopilot.
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How we Rebranded our Company in 3 Months
Vinay Patankar · 28 Sep, 2016 · Business · Business-systematization · Featured
This post was written by Benjamin Brandall and originally appeared on the Process Street blog and is the story of how Cameron and I rebranded our startup Process Street. In the lifecycle of every startup, there comes a tipping point. For companies focused on aesthetics and creating something beautiful, there's a time where the founders need to shift towards their product — look inward and think deeply about the problems it solves, who's it for and how to refine user experience. For product-focused startups like Process Street, a necessary early shift is towards design. Just look at Apple — that's a company which thrives on making quality design and usability available on the mass market. ### Apple 2016: Would their product be as influential if their website still looked like this? ### Apple 1999: The simple answer is no because the brand evolves with the product. This is article tells the story of how Process Street rebranded itself. We've included lots of useful resources and tools to help you along the way if you're thinking of doing the same doing the same. Let's go! ## It started with a product, not a logo or a brand Our CEO, Vinay Patankar, had the idea to build Process Street from his own frustrations with workflow management software. While running a global team he found that there wasn't software out there which would let managers write process documents, create checklists, assign their team and track activity easily. While touring the world after leaving Australia in search of the entrepreneurial dream-come-true, he met Cameron McKay. Cameron is our CTO, a computer science graduate who built Process Street from the ground up and, alongside Vinay, took the company from idea to AngelPad in less than a year. Here they are in Argentina, where they met and started building Process Street. In this picture from 2014, you'll notice the logo isn't the same as it is now. And what's with those blues? The thing is, at the dawn of Process Street, branding and design were the last things on their minds. Based on past failures, Vinay knew the most important thing is to get a usable product together as soon as possible. Focusing on other areas before you've got something that can be sold or funded is a way to burn money, not make it. Here's what Process Street used to look like when it was a Bootstrap WordPress theme: While it's good enough for a first pass, there were some inherent problems with it. The most serious being that the light blue chosen for the main brand color didn't work inside the app. As user experience improved and the app became more visual, the light blue contrasted badly with the rest of the design. For the favicon, the P and S were condensed into a square — a pretty clunky and unmemorable way to do it, but the founders simply weren't designers. ## December 2014: Major app overhaul, minor site adjustments After graduating from AngelPad, Process Street had the time and money it needed to start redesigning the product to increase user retention. As for the marketing site, the changes were minor. We added a full-width product image above the fold, a more 'contrasty' blue (I'm also not a designer...) and a cleaner design. The logo stayed the same. While a great product can make up for bad presentation, great design doesn't fix a crap product. To stay hyper-focused on UX and building features, Cameron rebuilt the site in a day or two before returning to codeland. While Slack has its IRC hashtag, Trello has a board with lists, and Intercom has its... smiling microphone, Process Street had just a block with letters. Our latest redesign came when we decided to get rid of our logo and make something more recognizable. Here's how that happened... ## A logo idea came in the middle of the night I was talking to Vinay about where he got the idea to change the logo, and he said it just sort of... came to him while he was on his laptop in the middle of the night. This is the image which sparked it all off: It's the logo for Designmodo's Flat UI Pro, so we weren't going to use that, but Vinay wanted to go with a flat diamond for a few reasons: 1. Diamonds are the symbols for a decision in a flow chart. This is something integral to the app. 2. Diamonds are a sign of quality. Process Street is a quality product and helps with quality control because it ensures teams execute tasks by following a procedure. 3. The app and landing page is designed flat. The logo had to fit in with it. So, we cashed in our $100 discount from Tim Ferriss' promo code ("Tim") and headed over to 99Designs to post a competition! Here's the brief: Create a new logo \[Modern/Flat/Fun\] for business software startup @ProcessStreet We got some fantastic entries! We narrowed the pool of over 200 designs down to just 6, shown below: While none of them were spot on, they provided the ideal basis for a concept we could present to a designer. ## Working with Koombea design agency One of our investors, Jonathan Tarud, invested a combination of cash and service credit for his design agency, Koombea. They assigned us a brilliant lead designer, Mario Rocchi who took our logo, started creating iterations and uploading them to Basecamp. And, as you can probably see from looking anywhere on our website, we chose this one! Tada! 🎉 The logo formed the entire basis for the next step — a complete overhaul of our marketing site. ## From logo to landing page Deciding on a logo was important because it gave us two solid elements we knew would be included in the rest of the site — the blue, and the font (Cabin). We presented Mario with an overwhelming selection of sites we loved and wrote down what we loved about them. Keeping all of this in Basecamp gave us a place to have a group discussion while pinning everything in place. We added Mario to our Slack team as a single-channel guest and integrated the channel with Basecamp, so every time activity happened there, it would post a message in the channel. Here's a selection of sites we loved which inspired Process Street's design: ### x.ai We loved x.ai's super-minimalist landing page and the amount of whitespace. ### Freckle We loved the immediacy of the product and the fun color scheme Freckle use. ### Trello We loved Trello's use of icons, the large, easily readable font, and their bold, cartoonish colors. ## Prototyping the landing page in InVision Mario came back to us with loads of possibilities based on these recommendations. Here's a few we had a tough time deciding between. Eventually, as you'll see if you check our landing page, we settled for the top right option and then worked with Mario as he perfected in InVision. InVision lets designers work with clients and present them with interactive prototypes. Clients can comment on elements, then designers can make iterations and resolve the comments. It worked so well for us, we'd highly recommend InVision for anyone working with a designer. Finally, we decided that blue can get a bit too blue sometimes. Enter Process Street Teal and Process Street Red — incidentally two of my most favorite colors in the world. Check it out on our pricing page! ## We had 100 glyph icons designed See that little paintbrush icon in the header image? Mario designed that. Thanks to Koombea, we have more than 100 new glyph icons to use in header images, demo videos, landing pages and product demonstrations. Since he gave us the Sketch files, they're easy to manipulate even by us non-design folk. ## We blew our whole budget on design Process Street employs 5 full-time technical employees but 0 designers. We didn't need Koombea to implement the site, just design it. From there, Cameron got it up and running quickly. It would have been silly to ask Koombea to spend time on that -- instead, we spent everything on their design services. This meant we got graphics for social media, header image templates and graphics for features that hadn't even been released yet. Forward thinking, eh? We updated our AngelPad profile, Google Apps Marketplace, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Here's our shiny new Facebook profile: And some future feature graphics (as a sneaky way of telling you to hold on for all this good stuff): Woo. Looking smooth. And as for the blog header image graphics — Koombea cut about an hour a day from my workload with those little beauties, and I must say, they look fantastic. :) Check out the final designs in action: Homepage - Product page - Featured templates - Colors applied in the app - I hope this has given you some insight into our redesign, and shown you the steps we went through so you can take the ideas and apply them to your own company rebranding. What do you think of the design? Let us know in the comments! A strong follow-up in Business is Startup Idea: Evernote for Spreadsheets.
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A Look at The SaaS Stack in Our Tech Startup
Vinay Patankar · 07 Jun, 2016 · Featured · Technology
What keeps an innovative startup ticking over? At Process Street, we’re a huge fan of using the software other SaaS startups put out there in conjunction with the ever-dependable big names. Here are the 18 SaaS products we use at Process Street, and why we think they’re the best options out there. ## Analytics: Mixpanel, Google Analytics & Jetpack For analytics, we use 3 different products for slightly different purposes. Mixpanel is for in-app analytics. We use it to track trends, user engagement and sign-ups, getting an overall picture and week-by-week comparisons and helping us reduce churn by noticing patterns. Google Analytics is our go-to source for tracking conversions and referral traffic. This means we can measure the effectiveness of the content and the promotion separately. Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that simply tracks the views on pages. The only time we use it is to get a current view of page traffic since Google Analytics can take 24 hours to update, but Jetpack does it instantly. ## Project Management: Trello & Basecamp Trello is used by marketing, development, growth and support teams as the main home for tasks, attachments and status updates. During the employee onboarding process, we add new hires to the team boards and make a personal board for them which contains their first round of tasks and helps them get into the habit of using Trello. Basecamp is the tool of choice when collaborating with designers. When we had our site redesigned by Koombea, Basecamp was the ideal tool to neatly store resources and collaborate over designs until the iterations were moved into InVision to be prototyped. ## Personal Productivity: WorkFlowy & Evernote WorkFlowy — a tool for taking quick notes — is the best way we’ve found to make both simple notes and complex plans. Project proposals and plans go into WorkFlowy, where it’s easy to structure complex ideas because of the way the app’s designed: Evernote is where we keep everything from rough notes and screenshots to entire blog posts. With its Zapier integration, it also turns into a way to add text to any other app just by tagging the note. TaskPaper is a fancy text editor disguised as a to-do list app. Anyone who has kept their to-do items in a TextEdit file will like the added functionality, including tags, smart search syntax and projects. Other popular choices include Any.Do, Wunderlist and Todoist. 1Password is a password manager that keeps every password you use safely encrypted in a vault protected by a master password. It lives up to its name because one password is all you have to remember. While Chrome’s ‘remember this password’ feature is good enough, 1Password is usable cross-browser, OS and device. ## External Communication: Intercom & Close.io Intercom is our favorite customer support tool. All of our support conversations and in-app messages to users goes through Intercom. It’s easy to keep up with the tickets, loop in other departments and get notified when high-ticket customers reach out. Close.io is an awesome CRM. It’s built around search, meaning that you can create complex search queries and narrow down lists of hundreds of thousands to exactly what you’re looking for. We use it for sales and marketing outreach, as well as managing all content communications. ## Internal Communication: Slack & Appear.in While Trello is great for storing and organizing tasks, Slack is our main tool for internal communication. Its IRC-like interface makes it easy to chat with groups and individuals. Plus, the integrations with Slack, Intercom and the other tools we use. Appear.in is a permanent video chat room, which means you sign up and get a fixed URL your team can pop in and out of at any time. It’s much better for us than Skype, because you don’t need accounts or to initiate/end video calls at all. ## Workflow Management: Process Street Process Street is, of course, the tool we use for workflow automation, business process management, employee onboarding and content promotion. We break projects down into processes and assign these processes to teams and individuals. As they progress with the project and automate their workflows, we can easily get an overview by just looking at the Process Street dashboard. ## Email Marketing: MailChimp MailChimp is the home for all of our automated and one-off email campaigns. Every blog post email and product update goes through MailChimp, where we can track opens, clicks and trends. For me as a content creator, opens and clicks are a great signal that a topic has resonated with our readership. Since these readers came into our product and read our content, there are parallels across a few topics, like productivity and processes. ## Content Promotion: Mention & Buffer Mention scours the internet for brand mentions and backlinks, which means that when we’re linked to we get a notification and can then promote the post, both as a ‘thank you’ to the author and to maximize the exposure of a piece we’re being featured in. When we’re linked or mentioned, we then add the post to Buffer. Buffer lets you tweet the same link across multiple accounts (we have 12 linked up in there) in one click, and queues the posts up so they go out at the best time for your audience to see them. Content Writing: Google Docs & WordPress The Process Street blog is built on the perfect blog builder, WordPress. WordPress is ideal for drafting in a visual editor with a preview — much better than working with pure HTML. For guest posts, or collaborative work, we use Google Docs. In-line comments and suggestions make it great for working with writers as an editor. When you’re done you can copy a shareable link and forward it to the target publication for review. I haven’t found an easier way to collaborate and share articles. Alternote is an Evernote plugin that makes it bearable for content writing. Since I like to have all of my resources nearby, I can create a unique tag for each blog post, then use the Web Clipper to save sources with that tag. Here’s an example: Data Management: Airtable There’s probably over 100,000 records in our Airtable database. Everything from keywords to contacts lives there, and that makes it easy for us to reference and link together everything related to Process Street. We moved to Airtable after the frustration of managing data with Google Sheets set in. Spreadsheets littered between accounts, with random titles and dodgy permissions were making for a terrible data management experience. With Airtable — especially when you link it up to Zapier — you’ve got a far more efficient user experience. SEO: Ahrefs, Moz & SEO Spider Ahrefs an SEO powerhouse. You can use it to research keywords, monitor backlinks, and, what we love most about it — track every keyword a URL is ranking for. When we’re running campaigns to rank specific keywords, like we did with employee onboarding, Ahrefs provides the single best status update on that project within a few seconds of checking. Moz is a tool we only use for bulk keyword difficulty checks because Ahrefs is the better tool for us. In addition to keyword difficulty, I personally have Mozbar installed for Chrome which lets me quickly check Domain Authority (a rough guide as to how much weight a backlink holds from that domain). SEO Spider crawls URLs and looks for broken domains. Even with a free account, you can get 500 results from just pasting a domain in. You get to see how many 4xx errors are on that domain, and which links are broken. Then, you can start doing broken link building (as detailed in our marketing processes guide). File Management: Google Drive Google Drive is where I keep my Google Docs, graphic assets like SVGs, and upload any large file to share with my team. Its Trello integration means you can attach any file that’s already inside Drive, saving you from uploading it in multiple places. To see why we use Google Drive instead of Dropbox, check this comparison. App Integrations: Zapier Zapier connects every app I’ve listed here together. Impressive, right? Every app linked together means you can transfer data between them and automate a ton of boring work. For us, it’s a better version of IFTTT because it has more features. Here are some of my favorite examples, featuring apps like Evernote and OneNote: Copy Evernote Notes to OneNote Post Trello Activity to Slack Send a Slack Message for Checked-off Process Street Tasks Development: JIRA JIRA is the home of our planned features, user stories and dastardly bugs. Developers can add, track, prioritize and assign issues to their team, then feed that information to a live Slack channel. For example, whenever a new feature is pushed to the live server, a Slack channel gets updated with the feature’s new information and we can do a short write-up to announce it and test the feature to hunt bugs. When we’re linked or mentioned, we then add the post to Buffer. Buffer lets you tweet the same link across multiple accounts (we have 12 linked up in there) in one click, and queues the posts up so they go out at the best time for your audience to see them. ## Content Writing: Google Docs & WordPress The Process Street blog is built on the perfect blog builder, WordPress. WordPress is ideal for drafting in a visual editor with a preview — much better than working with pure HTML. For guest posts, or collaborative work, we use Google Docs. In-line comments and suggestions make it great for working with writers as an editor. When you’re done you can copy a sharable link and forward it to the target publication for review. I haven’t found an easier way to collaborate and share articles. Alternote is an Evernote plugin that makes it bearable for content writing. Since I like to have all of my resources nearby, I can create a unique tag for each blog post, then use the Web Clipper to save sources with that tag. Here’s an example: ## Data Management: Airtable There’s probably over 100,000 records in our Airtable database. Everything from keywords to contacts lives there, and that makes it easy for us to reference and link together everything related to Process Street. We moved to Airtable after the frustration of managing data with Google Sheets set in. Spreadsheets littered between accounts, with random titles and dodgy permissions were making for a terrible data management experience. With Airtable — especially when you link it up to Zapier — you’ve got a far more efficient user experience. ## SEO: Ahrefs, Moz & SEO Spider Ahrefs an SEO powerhouse. You can use it to research keywords, monitor backlinks, and, what we love most about it — track every keyword a URL is ranking for. When we’re running campaigns to rank specific keywords, like we did with employee onboarding, Ahrefs provides the single best status update on that project within a few seconds of checking. Moz is a tool we only use for bulk keyword difficulty checks because Ahrefs is the better tool for us. In addition to keyword difficulty, I personally have Mozbar installed for Chrome which lets me quickly check Domain Authority (a rough guide as to how much weight a backlink holds from that domain). SEO Spider crawls URLs and looks for broken domains. Even with a free account, you can get 500 results from just pasting a domain in. You get to see how many 4xx errors are on that domain, and which links are broken. Then, you can start doing broken link building (as detailed in our marketing processes guide). ## File Management: Google Drive Google Drive is where I keep my Google Docs, graphic assets like SVGs, and upload any large file to share with my team. Its Trello integration means you can attach any file that’s already inside Drive, saving you from uploading it in multiple places. To see why we use Google Drive instead of Dropbox, check this comparison. ## App Integrations: Zapier Zapier connects every app I’ve listed here together. Impressive, right? Every app linked together means you can transfer data between them and automate a ton of boring work. For us, it’s a better version of IFTTT because it has more features. Here are some of my favorite examples, featuring apps like Evernote and OneNote: - Copy Evernote Notes to OneNote - Post Trello Activity to Slack - Send a Slack Message for Checked-off Process Street Tasks ## Development: JIRA JIRA is the home of our planned features, user stories, and dastardly bugs. Developers can add, track, prioritize and assign issues to their team, then feed that information to a live Slack channel. For example, whenever a new feature is pushed to the live server, a Slack channel gets updated with the feature’s new information and we can do a short write-up to announce it and test the feature to hunt bugs. Related read in Featured: Looking for a Co-Founder for New Startup - UI/UX.
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Meeting Strangers: How to Prepare for an Effective Cold Meeting
Vinay Patankar · 26 May, 2016 · Business
Ever been nervous meeting a stranger? Nerve no more! Impressing a stranger on first encounter can literally change your life. Interviews are a good example. Others include sales pitches, freelance consultations, partnerships, supplier agreements and even dates. They’re a necessity in life. So why not get good? Here are some tips to get you started. Research: If you know who you’re meeting, take 10-20 min to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter them. Ideally you’re looking for information related to the topic of your meeting. But you’re also looking for personal information such as achievements and common interests. Look for media interviews & charity support. Do you both rock climb? Have they recently been promoted? Have they achieved one of your goals? Also do company searches on the web, Google News, Twitter and in your CRM if you have one. Agenda To Agenda or not to agenda? An agenda is contextual. You wouldn’t do it in an interview, but you’ll never have a consultant from McKinsey or KPMG book a meeting without sending you one. My general method is for every meeting ask these questions: - If I set an agenda, what would be in it? - Will I remember to do all of the above without writing it down? - Will it benefit my prospect if I send them a copy? – If it will, send one. Consider adding a photo so they know who you are. Basically the agenda should add value to your stranger. Usually, more complex meetings have agendas. This gives your stranger time to prepare. On Arrival Once you arrive at the meeting location - 10 minutes early - wait around the corner for 5 min then head to reception or the cafe to be seated. Arriving more than 5 minutes early can look disrespectful as opposed to eager. But most importantly DON'T BE LATE! If you think there is a 50%+ chance you’ll be late by even a few minutes, call and notify someone. It looks way better to call and say you may be 5 min late, and arrive on time, then if you arrive 5 min late without calling. The Lobby After reception calls my stranger, I will stay standing until they arrive. Warning – if you take this road, be prepared for some long stands. But I feel it looks better than kicking your feet up on lobby couches. Sweaty palms? I hold my folder with my left hand and keep my right hand in my pocket –dodges the slimy handshake. Remember eye contact and a smile on greeting. Stand tall, chest out, firm handshake. If you’re in a busy lobby and you don’t know your strangers face, finding them can be awkward at times. Try and make the first approach, (it may take you a couple of times to get it right). Your stranger will be thankful for the awkwardness removal. Look for people looking for people. Exchange some short pleasantries then ask where they would like to go (unless there is already a plan). The walk During the walk from the point of meeting to room or cafe, aim to walk side by side, and ask a few standard open ended questions like: “Thanks for taking the time to see me. How has your day been?” Don’t worry what they say - you’re just trying to keep them engaged until you arrive at the sitting location. Try to find an anecdote (maybe something that happened on the way in or earlier that day) or common topic (the offices, building, location, current event or last resort – the weather) to keep them chatting until the sitting location. Just try and avoid a long walk of silence. Also, avoid discussing any important topics during the walk, interruptions are common and will kill your flow. Personal Note: I like to treat all my strangers like a first date. I open doors, hold elevators and offer them the first seat. Don’t take this to the extreme but if the opportunity is there, unleash the chivalry (that goes for you too ladies!). This shows you’re attentive and will put in the extra effort if they partner with you. Sitting Down Once you arrive at the meeting table, wait for the person you’re meeting to sit down first (unless they offer you a seat – then just take it). If you’re already in a cafe waiting for them, stand and shake their hand when they arrive. Again, watch the sweaty palms, smile, eye contact etc. I usually like to sit at a 90 degree angle avoiding the formal face to face arrangement. This is not always possible but it makes it easier to look over documents together or to describe while writing on paper or using your laptop. Once seated, give a business card to each person so they know who you are, how to spell your name (useful if you have a weird name like mine) and how to contact you after. Then you’re off. Do you do things differently? Related read in Business: How to Integrate @Intercom Support Messages with Close.io #CRM.
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How to Hire a Virtual Assistant for Startup Success
Vinay Patankar · 23 May, 2016 · Business-process-management
In recent years, the idea of small business owners using a virtual assistant to outsource daily business tasks has gained popularity. But many people don't know how to hire or benefit from one. As someone who has successfully hired a personal assistant for my business as well as several virtual employees, here's an overview of the issues involved in setting up and managing such relationships: Related: 10 Things to Outsource to a Virtual Assistant 1\. Determine if a virtual assistant will suit your business needs. First, figure out which tasks you would like to assign to an assistant and if it's cost-effective. Do an analysis of your business activities over the course of a day if not an entire week, writing down the minor tasks that are taking up time. Don't rule out anything as a task a virtual assistant could not do. While a United States-based virtual assistant can earn a salary that can start at about $15 an hour (and those with a specialty might command higher rates). Solid administrative-task virtual assistants from abroad, though, can be secured for as little as $3 to $6 an hour. Related: 6 Creative Ways to Use Overseas Virtual Assistants 2\. Understand the pros and cons of hiring a freelancer from an agency. It might be costlier pound for pound to hire a virtual assistant who's working for an agency, due to overhead costs, says Rich Pearson, senior vice president of categories and geographies at Elance-oDesk. (His company provides an online marketplace for hiring freelancers through the Elance.com and oDesk.com websites.) But an agency might arrange for an entrepreneur to use multiple assistants to smooth over gaps in availability or in skill sets. Listings of available freelancers on the Elance and oDesk platforms include those who are paid by agencies and those who work independently. The entrepreneur can also post a job listing. Pearson says using a freelancer who's not on contract with an agency can result in more personalized attention, given that it's just that one person on the gig. An agency might rotate in multiple virtual assistants for one assignment or pull one away at a whim. The most dedicated personal assistants almost always are independent freelancers with whom the entrepreneur builds a relationship with (as opposed to those freelancers hired through an agency), Pearson says. When deciding between choosing a virtual assistant who's located in the United States versus someone abroad, Pearson says, consider how important is it for the person to be awake while you work and how aware of American culture you need the person to be. Related: 4 Ways to Manage Remote Employees 3\. Do prep work to create a great job listing. When writing your well-edited, detailed job listing, always put in a call to action that merits a response to see if the applicant has read the description. For example, ask the applicant to provide examples of his or her work. There will be indications when a candidate seems motivated. I found it particularly telling one Saturday to receive a phone call from Nairobi from Joan, who's now my personal assistant, asking if she could be interviewed right away (even though I had not yet had a chance to look over all the messages from those who responded to my ad). Related: How a Manager Can Promote the 'Future of Work' 4\. Hiring the assistant. Go through the bids that come in and create a list of the applicants whose responses you like, read their reviews and then line up interviews. A platform like oDesk's can show an entrepreneur how a candidate scored on an English proficiency exam and how many jobs he or she has previously done. I like oDesk for its ability to generate a contract, monitor work and set up a payment system. A video conference interview with an applicant is a must and will serve a few purposes: It can reveal the person's grasp of English and the setting that he or she will likely be working from -- and if it's an orderly place from which to make a phone call on your behalf and the applicant's overall demeanor (enthusiasm and ability to think on his or her feet). Related: Siri's Founders Are Building Viv -- the Personal Assistant Siri Should Have Been 5\. Managing the assistant. While the hiring of a virtual personal assistant can free up your day, the burden is on you to allocate tasks smartly and effectively so that happens. Generally speaking, the more specific you are in explaining tasks, the better. You can use an onboarding software to centralize any information or materials they would need during the onboarding and training phase. Ideally, as a result of good management, a virtual assistant will in time learn your work style and you will be able to give that person more responsibility and encourage more initiative taking. Don't hesitate to share with the assistant Google Drive documents outlining the who, what, where and when of daily tasks, including relevant rules, permissions and passwords. You can use a Standard Operating Procedure software to familiarize your new virtual assistant with your standardized way of doing things. A Google search for “virtual assistant tools” reveals an abundance of gadgets that can be used by entrepreneurs who are open to managing assistants on their own. Online social-media entrepreneur Audrey Melnik of ZootRock in San Francisco explained to me how she hires and manages her virtual assistant. “We use two tools," she writes in an email. "The first is called Process Street that allows you to set up a repeatable process," for the virtual assistant to run through each time. The person checks off the steps and add comments where appropriate. "The second is a screen shot tool that takes images of the \[assistants'\] screen regularly and tracks their productive time so you can be clear on what they are working on when and capture evidence of them working the hours they are charging you for.” Encourage your assistant to offer you feedback, lending more warmth to the remote-work arrangement. Assistants might not provide feedback unless you ask, yet their ideas are often spot-on given their proximity to the work. It will be up to you to decide whether to trust your assistant with information like passwords and other sensitive materials. Start out with small things, such as granting access to social-media accounts. You may want to consider having an assistant sign a nondisclosure agreement. “Big things like the virtual assistant's booking your vacation can come later," Pearson says. "Training starts with trust, and that means small things at first.” When possible meet your virtual assistant at least once in person and try to have a video conference at least quarterly. Ultimately, a virtual assistant is not just another cog in your business machine, but an employee and certainly a human. So remember to treat this person as such. Related: 3 Qualities Every Remote Manager Needs (Infographic) Editor's Note: This piece has been updated to clarify that a virtual assistant in the United States can earn a salary that starts at $15 an hour. Related read in Business Process Management: Customer Development Questions for Startup Founders.
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How to Integrate @Intercom Support Messages with Close.io #CRM
Vinay Patankar · 14 Jan, 2016 · Business · Business-process-management · Business-systematization · Sales-and-marketing-standard-operating-procedures · Technology
I have been wanting to sync my support system Intercom with the CRM we use at Process Street - Close.io (which I have written about before). The reason for this is when we are looking at a customer in the CRM we want to be able to see not only the sales emails but all the support conversations they were having too. This can be done quite easily with other Help Desk Tools or via the API but I wanted to build something quickly that didn't require developer time. I first setup a Zap using Intercom's "New Message" Zap that triggered an email to my inbox which then Synced using Close's 2 way email sync, which worked fine but only worked for the first message that was sent, it didn't track the whole conversation which can last for days and contain lots of valuable information for sales. This basically meant sales still had to open both Intercom and Close.io to get a full picture of the customer. ## Integrating All Intercom Support Tickets with Close ### Step 1: Create a Webhook Zap in Zapier and get Custom Webhook URL Create a new Zap in Zapier and add the Webhook integration, click next until you see the custom URL ### Step 2: Create a Webhook in Intercom Go to Settings -> Integrations and click "Add Webhook Integration" Here are the topics I am passing in the Webhook: New Message from a User Reply from a User Reply from a Teammate Note added to Conversation Conversation assigned to Teammate User Unsubscribed From Email User tagged User untagged New events ### Step 3: Configure rest of Zap in Zapier Here is a screenshot of my Zap click for full image. Here is the text export (I assume you need to swap out my ID numbers): Subject: \[Intercom {{6451100\\data\\item\\type}}\] {{6451100\\data\\item\\assignee\\name}} <> {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\_name}} Body: Email Subject: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\_subject}} Conversation Message {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\parts\\conversation\parts}} Conversation Link: {{6451100\\data\\item\\links\\conversation\_web}} Other Action Data: Data Item Assignee Name: {{6451100\\data\\item\\assignee\\name}} Data Item User Name: {{6451100\\data\\item\\user\\name}} Conversation Message Author Manaul Tag IDs: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\manual\tag\ids}} Conversation Message Attachments: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\attachments}} Conversation Message Author Created At: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\created\at}} Conversation Message Author IP: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\ip}} Data Item conversation Message Author Ua: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\ua}} Author Email Domain: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\email\domain}} Data Item conversation Message Author IP: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\author\\_ip}} Original Message Body: {{6451100\\data\\item\\conversation\message\\_body}} And that's it! This was just my first attempt, it will probably get cleaned up a little but at least the core data is being passed. If you have any tweaks' I'd love to hear them. If this Business topic resonated, continue with Abstract Income: How to Support an Abstract Lifestyle.
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Start-up idea: Marketplace for mechanics to help buyers purchase used cars
Vinay Patankar · 18 Aug, 2015 · Business · Technology
I am thinking about a marketplace that would help buyers who know nothing about cars evaluate if a second hand car is a good buy or not. You could create a profile and post the 3-4 cars you are considering. Post details of their make, model, price and pictures or a video of the car and the engine. You could then post a bounty for a mechanic to help you out, with a reward of say $50 (or whatever you choose). Then similar to 99 designs, mechanics from all around the world could submit their reviews and advice on the cars. Giving you questions to ask, feedback on your pictures and prices, links to other cars or whatever you may need to help you make a decision. At the end of the process, you reward the most helpful mechanic the $50 prize. I imagine this would be a great way for mechanics from all around the world to earn some extra cash and an easy way for buyers to protect themselves from getting ripped off on a shitty car that could potentially cost them thousands. If you know of anything like this or are interested in building it let me know in the comments :) Check out my real startup here. You can see a few of my other startup ideas here, here and here, learn about why my first startup failed here. A strong follow-up in Business is Start-Up Idea: TailSearch - Search for Retail Stores.
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How the snooze button can make you more productive
Vinay Patankar · 12 Aug, 2015 · Business-process-management
Making decisions is one of the most important traits of any leader and is something I have to deal with on a day to day basis as CEO of Process Street. The science behind why decisions are important is explained in Science says you should do your most important work first thing in the morning by Drake Baer. While we don't always realize it, as we breeze (or slog) through our working days, we make countless decisions. Which email should I reply to first? Should I take care of this now or after lunch? The reason that we get tired at around 3pm isn't just because our body is diverting energy from the brain to the stomach as it tries to digest your lunch, but also because we have decision fatigue. We take the path of least resistance. Things we would usually have given thought to, we dismiss. Judges are well documented when it comes to decision fatigue, and since our decisions might not be as impactful or obvious as a choice to send someone to prison for life, it's still a real problem. The solution to overcoming decision fatigue comes in a strange form. A form that you might normally associate with laziness or days off work... The snooze button. Recently I was reading a post by Tomasz Tungz on how he discovered email snoozing boosts his productivity. This was interesting to me as I have recently adopted a couple of products that use the "snooze" function for managing tasks and emails. In the post, Tomasz mentions tools for snoozing emails including Dropbox's Mailbox, Google Inbox and Boomerang. I personally use Boxer which also has the snooze feature, but this is not how I primarily use snooze. Another tool worth checking out to improve your email productivity is Right Inbox. ## How I use snooze to manage tasks and emails I use snooze on two different apps and actually use it for BOTH task and email management, not just email. ### The first is Any.do Any.do is a task management app that I use to track my daily to-dos. This is my task dumping ground, I just have one main list and everything goes into it. The only separate list I keep is a shopping list that I share with my roommate and girlfriend. Besides that it's kind of like an 'everything' list that I just dump stuff into. I love this approach of managing tasks because when I have something I need to do I can just throw it into the main list, this removes a decision I need to make as I dont need to choose a specific list everytime I add a task. I use Evernote in a similar way for dumping notes, screenshots, receipts and business cards. I still have spreadsheets on wishlist. Any.do then has a focus mode called "Any.do Moments" that lets me me go through all my tasks one by one. Any task that is past due or that has no date attached will pop up, and it will ask me to action the item either by completing it or snoozing it for a future date. This is a highly effective way of managing tasks as I can easily push back things that I think are lower priority. This way of managing tasks via "Snooze" is the most effective way of managing tasks I have found and is the sole reason I use Any.Do over other todo apps (that and they are an AngelPad company). ### The second is Close.io Close is the CRM I use for managing my business relationships and for Process Street. Here is where I track emails, calls and notes specifically about other people. This includes customers, investors, partners, suppliers and other bloggers that we do cross promotions . The Close inbox and snoozing features are actually brand new as of the writing of this post (Aug 2015) they have only been out for a couple of months but this re-enforces the direction of apps moving towards task snoozing. Close beautifully combines both tasks and emails into a single view allowing you to power through all your emails and tasks in one go. This is incredibly helpful for me as a CEO but I imagine it's even more powerful for full time sales guys. Snoozing has been the most effective way I have found to manage both tasks and emails. It helps me action things faster and reduces the overall number of decisions I need to make each day. If you haven't already, try adding a snooze button to your Workflow and see if it improves your productivity. If this Business Process Management topic resonated, continue with How can you save time using the snooze button?.
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Vitoto Officially Shutting Down
Vinay Patankar · 31 May, 2015 · Business · Technology
2012 - San Francisco... Vitoto was a failure. It feels good to say that. There has been an air of uncertainty around the state of the company for the last few weeks, its nice to make a decision. Firstly, I am proud of myself for taking the shot. > "You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take." > \-- Wayne Gretzky I am also proud to have acquired my first startup failure. People in Silicon Valley respect failure, its almost like a badge of honor. Don't get me wrong, I would have much preferred a success, and I am really disappointed I was not able to generate a return for my investors, but I definitely left this experience with more than I started with so I'm not complaining. If you don't know, Vitoto was a startup I founded in July, 2012 that set out to create a collaborative video app for the iPhone. I came up with the idea while I was in Las Terrenes, Dominican Republic - I had been perpetually travelling for the previous 2.5 years while running my internet marketing company. I quickly raised some seed capital ($50k) and partnered with a Sydney team - Moroku - to build the MVP. After about 4 months of design and development (during which I traveled through the DR, USA, Thailand and Australia) we launched on the Apple App Store and I moved to San Francisco to start the funding gauntlet. 3 months, a plethora of emails, calls, meetups, pitches and half a startup accelerator later we are shutting down the doors. I want to keep this post as short as possible while both covering off why we are shutting the company down, and some of the key mistakes I believe we (I) made in this process. ## Why Vitoto is Shutting Down The short answer is: No money. Another short answer might be: Good idea, bad business. Below is the long: ## 0\. The Problem One of the key lessons I learned is that great startups have a blindingly obvious, ideally really large and painful problem that the company is trying to solve. Solving this problem should drive almost every decision in the startup. Vitoto did not have this. I mused on this in an earlier post. I tried to spin up problems that I could use in pitches and conversations like "its difficult for people to create collaborative videos" but I couldn't even convince myself, let alone anyone else. The problem just wasn't real enough. Next time: Next time I need a blindingly obvious, clear, defined, large, real problem that is being solved. No exceptions. > I have been working on a new startup applying the lessons I learned from Vitoto. Check it out here: Process Street ## 1\. The Team I have seen two types of successful startup teams here in Silicon Valley. 1\. Young teams who can survive on very minimal cash. These are teams of 2-5 people who have a blend of skills (technical, design, business) and can execute an entire startup between their core team. They are able to stretch $30k to 9 months as they all live in one house, work 15 hours a day, 7 days a week and survive on ramen noodles. 2\. Experienced, well funded teams. These are teams that are generally spear headed by an entrepreneur who has had a successful exit in the past. The entrepreneur goes around and recruits a bunch of his or her friends from their 6 figure jobs and convinces them to help create their next vision. Due to their strong track record and the experienced team formed, they are able to raise money before a single line of code is written. The money raised can be anywhere from $250k to $40 million. Both team styles have pros and cons, however, these two team structures seem to be the most successful. The Vitoto team fell somewhere in the middle. We had a great team, don't get me wrong, but there were some key elements in the structure that lead to the inevitable demise of Vitoto. The two key factors were: 1\. We had a team that was too experienced for the budget. 2\. We had no invested User Experience/Design specialist. Our team ran out of runway and could not develop new features into the product. The product was not getting the traction needed nor could we get the viral loop to work, this made the product unappealing to investors. We did not have enough money to support the team in executing the required UX tweaks and experiments, thus were unable to further develop the product to a point where it could get enough traction to attract investors. One key element here is that the Australian team was not able to deliver any code without money coming in. They have huge overheads and were unable to contribute time for pure equity. Next time: Next time I make sure I start or am part of a founding team that falls into one of the 2 above success categories. ## 2\. Lack of UX focus, planning and execution. The lack of UX focus was another key factor in the (lack of) success of Vitoto. The first element to this was that we had no dedicated UX specialist on the team. We did bring in outside expertise for the graphics design, and while the quality delivered was high, this put further constrain on the budget. The second element was that the team never properly sat down and brainstormed the UX. Quick decisions were made to get the MVP out the door and these had serious impacts on how the product was received by customers. Next time: Next time I will make sure that there is extensive planning, brainstorming, and user testing done on the UX of the product before any time or money is invested in actual coding. And I will make sure there is an invested UX specialist on the founding team. ## 3\. Resource Allocation When I budgeted my initial capital for the business, I budgeted to get an MVP out the door. While I understood there would need to be a marketing effort for the product, I didn't take into account the extent of tweaking that would need to be done to the product after the MVP to get it to a point of consistent user uptake. The UX is the most important marketing tool for an early stage startup. If people are not using your product, it doesn't matter how well you market it. I consistently had user feedback to add, remove or enhance features or experience. But continually found myself saying "it's on the road map but we don't have enough money to build it". A position I should have never been in. Next time: Next time I will make sure my initial funding can carry me to TRACTION not just the MVP. Traction (unless you're super lucky) is going to be a solid 6-12 months AFTER the MVP is released. So I will make sure I have enough to last that long before I dive in. ## 4\. Monetization strategy was loose. This is important, but not as important for consumer focused products. If you are building a consumer app without a clear monetization strategy, just make sure you have the runway as mentioned in point 3. You will either gain traction or you won't. If you gain traction you can figure out monetization, if you don't, well, you're dead in the water anyway. Next time: Next time I am not building a consumer product. B2B with a clear cut monetization strategy and a focus to start monetizing as early as possible. ## 5\. Product outside area of specialization Nobody in the team had built a successful consumer product before. We all had experience in the enterprise space, selling to businesses. We had no experience in consumer of video. We were not playing to our strengths. Next time: Next time I will play in a space I have lived in before. ## What's next? As I said at the beginning, this experience has definitely been a positive one. I can't even begin to describe how much I have learned. It felt like an accelerated university degree. I have gained a TONN of real world experience in the startup world, built a strong network in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and even have my next startup idea locked down. But for now, my visa to the US runs out in about a month so I will be leaving. My marketing company is still running strong and the focus is going to be on scaling that over the next 12 months. I am going to do a few stops in the US over the next few weeks, San Diego, Tempe, Pittsburg then I am going to head to Hong Kong to handle some banking and I want to visit my parents and little brother who are currently in Ningbo (a city in China near Shanghai). After that I am planning to move to Jaco in Costa Rica for at least 6 months. The words for the year are "Scale and Systems". Beyond building my business, I also want to focus on getting stronger in the gym, learning to surf properly and learning Spanish. I am also brewing the idea of doing another sneaky startup, working on team for this one so well see how that goes. What would you have done different? > I have been working on a new startup applying the lessons I learned from Vitoto. Check it out here: Process Street For another Business angle, read Vitoto Editing Features Launched.
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How to Make Awesome Videos for Your Store (With AI)
Vinay Patankar · 21 May, 2015 · Blogging · Business · Technology
Back in 2016, I wrote the original version of this post. Making a decent video for your store cost $300 to $600 in software alone, took days of work, and still looked amateur. You needed a microphone, screen recording software, animation tools, and video editing skills. That world is gone. In 2026, AI can turn a single product photo into a full video ad. No script. No storyboard. No editing. One image, one click, one video, and the results are outperforming traditional production in many cases. This is a complete rewrite. Every tool, every technique, and every workflow is new. ## Why AI Video Changes Everything for Ecommerce The economics have flipped. A traditional product video shoot costs $5,000 to $30,000 per collection. AI catalog video generation does the same job for pennies per SKU. But cost isn't even the biggest advantage. It's speed and iteration. When I wrote the original post, I praised DIY video because startups pivot constantly and you can't afford to reshoot every time your product changes. AI solves this completely. Product image updated? Generate a new video in minutes. Here's what the data shows: - 20% higher on-site conversion when AI product videos replace static images - 150% conversion improvement over static images in Pic Copilot's testing - 350+ videos per hour using automated AI pipelines - $0.54 per video for consistent AI UGC with the same character across unlimited variations The ecommerce brands winning right now aren't choosing between "professional video" and "DIY video." They're choosing between "some videos" and "a video for every single SKU in the catalog." ## The Two Types of AI Video That Matter for Ecommerce Before diving into tools, understand the two dominant use cases: ### 1. Product Videos (Catalog-Scale) These are the videos that live on your product pages, Amazon listings, and Google Shopping. They show your product in motion: rotating, being used, in context. The workflow is simple. Upload product photos, AI generates a video. This is where the biggest ROI lives. Most ecommerce stores have zero video on their product pages. Adding AI-generated product videos across your entire catalog is the single highest-leverage move you can make right now. ### 2. AI UGC Ads (Performance Marketing) These are the TikTok-style, talking-head, "authentic" video ads that drive paid acquisition. AI now generates realistic UGC creators: consistent characters that can appear across hundreds of ad variations. One ecommerce advertiser tested AI ads vs human UGC with $100K in spend over 3 months on Facebook Ads. The results were close enough that AI's 100x cost advantage made it the clear winner for creative testing at scale. ## The Core Workflow: Image to Video The killer workflow in 2026 is image-to-video. Here's how it works: Step 1: Start with a clean product photo. White background, high resolution. If you're already selling online, you have these. Step 2: Choose your AI video tool. Feed it your product image. The AI handles motion, camera movement, lighting, and context. Step 3: Add a hook and CTA. Layer on text overlays, a voiceover (also AI-generated), and a call to action. Step 4: Generate variations. This is the real power. Generate 10, 50, or 500 variations for creative testing. Different angles, different hooks, different styles. That's it. No script writing, no storyboarding, no editing timeline. The entire process that used to take days now takes minutes. ## The AI Video Tool Landscape There's no single winner yet because the space is moving fast. Here's how the tools break down by use case: ### For Product Page Videos Claid.ai is the current industry standard for brand-safe, commercial-ready product videos. Best for fashion and ecommerce brands that need clean, professional catalog videos at scale. Handles product attributes well. Luma AI (Dream Machine) offers strong image-to-video generation. Good for hero product shots with cinematic camera motion. Works well for higher-end products where you want that premium feel. Kittl (Motion on Canvas) launched February 2026. It turns static designs into animated content. Good for product graphics and promotional materials that need motion. ### For AI UGC Ads MakeUGC is the most-discussed tool for AI UGC. Pair it with Google's VEO 3.1 Extend for longer clips. Users report generating 350+ performance-ready short-form ads per hour, fully automated. HeyGen is an AI avatar platform for talking-head videos. Reviews are mixed: some love the output quality, others find the avatars still fall into uncanny valley. Best for explainer-style content where a "presenter" walks through product benefits. Topview is a UGC AI agent that works with Sora 2. It takes viral video formats and recreates them with your product and brand. Good for riding trends without manual video production. ### For Full Pipeline Automation Runway is the Swiss Army knife of AI video. Image-to-video, video-to-video, motion brush for controlling specific elements. The most flexible tool if you want creative control. Pika is built for fast iteration, good for generating lots of short clips quickly. Strong at stylized motion. Google VEO 3.1 is currently the most capable model for realistic motion. Best results when paired with other tools (MakeUGC, n8n workflows) rather than used standalone. OpenAI Sora 2 is strong for cinematic, longer-form content. Being used for full ad production by some brands. ### For Automation at Scale n8n + AI Video is an open-source workflow automation approach. Several ecommerce operators have built pipelines that take a product URL or image, generate video through AI APIs, and publish directly to their store. ## AI Voiceovers: Forget the Microphone In the original post, I recommended buying a $180 Yeti Blue microphone and recording your own voiceover. That advice is obsolete. AI voice generation is now indistinguishable from human voiceover for product videos. Tools like ElevenLabs, PlayHT, and the built-in voice features in HeyGen and MakeUGC handle this automatically. The workflow: write your script (or have AI write it from your product description), select a voice style, generate. You get studio-quality audio in seconds. For UGC-style ads, the AI voice is already baked into the avatar generation. The character speaks naturally with lip-sync handled automatically. ## AI Music and Sound Design Same story as voiceover. AI handles this now. Tools like Suno and Udio generate custom background tracks in any style. But honestly, for ecommerce product videos, you usually want minimal or no music. The product and the hook do the work. If you do need music, most AI video platforms include royalty-free background tracks. Don't overthink this part. ## The Chinese Ecommerce Playbook Here's where things get wild. Chinese ecommerce brands are already running AI-powered livestream sales where: - An AI model holds the actual product on a green screen - AI generates the voice in real-time - AI lip-syncs the face - Everything composites live This is 24/7 automated live selling. The tech exists today. Western ecommerce hasn't caught up yet, but platforms like TikTok Shop are pushing in this direction. If you're in dropshipping or high-SKU ecommerce, watch this space closely. ## What AI Video Still Can't Do Well Let's be honest about the limitations: - Rigid geometry. Hard products with exact shapes (electronics, tools) can get distorted. - Reflective materials. Glass, metal, and shiny surfaces are still tricky. - Precise product details. Size, texture, and material accuracy aren't reliable yet. - Brand consistency. Getting exact brand colors and styling requires careful prompting and often manual touchup. For products where precise detail matters (jewelry, electronics, technical products), AI video works best as a supplement to real photography, not a replacement. Use AI for the lifestyle/context shots and UGC ads, keep real photos for the detail shots. For fashion, beauty, food, and lifestyle products, AI video is ready to be your primary production method. ## Cost Breakdown: 2026 Edition ### Full AI Video Stack - Claid.ai: ~$49/mo (product page videos at catalog scale) - MakeUGC: ~$49/mo (AI UGC ad generation) - ElevenLabs: ~$22/mo (AI voiceover) - Runway: ~$28/mo (creative image-to-video) - Total: ~$148/mo for unlimited videos across all use cases ### Budget Stack - Kittl: Free tier (basic animated product graphics) - Google VEO (via AI Studio): Free tier (image-to-video generation) - CapCut: Free (editing and text overlays) - Total: $0 and good enough to start ### Compare to the Original Post In 2016, the budget setup was $144 for a few videos. In 2026, $0 to $148/month gets you unlimited videos across your entire catalog. And the quality is dramatically better. ## The Playbook: Where to Start If you're an ecommerce store owner reading this, here's what to do this week: 1. Pick your 5 best-selling products. Grab their hero images. 2. Generate product videos. Use any image-to-video tool (Runway, Luma, or VEO free tier). Upload the image, generate a 5-second product motion video. 3. Add them to your product pages. Even basic AI-generated motion outperforms static images. 4. Test one AI UGC ad. Take your top product, generate a UGC-style video ad with MakeUGC or HeyGen. Run it against your current creative on Meta or TikTok with $50. 5. Measure and scale. If conversions improve (they almost certainly will), roll out AI video across your full catalog. That's it. No $627 in software. No learning Adobe After Effects. No recording yourself in a quiet room with a $180 microphone. One product photo. One AI tool. One click. A video for every product in your store. The future of ecommerce is video-first, and AI just made that accessible to every store, regardless of budget or team size.
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Ultimate Youtube Video Ranking Guide
Vinay Patankar · 21 May, 2015 · Blogging · Business · Technology
I've been using videos to market our startup Process Street for the last few months and have been getting some great results with video bringing in a steady flow of views, leads and customers. Now, you might already be aware that video is an important marketing tool in today's online world — that's why products like PowToon exist — but the way I use video might be a little different. See, I'm not using video in a traditional sense of putting it on my website and using it to convert customers or explain ideas (although I do that too), I'm using these videos as pieces of content to rank in Google to bring in organic search traffic. # Why Video is Awesome Creating videos in this way is similar to creating blog posts or landing pages for SEO, but with some important benefits. Firstly, YouTube videos rank well in Google. Like really well. Since YouTube is owned by Google, and is already an extremely high authority site, chances are that a piece of content you put on YouTube will rank higher than your own site, especially if your site is new and doesn't have much authority. Posting content on YouTube also lets your content be discovered when people search YouTube, which is the second biggest search engine in the world, bigger than both Bing and Yahoo. Moreover, optimizing your videos to rank in Google automatically optimizes them to rank in YouTube too, bringing an additional traffic stream you otherwise wouldn't've had. But what is really great about ranking in Google search is that it's search traffic, the best kind of traffic for a product like mine, which is solving a very specific pain point for businesses. This kind of traffic brings us customers from huge enterprises which I otherwise would have had a hard time identifying and marketing to. # How I Rank YouTube Videos In this post I will explain the process I use to optimize and rank my videos in Google. Here are a few examples of terms my videos are ranking for in Google: Standard Operating Procedure Software (Google Search|Video Link) Business Systemization (Google Search|Video Link) Sharepoint DMS alternative (Google Search|Video Link) The amazing thing about ranking videos for these kinds of keywords is that, even though they might not have a ton of traffic, they are VERY targeted visitors, people searching for that exact kind of product. I am not going to talk about how to make a video in this post. If you want to learn more about creating videos, I recently wrote a post on how to create a startup explainer video plus PowToon has a number of great tutorials on their blog. In this post I will show you how to optimize your videos and get them ranking for your target keywords. # On Page Optimization The first thing you should do before uploading your video is prepare you keywords, title and description. ## Keyword Research When ranking YouTube videos it's good practice to target multiple long tail keywords in the video. This will bring in more traffic as you rank for multiple terms with just one video. For example, this video I did on checklist software is ranking for Checklist Software, Checklist Software Tool and Checklist Template Software. You should find a keyword to target based on the content of your video. This is pretty easy: type a few variations into the AdWords Keyword Planner tool and find the one that ranks the highest. There are a few tricks you can do to find keywords that have low competition, but for the sake of this guide I am going to a assume you already know what keyword you want to rank for before you created the video. For our example, lets use "Tree Removal Miami" > Tree Removal Miami Once you have your primary keyword, it's time to get to work building a list of secondary keywords and constructing a title and description for your video. Below is a video I made for a friend teaching him the process of keyword research and constructing the title and description. In the video I walk through two example keywords "Tree Removal Miami" and "Electrician Miami". The video is an over the shoulder of me doing it, and runs about 30 minutes if you need a detailed explanation. (Spreadsheet from Video) ## Build Keyword List Take your primary keyword and put it into the AdWords tool, then pick 3-6 other keywords that have the highest search traffic and are related to your product. You can also use Uber Suggest to find the most common searched for terms after your keyword. This is the keyword list I came up with for Tree Removal Miami > tree removal miami tree removal cost miami tree removal service miami tree stump removal miami palm tree removal miami tree removal services miami emergency tree removal miami tree removal company miami tree removal miami FL tree removal cost miami FL tree removal service miami FL tree stump removal miami FL palm tree removal miami FL tree removal services miami FL emergency tree removal miami FL tree removal company miami FL ## Video Title Use the keyword list to construct the title. Weave in as many of the keywords as you can with the title still making sense and not looking like spam. > Tree Removal Service Miami FL | 555-555-5555 | Low Cost Emergency Tree Stump Removal Company ## Video Description The description should include ALL your keywords, woven into legible paragraphs that again don't look like spam. > Tree Removal Service Miami FL | 555-555-5555 > Low Cost Emergency Tree Stump Removal Company in Miami FL. Get lowest cost services on your emergency tree removal. > We guarantee the lowest tree removal cost in all of florida for tree stump removal. Contact us today for a free quote from the most reliable tree removal company in Miami FL. ## Video Tags For the video tags, just copy and paste in your keyword list. Easy. ## Advanced Optimization There are also a couple of advanced optimization techniques that I hear good things about. They are: - Transcript (adding a written transcript to your video can help the search engines crawl the video and give you higher rankings) - Annotations (again adding more text to the video helps with search) I haven't tested these myself yet but so far I have been able to get to the first page of Google for a number of terms just using the methods above of optimizing the Title, Description and Tags then doing the off page optimization steps outlined below. # Off Page Optimization - Backlinks Now your video is uploaded and optimized, it's time to start ranking it. Ranking a YouTube video is pretty similar to ranking any website where the main ranking determinant is the number of backlinks you have pointing towards that video. YouTube has another factor however and that is the number of websites that have actually embedded the video, making it slightly different to creating backlinks for traditional websites. Here is a list of YouTube ranking factors in order of importance: 1. Embeds 2. Links with Anchor Text 3. Links without Anchor Text 4. Social Signals Below are the strategies I use to rank my videos on YouTube. Keep in mind that these are not all the strategies that exist, and that there are many ways to get backlinks and embeds. ## Submit to Social Media Properties - Share on personal Google+ and company - Share on company Facebook page, like it, share it - Share it on twitter company account - Retweet on your own account ## Submit to Onlywire Onlywire is a service that lets you manage over 30 web 2.0 properties from one control panel. It's awesome to get a quick backlink shot of 20-30 links to any post or video you publish. Submitting your video to Onlywire won't move the needle much but it takes just a second to do and the more links the better. I use Onlywire quite a bit as I use it to build links to every Web 2.0 post, guest post, video, forum post, profile, etc. that I create. This is a really easy way to get a quick link boost. Plus you can pay someone on Fiverr to set it all up for just $5, an effective, cheap and automated way to do social bookmarking submissions. I talk about submitting to Onlywire a lot in the rest of this post. This is not a necessity though, merely a shortcut. There are other social tools to help you manage various social networks, or you can simply submit to them manually for free. However, Onlywire is the easiest tool I have found, and it's what I use in my business. ## Post on Site Create a blog post or landing page on your website. A general rule for a landing page is that it should have 300-500 words of unique content. The keyword should be included in the title and the body. The keyword should be linked to the YouTube video, the video should be embedded onto the page and you should also link out to an authority site. To beef up the page further, add the keyword into an h1 tag and as the alt text of an image. This formula should be followed when posting anywhere, including your site, other blogs you own, or Web 2.0 sites. Here is a quick checklist: - 300-500 words unique content - Keyword in title - Keyword in body - Keyword anchor text linked to video - Embed video - Authority link - H1 tag with keyword - Image with keyword in alt text Once you have published your post to your site, don't forget to promote it. Submit it to social bookmarking sites, Onlywire and across the web. If you are looking for more places to promote your content, try this checklist. ## Post on Blog Network Create a blog post on a personal blog or other site you own. If you don't own any other web properties, now might be a good time to create a blog. Having a second web property such as a blog is a great way to get additional exposure and backlinks for your videos. I have a few older blogs that are still around and have some decent authority so I use them to write posts and embed my videos in, like this one I did on standard operating procedure software. Once you have published your post to your blog using the same format as above, submit it to Onlywire. ## Submit to Profiles Company profiles and business directories are another great way to get embeds for your video. Depending on your niche you can embed your video onto your LinkedIn page, Angel List profile, or Yelp listing. These are great quick ways to not only get backlinks to your videos but also to generally increase your branding as a company. Remember to submit your profile pages to Onlywire to get some secondary link juice. ## Guest Post Write related guest posts for other sites and find meaningful ways to link or embed your videos into the guest post. This is one of the most powerful ways to get links to your videos. In fact, I am doing it right now with this post. Another example of a guest post where I embed and link to a number of my videos is this post I did for the Startup Chile blog. Remember to promote your guest posts too! Submit them to social bookmarking sites and Onlywire. If you want to learn more about guest posting, try these guides: Advanced Guest Posting 10 Resources to Make You The Best Guest Blogger Ever ## Create a Post on Your Web 2.0 Properties Another great way to get embeds, links and views for your videos is to publish them on your Web 2.0 sites like the ones listed below. Use the same format as when submitting to your blog or website. There are a lot of different Web 2.0 sites available, and it can take a bunch of time and resources to post on all of them, so I have broken them down into Tier 1 and Tier 2 sites. Start with the Tier 1 and, if you have the time, keep posting onto the Tier 2 sites. ### Tier 1 Wordpress.com Blogger.com Tumblr.com Medium.com ### Tier 2 LiveJournal.com Soup.io Webs.com Doomby.com Hpage.com Sosblogs.com Blog.com SnapPages.com Jigsy.com Beep.com Tripod.lycos.com Ucoz.com Jimdo.com Bravesites.com Newsvine.com Storify.com Over-blog.com Whether you are posting on Tier 1 or Tier 2, every time you create a new post, make sure to submit it to Onlywire. ## Keep on Linking As you continue to write content, do presentations, post on forums, etc., remember to keep linking back to your videos when you can. The more links you can get back to your videos the better they will rank over time, so keep on plugging them wherever you can. If you do the linking optimization tips above and actively work on generating links and embeds to your YouTube videos, they will rank in Google and bring in a targeted, free flow of traffic. Tell us about your YouTube ranking experiences in the comments below! Related read in Blogging: Start-Up Chile Application Video.
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21 Things I LOVE About Travel
Vinay Patankar · 17 May, 2015 · Travel
I travel a lot. I've basically been a digital nomad for over 5 years, earning a living running (and failing at) start ups and various internet companies. I have visited hundreds of cities and met a lot of crazy people. Thus I know a thing or two about sleep hacks and travel gear. But even after all this time, I still love travelling. Travel is awesome. Here's why: 1. I don’t have to shave 2. Every day is an adventure 3. I have more time to read 4. I get to try new beer 5. I’m a friendlier person 6. I'm less fashion conscious (usually) 7. I’m forced into awkward situations outside my comfort zone 8. There’s no TV 9. I meet someone new everyday 10. Every day is the weekend 11. I have more time to write 12. I’m getting used to funky smells 13. I learn all day every day – kinda like school, only fun 14. I judge less 15. I no longer let ‘what I do for a job’ define me 16. I’ve become more comfortable on my own 17. Food! So much new food 18. I sleep less… It’s ok, I can sleep when I’m dead 19. I’m more relaxed 20. I have few material possessions to worry about 21. I smile more What do you love about travel? Related read in Travel: Travel and Me.
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