X

Asana, a popular work management platform, was facing the challenge of managing its Ambassador program at scale. The program, designed to connect with users and provide them with resources to better use Asana, required a significant amount of manual work. This included onboarding new members, encouraging existing members to participate, and recognizing members when they achieved program milestones. The manual nature of these tasks was time-consuming and inefficient, potentially hindering the program's growth and scalability. Asana was in need of a solution that could automate these processes, allowing the team to focus on adding value through customer care rather than managing day-to-day operations.

The case study revolves around the challenges faced by the founders of Carlypso, a tech startup that sold cars 100% online. The company was founded in 2013 and sold to Carvana in 2017. The primary challenge was the limited engineering resources, which were spread thin due to competing priorities and a constantly changing roadmap. The founders felt that they were distracting their engineers with requests to integrate off-the-shelf apps, which was hindering them from focusing on building technology products that could differentiate them from their competitors. Another significant challenge was the manual tasks that prevented the company from scaling quickly. These tasks involved moving data from one system to another, which was time-consuming and inefficient.

The rise of 'news deserts'—communities no longer covered by local newspapers—has become a significant issue in the United States. Simon Galperin, a seasoned journalist, identified this problem in Bloomfield, N.J., and initiated the Bloomfield Information Project to address it. The project aimed to collect and share news and information across the community. However, the challenge lay in manually curating information into a newsletter. Bloomfield residents expressed that news and information in town were fragmented, with no single reliable source. Simon needed to aggregate these pieces and disseminate them to the public, a task that was equivalent to a full-time job. The Bloomfield Information Project aggregated news through RSS, websites, online search, and CrowdTangle, a social monitoring tool. While verifying sources and information required a human touch, Simon needed a solution to help with the more tedious aspects of the process.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit North America, a Canadian volunteer group, Canada Sews, found itself in the midst of a massive effort to sew and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) to health workers across the country. The group, led by Lee-Anne Moore-Thibert, was managing a network of 8,000 volunteers to meet the growing demand for masks. Initially, the process of receiving mask requests, inputting them into a spreadsheet, and manually sharing them with the teams was fraught with potential for human error. The system was not only time-consuming but also risky as exhausted team members could easily make mistakes, such as deleting an entire row of requests. The challenge was to streamline this process, eliminate the risk of human errors, and efficiently manage the large-scale volunteer effort.

Blue is the Land, an eCommerce business founded by Derek Howles, faced a significant challenge in managing its sales records across multiple channels. The company, which sells neighborhood maps, operates on various platforms such as Shopify, Etsy, and Fancy. While these multiple sales channels increased revenue, they also complicated recordkeeping as transaction information was scattered across different systems. It was crucial for the company to ensure that orders and customer information were consistently funneled through the fulfillment pipeline. The challenge was to create a centralized database that could consolidate each transaction from every channel in a convenient and efficient manner.

Calendly, an online scheduling platform, was facing a challenge in inter-team communication. The company was neither a small startup nor a Fortune 500, and thus, had its unique communication needs. The teams within the company were communicating and sharing information, but the process was inefficient. The tools each team relied upon did not sync with each other, leading to manual data transfer across teams and departments. This manual process was prone to forgetfulness, mistakes, and was a significant time drain. The company needed a solution that could get their tools to communicate as efficiently as their teams.

BuildASign.com, a company specializing in custom signage, was facing a significant challenge in managing their growing number of leads and contacts. The marketing team was constantly requesting assistance from the company's developers to connect apps that lacked native integrations or to build custom reports and search tools. However, the developers were often unavailable as they were shared resources with the support and sales teams. The marketing team had to manually move leads and contacts from the generator to a customer relationship manager (CRM) or ActiveCampaign, which was a time-consuming and menial task. The workload was becoming overwhelming and was diverting resources away from more important tasks.

Real estate agents often find themselves spending a significant amount of time on administrative tasks such as data entry, transferring information between systems, and managing social media posts. This was the case for Sommer Cronck, a realtor and founder of Best Bellingham Homes. A large portion of her time was consumed by managing contacts and leads across different tools. Whenever an email came in from a client, she had to check her customer relationship manager (CRM) to see if the person was already in her contact lists, and then add a note with details from the email. This manual process was time-consuming and reduced her opportunities to engage with clients effectively.

Be Epic, Inc., a digital marketing agency based in Edmonton, faced the challenge of managing complex processes for their clients, including social media management, SEO, web design, and video production. A significant part of their work involved social media and advertising, where they had to generate and manage leads for their clients. They utilized Facebook Lead Ads for this purpose, but the process of managing multiple ad campaigns, targeting different audiences for each client, and transferring new leads between different apps was time-consuming and complicated. Without a proper process in place, they risked losing leads and wasting valuable time.

Blissfully, a SaaS monitoring software company, was facing a challenge in managing and responding to leads in a timely manner. The company understood the importance of quick response times, as leads are time-sensitive and often reach out to multiple competitors. The delay in response could result in losing potential clients. Additionally, Blissfully recognized the value of having detailed information about the lead to improve the chances of closing a sale. The challenge was to find a way to collect lead form submissions, build a robust profile of the lead, and notify the growth team instantly to cut down the response time.

For any business, identifying and engaging the right audience on social media platforms is a complex task. The challenge is not just to find the audience but also to persuade them to visit the website, make a purchase, or sign up for a newsletter. The situation becomes even more complicated when the data collected from different campaigns live in separate systems. This fragmentation of data leads to a decrease in productivity and an increase in the chances of duplicate information in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Four eCommerce businesses were facing these challenges and were looking for a solution that could help them connect with their customers more effectively and manage their data more efficiently.

Convert, a startup that develops A/B testing software, was facing a challenge with its lead qualification process. The company was generating leads through three main channels: email newsletter subscribers, webinar registrants, and trial account sign-ups. However, the volume of leads was more than their small sales team could handle. As a result, the sales team was only able to follow up on leads that appeared to have the most potential, based on the domain name of the email address. This approach was not effective in further qualifying leads to increase the probability of sales success. The team realized that they were potentially missing out on valuable leads, such as a CTO of a major brand who might have used a personal email address to sign up for a trial.

Pia, the founder of Curate Well Co., was faced with the challenge of helping emerging and established female entrepreneurs streamline their service-based businesses. Her clients, whose expertise ranged from life and leadership coaching to IT strategy, needed help in executing their business strategies effectively. One of her clients, a Life and Leadership Coach and Consultant, was transitioning from a decade-long career to launching her own coaching business. She needed help with the strategy and logistics of this transition. Another client, an attorney focused on proactive planning, was looking to switch from the industry-standard billable hour model to a completely customized a la carte package model. Pia's challenge was to help these entrepreneurs improve profitability, scale their programs, and design their businesses to make an aligned and authentic impact.

Covalence, a coding bootcamp, was facing challenges in managing their growing number of students. With the increase in admissions, the bootcamp had to scale their processes at the same rate as their growth. One of the major issues they faced was the manual work involved in creating invoices for new students. The process involved creating a profile for the new student in their customer relationship manager (CRM), then jumping into their accounting software to build an invoice, copying over the student's information, and finally emailing the invoice to the new student. This was a time-consuming and inefficient process. Moreover, the custom backend that Covalence's Chief Technology Officer, William Johnston, and his team had built to connect all their tools lacked flexibility and was cumbersome to modify or add new tools.

Fred Castagnac and Sean Kennedy, product marketing managers at Zapier, were facing challenges in managing large scale projects due to the lack of organization. As a completely remote company, Zapier's team works together across the globe, making organization essential. The team was struggling with scattered mission-critical documents across different apps and folders, making it hard to search and interpret information. The apps they were using did not offer the features they needed, making the organization process inefficient and time-consuming. They were in search of one app that could help them accomplish better organization.

Craft Clubs, the UK's largest alcohol subscription service, experienced a sudden and significant increase in business after a successful appearance on Dragon's Den. The company received a £75,000 investment and a new business partner, leading to a sixfold increase in their numbers. Despite this rapid growth, the company did not have a technical staff member or outsourced technical help. Co-Founder Jon Hulme was responsible for managing the company's tech stack, which was comprised of off-the-shelf software tools including MoonClerk, Zapier, and Google Sheets. The challenge was to manage this surge in business and maintain efficient operations without the need for additional technical resources or expertise.

Chi City Legal, a small law firm based in Chicago, was facing the challenge of managing their operations with a minimal administrative staff. The firm, consisting of only two attorneys, was struggling with the administrative load that came with running a law firm. The tasks included client communication, creating proposals, documents, and forms, and managing case information. The workload was overwhelming and was taking away from the time they could spend on their clients and their cases. The challenge was to find a way to manage these tasks efficiently without having to hire additional administrative staff.

DevsData LLC, a tech consulting firm, was grappling with productivity issues due to the overwhelming volume of emails, tasks, and notifications. The team found that the sheer volume of these tasks was eating away at their productivity, causing a backlog of work and hindering progress. The situation was particularly challenging as it reflected poorly on the company's efficiency and ability to manage tasks. The team was spending approximately half of their workday managing multiple inboxes, which was not only time-consuming but also distracting. The distraction often led to other tasks being pushed back, resulting in little to no progress in their actual tasks. Furthermore, the team was struggling with multitasking, which often resulted in a compromise on the quality of output.

Customer.io, an app engagement platform, faced a significant challenge due to its small team size and shared responsibilities. The team members often found themselves working on diverse projects, ranging from marketing to sales and support. The shared responsibilities often led to redundancy and duplication of tasks, which not only wasted time but also disrupted their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and skewed analytics. The team needed a solution to manage the multiple apps used across different departments and to foster collaboration. They also faced the challenge of standardizing data from different applications used for sales, marketing, and people operations tasks. The data from these apps came in different formats, making it difficult to standardize and analyze.

Digioh, a platform that runs eCommerce quizzes for businesses worldwide, faced a significant challenge as it grew. The company needed to scale its operations, particularly in sales and customer onboarding, without expanding its lean team of 15 employees. The CEO, Rishi Shah, who also led the company's sales activities, found it increasingly difficult to manually email new prospects as the company's customer base expanded. The process of triaging new sales leads needed to be automated to keep up with the growing demand. Additionally, the company needed an efficient way to onboard new customers once a deal was closed. The challenge was to automate these processes without compromising the high-touch, personalized service that Digioh was known for.

DoSomething.org, a well-known non-profit organization in the United States, faced a significant challenge in managing the influx of applications for their internship positions. The organization's popularity led to receiving hundreds of applications for each announced position, all of which ended up in the inbox of the Director of Engineering, Desmond Morris. The existing process involved potential candidates sending their resumes and cover letters to a designated email address. However, this led to several issues, including applicants getting lost in the inbox, delayed responses to applicants, lack of a proper feedback mechanism from teammates, and the risk of missing out on good candidates. The organization recognized the need for a more efficient process to manage the recruitment and selection of interns.

Dollar Flight Club, a small and remote startup, was facing a challenge in managing its resources efficiently. The company, which was bootstrapped into existence, had a significant overlap of responsibilities, especially in the early stages. Engineers hired for specific tasks often found themselves creating custom reports or connections for the sales and marketing teams. As the engineering demands increased, it became increasingly difficult to allocate resources for one-off projects on other teams. The company needed a solution that would allow them to do more work and save time, without constantly relying on the engineers.

DogSpot, a company that provides heated and air-conditioned dog houses for pet owners on the go, was looking for an efficient way to celebrate their business wins, specifically new leads. The company wanted to share these victories with their team in real time to boost morale and show the team how their hard work was paying off. However, manually sharing this information was time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, DogSpot needed a way to manage these new leads and contacts in their customer relationship manager (CRM), a task that was also taking up significant time each week.

Eloquent, a small Australian-based digital marketing agency, was facing a significant challenge in sharing and capitalizing on leads for their clients. Despite their successful campaigns, the process of downloading and exporting lead sheets daily was time-consuming and inefficient. The team also struggled with sending effective follow-up email sequences. As a small startup, Eloquent couldn't afford to invest in an expensive tech stack to streamline these processes. They were using a variety of smaller tools, which they jokingly referred to as their 'Frankenstein' tech stack. However, this approach was not sustainable in the long run, especially as their clients also couldn't invest in large tech stacks.

Fellow, a company known for its beautifully crafted brewing tools, experienced rapid growth, expanding from a team of 20 to 80 with plans to grow by another 50% within a year. The company sells its products to a wide range of retailers across 50 countries. However, as Fellow grew, it became increasingly difficult to balance selling to large retail accounts like Nordstrom while still supporting small, independent coffee shops that form the backbone of Fellow's business model. The challenge was to maintain the company's focus on the specialty coffee community and continue to work with small retailers, despite the lack of bandwidth to manually set up hundreds of new wholesale accounts and manage national retail accounts.

Fortified Bicycle, a company that designs and sells theft-resistant bikes and accessories, faced a significant challenge in reaching out to potential customers and spreading the word about their products. Despite successful Kickstarter campaigns and a strong product offering, the company needed to find a way to connect with potential customers more effectively. They were experimenting with Facebook Lead Ads to increase awareness about their bikes, but found it difficult to establish immediate contact with interested individuals. The traditional method of manually checking leads and sending text messages a day or two later was inefficient and did not provide the immediate engagement that the company desired.

Graphiq, a graphic design agency based in Norway, faced a unique challenge in coordinating new project requests with designers located in different time zones across the globe. The company's mission is to make the internet look better by enabling businesses of all sizes to outsource their design requests to a global talent pool. However, the geographical dispersion of their designers posed a significant hurdle in managing the sales process. The process of manually transferring client information, creating new deals and contacts, notifying the team of new projects, and creating tasks and subtasks was time-consuming and inefficient. The challenge was to streamline and automate this multi-step sales process to ensure seamless coordination and efficient project management.

eSight Eyewear, a company that provides electronic glasses to help the visually impaired see again, was facing a significant challenge in managing their client scheduling and data management. The popularity of their product, the eSight 3, meant that they had to schedule a large number of in-person demonstrations to show how the technology works. Before implementing a new solution, each of their clients would spend at least 30 minutes responding to scheduling emails. Additionally, eSight's Vision Advocates spent about an hour's worth of work per client just on scheduling the first demonstration. This process involved multiple calls, including reminder calls and often missed calls. The company needed a solution that would streamline this process and improve the scheduling experience.

Fluent, a company that helps brands acquire new customers with high lifetime value, faced a significant challenge in targeting and identifying interested customers and matching them with the right brands. The company works with subscription brands, streaming services, and game developers, surfacing content and promotional offers to potential customers based on their preferences and interests. However, tracking the success of these campaigns was not straightforward. Fluent could not solely rely on tracking online metrics like lead submissions as it did not provide a comprehensive picture of sales that ended offline. The company needed to track offline conversions, which involved exporting conversion information, reformatting it, and then uploading it to Google Ads, a process that was time-consuming and did not fit into their existing workflows.

Free State Project, a nonprofit based in Manchester, New Hampshire, is committed to promoting liberty and education. Their mission is to recruit and organize over 20,000 pro-liberty activists. However, being a small operation, they faced challenges in managing their limited time and resources effectively. Their operations included sending thank you emails to donors and activists, tracking payments to independent contractors, and keeping a record of additional expense details and event sales information. These processes were entirely manual, leading to an increased likelihood of mistakes and errors. The manual processes also resulted in time and resource inefficiencies, hindering the organization from focusing on their primary goals.