Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

Process Example: Enable Quiz

Strategy and Core Processes

Andrew starts out by defining the company's strategic objectives:

Enable Quiz will build a technical quizzing platform that dramatically increases our customers' success in recruiting and ongoing skills development. This means working with our pioneer customers to discover what works and establishing a foothold in the mainstream market.

As we discussed earlier, the second part of their mission is likely to morph into something more oriented toward measurable growth and scale.

Next, he outlines the four core processes to implement those objectives:

1. Acquire and Retain Customers

This covers every action the company takes to get customers and keep them, including marketing, sales, on-boarding, and retention. In high-tech businesses, sales and post-sales are often divided up organizationally. However, Andrew wants these functions to be organized together since, in a SaaS business, revenue is as much about customer retention and average billings as it is about acquisition.

2. Provide Service

This deals with everything the company does to keep the service running and performing well per the customers' expectations.

3. Develop Product

This deals with everything the company does to deliver the product, all the way from the point of conceiving new features to releasing them in a nice, tidy, consumable package.

4. Bill

This last process deals with making sure customers are billed, done so in the correct amount, and that ...