Hi, I'm Phil Freo

I built a micro-SaaS as my pandemic side project:

TeamHome.app – An internal company directory designed for remote teams. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Read on for details & some background…

My blog post on the Close.io blog was pretty popular (18,000 pageviews & lots of HN comments) so I wanted to cross-post it here:

Sweating the UI & UX details in Close.io: Emails & Email Addresses

We like to think of our sales software, Close.io, as having a lot of magic under the hood. When we do our jobs successfully, our users may not even notice, but their lives will be made a little easier. We try to make features just work without requiring users to think too much, even if that adds complexity in code.

Here are a few examples:

I just launched a website for Close.io, the product we’ve been working on at Elastic for the past few months.

Go check it out: http://close.io/

We’ve built this as “sales communication software”, which we believe didn’t really exist before. CRMs (salesforce.com, I’m looking at you!) are inadequate because they are more like databases of contacts than software that really helps you do the selling. We’ve trying to change that by making your sales phone calling and sales emailing experience tightly coupled with your lead data (CRM).

Would love to hear any feedback you have about the product!

I watched Jeff Veen’s “Designing for Disaster” talk (below) and took away a couple of parts that I thought were really good. Some notes:

How to do Product Reviews (can be design, product, process, anything) — making an objective process out of something that is very subjective.

• Optional attendance, but mandatory participation (keeps everyone focused)
• Not a forum for expressing opinions
• Rather, a place to solve problems.
• Define in the beginning if session is supposed to be divergent or convergent.
• Divergent –  I want as many ideas to solve this problem as possible – let’s talk about everything; brainstorming
• Convergent – Evaluating feasibility, acknowledge constrains. Drive towards consensus.