Archive for Entrepreneurship

My InsideSalesSummit interview: How sales and engineering teams should work together

I did an interview for the Close.io Inside Sales Summit, a free 5-day virtual summit with perspectives from 50+ leaders on inside sales. Ryan Robinson interviewed me for an engineer’s perspective on topics related to sales, including how sales teams and engineering teams can work best together.

Watch the interview here: https://www.insidesalessummit.com/interviews/wednesday/phil-freo/

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Solve multiple problems at once

Startup engineering teams face many decisions about what to build. At Close.io, many areas compete for the focus of our small engineering team. Customers often have one little thing they really need. Our team envisions the next big thing to move the product forward. There are poor UX workflows to optimize. We have an idea on how to grow our customer base faster. And of course there are always bugs to fix. The list is endless!

A small engineering team doesn’t have the time or resources to regularly improve every part of a product. It’s not uncommon for a section of an app, once launched, to remain untouched for a year or longer. We usually work to solve a problem or empower customers in a new way or fix a pain point, and then we move on to something else.

One reason I believe our super small team at Close.io has been successful is that we often solve multiple problems at once. When a feature needs to be built, we often expand the scope a bit to include other related problems or features that naturally go together with the first one.

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How one of my tweets landed Close.io a $585/month customer

One of my tweets is featured in an article on Mention.com:

How Close.io Closed $585 in Monthly Revenue from 1 Tweet.

Check it out!

Press around Close.io

We’ve been getting some great press and feedback since launching Close.io software for salespeople.

They’ve got a couple good quotes from me in the PandoDaily article.

Quick notes from Startup School 2012

I got to go to Y Combinator’s Startup School this year and had a great time. Between the reception dinner the night before and the day of event I got to meet a lot of great people and reconnect with some I’d met in the past or only talked to online. Most of the speakers were really good.

I took some very brief notes during some of the talks of the 1 or 2 things that stuck out to me as either surprising, motivational, or instructional.

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Two Years at Quizlet

The last two years (2010-2011) I spent working at Quizlet were an incredible learning experience.

Like I did in Jan 2010, I wanted to reflect on some of the technologies I learned and things I did over the last 2 years…

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SXSW & Business Cards

With SXSW coming up, I decided to make up some quick business cards and have them printed through OvernightPrints.com. I can’t believe SXSW (and Spring Break) is only a week away, but I am excited and looking forward to learning a lot and meeting some great people.

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Some lessons on business from traveling

I am fortunate enough to be able to work from Florida for a couple days due to July 4th, leaving me with a nice 9-day visit back home. While traveling, I observed a couple of interesting things about business, opportunities, and life. Check them out… Read the rest of this entry »