Personal blog of Jesse Wynants, Founder of Prezly.com

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English (Global)

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Whenever your company starts growing and you start hiring more and more people, almost every management book will tell you to start delegating, putting your team more in charge. But what they often fail to mention is that this is probably one of the most challenging steps to take as a founder, and maybe not even the right thing to do at this point in time. Another great fallacy is, that this starts with hiring and onboarding people on your responsibilities, this is completely wrong and will end up costing you tons of time and money.

On delegating your founder's responsibilities

Whenever your company starts growing and you start hiring more and more people, almost every management book will tell you to start delegating...

Having a clear and organized internal knowledge base is crucial for any company, and at Prezly, we've been using Notion as our internal knowledge base since early 2018. After spending many hours refining our structure, we believe we've found the perfect solution. In this post, we'll share our structure with you and provide a template that you can easily duplicate for your own use.

The Ultimate Guide to Better Company Documentation Using Notion

Having a clear and organized internal knowledge base is crucial for any company, and at Prezly, we've been using Notion as our internal knowledge...

We returned from our annual company retreat 2 weeks ago. Although we're remote-first, we're surely not remote-only, and having that yearly in-person meet is a pretty essential part of our company strategy. We organise this internally, which requires quite a bit of time, but it puts us in full control over the whole experience.

The cost of running a company retreat

We returned from our annual company retreat 2 weeks ago. Although we're remote-first, we're surely not remote-only, and having that yearly...

In 2017, on a company retreat, I shared the following slide with our team:

"Do not Die" was our only strategy for the first 8 years of our company

Pretty much anything we decided before showing that slide was based on the company strategy "Do not Die," and I’ve got to say, we got pretty good at not dying. It's a founder skill that's rarely appreciated in company building. Mostly because all business books talk about having a clear vision, a spectacular product, and a sleek marketing plan. But it's rarely mentioned that figuring these things out can take a long, long time. So you need to make sure that you're default-alive while you're executing on these things. Additionally, there are macro-situations out of your control, which could hamper your growth in the early stages. Prezly was started in 2008 in the middle of the financial crisis, so we needed to set ourselves up for survival throughout those first years.

While reading Rand Fishkin's blog post on performance advertising being an Analytics Scam, I started thinking about our own marketing budget and what we could have done with that money if we hadn't spent it on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter ads. If we follow his logic and say that the money we spent on ads didn't really make a difference in sales, what else could we have done with the money?

What if we had spent a decade worth of paid advertising budget on something else?

While reading Rand Fishkin's blog post on performance advertising being an Analytics Scam, I started thinking about our own marketing budget and...

As a bootstrapped startup, cashflow is one of the more important metrics you need to keep an eye on. Not just because you actually need that cash to keep everything running (though this is important). If you're growing, you want to know what's available to re-invest and how many new people can you hire? For us here at Prezly, running this forecast allows us to make sure our hiring plans are feasible and gives us enough of an edge to hire pretty close to what comes in.

The indie hackers guide to building your SaaS cashflow forecast

As a bootstrapped startup, cashflow is one of the more important metrics you need to keep an eye on. Not just because you actually need that cash...

One of our main values is "Customer Love" – two words that are easy to scratch down in any company handbook. We want our customers to like us – who can argue with that? Actually acting upon it, actually proving internally and externally that you live by that value, is a lot harder.

Why does the whole company (still) do support?

One of our main values is "Customer Love" – two words that are easy to scratch down in any company handbook. We want our customers to like us...

Even after a decade of running a PR tech company, this is still a common question we get from people interested in Prezly. Do you offer journalists' contact details? We've always said No, and it happens that this often stops the conversation. It seems that for some of us, this is a key requirement. Yet, our recent global PR survey shows that the majority of PR practitioners don't deem buying media lists to be essential to doing their job.

Why we don't sell contact lists, and why you shouldn't buy them either

Even after a decade of running a PR tech company, this is still a common question we get from people interested in Prezly. Do you offer...

Why everyone at Prezly communicates with clients

Lessons learned: everyone on first-line support

If you’re a Prezly customer, you may have noticed that, depending on the day of the week, you’ll get help from a different Prezly team member. That’s because we have a rotation system for first line support.

Raising money is over-emphasised in today’s startup world. The most successful startups seem to be the ones who’re best at raising money. For starting entrepreneurs it feels the logical step to take, but it’s not.

Customers before Capital

Raising money is over-emphasised in today’s startup world. The most successful startups seem to be the ones who’re best at raising money. For...