Ask HN: How startups manage their operations?

[t0t4lnoo3]

Hey everyone, we are two guys with no tech background in need of some help understanding how successful startups managed their first hires, interviews, new leads, first paying customers, invoicing, customer communication, to do lists, who’s working on what, customer bookings, feedback, change of schedule, how to analyse customers needs to offer more services and all the data that all of this creates?

For a sense of scale and what we do, we have 100 paying customers, we sell a service, think at home haircuts, so we have 8 hairdressers and need to hire 2 more today, then we need to keep track of all the families and manage their bookings, one family might have 6 members, 2 parents with weekly haircuts at 2pm and 4 kids with haircuts from 4 to 6pm every two weeks all good until one kid can’t make an appointment and need to reschedule, so now we need to organise a time the kid and the same hairdresser are available, this happens quite often. But the biggest pain is matching desired customer time with available hairdresser schedule with lots of back and forth through emails and calls, then the next school term the school changes after school activities and we are back to zero, so this won’t ever be fixed.

Then we need to invoice every family, gather feedback, changing hairstyles, hairdresser notes, parents notes, kids feedback, parents goals, our goals, reviews, wom recommendations, new leads, book trial haircuts, trial feedback, etc…

On top of that we have all the CVs we are getting, interview notes, how to quickly find a past CV that wasn’t perfect but we are desperate so let’s interview them again and offer some training, book training, book trial haircut, invoice, get trial feedback from customer and hairdresser, analyse trial feedback, review, hire, etc..

Could go on..

[mtmail]

The question is quite broad. If you're new to HackerNews check https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade Many services are SaaS with monthly pricing and there's a lot of promotion (startups adding themselves). The HR section seems relevant.

I'd say the majority starts simply to lots of Excel/GoogleDocs spreadsheets, then add chat tools for the website, then messaging tools for the team to manage one mailbox (https://frontapp.com/, https://missiveapp.com/ and such), possibly https://calendly.com/ to let user add themselves to calendars, sales tools like https://close.com/

High growth might then require consolidated data with tools like Salesforge, https://www.hubspot.com/, https://segment.com/ To integrate and finetune those can be a full-time (engineering) job.

[t0t4lnoo3]

Thanks, how could I make the question more specific?

I had a quick look at the ToolsOfTheTrade, we are currently using Trello to organise who’s working on what and to do list, an industry specific service for invoicing, gmail for team communication, Hubspot for new leads and several spreadsheets and gdocs.

I’ve researched quite a bit about the tools but I’d like to hear from first hand experience how people are implementing this as I can see that the setup we have today is about to stop working, it’s getting harder to find and track what’s going on and I’m afraid to choose a wrong tool now that could be tougher to change later on. Or that there’s a smarter simpler way to do things that I’m now aware.