Scott McRae

🌱 Many early-stage startups I've worked with have leaned heavily on word-of-mouth to hire their engineering teams. They bring in people they've worked with before or contacts of friends. There are plenty of pros to this: ✅ These hires tend to stay longer. ✅ References aren’t always necessary. ✅ It’s quick and cost-effective. And while I’d never suggest abandoning this approach (because it works!),in my opinion you still need to get hiring and attraction processes in place for the future. Without proper hiring and attraction processes in place, when you need to reach outside your ‘networks’ of referrals you will find it hard to keep scaling. Often by this stage urgency and volume of hiring has increased as well! Even if your word-of-mouth referrals keep coming, diversifying your tech team with fresh perspectives is crucial. Plus, referrals are a great way to test and refine your hiring process. Would you still want ‘hiring and attraction’ processes in place even if you had a great referral process? 🤔 #StartupHiring #TechRecruitment #EngineeringTeams #ScalingStartups #TalentAttraction #HiringStrategy #ReferralHiring #DiverseTeams

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15% to 40%+ of experiments are invalid due to gaps in QA. It’s a big range. It’s a serious issue. It’s impacting your business. To be honest, after 1500+ experiments in the last 10+ years I can’t remember the last time we run a serious* experiment without squashing some bugs in development. Did we miss some? Of course. Did we get better over the years? Absolutely. Do we learn and apply new insights to our QA process each time? Damn right we are. That’s how we got to where we are today: → Each new client starts with a foundation of 50+ QA checks  → Evolving and updating it as we go for each client → Establishing a clear framework & process It is a process. Unfortunately it’s a mind numbing process sometimes. → hence the checklists You also need the right person, right attitude and right eye for details. No, it’s not the engineer or developer you got to write your code. That would be like asking the fox the guard the chickens. It doesn’t matter how hard they try. They’ll fail more times than they’ll succeed. Often times marketers confuse: “Is it working?” with “How can I break this” Small but important difference. — — — It’s experimentation and a/b testing QA week… How many “bugs” did you squash on your latest experiment?   — — — P.S. “Experimentation Confidential | Off the Record” ↳ Private conversations. Actionable insights.

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Ditch the Commute! 15 SaaS Companies Crushing Remote Work in 2024: The future of work is flexible, and these top SaaS companies are leading the charge with awesome remote-first cultures: 1.) Zapier (automation platform) 2.) GitLab (version control) 3.) Cloudbees (software delivery management) 4.) Automattic 5.) Doist (task management) 6.) HubSpot (CRM platform) 7.) SurveyMonkey (online survey tool) 8.) Slack (communication platform) 9.) Zoom (video conferencing platform) 10.) Dropbox (cloud storage) 11.) Mailchimp (email marketing platform) 12.) Stripe (payment processing platform) 13.) Canva (graphic design platform) 14.) Airtable (collaborative work management platform) 15.) ClickUp (project management platform) Considering a remote role? Research the company culture and benefits to ensure it aligns with your needs. Look for strong communication practices and support systems for remote teams. **Do you work for a remote-first SaaS company you love? Share it in the comments! #remotework #saas #careerdevelopment #hiring #recruiting #flexibility

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I don't often make time to provide feedback on the products I use (I know, the hypocrisy) but felt compelled to do it for this product because I'd want to know if I were their product folks. This is what I sent when asked why we canceled our subscription: "We were trying out XXXX for a webinar we held on June 4th and live-streaming to LinkedIn. We set it up weeks in advance, bought 2 licenses so we could train a back-up person in case something went wrong, did test runs, ran paid promotions, and secured 350 registrations, which is a lot for us as a start-up. We went live on the dot and started getting slack msgs from employees who could see/hear nothing. We troubleshoot, but can't figure out what we did wrong. As a last resort, we hopped out of the scheduled one and quickly launched a new one (with none of the branding we spent so long setting up). We were live...except the people who were looking for it on the event page were seeing a notice that said "this event is canceled".  So anyone who came to the event site 8 or 9 minutes late thought the event was canceled and likely left. The situation also frustrated our guest speaker (rightly so) because his rep is on the line, too. But we were willing to give it another try with an upcoming webinar if we could figure out what we did wrong to make sure it didn't happen again. The customer support rep, a nice guy named Colin, did some research and found it was a backend error on your side. Turns out that editing event info via LinkedIn after it's linked to XXXX can cause a backend error.  How in the world were we supposed to know that? And just how many of those jack-in-boxes are out there? All my brain heard was "any random series of keystrokes, typed in any order, in the future or past, by any person you've ever had coffee with can possibly screw up your webinar at your very peak moment of vulnerability”. I never liked action films; they stress me out. All those surprise car crashes, explosions, plot twists, and chase scenes. I like documentaries with soft-voiced hosts like Jacque Cousteau, who quietly interacts with fish, all while rocking gently on the Calyspo. No scary cliff scenes, spinning knives, or mutant raptors. Just a quiet, reliable bedtime story where you fall asleep to the sound of dolphins instead of staring at the ceiling, rigid with terror because of some sound the ice maker downstairs made. We are canceling because we accidentally walked into the wrong theater. We heard amazing reviews and loved the marketing. But sometimes it’s still not a fit. Thank you for the responsiveness and professionalism of the customer support team who did their best to help. I'm in marketing and feedback is key. I wanted to give you an honest account of what that awful hour felt like for us and throw in enough humor to suggest we forgive you. Please fix that pesky little bug or put enough info in the instructions so we know what not to do. Sincerely, Holly"

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I often post about moving away from job ads and reactive hiring to fill engineering roles. Recently, a CTO at a FinTech startup asked me how to make this shift. I thought I’d share my thoughts. The first step? Define your Ideal Candidate Profile, just like you define your ideal customer. This isn’t only about filling one role. It’s about building a profile to guide the whole engineering team. Big companies, like FAANG, can talk to every top engineer. Startups don’t have that time or budget. But we can still make progress by focusing on a targeted group. For example, you could look for engineers who specialize in Golang, live in a specific region, and have a passion for HealthTech (or whatever fits your needs). Having this profile helps you go from reactive to proactive hiring. To make it work, everyone involved in hiring needs to agree on this profile. You’ll know you’ve nailed it when the whole team can tell if a candidate is worth a chat. It’s still a big time investment to reach out and build relationships with candidates. You need a clear, consistent message. But the first step is knowing what your Ideal Candidate Profile truly looks like. Does your business have this in place, or do you still base hiring on individual roles as they open up? #StartupRecruiting #EngineeringHiring #ProactiveHiring #StartupGrowth #EngineeringTalent #StartupHiring

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Definitely not the first time I've heard this... And probably won't be the last. "We just invested in a AB Testing software, but honestly we're just guessing with tests..." I heard this from a 9 figure brand yesterday, you'd know who they are, if you have a kid under 10 🎶 Props to them for being honest, but lets not put the cart before the horse. I am all for testing... And I would much rather a brand test all the things they would normally just implement. That is a far better approach. Waaaay less risk. And you'll at least learn a little. But if you're really serious about improving your on-site experience. AB Testing alone won't cut it. That's a step in the process. If you don't do the rest of the process... You will get half baked results. It's like baking sourdough, but forgetting the starter. You see the truth is: It's really hard to complete the recipe successfully by skipping steps. So why are you doing that with your CRO efforts? If you're are one of those brands... That has invested in a testing software, but needs a little help. A little direction. Here are 5 steps you should follow: 1. Use quantitive data to focus and prioritize efforts. 2. Use qualitative research to identify the problems and ideate solutions. 3. Test to validate you are making an impact. 4. Repeat steps 1-3 to get the most out of your efforts. 5. Follow me for the nitty gritty of each step. Bonus: Shoot me a message I love to talk CRO and I won't sell you... I promise.

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I scaled ScraperAPI from a one-man project to a 7-figure acquisition. Here are 6 tips on writing copy for a developer audience. 1) Don’t BS Devs can smell that from a mile away. Don’t know what you’re talking about? Find a technical person who does. Thinking of stretching the truth to make your product sound a little better? Forget it. 2) Call to action, but not too much Conversions happen slowly with developers. The worst thing you can do is constantly make them feel rushed. 3) Keep it clear This isn’t the time for run-on sentences—short and to the point will do. If your “why” and “how” aren’t clear after the first read, it’s game over. 4) Prioritize accuracy Whether it’s a landing page or a paid ad, you want your first impression to not just be cohesive but to give the right information. If developers see inconsistencies in your messaging further down the conversion path, consider them gone. 5) Know the lingo I’ve seen way too many dev tool ads describing products with terms developers themselves would never use. Make sure there’s a line of communication between your copywriters and your technical folks to keep the language authentic. 6) Build trust Got technical experts on your team? (If you’re building a dev tool, the answer is almost undoubtedly a “yes”). Even if it’s only a phrase, play that up. Developers want to know they’re getting something from like-minded peers who actually understand their pain points. tl;dr: 6 tips on writing copy for developers - Don't BS, avoid being too sales-y, keep it clear, prioritize accuracy, speak like a developer, build trust

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I'd just like to call out Hostfully for absolutely _nailing_ their product integration strategy, at least as far as I can tell from the outside. Here's what I think they got very, very right: 1. They clearly mapped out their customers journey and painpoints, and understood how their product fits into the lifecycle and "jobs to be done". There are a few frameworks you can use to map this, but almost certainly you've already done some of this when building out your core product. So when you're planning your product integration strategy, do what the Hostfully team did and map tools to journey points, then figure out which ones are the most critical path. 2. They built quality integrations (or coordinated to have them built, TBD). This is table stakes, but it's obvious when you look at the documentation etc. 3. They documented them incredibly well! Look at the 1-7 steps in the journey and how they break it down. *chefs-kiss* 4. I can't guarantee this, but I'm willing to bet anything that everyone there in the GTM team knows about this. Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and likely any agency partnerships they may be brewing up. Just a thing of beauty. I don't often get excited by a marketplace and integration strategy. But gotta give them roses when they're due!

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An email landed in my inbox today making a crazy claim. What do you think? Can even the best developer tool 5x your engineering productivity? Probably not. And any product that claims so probably makes other less-than-transparent claims. Ellipsis (YC W24) doesn't. Our AI code reviews & bug fixes will improve your engineering productivity by ~10%. We don't need to make crazy claims because our product actually works. If you're buying AI developer tools, do your research. You can install in 2 clicks and start a free 7 day trail at https://ellipsis.dev

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🚨 They call it the "silent growth killer." I disagree. It’s LOUD. Operational inefficiencies disrupt team morale, impact customer follow-through, erode partner trust, and frustrate vendors. The (red) flags are flapping in the wind! I launched Circle 4 Marketing, LLC to offer a solution. With 25 years of marketing experience across the retail, hospitality, tech, and non-profit sectors, I believe the critical first step in strategy development is understanding your capacity for growth. Whether you or someone in your network needs support with one-off consulting projects or longer-term fractional leadership to drive results, I can help! We'll start with a 30-minute complimentary discovery call! https://lnkd.in/ev8Qxj-C #OperationalExcellence #sustainablegrowth #PartnershipMarketing #Circle4Marketing

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Here’s another gem from D.S. & DURGA's website: the custom set builder. A bundle is a bundle, so I won’t really dive into any strategic considerations here. I just love the amount of UX thinking that clearly went into building this. No wasted clicks. No clunky interactions. A few moments of delight, such as the “Free Shipping” animation. Whoever worked on this, hats off to you. #dtc #ecommerce #design #ux #bundles

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Mic Drop on The Product Manager Podcast with Hannah Clark! The tech market is more unstable than a toddler on a sugar high, and if you're a product manager clinging to that dusty resume, you're toast. That's why I just threw down FIRE on The Product Manager. We weren't there to sip tea and talk fluffy unicorns. We eviscerated the idea that it's all about your resume. This ain't a participation trophy game. You need to weaponize your skills and become a selling machine. Learn how to read the damn room (the hiring manager's headspace, that is) and convince them YOU are the NUKE they need to obliterate their problems. Listen to the episode: https://lnkd.in/ednfd4BS And learn how to dominate this wild west of a job market. Don't be another resume in the slush pile. Become a freaking HIRING MANAGER MAGNET. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 💯 💯 💯 💯 💯 💯 P.S. Still lost in the dust? Hit me in the comments with your burning questions. Let's get you hired, killer. #productmanagement #jobmarketmayhem #careeradvice #podcast

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Programming is Unnecessarily Hard! I’ve taught programming to business and product folks at Acko and Coverfox Insurance. The goal was to help them run queries and get data without depending on the tech teams. Here’s the reality check: Before they even get to writing code, they’re buried under syntax, editors, file organization, server deployments, version control, and so on. As a developer, I get it—it’s part of the job. But for non-tech folks, this has been a total roadblock. It’s not about their aptitude; it’s the crazy learning curve. That’s why I founded FifthTry. We believe programming should be as easy as changing a cell color with conditional formatting in MS Excel. Doesn’t that instant win make you want to keep going with Excel? Coding should be just as rewarding from the start. I am excited to share that over 1,000 non-tech folks have already started their projects with us 🚀 A big shoutout to our early supporters: Dr. Sneha Upadhyay, Swapnendu Banerjee, Rutuja Kapate, Jahanvi Raycha, Govindaraman S & others. Let’s make tech easier for everyone. #CodingForAll #FifthTry #TechMadeEasy #Fastn

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1% reach. Just 1%. That’s how much Airbnb’s company account got on X, compared to their CEO's account for the same announcement. Based on Airbnb’s 2023 Winter Release results, they've shifted their strategy to have all feature announcements come from Brian Chesky’s account. The data speaks for itself. Throughout my career, I’ve been passionate about building content for executives to help them land stories and build their personal brand. Recently, I discovered Social Files by Tommy Clark, and his articles prove that an executive’s presence is a game changer, both internally and externally. Here are a few key takeaways I found in Clark's content: 💡 Think in Slack Groups 💡 Your content should be so compelling that your target customer can’t help but share it in their Slack group, sparking conversations among CMOs and CEOs. That’s when you know you’ve hit the mark. 📝 Create Share-Worthy Content 📝 Remember Debbie at her desk? Shaan Puri shared how BuzzFeed writers used to craft articles for “Debbie at her Desk,” the bored professional seeking a 5-minute distraction. Captivate Debbie, and she’ll share your content, amplifying your reach. ✨ The Executive Edge ✨ Executives as brand ambassadors bring a personal touch to social branding that a company page can’t match. Their unique voices make your brand more relatable and trustworthy. Long story short ➡ If you’re an executive and not showcasing or leveraging your personal brand, you and your company could be missing out. #SocialBranding #MarketingStrategy #ExecutiveBranding #ContentMarketing #DebbieAtHerDesk Full Airbnb story: https://lnkd.in/ewAhwbKf

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Two things I’ve seen the best PMs do really well: 1. Creating hype: They get everyone in the organization excited about any initiative and align xfn teams. 2. Open-mindedness: They don’t get too attached to a specific idea. Instead, they take a step back, view things objectively, and obsessively gather feedback from as many people as possible. Kevin Anderson is one such awesome PM who has a genuine curiosity and infectious passion for Experimentation. I had a fireside chat with Kevin last week hosted by Statsig, where we discussed various topics, including the latest trends in experimentation, build vs. buy, reducing friction, measuring success, and so many insightful anecdotes that you can check out here: https://lnkd.in/gRgi4KDd #productmanagement #experimentation #data

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PRO TIP. If you are going to use #AI to write a LinkedIn message to sell your services, spend at least a minute or two reviewing and rewriting it to make it sound like a human wrote it. I will NEVER reply to such a message... EVER.

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Pricing transparency is often the number one complaint clients have about their agency. Software projects are notorious for going over budget. From the beginning, we felt Devize needed to solve this for our customers. We had some ideas, but it took a TON of iteration to get right (and luckily, we're not just an agency, so we can do things others can't) Our customers wanted pricing that was predictable and transparent. So, we tried offering fixed-price projects. But our customers needed to be agile as the build went along. So, we switched to fixed-price sprints But scoping and pricing every sprint added a lot of friction So, we started selling packs of hourly work. Hourly work, even as a bundle, is almost always a bad idea (too many bad incentives). Finally, we introduced our development subscriptions, and I think we've nailed it! Our customers get a fixed monthly fee (all their hosting and development included), the scope can change without us pausing everything, and as a team, we're incentivized to complete their work as quickly as possible. No pricing plan is perfect, but I think what we've settled on is pretty close. I'm not sure our model would be possible without building on our development platform.

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I wanted a simple framework for my website. I wasn’t about to haul WordPress or Angular into this. So, I went down the SSG (Simpler Static Site Generator) rabbit hole. After testing a few options, I chose 11ty. It’s lean, clean, and, with Bootstrap, it’s been a blast to build. ChatGPT has made it fun too. I ask ChatGPT as much as I need, and boom—I’m learning exactly what I want to know, faster than ever. No more: 1️⃣ Digging through Google for answers that don’t exist. 2️⃣ Posting in forums and dealing with internet trolls. 3️⃣ Sitting through YouTube tutorials for that one line of useful info. I’ll leave the link to the webpage I’ve been working on with ChatGPT: 👉 https://lnkd.in/d5DMHBkr ChatGPT even helped design my story layout, inspired by Medium.com. Three stories are up so far. Here’s one to check out: 👉 https://lnkd.in/e8ct98Zm 🎉 Got your own AI win? Share it in the comments! #RealEstate #RealEstateNoteInvesting #RealEstateInvesting #RealEstateInvestor #AI #ChatGPT  #WebDeveloper #SoftwareDeveloper #SoftwareEngineer

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Every year I deep dive into the annual BenchPress Report from The Wow Company. Here’s what stood out to me… The agencies with the highest growth rates are all doing 3 specific things: 1) They're using PSA (Professional Services Automation) software  This made perfect sense to me, because we saw the growth of our own customers at Teamwork.com‎ follow the same pattern. They started out asking us for basic task and project management features. Over time, growing firms started asking us for time tracking, utilization rates and profitability reporting–they wanted one tool that helped them manage the entire client work lifecycle. Generic project management just wasn't enough anymore. 2) They're reviewing gross margin (Monthly) It still seems crazy to me but among the firms with slower growth rates, only 65-75% of them are reviewing gross margin at least once per QUARTER–let alone once each month. How can you manage profitability if you’re not looking at your #’s all the time? So many service-based businesses fall in the trap of looking at their top line revenue as they try to scale. But if you aren’t keeping tabs on your actual profits, it’s tough to keep reinvesting profits into that future growth. 3) They're maintaining high utilization rates  The stats show a similar challenge we saw in our own State of Agency Operations Report. The agencies with slower growth rates struggle to hit the common industry benchmark of 60%+ for average overall billable utilization. The fastest growing firms were hitting billable utilization rates of almost 75%! That’s what the stats show.   Is there anything you typically see that fast-growing professional service firms usually have in common? #B2B #growth #professionalservices #clientwork #clientservices

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