We’ve been pretty lucky at incident.io to be able to avoid dealing with more complex authentication issues for quite a while, because we piggy-back on Slack to know who you are and which organisation you work in. Whole companies have been built around doing authentication and user profiles really well, so it was pretty neat to be able to avoid doing most of that work for so long!
Getting your pricing right is critical to the success of any SaaS company, but finding a model that works can be tough. Price too high, you won’t close enough deals - your business will fail. Price too low, your business model will be unsustainable - your business will fail. To add to the complication, when you’re a new startup your goals are evolving.
We’re a small startup (10 people at time of writing) with big ambitions, particularly when it comes to our product. With so many things we want to do, it’s important for us to be structured the way we approach our work, without being so process-driven that we lose all the benefits of being small and nimble. As we’re still new, and the team is growing all the time, very little is set in stone.
We wrote this article in response to a question asked in our Slack Community. Click here to join hundreds of technology leaders discussing best practices for incident response! ✨ We know a thing or two about incident response. As such, we're often asked to advise when companies are designing their incident response processes. A common question is "How do you design your incident severity levels?". It's a great question given how central they are to incident response!
Based on our newfound data feet, we’ve started consistently tracking the adoption rate of our latest features. As it happens, we’ve been impressed with the results! For example, we were delighted to see that our new tutorial flow was completed end-to-end by 35% of our users (against an industry average of less than a quarter for 6-step product tours like ours). I know, I know: being at such an early stage means it is arguably easier to hit customer needs on the head.
There’s no one-size-fits-all incident response process. Depending on your organisation’s shape and size, you’ll have different requirements and priorities. But the same three pillars form the core of any good process, whether it’s for the largest e-commerce giant or a scrappy SaaS startup.
The role of an engineer at a startup is a tangled web: as well as writing code, you have to be your own product manager, QA tester, customer support and designer. But there’s another hat that you have to wear which you might not have thought about: copywriter. All products have copy, from welcome messages to text on a submit button. At incident.io, we have to put on our copywriting hats every time we add a new feature.
If you’re working at an early stage startup and looking to get some good incident management foundations in place without investing excessive time and effort, this guide is quite literally for you. There’s an enormous amount of content available for organisations looking to import ‘gold standard’ incident management best practices – things like the PagerDuty Response site, the Atlassian incident management best practices, and the Google SRE book.
When I first started out as an engineer I really leant in to the idea of what’s often called “being a hero”; I would get to the office a bit early to make sure I could fix anything that had gone wrong overnight. I loved the camaraderie of someone outside engineering bringing their laptop over with a critical process broken for me to fix (even if I’d been the one to break it!). Being a hero feels really good for a while, but over time, it loses its shine.
Nowadays, easy access to data is table-stakes for high-performing companies. Easy access doesn't come for free, though: it requires investment and a careful selection of tools. For young companies like us, the question is how much? And when do you make that investment? Having grown to ten people, several without engineering backgrounds but with strong data needs, we decided 2022 was going to be that time.
