Over the past 5 1/2 years of business, we have a fallen into a variety of processes and systems. Some are convoluted, some are purely convenience. In almost every case, they were implemented in the heat of the moment and rarely received refinement. We often had huge dreams of building an entire platform for not only managing audio and video publishing, but also providing all of the tools we need to run and build Castfire. In reality, we have found this is a very poor use of our engineering focus.

In the last 6 weeks, we have started putting process in place and locking in our use of 3rd party services. Our engineering time is extremely valuable, so maximizing our time working on core functionality is key. On that note, here are some of the key companies that we rely on as we scale sales and account management while keeping our engineers focused on our publishing platform.

Highrise
We had been using Salesforce for almost two years but found that it was overwhelming for our small sales staff. Unfortunately, during setup, we tried to populate it with all of our contacts throughout the years. The result was a database filled with inactive records and poorly categorized. While Salesforce is a very strong SaaS platform, we needed something simpler.

Enter Highrise from 37Signals, which is a very simple CRM for small businesses. The cost savings was not only substantial, but it also allowed for everyone in the company to have access to the data. We have now begun consolidating all of user management, pipeline, and marketing efforts within Highrise. Our goal by the end of the year is to use Highrise to do monthly reviews of not only our pipeline, but also existing accounts. It will aggregate everything from marketing emails, billing, support and more into a single place. Even early into this process, it has increased our productivity and our internal conversations about Castfire.

Zendesk
We have been a Zendesk customer since July, 2008. They have provided a wonderful support system that has grown dramatically over the years. The email workflow for support tickets has been essential for us. With the addition of Randall Bennett, we have begun taking advantage of the knowledge base and forum functionality as well. We are looking forward to utilizing the integration with GoodData to provide reporting on our response times and the types of tickets.

In our goal to consolidate around Highrise, this October, we will be utilizing their webhooks implementation to add tickets to Highrise automatically. Unfortunately, it is not a simple process to integrate immediately, however, it should only take a couple of hours with some creativity.

Freshbooks
Prior to March, 2009, our billing process was a partially automated, fully pain in the ass system. While there is a separate datawarehouse for every client on Castfire, representing all usage of our platform, the actual process of getting invoices out was slow and painful. It involved quite a bit of back and forth over emailed spreadsheets and often incurred delays.

We implemented the Freshbooks API in less than a week, fully automating the monthly process of creating invoices. While we still incur delays on certain months as we QA all of the billing, we have found that Freshbooks is rock solid and is a fabulous invoicing system. It is such a valuable tool for Castfire it is painful to think of the days we did not use Freshbooks.

In October, we will also be integrating our Freshbooks solution with Highrise. While there is not an existing solution, webhooks again to the rescue. This is a huge step in being able to review account status from a single application.

The most difficult aspect of our billing process has been the refinement of our pricing model. While the iteration process has led us to a greatly simplified model that is resonating with customers, it is a nightmare to keep up with the variety of historical models. We are beginning to consolidate all customers to a single model, but it has been a struggle. Simplifying our pricing model not only makes it easier for our customers, it makes it much easier for our operations staff to accurately bill each month.

MailChimp
There are a ton of email marketing companies on the market. As we have been heavy on video and engineering expertise, and admittedly light on marketing expertise, we looked for a solution that was easy, offered tons of functionality and, most importantly, would walk us through the process of managing our newsletter. Mailchimp has provided us all of the functionality in a simple to use interface with fantastic pricing.

As a bonus, their integration with Highrise is great. We are able to gather all of the stats from our email marketing directly into our CRM to provide a single dashboard to review our current and pipeline customers. All of the functionality was enabled in about 10 mouse clicks. Amazing.

Google Apps
This is the basis of it all for the Castfire team. Google has rolled out an amazing suite of tools for our team. I am not sure where we would be if we had to put together Mail, Calendar, IM, Office apps and simple wikis on our own. I can promise you that it would not be as reliable, would not be as complete and would not allow our engineers to focus on our core business. This has been a major win for Castfire.

The ability for web applications to interact through APIs and Webhooks makes life so much easier for start ups. We picked best of breed solutions and connected them, utilizing very little of our engineering time. We are thrilled with what we have put together in the past 6 weeks and look forward to refining this the remainder of the year. Thanks to all of the companies and open technologies that have made this possible.

So I’m the new guy around here. My name is Randall Bennett, and if you’re a Castfire customer, you’ve probably seen my face before.

It’s not that I’m famous, or some sort of megalomaniacal egotist, it’s just that for the past few years a much younger Randall in an uncomfortable looking suit has showed many people the basic power of Castfire. Early 20s Randall, as we’ll call him, helped the Castfire team prototype the original video product all those years ago, and now late-20s more experienced Randall has joined the Castfire team to help run the show.

I’m a video producer by trade, technology journalist by passion, and I’m really looking forward to helping shape Castfire, and helping change web video for the better. On a day-to-day basis, I’ll be primarily responsible for managing our relationships with customers after they start using the product. In short, that means customer support, but it also means I’ll be dealing with feature ideas to fix problems, building internal systems to minimize support issues in the first place, and managing external communication.

Since I’ve been around the product from its early days, I’ve had some in-depth insight into the product and seen it evolve. Now, we’re going to make sure that all of our customers know what’s happening inside Castfire.

For starters, take a peek at http://status.castfire.com/, our newly minted status blog. Our goal is to give you some insight into the inner workings of the company to get a sense of where we’re going. On the Status Blog, you’ll see what our development team is working on day-to-day. From major things like upcoming scheduled maintenance and outages, to minor things like code pushing to the backend, we’ll peel back the curtain and show you (briefly) where we’re going. Also, when major issues come up and are resolved, we’ll keep you in the loop on the Status Blog. And should an act of God strike our data centers, the Status Blog will remain standing since we’re using our friends at Tumblr to host it.

Aside from the status blog, you’ll notice us popping up on this blog more often. This is the place where we take some of the knowledge we gain by doing this stuff all day every day, and share it with you. We’ll share things we’re excited about, things we find interesting, and generally keep you up-to-date with video-related trends we’re paying attention to.

All of these changes are in place simply because we want you to know what we know: Video is a complex ecosystem that’s on the verge of many major evolutions as it moves from signal to bistreams. We’re excited about the shift, and here to help you make sense of it all.

As for me, I’ll be manning the support desk, so if you’d like to get in touch, that’s a good place to find me. Let’s stay in-touch, m’kay?

Our recently signed deal with Samsung exemplifies how Castfire is being used to provide on-demand customer training.  Instructional videos will be organized around Samsung’s broad product categories such as TV, Mobile, Photography, Office, etc. and made available to customers and retail partners.

This is not the first time that Castfire has been used by Samsung. For the last year or so, the marketing agency named MWW Group has used Castfire on behalf of Samsung and Nikon.  For Nikon, we were a part of the Looking Good In Pictures campaign staring Carson Kressley of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

We are pleased to be working with Samsung again!

Many sites worry about the Digg effect — their traffic can be overwhelming. We have always built with the mindset of having all of customers getting Dugg at the same time and it has worked like a charm. Yesterday, however, we got the true Digg effect: Federated Media is running video ads through Castfire ON Digg. Instantly, our system monitors alerted all of us that the system was starting to perform slowly under the increased load. Uh oh…feels scary!

It was at that moment that I was happy I followed the lead of our friends at Dogster and had retained Laine Campbell from Palomino DB. In our hurried conference call, with everyone throwing out suggestions, she calmly identified the issue and suggested a simple, elegant solution. With her assistance, we had the fix in 30 minutes later and the all of the servers were back to no load and humming along. Laine has quickly become a part of the Castfire team and works with us not as a consultant, but a full member of the team.

If you are a startup looking at growth and scaling, I pass on the same recommendation that Dogster did: contact Laine! She is uber responsible and quite the wizard. Thanks to Dogster and Laine!

Sometimes it is shockingly evident to me that Castfire is able to move forward only because of the highly skilled members of the team. I have to publicly thank Christoph, Leo and David for each owning their part and getting this release into production. This week alone has seen 5 AM mornings — that’s finish, not start — three times!

To Christoph: yet again you amaze me, my friend. Castfire would not be here without the super human efforts you continually extend. As always, let’s keep moving on to the next release.