Google Apps helps CustomMade operate at the speed of small business

Posted by Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade, an online platform for buying custom goods from local Makers. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

CustomMade is built on quality craftsmanship. We’re an online marketplace that matches our customers with a network of nearly 11,000 of the world’s best craftspeople - we call them Makers - to give them access to high-quality, custom-made goods. My co-founder, Seth Rosen, and I started CustomMade because we love working directly with Makers to build things that matter to people. We’ve been able to make it successful because we have tools that let us maintain the high metabolism that small companies require.

We started in 2009 as a two-person company working out of my one-bedroom apartment, and by being nimble and operating quickly, we’ve grown to 45 full-time employees working out of our headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Google Apps for Business is the agility engine that helped us get there. It’s been the backbone of our communication and collaboration, letting us focus on getting work done rather than how we get it done - a crucial distinction for a small business.

Google Apps helps us smooth out the rough edges of running a small business, like onboarding employees. Teaching new hires about the business and culture is inherently difficult, but since most of our hires use Gmail on a daily basis, we don’t have to spend as much time teaching them how to use our technology. By giving them the tools they’re already familiar with, they’re able to adapt quickly and jump right into their jobs without worrying about how to set up a meeting with Calendar or share a Doc with their teammates.

With thousands of Makers selling tens of thousands of different products, we’re a very numbers-focused company. Google Apps makes tracking goals across all of our teams incredibly simple. Our sales, concierge, and product teams all work towards weekly goals, such as site traffic and requests for custom items, which they update constantly in a shared Google Sheet. This gives me visibility into each team’s performance and metrics, and I know the data I’m looking at is always up-to-date. We also use Docs and Sheets for operational tasks, like storing creative briefs and tracking licenses, contractors, addresses and funnel conversions.

Google+ Hangouts are our secret productivity weapon. We work with 15 freelancers and consultants, including 10 in India, one in the UK and the rest across the US. Hangouts make it feel like they’re right here in the office with us. Our team hosts five to 10 Hangouts each day - they’ve become an integral part of our day-to-day routine.

Moving fast and staying nimble is essential to CustomMade’s success, and Google Apps keeps us on our toes and forging ahead. Instead of spending time worrying about IT problems or outdated Excel worksheets, we focus on connecting Makers like Marv Beloff with bow tie enthusiasts and helping bring dreams of custom wood tables to life.

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Johnny Cupcakes has gone Google

Posted by Justin Hiltz, Media Futurist at Johnny Cupcakes

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Justin Hiltz, Media Futurist at Johnny Cupcakes, a designer, manufacturer and retailer of unique, limited edition t-shirts founded in Boston. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

We’re fans of individuality and expression at Johnny Cupcakes. Our t-shirts are specially made in small batches to help express and reflect our customer’s unique styles. This independent ethos helped propel our brand from a cult favorite in our hometown of Boston into a multi-million dollar, international business with stores in London, Los Angeles and, of course, across Massachusetts.

We’ve grown a lot since Johnny Earle started Johnny Cupcakes in 2001, but we’ve always put a premium on staying fresh – both with our designs and the technology we work with. When I joined the company two years ago, I realized our email system was causing more harm than good, especially at the rate we were growing. I knew we needed an upgrade, I knew it didn't make sense to install a server that required constant maintenance, and I knew most employees were already using Gmail on their own. Moving to Google Apps seemed both attractive and obvious.

Google Apps for Business makes communication a snap. We’ve grown to 50 employees, but still work at the same breakneck speed we did when it was just Johnny hustling to get the company off the ground. That’s why it’s essential to have the tools to keep up with our pace. Google Chat makes that possible. We love that we can send a quick ping to someone with a question, an idea in need of feedback or a project update without having to leave our desks.

Google Apps saves us a lot of time and prevents a lot of headaches. Take our recent website redesign, for example. Our customers are our biggest fans, so we wanted to show them some love by highlighting a handful of them on our new site. At first, the thought of coordinating, collecting and curating that amount of content seemed daunting. I was worried we’d have to use a 3rd party questionnaire app or do everything over email and pull it all together manually (and painstakingly). Then I realized I could do it all through Google Forms. I set up a questionnaire, sent it to our customers, and saw the responses show up in real-time in a single spreadsheet. It saved me hours of work I would’ve wasted emailing, copying and pasting.

Johnny Cupcakes is all about our customers – we love them and they love us. This connection fuels our drive to make clothes that are both exclusive and accessible. Google Apps allows us to communicate more effectively, which helps free up our time so that we can concentrate on the things that really matter: our customers.

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GHouse has gone Google

Posted Tim Luckow, Founder & Owner of GHouse

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Tim Luckow, founder of Boston-based GHouse, a record label, management and promotion company. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Photo by Christopher Evans, Boston Herald

One of the most enduring critiques of the record industry is, as Q-Tip rhymed in 1991, "Industry Rule No. 4,080: Record company people are shady." While some things have improved since then, there are still plenty of ways the industry could be better. I started GHouse, a Boston-based music label, management and booking agency, to make that change happen.

Transparency reigns supreme at GHouse: we’re dedicated to showing our artists what happens behind the scenes on the business side so they can focus on their music. We want them to know exactly how much they’re making from digital sales, how many people are streaming their songs online and what each venue contract really means. It’s good both for the artists and for us: we’ve doubled our profits quarter-over-quarter since the start of 2012.

Google Apps makes that transparency - and the vision I have for my business - possible. The foundation of this clear communication sits in Google Sheets. We create, share and constantly update a spreadsheet for each of our artists that tracks performance across multiple channels, from the number of times their songs are live-streamed on certain sites to how many tickets they’re selling for upcoming shows. That way, the band can hop into the spreadsheet at any given time and know how much they can expect in royalties and sales.

As we’ve grown, so has the geographic distribution of our bands. Thanks to Google+ Hangouts, it feels like we’re still in the same neighborhood. Instead of having to venture down the Eastern seaboard on a bus each week, we’ll catch up with them over video conferencing. That’s eight hours I spend focusing on my business rather than commuting along I-95.

Most importantly, Google Apps has helped me prove the legitimacy of the business side of GHouse to the investors, who are an increasingly essential part of the company’s future. I track everything about the business in Sheets, including quarterly distribution and tour numbers, divided by artists and labels. The investors I’ve shared these with love how all this information is centrally located, impeccably organized, updated in real-time and accessible to the team at any time, from any device.

Google Apps is truly the core of my business. It’s helped GHouse function as a company for four years without an office, whether we’re updating our artists’ performance spreadsheets over lattes at a coffee shop or doing last minute planning for a SXSW showcase in Austin. I’m able to run a record label like I think it should be run. To me, that’s real success.

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Daily Grommet has gone Google

Posted by Aimee Anderson, Vice President of Business Development at Daily Grommet

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Aimee Anderson, Vice President of Business Development at Daily Grommet, a Boston-based online marketplace for new, innovative consumer products. See what other companies that have gone Google have to say.

At Daily Grommet, we love finding the next new thing. Since we started in 2008, our site has launched more than 1,500 products from companies with innovative consumer product ideas, including luggage, solar-powered lights, funky watches, headphones and skin care products. We’re a fast-moving company that embraces the entrepreneurial spirit, both in our own culture and in the products we help go to market.

Building a business around a steady stream of product launches demands a strong technology platform that enables quick and constant collaboration for a team that works all sorts of hours from all over the country. Our office is in Boston, but we have remote workers in Colorado, California and Minnesota, and people often work from home or on the road. Whether it’s catching up on a project using Google Chat, firing off an email or collaborating in real-time with co-workers using Google Docs and Google Sheets, our employees are connected wherever they are. Our marketing team has even completely dumped wired phones and relies entirely on Google+ Hangouts. They may be dispersed geographically, but with video conferencing, they feel like they’re all in a room together.

While Google+ keeps us connected, Google Sheets drives our product launch cycle. We launch something new each day at noon, so getting each product ready to go live is an intense process that requires significant coordination and collaboration across multiple teams. Every ounce of information about all of our product lines is held in a shared spreadsheet, from purchase orders to contact information, manufacturing details to photos and videos. Each spreadsheet is shared with the discovery, marketing and development teams and gets updated as every product moves through the process to launch. Releasing a new product takes a lot of coordination and our teams need to know the information they're working with is up to date and can be accessed anywhere by anyone. With Sheets, that’s never a question.

Finding the next new thing requires a technology backbone that lets us be nimble, fast, and always connected. Google Apps does just that. Right now, we’re celebrating National Craft Month by highlighting more than 30 cool pieces of jewelry, food, crafts tools and other amazing things our partners create. Google Apps helps us make good on our commitment to the companies we work with by giving them a springboard to build their business. That’s a commitment we take seriously and are proud to uphold.

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HubSpot has gone Google

Posted by Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. When we looked at several recent lists of the top startups in the Boston area - from Bostinno, Quora and the Boston Business Journal - we were pleased to discover that about 75% of these companies are running on Apps. 

Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot, the industry leader in inbound marketing software and one of those top startups. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Back in 2006, two MIT alumni decided there had to be a better way to do marketing. Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan knew that loud, interruptive and unwanted advertising wasn’t the way to help businesses attract customers, not to mention that new technology like caller ID and spam filters was simultaneously rendering those legacy efforts less effective. So they started HubSpot, and with it, a new paradigm that would be better for both marketers and customers, replacing loud, interruptive advertising with marketing consumers actually love.

HubSpot has grown to 450 employees since launching in 2006, and along the way, we've settled on a core mantra when it comes to how we work: “use good judgment.” We don’t tell employees where they have to work or when they have to be here - we care most about results. It’s imperative, then, that we leverage enterprise tools that make work easy and accessible anytime and anywhere. That’s why we use Google Apps. It lets us work together whether we’re at our desks or halfway around the world. That, combined with the fact that it grows with us and is simple to use, makes it the perfect solution for our company.

Our employees use Google Apps every day on nearly every aspect of our business. With Docs, Sheets and Slides, we’re able to collaborate on our most important documents with our colleagues, no matter where we are. We can store all our files in one place with Drive, so each team knows they can find their templates and notes whether they’re sitting down with their laptops or traveling with their smartphones. And Google Forms makes tracking executive speaking requests simple and seamless. Any time an organization wants a HubSpot expert to talk at an event, we send them a form with a set of standard questions, and the information they submit about the opportunity is automatically populated into a spreadsheet that houses all other requests. It's perfectly efficient.

Google Calendar helps us stay transparent, which we consider essential to empowering our employees. Many of our executives book office hours on Google Calendar and share them with our company. Any employee at any level can sign up for an hour with them, where they can bring up anything from product development ideas to problems they’re having at work.

Working for a fast-moving company isn’t easy, but with Google Apps, we’re not burdened by the hassles that can otherwise grind busy days to a halt without a strong technology platform. We don’t have to deal with attachments, version history screwups, email outages or fussing around with our phones to get our email to sync. We open up Google Apps and it works. It’s the same experience we offer with our software – simple, effective and lovable.

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Faneuil Hall Marketplace has gone Google

Posted by Kristin Phelan, Marketing Director at Faneuil Hall Marketplace

Editor's note: Boston’s changed a bit since Paul Revere set out on his famous midnight horseback ride in 1775. Belichick and Brady hadn’t met yet, the curse of the Big Bambino had yet to be cast (then broken), and Ben and Matt hadn’t won an Oscar for “Good Will Hunting.” But one thing has stayed the same in Boston over time: the city has been driven and defined by self-starters and homegrown businesses.

We’re wicked excited to highlight a few Boston businesses using Google Apps over the next few weeks. Today, we’ll hear from Kristin Phelan, Marketing Director at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a historic Boston landmark. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

It’s not every day that you get to work in the same spot where Samuel Adams brought Bostonians together on the eve of the Boston Tea Party or where George Washington toasted the United States of America on its first birthday. As the Marketing Director at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, I help carry the legacy of America’s first marketplace forward.

Faneuil Hall is entrenched in its rich past, but part of my job is to make sure it also stays modern. We’ve recently started adding programs that reflect a new, more innovative and independent spirit: on top of the bustling retail space we’re historically known for, we’ve also hosted local musicians, NBC’s The Today Show, an LED light and sound show, pilates bootcamps and the Urban RAID obstacle course race. And each new day brings another new idea.

Coordinating all these activities requires a lot of communication and organization. It also requires a reliable technology platform - something we didn’t have until we moved to Google Apps last year. I remember the night I knew we had to switch. I was working late on a project, when all of the sudden I got a notification that my mailbox was full. I’d been using Gmail for my personal email and knew it would be a better solution for our team not only for storage, but for the rest of the tools in the suite.

Getting Apps up and running was a snap. I’m no IT expert, but setting the team up with email and teaching them how to use Calendar, Drive and Docs was simple. In our first week, we set up a shared calendar to track our street performers, visiting artists, and events, so now everyone can see what's going on and when.

Apps doesn’t just help us stay organized – it also helps us work better together when we’re away from our desks. Just a few weeks ago, I was doing an on-site walk-through for an upcoming mural when a reporter called looking for pictures for an upcoming article. I jumped on my phone, opened the Drive app, and with just a few clicks, gave her access to the photo folder I had created for press inquiries.

I may not be an American Revolutionary, but I still get to help bring millions of people together at one of the country’s most revered landmarks. And thanks to Google Apps, we have the tools to keep our 271-year-old building in the 21st century.

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