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KK

Kenn Kelly Speaker // Founder // SaaS // Tech // Culture

Denver, CO

Founding Partner of 3 Tech Startups and 2 World Causes (all profitable). Redefining entrepreneurship through culture and boundaries. Bootstrapped, Angle Funded and Venture funded companies. Remote Work, Culture, and Lean methodology expert. Product development for 25+ products with over a 2M+ combined active users.

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Member since November 2014

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Super valuable call - Kenn has great insights and has a wealth of experience to draw on.

Source: Clarity Alan Park Mar 22, 2018

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Clarity

Kenn Kelly

Denver, CO

Founding Partner of 3 Tech Startups and 2 World Causes (all profitable). Redefining entrepreneurship through culture and boundaries. Bootstrapped, Angle Funded and Venture funded companies. Remote Work, Culture, and Lean methodology expert. Product development for 25+ products with over a 2M+ combined active users.

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Entrepreneurship Web development Product Strategy Lean Startups WordPress Product Development Virtual Teams UX/UI Design Change Management Culture Building

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Redefine Your Company Culture

Culture is created not inherited - every company must tap into it's own identity to build a culture. Culture can be a sinking weight or growth accelerator for the business, employees, and customers. I have founded multiple companies both in and out of Silicon Valley and despite the trend to overwork and fight for most time in the office neither actually increase value nor are productive to creating sustainable success - however the right culture is. For a quick example an outside the box approach to a culture paradigm shift check out this quick article: http://neversettle.it/actual-40-hour-weeks-in-a-startup/

WordPress - Enterprise Expert to "Whats WordPress?"

Over ten years of using WordPress, building WordPress plugins and products, and building WordPress enterprise level solutions for businesses. Co-Founder of Never Settle a WordPress agency and custom development company.

Lean Startup - How to Actually Apply Lean Principles to Your Business

Practical advice and guidance on how to actually take Lean principles and apply them to your situation and goals. We've developed testing tools and tips like this http://neversettle.it/run-successful-lean-startup-experiments/ and love to help others learn how to leverage the power of Lean in their organization

Answers 13
Reviews 1

Answers

Kenn Kelly answered

What is the best way to get a physical product to market in 2014?

This is assuming you already have a physical product created or are planning to create your own unique product. If you're simply reselling another product the answer would be slightly different.

Validate your assumptions by getting your product into a potential buyers hands as soon as possible. Any product feedback you can gain early on will save you massive amounts of time and money in production as changes come about.

If you can do small batches - this might sound counter intuitive and be slightly more expensive but produce a small batch and get it into a market like Amazon or a market relevant to your audience. Having this small batch will allow you to gain invaluable product packaging feedback, product variation and size/quantity feedback, etc. All of that learning you can then apply to a larger batch and not be stuck with lots of unwanted packing, sizes, or quantities.

Determine your growth engine and maximize it to get direct feedback from your customers early on.

Spend time with your initial customers listening to what they are really saying and do not be afraid to make a pivot - it's more important to solve the customers real problem than to launch your own good idea - the former is something you can build a business on.

Look to make relationships with industry influencers and leaders in your segment - doesn't always work but if you can get an influencer to support your product that is an excellent way to gain early traction. Before asking them to partner or recommend your product be sure to get their industry feedback and perspective it might be some of the best advice you get.

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Product Strategy

Licensing

Manufacturing

Kenn Kelly answered

Thinking to replace my existing q&a system with wordpress plugin for Q&A considering SEO as first thing in mind, pls suggest is my decision right?

As David mentioned the migration is probably the most critical piece to get right if you make the jump.
* Based on the priorities you outlined I believe this is a wise jump for you pending how you execute the new q&a forum.
* Using the right one will, there is a lot out there but the main thing you're going to want/need is a q&a that generates a unique post per q&a - if its a plugin that simply creates a thread of information or posts all on one page or just a few pages you'll be losing out on some of the main power WordPress can offer by migrating to it. You'll want to ensure that you also setup the hierarchy to support the SEO funnels you are trying to build. You'll most likely simply use categories inside WP to accomplish this.
* Without knowing the current format of your data or the site this is coming from it would be an uneducated opinion at best to provide a recommendation.
* This last question raises more questions than answers - are you planing to still maintain the ASP.net site or do a full migration, what will be the authoritative source of data, if your doing a full migration what authentication is necessary?

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

WordPress Development

WordPress

Kenn Kelly answered

Is it possible to pre-sell and enterprise grade saas product without building it? Ie with design only?

Absolutely, however I would say the approach is dictated by the fact you are wanting to build an "enterprise" SaaS product. The approach for an enterprise solution is quite a bit different than an MVP for a small single web product.

Assuming you see a need/demand for the product you are wanting to build I would start by building out a high level of requirements that outline the solutions your product will be solving which aren't currently solved in the market with the existing products available - no need to write out all the things already being done right now. Then create mockups or use a simple prototyping iOS/Android App which uses images to appear as though its an interactive app to display those critical requirements you will be building.

Get in front of the customer with your solution and start engaging in finding out what the pricing and exact refinements to those requirements/solutions would be and work to get commitment entering into an engagement with those first customers that's at a discount of what the future price will be (as they are technically funding your development). Its critical not to overthink those solutions in the beginning as finding out what the customer wants and is willing to pay for is the most important piece here but to have that convo you first need a starting point to present your new solution to them.

One other note, don't oversell make sure you have the talent in house already that can deliver the solution you are offering. If someone decides to go on a long shot and enter into an agreement before the product is complete it's critical you follow through on everything you offered.

We were able to close a national retail chain on a custom Point of Sale mobile based SaaS by following the steps above, let me know if you would like more details.

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Entrepreneurship

SaaS - Enterprise & SMB B2B

Fundraising

Kenn Kelly answered

How to balance being a co-founder with social life and relationships?

Great question, it shows your aim is on winning the marathon not the sprint. I agree with most of the advice in this thread. For us, it came down to putting a boundary around our work hours, in my last three companies there were never boundaries and we had what we thought were sweet benefits like "take as much vacation as you want" but really it just meant longer hours before and after your time off. We did an experiment called "40 Hours a Week No More No Less" testing to see if we could meet current responsibilities, stay profitable, and beat the competition. That experiment turned into a company policy three years and has been one of the most influential things we have done as a company. There isn't enough room to provide the full background but in short, by setting boundaries around our work hours it actually increased efficiencies and created a hyper focus on prioritizing the right work each week. You can read more about it here: http://neversettle.it/actual-40-hour-weeks-in-a-startup/

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Work Life Balance

Entrepreneurship

Kenn Kelly answered

How does Rainmaker compare to Wordpress?

I think a better question is what do you need and what is your current skillset. If you have some understanding of development and or content management architecture WordPress would be the better tool for you. If you have no background and don't have incredibly complex customization needs then Rainmaker would be a better fit. For someone with little cms background Rainmaker will win the ease of use and appearance, otherwise versatility, seo, scalability, and customization potential - WordPress would be your winner.

Disclosure: in the last 5 years my company has built 600+ WordPress sites - however we have used many of the top competing CMS platforms and have researched Rainmaker and other hosted CMS alternatives for our clients and implemented some of those alternatives.

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Rainmaker

WordPress

Website Development

Kenn Kelly answered

What are the best strategies for an efficient 'image list' type Wordpress post?

Like most things in web development there are 100 ways to slice that pie - so this answer is by no means all encompassing of all ways to do so.

Depending on what your objectives are I would recommend one of two ways:
1. Use the built in WP gallery feature tied to the WP core. No extra code and thus you couldnt get any lighter than that. It already resizes the images to different sizes. To access simply goto "insert media" and look in the upper left hand sidebar for the gallery option, select your images, determine size, press insert. If you want to customize the wp core gallery functionality to show attributions or something similar a good wp coder could knock it out in 30 min or less.
2. If you want a lot of features and customizations an display and interaction I would recommend just getting Revolution Slider. It has more features than you could ever need and it can pull images into galleries OR it can pull posts in from WP and use the featured image, title, and any other custom field you have into the slider.

There is a lot more that could be said but that is a quick - to the point - response.

Cheers!

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Wordpress Design

WordPress

Kenn Kelly answered

I'm creating a coaching course for my home-based-business team, which includes documents/vids/downloads. Does wordpress offer good templates for this?

There are many routes you could take this with different membership plugins or subscription based plugins which would accomplish what you are looking to do. However, the best starting point for you is probably using an LMS (Learning Management System) plugin or theme. An LMS will provide everything you need out of the box and will be scalable for your future needs as you develop more courses, integrate quizzing or surveys, award badges or certificates, etc.

The LMS will integrate the membership or subscription tools you'd find in those plugins with all the other tools you'll need to create your coaching course.

Let me know if you want to dive in more.

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WordPress

Website Design

Website Development

Kenn Kelly answered

Is it possible in woocommerce to display Shipping methods first on the checkout page?

Yes based on the hooks and templates in WooCommerce you can customize the flow of checkout to be anything you want. I know that's a simple answer but most things you can think of can be done in WC. Even pulling in live shipping rates via an API to FedEx, USPS, UPS, etc...

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Shipping

WordPress

E-commerce

Kenn Kelly answered

What WordPress themes or plugins can you use to create a 30-day challenge on a drip campaign?

You're going to need to baseline technologies - something to capture membership and manage members and something to deliver the content. Even in a low budget you can either merge to services/technologies or plugins together or find an all encompassing one. There are many more options than this but to help get you started.
Tools for Membership
- PMPro
- Woo Subscriptions
- Member Mouse

Tools for Drip Content
- Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, i.e. newsletter services with marketing automation built into them ('marketing automation' will be the keyword you'll want to do searches on to find the tool thats right for you)
- Intercom (not for low budget)
- Hubspot (not for low budget)

Tools that do both:
- Agile CRM (WordPress Plugin and Integration)
- Presspoint

Biggest thing to understand is that at the core you need two pieces - the first is a way to manage members (even if free) and provide secure content only to them. The second is distribute your content on a schedule. Like all things there are many ways to approach this but hopefully this gives you a head start. If you have more specific questions let me know.

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WordPress

Wordpress Design

Online Marketing

Kenn Kelly answered

How important is it to support older browser for a new international site?

Get data! Let your customers tell you through the data what you need to build. I would start by building the one browser you know for sure you're going to support. Roll it out and review your analytics to see what browsers they are using. If you have a browser that you don't support that is providing a decent % of your traffic you can prioritize that as your next browser to be sure you're compatible with. Much cheaper and quicker to let the data determine your development path than spend too much time on assumptions. At the end of the day it ultimately is just an assumption until you have data from your audience (not competitors or similar products and services).

Cheers!

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Web development

Browsers

Kenn Kelly answered

How much is customizable in a WordPress multi site with custom domains?

The quick answer is everything you're asking for is possible and fairly easy to implement. You're scenario and desire to keep things scalable on a large network is the main purpose for WPMS. We've built over a dozen client networks some with more than 700 installations on one network. We have built robust tools like the neversettle.it/ns-cloner-pro which allow you to clone, copy, update, migrate, etc. with one click inside your network.

With MS you can run an admin level codebase for all sites while maintaining unique content as well as unique functionality and design if you choose. With domain mapping you can also have a custom domain per sub-site if desired as well. I.e. instead of having dealerA.yourdomain.com and dealerB.yourdomain.com you can have dealerA.com and johnscardealerB.com

Once you have correctly configured your network and have tools like our Cloner the possibilities are endless.

Cheers,

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WordPress

WordPress Development

Web development

Reviews

Super valuable call - Kenn has great insights and has a wealth of experience to draw on.

Alan Park Source: Clarity

Member since November 2014