Awesome People - Ep 93
Ops, Google Sheets, Dashboards, No code - for everyone from web3 to SaaS
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
We deliver awesome people to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes— people who give your startup superpowers 🚀.
In addition to this newsletter, we also run a Web3 Pallet job board.
Know someone who wants to work in Web3? Tell them to join our Pallet board.
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The Pallet board is getting me fired up. It feels really good to be back in flow. I hope you join us.
Please meet Joe Rhew, Your Fractional Head of Ops 📈
I met Joe when he joined DAO Masters. He jumped right in and started contributing. He reworked our Discord structure, access controls, and community programs. After a season, we invited Joe to join our leadership team. I highly recommend working with him!
Previously, Joe was the co-founder and COO of a YC-backed company, Tyltgo. They created a same-day delivery marketplace for SMBs. Before that, Joe was at Uber for 4 years. In his last role, he led Uber Eats’ Canadian expansion. He managed marketplace ops across millions of monthly deliveries. Notably, in one day, they launched 30 new cities and increased national population coverage by 10 percentage points! One little-known fact about Joe is he’s a third culture kid. He was born in Korea, grew up in Russia, and is currently based in Canada.
He's trusted by Uber, Daangn Market, Bankless DAO, DAO Masters, and Morgan Stanley.
You can hire him on a fractional or project basis to run your operations. He works with founders between Seed and Series B to remove bottlenecks and scale ops. He can:
build dashboards
automate processes & build internal tools using no code
choose your SaaS stack
set company strategy & KPIs
design an end-to-end hiring strategy
He’s interested in working with web3, marketplace, fintech, and SaaS companies. And DAOs, of course.
Want an intro to Joe? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
Joe was gracious enough to share some pro-tips with us here ✨
Early stage ops isn’t for everyone. It can feel like juggling a million things at once. Tasks that don’t have a dedicated person often find their way to the ops team.
Early stage ops is all about the 80/20 rule
Most people are familiar with the Pareto Principle. 80% of the output is determined by 20% of the input. You need to be okay with “good enough” — 80% solutions. You have to constantly ship and avoid failing into the perfectionism trap.
At Uber Eats, for the first few years, we ran marketplace operations off of Google Sheets. One massive sheet included most of our dashboards and the levers to curb demand and increase supply (e.g. peak hours like Sunday evening or snowstorms). It sounds like a 60% solution, but it was good enough for 100,000s of deliveries 24/7.
One benefit of running ops on Google Sheets is that when you finally build internal tools, you know exactly what you want. It saves a lot of wasted product development time and trial and error.
An effective tactic to force 80/20 is to set ambitious deadlines. Don’t give time for that last 20%. A tight turnaround time — one that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable and excited at the same time — forces ruthless prioritization and accountability.
*I’ve included some super practical Google Sheets tips that everyone can start using today in the P.S. section of this email. Scroll to the bottom if that’s your jam.
No code gives you superpowers
Engineering resources are limited and ops is usually the last in line. No code tools give you superpowers.
At Ops Hacks, the online community I founded for early-stage ops, I run everything off of no code — our landing page, member signup & onboarding flow, CRM, you name it.
Here’s my no code stack and flow chart for member onboarding.
With no code, I can iterate quickly and grow the community with a very limited budget and time.
Here’s the no code stack I often recommend to early-stage operators:
Google Sheets: You all know this one 😀. Use it for your dashboarding needs.
Airtable: A user-friendly relational database, great for CRUD operations. Read more about my take on Airtable here.
Make (fka Integromat): A process automation tool to connect all your SaaS tools. My writeup here.
Bubble: The most complete no code tool to build complex web apps. Here are some examples.
Above is how I automate the flow of community applicants and members at Ops Hacks. Airtable is the source of truth and CRM for community membership. When a member’s status changes in Airtable, Make automatically reflects that change in Mailerlite (our email tool) and sends the appropriate email.
Involve everyone in customer support
I first discovered this practice at Uber. The ops team took turns answering driver and rider tickets every day. Since then, I’ve taken it to every subsequent startup.
I do this because:
It increases ownership
It contextualizes the impact of our work
It leads to a better product & processes
In the early days of Uber in Korea, our weekly payment process was janky. The local team was the first to know when something broke on the backend. If drivers didn’t get paid, they’d write customer support. We’d provide timely feedback to the product team in SF and the accounts payable team in Singapore. This practice improved our work.
You can’t have everyone answer tickets forever. Here are some signs that you may need to hire a full-time customer support specialist:
Your support logic is too complex and it takes too much time to train everyone up on the latest playbook
Time spent on support as a % of overall work time becomes significant (> 20%)
You’re stuck in a never-ending loop of answering the same tickets over and over again, but you don’t have the resources to build out a knowledge base FAQ to prevent those tickets
Need ops help? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you to Joe!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to Joe!
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🥳
Recent features
Akhila, your part-time Web3 Technical Product Manager — Most recently, Akhila worked at Coinbase for 2.5 years and launched Coinbase Prime APIs. Prior to that, she was an Ethereum core developer.
Kassen, your Technical Product Manager & Community Builder — She worked on community initiatives at Crypto, Culture, & Society (CCS), the first product partnership at 0xStation, and scalability for Cloud AI at Google.
Sehr, your part-time Head of People — She built the early People function at several high-growth, now unicorn startups, backed by a16z, Founders Fund, and top VCs. Every company that she’s worked with has tried to hire her as their full-time Head of People.
Want intros to anyone here? Lmk and I’ll connect you!
P.S. How to use Google Sheets like an ops pro 🔥
Building dashboards or internal tools for your ops team with Google Sheets is very different from how you use it as your scratchpad.
Here are 3 easy tips that Joe shares with aspiring Google Sheets wizards:
1. Color code your cells
This is an easy hack to instantly improve the usability of your dashboard. Different colors let the viewer of a sheet know which cells are formulaic vs. hardcoded, and which cells are okay to play around with vs. should be left alone. This saves you, the creator of the sheet, a ton of time as it minimizes the amount of explanation you have to do to others who want to use your sheet.
For example, I use black font for formulas (i.e. don’t touch) and blue font for hard-coded (i.e. you can change it). It’s not important which colors you use, it’s just important that your team follows the same conventions.
2. Name your most used cells
In a complex model or dashboard, make sure to name the cells that get used often (Data > Named Ranges).
Perhaps you have a scenario picker that toggles between bull, base, and bear cases in cell A2 in a sheet named “scenario”. You’ll likely have to repeat writing out “scenario!A2” a lot as you’ll continue to refer to this cell to build out your three scenarios. In this case, assign a name to the cell — something like “case” to indicate the three cases.
Now you can write your formulas much more quickly by referencing “case”. And you can start writing much easier-to-understand formulas like this:
=ifs(case=bear,10%,case=base,50%,case=bull,100%)
3. Write scalable formulas
Did you know that you don’t need to specify the ending row to capture all the rows? Instead of writing sum(A1:A1000), you can write sum(A1:A) which will capture all the rows in column A beyond a thousand.
And did you know you could do the same with columns? Instead of entering sum(A1:Z1), write sum(A1:1).
That’s all folks! If you made it here, congrats on your Google Sheets skills. Next level.
P.P.S. If you’re considering working in web3 or hiring in web3, join our Pallet board here 🥳
(last shameless plug, had to do it ❤️)