Many outstanding SaaS ideas never reach their full potential, meaning that we miss out on some amazing services. Very often, creators simply want to focus on building a product and the legal, accounting, or marketing side of the business takes the wind out of their sails.
itrinity, a SaaS portfolio operator, was born in Czechia and Slovakia with a desire to remedy this problem and allow SaaS businesses to reach their full potential while giving creators a chance to reap the benefits of their ideas. The company is creating a portfolio of SaaS solutions that already includes UptimeRobot, a leading uptime monitoring tool; Email List Verify, an email verification service; and GeoTargetly, a geo-targeting platform.
The business is ranked fourth in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and appeared in the 2021 Financial Times FT1000 as one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies, where it ranked 91st out of 1,000. It serves more than 6.5 million users across the globe, including customers such as BMW, NASA, and Cisco. But moving from several employees around one table to serving industry giants required the right productivity tool.
“The founders did some research and looked at the alternatives, but Slack was the only product that made sense. It still is,” comments Jakub Kubis, COO at itrinity. “Slack has been instrumental in revolutionizing our remote cooperation. It ensures that we maintain high productivity and efficiency, irrespective of geographical boundaries. This capability is crucial as it aligns with our vision of the future of work, which we see as increasingly decentralized and flexible, allowing talent to contribute effectively from anywhere in the world.”
“Most of the products we acquire already have Slack, but we create one external connection channel and use that to discuss everything we need. Within a month we export the data from their Slack into our own, so we retain all the historical information from their products.”
Bridging separate groups and projects
As a fully remote company, itrinity can hire top talent regardless of their location. The business therefore grabs any opportunity to build team cohesion, such as using the Bonusly Slack integration to give people kudos. Kubis believes that these micro-interactions help create relationships and support good culture remotely, while social gatherings are supported by Slack Polls, helping everyone contribute and vote on ideas for physical get-togethers.
In small personal ways and large company-wide processes, Slack permeates itrinity. For example, if the support team has an influx of tickets in a particular area, they immediately tag the developers on Slack and at least 40 to 50% of IT issues are resolved this way. This is why maintaining connections is incredibly important to itrinity’s way of operation; especially since each product within the company’s portfolio comes with its own CPO, CTO, and developers with a specific focus, resulting in separate Slack channels and groups.
Thankfully, Slack allows for separate-but-together collaboration. “The teams working on each product have different channels to discuss things in depth,” says Kubis. “Each product also has one public channel, open to everyone in the company, for weekly updates, news, revenue targets, and whatever else we want to share. We like to keep everything transparent and open to everybody while not inundating people with details.”
The same is true for running projects. For example, one product might be in Jira while another is in Notion, but they’re all coordinated through Slack with the help of integrations, huddles, and updates in channels. For Kubis, who works across all the groups and products, experimenting with different solutions is always on the cards. “I want the most efficient way of collaborating,” he comments. “I don’t want to invite people to five different tools. Right now, our main stack is Notion and Slack.”
Focusing on work instead of meetings
The nature of remote work often requires impromptu meetings to allow teams to make strategic decisions on the go. Such decisions can include cross-departmental subjects, support issues, approval of emails or social media posts, and much more. “There’s a time and place for scheduled meetings, but Slack allows us to connect immediately, which we believe is far more conducive to productivity,” says Kubis.
At the same time, the ability to use Slack statuses to communicate when people are online, on vacation, taking a break, or simply focusing on a task, helps respect everyone’s time and manage expectations. And although itrinity tends to avoid meetings, when it does have them, Slack helps streamline the experience.
“The ability for us to centralize everything, having huddles and then notes afterward, is great,” says Alexandre Comas, Affiliate Marketing Specialist at itrinity. “The fact that you can record a message while showing your screen for a recap of the meeting is amazing. Recently, the addition of a to-do list and the ability to have everything in one place makes it really interesting for us.”
Taking it a little further, the marketing department is also relying on feedback from videos to move things forward. “Because we’re all remote, we record videos instead of meetings,” says Kiril Bunin, Chief Marketing Officer at itrinity. “The rest of the team can comment and provide feedback directly in Slack. In general, Slack eliminates meetings that so many remote companies like ours have to deal with. It gives us the ability to be on top of things without them.”
This is also true for external collaboration with the use of Slack Connect, which speeds up communication with partners and clients. To date, itrinity has created 12 connections with external collaborators, allowing the company to keep all the relevant information in one platform instead of spreading it out over emails and other solutions.
But itrinity doesn’t stop there. By using Slack to receive suggestions and requests from customers, it can develop successful updates. For example, itrinity’s UptimeRobot, a leading uptime website monitoring service, now offers a Slack integration that enables its clients to benefit from seamless communication tools directly within their workflows.
“Whenever something goes wrong with a website server or anything related to that, UptimeRobot users are alerted via Slack,” says Bunin. “Currently, we have about 50,000 Slack integrations from 36,000 customers using Slack as their main notification channel. Slack is also one the biggest motivators for customers to upgrade from our free to our paid service.”
“Slack eliminates several meetings which so many remote companies like ours have to deal with. It gives us the ability to be on top of things without needing endless meetings.”
Supporting business growth with one tool
From IT to marketing, everyone at itrinity uses Slack and relies on its automations to save time and make an impact. “We have just over 50 employees with eight products in our portfolio. This is very rare,” says Bunin. “Just one of our products would normally require around 100 employees, so we have to automate everything because saving even five minutes is beneficial in the long term. The main advantage of Slack is that it prevents wasting time and it saves me at least one hour each day.”
This dedication to automation is obvious in the way that itrinity looks for new businesses to acquire. With a goal of purchasing two to three companies a year, it developed a scouting bot that uses ChatGPT and its own complex script to scrape the internet for SaaS businesses that fit specific criteria. This bot is integrated into Slack and provides teams with updates and results of its analysis.
When itrinity does acquire a new business, it slowly integrates it into Slack while retaining all the existing data. “Most of the products we acquire already have Slack,” says Bunin. “But we create one external connection channel and use that to discuss everything we need. Within a month we export the data from their Slack into our own, so we retain all the historical information from their products.” And the first item on the onboarding checklist for all new staff? Setting up a Slack profile.
To support the marketing of new—and existing—products, Bunin’s team uses Slack for anything from competitor monitoring and quarterly planning to sharing blog header options with the wider team. They’ve also integrated their social media channels, which means that posts and replies are all done via Slack. “I haven’t had to open our Twitter account in a year,” says Bunin. “I can just open the dedicated Slack channel to see what’s going on. We don’t even use any social media monitoring tools. We just use Slack.”
Exploring the possibilities of AI
In his role as COO, Kubis strives to ensure that the company’s operations are scalable and replicable, which is crucial for smooth transitions when making acquisitions. Slack supports this goal and allows for continued business growth. “Slack is the first thing any new modern company implements when starting,” Kubis says. “It was here long before I joined the company, and I can’t imagine working somewhere where Slack didn’t exist.”
At itrinity, automation, simplification, connection, and streamlining are the focus for everyone. It’s the way forward for this rapidly growing business, which is why Kubis is looking into other integrations and efficiencies that can be achieved with Slack.
Next, he wants to explore Slack AI. “We want to leverage AI to further streamline our efficiency,” he says. “We want to lean into it as much as possible. For example, Slack AI summaries are a great idea because we sometimes have very long discussions with 100+ answers. We’d love to use this directly in Slack and I am curious to see what it can do with languages other than English.”
