It’s been exciting and gratifying to see how the OpsScale newsletter has started to grow. I began writing as an experiment, just hoping to share things that I was learning. I didn’t have a specific plan or a grand vision, so everything has been new, and I have been learning a lot.
I hope you’ll permit a one-week interruption from our normal posts for a couple of exciting announcements.
With the goal of making the OpsScale newsletter a valuable resource for you as you build your career, I’m excited to announce the following changes:
First - the “OpsScale Scouting Report”
What is it?
Professional sports teams have entire teams of scouts dedicated to finding and evaluating potential players.
These scouts do the dirty work of watching, evaluating, and recommending specific players that they believe are worth adding to the team.
The best scouts are knowledgeable and persistent, leverage their relationships to find potential players, and focus on their goal of finding players who are a great fit for the team they work for.
As an Operations professional, it’s high time you had access to something similar.
The OpsScale Scouting Report is an email sent twice a month with one goal - to make it easy for you to stay up to speed with the cutting edge of the ever-changing Go-to-Market tool landscape.
Each email will focus on a small handful of tools (1-3) that I believe are worth knowing about.
The tools will be evaluated on a variety of criteria, and other specific information around pricing, go-to-market strategy, current customers, and other data points will be included as well, for your reference.
These emails fall into the “work smarter, not harder” bucket.
Why?
Ops professionals have so much going on in their day-to-day. Our calendars are full of meetings, projects, and to-dos, and our minds are full of questions,
There are tens of thousands of Go-to-Market tools out there, and the number is increasing daily. No one has time to keep up with all of the changes.
The Scouting Report will make it easier for you to keep your finger on the pulse of the ever-growing GTM-tech universe, as well as notable trends and happenings.
Really - you’re focusing on tools?
Wait, wait - I thought adding tools was something you did as a last resort? It’s even harder to add tools in this economic climate! Won’t everything just be eaten alive by AI?
Well, you’re right.
No tool is a silver budget.
Tool budgets are very tight.
AI is everywhere.
But those are also great reasons to subscribe to the Scouting Report.
With the data provided in the Scouting Report emails, you will have a better idea of which tools should be included in a tool assessment or RFP, which is much better than just Googleing “competitors of XYZ tool”.
Because tool budgets are tight, it’s even more important to be aware of tools that might be a potential fit. Having a basic understanding of a tool (that lands conveniently right in your inbox) will help you make smarter decisions about your precious tech dollars.
AI is everywhere, but does it belong in your stack? Perhaps it does. AI tools will be among those highlighted in the Scouting Report, so you’ll be well-informed about tools with artificial intelligence capabilities.
If you are going to add a tool, you might as well do it right - and the OpsScale Scouting Report will help.
I’m a tool guy - I’ve always been interested in tools. Niche tools, obscure tools, new tools, I’m always on the hunt - and now I’m excited to have a way to share the ones that I’ve found.
So, now what?
In December, I will send out the first edition of the Scouting Report to ALL OpsScale subscribers (so if you’re reading this in your inbox, you’ll get it!)
I’ve already been building a list of tools to highlight (there’s over 30 included right now), so there’s plenty of great content coming your way.
This leads to the second part of the announcement…
Second - Adding a Paid OpsScale Subscription plan
Beginning in January 2024, the Scouting Report emails will be sent twice a month. To continue receiving those emails, you will need to upgrade to a paid subscription to the OpsScale newsletter. Paid subscriptions have not been offered before. In addition to receiving the Scouting Report emails, you will continue to receive the weekly OpsScale Newsletter emails you have been receiving up to this point.
As a paid member, you will also receive access to the Scouting Report Airtable, which is a repository of all of the tools highlighted in the Scouting Report emails. This Airtable is sortable, and filterable, and is a great way to easily keep track of any tools included in the Scouting Report.
To recap - here are the paid subscription benefits:
2 Scouting Report emails/month - highlighting a specific tool. Objective analysis and data collection/consolidation.
Access to the Scouting Report Airtable, where all featured vendors will be archived
The ability to request a Scouting Report on a specific vendor
All Free emails
If you choose not to become a paid subscriber, please don’t tune out! I appreciate that you’ve invited this newsletter into your inbox and I will continue to work hard to provide valuable, interesting, and actionable content to help 10x your Operations career. You will continue to receive the weekly emails every Monday.
I am working on some additional content and educational resources for all subscribers and will have more information on those soon.
Free subscription benefits:
One email every week
Future content and resources as it becomes available
The free OpsScale Scouting Report email will arrive in your inbox in early December, and it will include information on how to upgrade your subscription if you’d like to.
If you’re worried that this is going to change the newsletter and I’m going to be pushing you to shill out for a paid subscription every week - don’t worry. My focus is on providing valuable content, not testing every little growth hack known to humankind.
We’ll get back to our regularly scheduled posts next week - thanks for making it to the end!