Top Tools to Kick-start your Startup
from Entreprenaur.com 07 July 15 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz
This past September we founded a social tech startup, Stand4. It’s a simple concept centered around creating new ways for you to make your mark on the world. And it’s thriving: Over the past few months we’ve grown our team to 20-plus, brought on some great partners and begun to gear up for our launch. While all this has been going on, we’ve made a conscious & ruthless effort to utilize the best tools for small teams. Here are six of our favorites:
1. Trello. It depends on the environment you’re cultivating, but if you’re about ultra-transparent teamwork, there’s no better tool than Trello. It’s “a new document type that starts with collaboration,” says Michael Pryor, CEO of Trello, “where everyone is seeing the same board at the same time.” The visual nature of the platform makes it highly flexible, highly collaborative & great for small teams. We love it for prioritization standards. Our daily standups are centered around simply ranking our Trello Cards. Now, at any moment, any team member knows the exact top priorities of the team.
2. IFTTT. “When it comes to building a business, there are certain everyday tasks that you want running automatically in the background,” says Linden Tibetts, co-founder. IFTTT helps you automate your business by creating easily-integrated, highly-customizable combinations that connect services together – so you don’t have to. We love this tool because you can use it in so many different ways. There are over 165 channels that plug into services – ranging from Dropbox, to Gmail, to the lights in your office. Simply set up an “if/then” statement and you’re good to go. We use it for quite a few things. Some examples:
· If someone posts a photo with Stand4, we get sent an Email with that photo.
· If it’s 7 am, we’ll receive daily reminders in Slack.
· If we post any photo socially, we’ll have it autosaved to a dropbox folder.
3. Charlie, is a Personal Assistant that helps you prepare for upcoming meetings. This automated tool syncs with your calendar, then pulls from LinkedIn, Twitter & major newspapers to provide insight into the company and person you’re about to meet with. This young startup is still learning, but is off to a great start. Aaron Frazin, CEO of Charlie, imagines it being “a personal assistant that knows exactly what research you want on your desk – an hour before any meeting.” He adds: “Charlie is about to start learning what you need, so you never walk in unprepared.”
4. YesWare. It seems like everyone we know is using some type of Email-tracking SW these days. When we first started out, we dabbled in a few, but could never get behind one fully. YesWare is the best we’ve seen. For its price, it offers the most complete Email analytics solution with “open/click” tracking, email Templates & the ability to collaborate with other team members. Michael Bellows, CEO of YesWare says “We serve brand-new startups & publicly held companies. Our mobile application works seamlessly with our desktop products. And we’re just getting started”.
5. Product Hunt, is quite different from the rest of this list, but we really believe it belongs here. Discovery is a huge part of any startup, and Product Hunt – which offers just what its name says – manages that better than anyone else. It’s one of the first sites we read every morning, and should be one you frequent, too.
6. Slack, is an internal communication app designed to allow businesses to chat & collaborate at work. Slack aims to replace Email by providing companies with more significant ways to share information. The app supports private messaging as well as group chats, It’s built to work across devices and integrate with outside services such as Google Drive & Twitter; Features include the automatic archiving of all communications on the platform, as well as the ability to search all interactions for keywords. The idea is to reduce pointless Emails via the introduction of multiple, tailored channels of communication.
Comments: Do you know any other Tools to Kick-ass your Startup?