Friday 9 August 2013

My Start up Tools

I'm often advising others about tools I use and tools I've discovered so thought it may be worthwhile sharing the tools I use or have tried and like.

I'm sure I'll miss some but can always come and revisit this post (or add a part 2) at a later stage.

These tools are mainly cheap/free and suitable for startups and small businesses.  Also these are from an Australian point of view which may or may not make a difference!

Mailchimp for eDMs (electronic direct marketing) or newsletters and general email out.  There is a very generous free tier.
Google Apps -- I've had a Google Apps account (two actually!) back when it was free.  This is great as I can attach additional domains to it and create groups, aliases etc.  It is limited to 100 users max but at this stage I haven't hit that mark yet :)
Google Apps also comes with Google Drive which includes the suite of productivity tools aka Google Docs (found under Drive) including Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Form, Drawing.  There  additional tools you can add via the marketplace too (for a Visio type tool you can use Draw.io)
Waveapps for accounting.  Great for creating invoices and ability to upload receipts (there is even an iPhone app and soon an Android app to process receipts but I haven't tried it).  It doesn't do Australian payroll though.  The really cool thing with Waveapps is that it's free!
Kickofflabs -- I started with LaunchRock but there was some sort of bug in it that would make the page not render. Hard to justify keeping with LaunchRock if that is the case!  So I moved to Kickofflabs.  I use the tier which allows me up to 5 pages/5 domains.  I like how quick it is to alter and to use.  Their templates are good and they have a lot of integration with other tools such as Mailchimp.  I love the ability to easily add Google Analytics goals, facebook advertising tags etc without having to think where to put it in the code.  Their support is also fantastic (they use another tool I'll mention below UserVoice).
GoDaddy -- this is mainly for historic reasons and price. It's cheap and it's good for me to have all my domains in the same place.
LastPass -- I use this personally to store all my logins/passwords and for it to generate a secure password.  For a shared password list I'd recommend Passpack.
AWS -- we're using Amazon Web Services and although the console is confusing to navigate the suite of tools is pretty amazing.
SendGrid / Mandrill - both seem good for transactional emails.  Received some good support from SendGrid when initially setting things up to keep emails out of the spam folder!
Uservoice / Desk.com - there are a number of similar tools which allow you to provide a support queue and FAQs for your website.  I've used both Uservoice and Desk.com and they seem pretty similar to be honest.  I'm using Uservoice for my own startup... because I had a discount voucher :)
Pixlr - I use this for graphics with my limited ability to do things.

General every day tools...
Evernote for note taking although on my Chromebook I sometimes have to use Google Keep instead
Feedly and RSS feeds to keep up to date with all that's happening with what I'm interested in
Google (how the heck did anyone do anything before search engines existed?)
Dropbox for synchronising files and it backs up my photos from my phone automatically
Podcasts via Doubletwist so I can listen to This Week in Google and a couple of startup podcasts.
Some Apps on my (HTC One XL) phone:
Whatsapp for messaging although lately it's been a bit flakey and unreliable and I've gone back to normal text messages.
MightyText to type my sms messages on a real screen
Timeriffic - to adjust settings according to the time
Busyme - to stop the phone from ringing out loud when I'm in a meeting
CallTrack to record in my messages and calls into my Google calendar



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