A Broke Bi**h’s Guide to Tech Start-up: Productivity Tools

Whether you are a hobbyist, a FOB (fresh on bootstrap) start-up founder or genetically predisposed penny-pincher, building a usable product specially in GenAI takes money. When I got started, it was all fun-&-games at first but then the cost kept racking up. Being my grand-daddy’s first grand-baby, I had to leave up to his legacy and this got me thinking that there has got to be a 2-cents way of doing things. Well, I couldn’t find a literal 2-cents way yet but I did find ways to keep the cost down. Maybe what you are doing is way fancier than mine but still there is a near-zero-cost way to great through your first hump.

If you are coming from medium to large tech, you never had to worry about tooling cost. And it is very natural to think that you need an insane setup to do even the basic thing, but you really don’t. So in this episode I’ll focus on set up — Productivity & Ecosystem.

Like most new tech start-up founders, you would probably be doing this in your living room or your basement with 1 or 2 other friends/co-founders. Regardless of your focus area, there are some basic things you need -

• Document/Content Management
• Communication Tools
• Developer Tools and Ecosystem
• Re/Search Tools
• Tech Setup

Content/Document Management — $0

For all you Apple and Google afficionados this might hit a nerve. So brace yourself. I am a huge fan of Office 365 ecosystem. It works for me, it feels naturally intuitive to me and so I use O365’s free services as much as possible. Having spent more than 5 years of my professional career working in O365 security, I know what went into building these products and the backends. I have absolute lack of hair on my head to prove it. It just works (except for Teams — f**k Teams and the team that built it.)

• Docs — OneNote: This is one of simplest easily usable forms of collaborative content management: like design docs, specs, random ideas, saving random clipped notes from the internet. It has a web interface, desktop and mobile ALL FOR FREE. Its integration within Android ecosystem makes it the most used power-tool for my daily work. I even use this for task management. When I was working as a Product Manager, I remember living my entire work-life in this. It feels so good to be back to using it!
• File Share — OneDrive: Great for file storage and you get 5GB of free storage. If you have a co-founder, you have collectively 10GBs. That’s A LOT OF documents. On top of that it has mobile and desktop integrations FOR FREE.
• Spread Sheet — Excel Online: Although I rarely have need for using spreadsheet and Powerpoint preso these days, Excel Online simply kicks butt! And its FREE. However, if you want a desktop client, that’s gone cost of you some $$. But then again, it’s not like Google has anything with a desktop client.
• Design & Drawing — Figma: This is my go-to for ideation, architectural diagrams, UX design, product design, interaction workflow, operational workflow and everything-drawing. You can create unlimited number of personal drafts and 3 joint collaborative design files with the free tier. But more importantly, Figma is SO GOOD, the experience is so amazingly easy and intuitive to use (except for their GenAI/LLM co-pilot, that one is as useless as a bucket without a bottom). Also their Product Security team is hands-down one of the best product security teams in the industry.

Communication Tools — $0

• IM — Slack: I love Slack! I love it so much so that for my first prototype, I built the UI as a Slack app instead of a Web App (although web app would have made lot more sense). You can create a workspace for you and your team, create multiple channels and have integration with 10 other apps/bots for FREE.
• Mail — Gmail/Gcal + Outlook: Gmail/Gcal is free and just better. Even after all these years I could not get myself to like Hotmail. It just feels too clunky. BUT if you want a desktop client, get the Outlook (new) client — NOT to be confused with Outlook App or Outlook 365 (as if they ran out of random names 😝 WTF). I use Outlook (new) client (on my Windows machine) that connects to my Gmail and Gcal. Of course, with Google, you have no concept of privacy but in the early days of your start-up, meh.
• Video Conf. — Google Meet: Google meet is lightweight, reliable and integrates well with Gmail, Gcal and their mobile apps. It is free for up to 1-hour of meeting time. If you need a longer period, you will have create a new meeting instance. I have used Zoom (unfortunately) and NO JUST NO. I had to spend some of “unforgettable” periods of my career dealing with their partner ecosystem and engineering teams on Security issues I needed them to fix. The people — I really hope our paths never cross.
• External Meetings — Calendly: Great utility for letting people schedule meetings with you through your own calendar (Gcal). Even with the free tier you can create a block of time and days where are willing to take meetings. Calendly creates a fixed URL for you that you can give to someone who is trying schedule some time with you. If you regularly receive a whole bunch of messages from random people on LinkedIn who wants to talk to you, Calendly is a life saver.

Developer Tools and Platform — $0

• Local IDE — Visual Studio Code: Hands down the best and the most versatile code editor/IDE there is. It works with pretty much any language and on pretty much any OS. It has integration with pretty much any external platform you can think of. For example — I use Zorin-17 and Ubuntu 23 as OS. I code mostly in Go, Rust and Python. I use MongoDB as a Database, Docker hub as my container repo, GitHub for source control and Azure for hosting. I never have to leave my IDE. And it is FREE.
• Remote Python IDE — Kaggle: If you are a Python-primary developer, want a Jupyter notebook like experience and access to higher memory and GPUs that you don’t have on-prem, Kaggle is the place to be. It is free to get started, free to stay and a staggering 30 GPU-hours/month for FREE.
• Code Repo — GitHub: This is probably the most popular source control platform, and it is FREE. I don’t know if there is a limit to the number of repos you can have with the free tier but hey, I am up-to 19 repos right now.
• Container Repo — Docker hub: This is like the GitHub of containers/docker images. AFAIK Docker hug is free, if you are okay with making your images public/open source (which you should. I can promise you; you would not have been able to even get off the parking lot had it not been for the huge community of open source devs and the amazing work they keep doing every day). This way you don’t have to pay for services like Azure Container Repo. It has easy integration with Visual Studio, GitHub, Azure and AWS. It works on pretty much all OSes (Windows, Linux variants, Mac)
• AI Model Repo — Huggingface: If you are working on GenAI or NLP this is the Github of open-source AI models. It is free to use. You can download any model that is available here and run things locally for FREE. They also have relatively cheaper options available for GPUs and high-perf computing tasks.
• Hosting — Azure: Azure gives you $200 worth of subscription for FREE just for signing-up. This might not seem like much but l can assure you this goes a long way. I am running 4 web-apps and 6 containers every day and my February bill was $9 (which is subsumed by the $200). I think AWS and GCP also has something similar.

ReSearch Tools / Developer Co-pilot — $0

• Developer Search — ChatGPT 3.5: If you are thinking you need to spend $40 — $60 a month for GitHub co-pilot or Cody, Don’t. I have tried them out and they are NOT WORTH it. ChatGPT 3.5, which is FREE, does a better job even with hallucination in 90%+ cases (and that includes Go and Rust).
• Real-time Search — Bing Co-pilot: I know ChatGPT is not meant to be a search engine but man … it works better than any of the search engines there is. If you do need real time data or Bing Co-pilot is actually NOT bad. It tends to give up really fast but hey you get what you pay for (which is 0$)

Tech Setup — $300

If you already have a beefy development machine and you know how function there, feel free to skip through this. But if you do feel like you want a new environment -

• Local Virtualization — Virtual Box: Free virtualization tool to run Guest operating system on your laptop. It even works on Windows Home 😲 and can host anything and everything that has an *.iso.
• Laptop: This is really up to your personal preference. I use a 4-year-old laptop that came with Windows Home. I love Windows for productivity/non-development tools (there are just lot more options) and Ubuntu derivatives for development. I run Virtual Box on Windows 11 Home. It hosts a Kali, a Zorin-17 and an Ubuntu 23. Zorin-17 is an Ubuntu 22 derivative but lighter, more stable and with a slicker UI. If you are wondering what kind of configuration I have — let’s just say this $300 laptop got it better than what I have (well, I have more storage). In case you are wondering, I won’t touch a Mac or any Apple product with a 10 feet pole. But if that’s your jam — you do you boo-boo.

Now go build that spaceship!

PS

• LinkedIn | GitHub