An Entrepreneur’s Tool Stack

Tool stacks are very interesting. To geeks like myself, it’s very important to know what tools and apps and services fellow geeks use to thrive in their respective fields. Sharing workflows and improving your own from others’ is very rewarding and keeps one on track and helps one continually furnish the way he/she works.

I am a regular reader and a fan of the Sweet Setup and David Sparks’s home-screen series. This way I don’t miss out on the cool new service or app that I should be using. I have been touted as an “early adopter” many times and I pride myself in heralding the tag.

My Favourite Services

So lets dive in to the list of things I use. It’s worth noting that I value and cherish the delight factor way more than I should when it comes to software.

Email

I loved (I still do) Fastmail. It’s without a doubt the purest execution of IMAP I have used. It’s splendid. But I got tired of not being able to share files and collaborate with my co-founder and colleagues who used Google Apps. I gave in and signed up for Google Apps (Gmail). It’s no longer free and I am paying INR 125/user/month for my and my wife’s accounts. For all the privacy concerns that Google invites, on the plus side the service itself is just amazing. It may not be pure IMAP but as a mail backend, it’s flawless and improving. So Gmail it is. I still care about my privacy but I think as long as they don’t leak/lose my data, I am reasonably fine with it.

APPS

On iOS, I use Mailbox. It allows me to create actionables/snoozes from emails. It’s almost as if you created a reminder in your to-do manager. This obviates the need to integrate the email with your to-do system. It also has push notificationson iOS.

On Mac, I recently converted from Mail.app to Mailbox’s OS X client. It’s in beta but it works fine for now.

For the non-taggers, Mailbox is perfect. It doesn’t support Gmail tags but I don’t use tags a lot and the ones I do are applied automatically with rules for minor organising.

Notes

This is another important area. For notes, I emphasise on 4 things:

• Ubiquitous apps (iOS, Mac, Optionally Web)
• Fast and reliable sync
• Image and document support
• Phone-camera based scanning (for paperless lifestyle) and optional OCR

You can already see where this is going. Evernote is my choice for note-taking. It supports images, rich-text, attachable documents and audio-notes. It even lets me scan receipts, bills and any kinds of documents and refines them to look like professionally scanned copies.

Evernote’s sync has grown to be reliable. It had its dark days and slip-ups but it’s matured over time. I used Evernote 3 years ago and loved it then. I have restarted using it for business and I love its collaboration capabilities.

We at Octal use it for sharing walkthroughs, tutorials and visual guides, of which there are many in our line of programming and hardware tinkering. We share screenshots, annotate them with their tool Skitch and even scan copies of paper and convert them to notes (even this article started its draft from Evernote).

There’s really a lot Evernote can do and to their credit, it’s completely free to use and your usage will most likely permit you to stay within their free limits and enjoy the service (ours does). Full marks here to Evernote.

Cloud Storage

Since I pay for Google Apps, I use Google Drive now. I used Dropbox for a long time but it doesn’t match the feature-set of Google Drive. In that, Google Drive has direct integration with Google Docs which renders iWork and Microsoft Office suites useless for me. Since Google Docs can open and deal with any type of Office file format, I can get by with it just fine. Sharing and collaboration over the tight integration of Drive/Docs is also fast and efficient. It’s just so simple to keep everything under one roof. Offering barebones cloud storage is one thing and offering a slew of features around the files you store in that cloud storage is another. Check out the recent ‘Learning to Love Google Drive’ screencasts series by Bradley Chambers.

Also, storage-wise, Google Drive is cheaper than the competition. For $2/month, I get 100GB of storage. I use this storage for backup of my phone photographs and the rest of it is used by Gmail and other files and documents. The web interface is much better compared to Dropbox where Google Drive shows a lot of details about how and with whom the folders are shared and what the latest activity in them is.

I know I was against using Google for a long time and I still don’t like the liberty they take in privacy invasion but I am willing to be a bit more lenient in return of a nicer feature-set that makes my work fast and easy.

Instant Messaging

This is a big one. A very important one. In small companies and businesses with remote employees, a good robust IM solution is a must. We began with Slack a few months ago. Slack is brilliant. There aren’t possibly enough great things being said about them. Slack offers so much alongside IM that it almost feels like a full communication system (it almost is). But our needs are slightly different (I mean at Octal). First, our team is not that big. So we don’t really need a lot of channels and streams of chats. We need 1 or 2 at the most. Plus, Slack is a bit of an overkill feature-wise too. It has snippet sharing, file sharing and a lot of inline integrations of different services within your typical chat. While these are good, they do become limiting once you start hitting the 2GB free storage limit (it happened quicker for us than we thought it would).

In came Telegram. With a userbase in the range of 100 million, it’s growing faster than ever.

Telegram is free, fast, super-secure, multi-platform, allows attachments of any size, has username support and is overall kickass.

When I used it for the first time a year ago, I instantly fell in love with it. We use it for our personal and professional conversations nowadays and it’s almost perfect. It has stable and very mature desktop and mobile clients. We recommend it whole-heartedly.

To-do Manager

How will we get any work done without these? Unless you’re a zen-master capable of remembering everything, you need one of these.

There are similar requirements here as mentioned above with the Notes app — syncing, effective collaboration, multi-platform apps, simplicity and speed. Tools like OmniFocus and Things are really great for personal productivity. But they don’t allow shared tasks and collaboration.

At startups and businesses, we need solid task-based collaboration. We narrowed down on 2 choices: Todoist and Wunderlist. Both are great and have almost identical feature-sets. We chose Todoist since it’s the one we felt more familiar and comfortable with. Plus it’s cheaper on the pro subscription as well while offering the same functions. I really like the all-white interface of Todoist and the productivity-zen-like feeling it exudes. Minimalism is really at work here.

Make no mistake though with the word minimalism being used for Todoist. It’s a very extensible fully-blown to-do management system.

With subtasks, notes, reminders, contexts, shared lists and file attachments, Todoist offers the right amount of feature-richness.

Worth noting: Task management on mobile is very important nowadays. Having a carefully thought-out iOS/Android app is a pre-requisite for any well-made to-do app. We rejected Trello, Asana and Basecamp for the same reason. They are great for a more outline-based project management but they lack serious on-the-go capability on mobile which is important to us.

Miscellaneous

Now I will list some services that are essential in my daily work. There are always alternatives available and sometimes they may suit you better. But these are my favourites.

1. Pinboard: The best bookmark-manager out there. It has an amazing API, iOS apps and tagging/archiving support.
2. 1Password: The best password generator and manager out there. Nowadays it does way more than passwords though. Bank accounts, driving licenses, credit cards, identity cards, server information, software licenses, encrypted notes and a lot more. It’s the everything solution you need for everything secret you want to keep.
3. Hazel: The best file-automator for your Mac OS X. It’s almost like an obedient butler acting on a set of rules you defined to organise the files and folders around your Mac magically.
4. Hover: The best domain registrar out there. There isn’t a better one. They’re Canadian for God’s sake.
5. Digital Ocean: The best hosting provider out there. There isn’t a cheaper one. They provide the best SSD servers for cheap. Try them!
6. Bitbucket: I’ve no particular reason to choose Bitbucket over GitHub but for the support of unlimited private repositories that Bitbucket provides. GitHub is equally good to host public projects.
7. Pocket Casts: I listen to podcasts a lot — almost always in the car. Pocket Casts is the best all-in-one solution to manage your subscriptions and listen to them elegantly.
8. Transmit: We do have to resort to FTP for certain development and server tasks. Transmit by Panic is the best FTP client for Mac OS X (and now iOS too). Its Sync feature is the killer deal.
9. Multibit: A very good Bitcoin wallet for desktop. I use it on the Mac and it’s quite straightforward to setup and use — recommended.
10. Day One: A great app for writing daily journal/diary of your life’s best moments. It supports images, location and weather too. It’s perfect for remembering stuff and writing in general and gets more and more valuable over time. It’s the app that has given me the most satisfaction from all the cross-platform apps I have bought.
11. Health app iOS: I value data-portability. I had been using Jawbone but that wouldn’t be good in the long run since I wouldn’t be able to get that years worth of data out of Jawbone system. It makes much more sense to track and measure data with the reliable platform-native iOS Health app. This way, I can always have this data safe no matter what app I choose to visualise it with.
12. Atom: Well, Sublime Text is really good. I love it. But as I mentioned at the start of this article, just to feed my enthusiasm for new tools, I tried Atom code-editor from GitHub and have liked it ever since. It’s hackable to suit your needs any way you please. In a lot of ways, it’s identical to Sublime Text. I plan to stick with Atom for now.