Tools I use every day as a Co-Founder of a Startup
As a co-founder I wear many hats, so I used lot of tools for different purposes to make my life easier. This post is a direct inspiration from Pascal Briod’s awesome post The 11 digital tools I use every week as Head of Product. We use quite a few tools that Pascal mentioned in his post.
We are an early stage bootstrapped startup so I spend lot of time discovering products that are simple and affordable. We don’t have the luxury to pay high subscription fees for lot of tools. So most of the tools I use are on Free Plan or have small subscription fees.
I found most of these tools through Product Hunt and Stackshare.
Trello — Free, flexible, and visual way to organize anything with anyone. (Free)
Trello is a really simple task management tool that we use among our team members. Everyone has their board for projects and cards for tasks. It’s a nice visual way to manage tasks and helps get shit done on time.
Slack — It’s real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. (Free)
Slack is an IM tool to communicate with your team. Now you might be thinking we use Messenger, Skype or Whatsapp for that. why do we need Slack? That’s what we thought initially. But the reason Slack works so well, at least for us, is because it’s just for work! nothing else! When you get a notification from facebook and whatsapp it could be for various different reasons other than work. But when you see a notification on Slack. You know it’s for work and you respond instantly. Also, it has amazing integrations with tons of different tools so it reduces your time spent on checking other tools for updates. For instance, you can integrate with Github so you get a notification whenever someone does a commit or a pull request. You can integrate with Trello so you get notification whenever a new card is added or modified. It’s an epic tool.
Alternatives: Hipchat, Messenger, Whatsapp, Skype
Inspectlet — Stop guessing what your visitors want. (Free)
We use this to see video sessions of real users using the website. It automatically records videos of users using the website where they are clicking, scrolling and spending time reading content. This helps a lot in designing the UI, changing the placements of CTAs and figuring out problems with low conversion.
Alternatives: Hotjar, Mouseflow
Mixpanel — Actions speak louder than page views.(Free)
We use this to do detail tracking on every interaction on the website. Although, you can do this on Google Analytics but Mixpanel has much nicer interface to do it. Also, you can setup slick conversion funnels to see exactly where users are getting dropped off. And yes, their customer support is outstanding! They are quick to respond and are helpful, considering the fact I’m on a free plan.
Alternatives: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manger, Heap, KissMetrics,
Close.io — Close More Deals. Make More Sales. ($65/User/Month)
Closeio is a sales CRM tool for managing leads. Most CRMs are quite clunky and extremely hard to use. I like this one because it’s extremely simple and can be easily customized for your needs. Also, it has one of the best sales blogs I’ve ever read, especially for people doing first time sales. Their content is outstanding!
Chatra — Collect feedback and deliver happiness in real-time, beautifully. ($12/user/month)
Chatra is a really nice live chat tool that we use to interact with users on the website. It’s a really cool way to interact with them instantly to retain them on the website and help them with anything they need. I’ve looked into lot of live chat software. The ones that are free have bad UI and the ones with good UI are really expensive. This was the only one that has a nice and simple UI with affordable pricing. Besides, the best thing about Chatra is that it actually shows you the user history on the website of what pages they have visited. You can use this to get a rough idea on what pages are you getting most live chat requests from users, and figure out what’s confusing the users on that particular page that they are asking for help. Also, it shows what users are typing before they even hit enter so you can quickly start writing your response and impress users with quick answers. It’s an amazing way to keep the users engaged and happy. I’ve talked to several users for more than 20 minutes on this and they loved us for that.
Alternatives: Intercom, Purechat
Paper — Capture and build on ideas, together (Free)
Paper is a really neat collaboration app by Dropbox. Think of it like Medium meets Google Docs. It has a clean UI like Medium and collaboration feature like Google docs where many users can collaborate in real time. We’ve been using it for the past few months for writing our spec documents and absolutely love it. It’s still in private beta but I think you can get access through Product Hunt
Alternatives: Google Docs, Evernote, Hackpad,
Monitority — Get Free alerts when your site is down! (Free)
I don’t think I have to stress on the fact that it’s imperative the website or app doesn’t go down. We use monitority that gives us free sms and email alerts if our website goes down.
Google Search Console — Monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results (Free)
Previously known as the webmaster tools. Organic Search is our biggest source of traffic, about 75%. So I spend lot of time doing SEO and making sure our website is optimized for SERP and have no errors.
Google Docs — Write, edit, and collaborate wherever you are. For free.
Just like everyone else, we also use Google docs for collaborating on spreadsheets and presentations.
Recruiterbox — Recruitment software to track job applicants (Free)
We are currently hiring so we spent lot of time managing candidates on Recruiterbox. Using it makes our lives so much easier as compared to getting resumes in email. It’s a simple way to screen candidates and manage them through different stages of the recruitment cycle. Beside, its free plan is more than enough for our needs.
Invision — Free Web & Mobile Prototyping (Free)
We use Invision for collaborating with designers and getting feedback from the users. I love how you can convert static mockups into interactive prototypes to gimmick how it feels like interacting with the website. Usually UI looks really good but when you prototype it you learn that the interactions are not that smooth, this really helps improve the feedback loop. It’s an indispensable tool.
I’m sure I must’ve missed out on lot of tools. I’d love to hear what tools you use and their particular use cases.
Tap the💚 below then follow me on Twitter if you liked this.
