Podio — build your own business apps
“Podio helps you structure the work you do every day so you can collaborate the way you want to”
Podio is an easy-to-use and affordable tool to create and customize (without coding skills!) many of the systems that every business needs. With Podio anyone can use what others have built or easily create from scratch apps for CRM, bug tracking, project management or recruitment to give a few examples. Podio brings different business apps into one central place and customizes them to your liking.
Structure and Customization
The real strength of Podio is customization. Podio is divided into workspaces that could, for instance, reflect your company’s departments. For each workspace you can add as many apps you need. For example, a sales workspace could have apps for leads, opportunities and products. This setup of course is a standard CRM tool but you could add, for example, an app for contracts or official sales documents. Similarly, a workspace for software development could have apps for issues, releases, test cases and test suites.
Unlike Salesforce, there is no need to write any kind of code or hire a consultant to do modifications. Any app that you have built or taken from the market place can be modified with just a couple of clicks to meet your requirements. Let’s say you need to add information about competition to your leads app. Competition would be marked as a category with options Yes, Unsure or No. The modification process goes like this:
- Go to edit mode in Lead app.
- Drag a category field to your app.
- Add options by writing the option name and press enter.
- Save your changes.
Creating apps from scratch is just as simple as adding a field to an app. You simply give the app a name and add the fields that the app needs. In addition, Podio’s marketplace is full of ready-made apps and full workspaces that you can install with just a couple of clicks and then edit the apps to meet your needs.
How we use it
At Etuma Podio is where our work is organised and managed, which means pretty much that if something is not in Podio it does not exist. We have workspaces for projects, sales, marketing and software development. In addition, there is the standard employee network so there is no need to have a separate service for sharing interesting links or to make company wide announcements.
Projects workspace is meant for projects that happen only once and we don’t want to have designated app for it. For each project we have deliverables and meetings that we attach to the project. Podio is very handy as tasks can be linked to any app item and we assign lots of tasks as sub-deliverables to comprise a deliverable.
For sales and software development, our setup is pretty standard with leads and opportunities for sales and issues and releases for software development. We also have some custom apps to keep information related to our customers and data that they use in our system. We have a service provider who gives us API keys for each customer and those keys are kept in a single app and each API key is linked to the correct opportunity and back-end system account for that same customer.
For marketing our main apps are Blog ideas and Metrics. Blog ideas are linked to Google Documents where we do the collaborative writing but in Podio we keep the title, author, stage, editor, publishing date and blog post related URLs in order. Each blog idea gets tasks assinged to it to manage the writing process. In the Metrics app we share information about what is happening at etuma.com.
All in all, Podio is making our life a lot easier and more flexible as work can be done from any place with an Internet connection.
Summary
All these examples that I have given above seem very simple and can be actually done with many different free or paid services. Nevertheless, Podio is the only one where all these can be done in the same service, with ease of use and for a really competitive price. In my opinion, Podio is doing what Salesforce should be going.
Disclaimer: I am huge fan of Podio and use it everyday. I am also a Podio Hero, which means that I get to see and use new features before they are released to everyone. I couldn’t be more biased!
