Steelwool promises to improve a business’ workflow management.
“Spending $20-50,000 often just isn’t in the cards for a young company,” said Rod Smith (left), co-founder of Volano Solutions. But small businesses still need to manage their work tasks, particularly as they realize that processes usable by one or two employees – say, spreadsheets and email reminders – aren’t as reliable when the company grows. To step into the yawning gap between a custom work-management system, which could cost thousands of dollars, and Post-It notes, the five-year-old software development company launched Steelwool.
“It’s a customizable workflow utility,” said Kelly Grace, vice president of sales, “made for small or mid-sized businesses to provide greater visibility and clarity of the status of their work.”
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For $99-a-month, users employ an online interface that lets them establish process steps, assign responsibilities and mark tasks complete, among other actions. Users can also send subsequent steps to colleagues either online or on their iPhone or iPads – the web-based app has a free companion mobile app.
Steelwool also has an API that allows users to pull information from the system and integrate it elsewhere, like a company website. Omaha non-profit Planet Water, for example, uses its Steelwool data to show the status of its projects by country for anyone who visits its Projects page.
A one-page worksheet comes with the purchase of Steelwool to help a client examine their process steps before configuring their work process, though currently, new clients do receive a short business consultation as a courtesy.
Prior to Steelwool, the 11 employees of Volano Solutions created applications customized to each business’ particular workflow. Steelwool aims to be a simplified version that businesses may or may not outgrow as they figure out their own work management needs.
Smith and Volano co-founder Don Stavneak (right) said Steelwool stands out from the crowd because it’s not project management software like Basecamp – “they’re not workflow-centric,” Smith said – and it’s not a traditional workflow system.
“We’d like to have the niche in training companies how to be more efficient and give them the custom tools to work with,” Stavneak said.
Eventually, Smith and Stavneak want Volano Solutions’ revenue to be generated half from custom software and half from products like Steelwool. The two have been working together since 1999, though Volano Solutions is their first company founded together, bootstrapped all the way.
A product in the hopper for future development is Lead Pin, described by Smith as “a data management system married to Google apps.” The app, which lets users pin locations to a Google map and easily manage those pins, was used by the Greater Omaha Young Professionals to highlight fun locations around the new College World Series location for out-of-towners.
Here’s a Volano Solutions promotional video providing an overview of Steelwool:
Credits: Screenshot from steelwoolapp.com. Video from Volano Solutions on YouTube. Photos courtesy of Volano Solutions.
