Founder Friday
is a weekly guest post written by a founder who is based in or hails from the Silicon Prairie. Each month, a topic relevant to startups is presented and founders share lessons learned or best practices utilized on that topic. August’s topic is the tools we use to get stuff done.
About the author: Raymonn Adams is co-founder and CEO of Lockr, a Lincoln-based startup that helps sports coaches organize, track and measure their effectiveness. Read more about Lockr.
Tools For Startup Fools
At some point in time, the amount of tools we used seriously reached more than 20. The very reason we used tools was to gain back time we needed to push out great work.
But there are so many amazing options—and so many damn good ones I might add—we wanted to try them all. However, the problem is we ended up managing the vast amount of tools used to get our daily tasks done, thus stealing away more valuable time.
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When searching for management tools, here are two profound words of wisdom: One, you don’t need all of them. Second, you don’t need more than four to five tools. At Lockr, we just happen to be using a bit more than five. Hah. We need to follow our own advice, right?
The key is to find the management tools that combine a few of your must-have functionality and have integration into each other.
The tools we use:
Google for Business (The entire suite of sweetness)
Google’s business suite is amazing in the way that it’s taken all the familiar business tools such as word documents, spreadsheets, and calendars and centralized it while making it affordable.
There’s no need to try and educate you on the business suite from Google business. We all just need to put our hands together and enthusiastically shout, “thank you Google for making daily tasks easier.”
Basecamp
When you are a startup your to-do list becomes monstrous. Projects need an item next to a checkbox, which the checkbox may need a checkbox, too. So many subtasks. Projects seems to take a long time and multiple people to complete. More than a checklist is needed to keep track of all the small, yet crucial tasks within a project. Managing these projects could be key in having early success in the startup world.
We use Basecamp for the simple, yet powerful and streamlined interface. Not too much, but just enough to get the job done with ease.
PipeDrive
There is no way to get around the traditional sales process for a new startup. It doesn’t matter the social connectivity or sharing functionality you have built into your platform. If you are going after a sale from the user, you have to make calls early on. Or at least know the process you want to create from first touch to conversion.
PipeDrive, visually, does it very well. PipeDrive’s Customer Relationship Management moves you through your sales process from a horizontal perspective giving you the ability to see the many prospects and in which stage they are in.
KISSMetrics
Startups live and die on metrics. In most cases using the free tools to get the job done is ok. But there are times when you need to swipe the card and get some more robust functionality to help you drill down to the finest of details. As mentioned we use Google for Business. It’s sweet and affordable. But I’m going to have to copy exactly KISSmetrics’ slogan. Whether you are a startup or a later stage company — it behooves you to know “who did what” in your software or on your website.
“Google tells you what happen. KISSmetrics tells you who did it.”
Campaign Monitor
Email marketing is key in our marketing efforts. Building your list is one of our main focuses. We can go on and on about the benefits of using email software and the ROI you get with using it. But instead, let me rave about how Campaign Monitor is, in my humble opinion, the best in regards to ease of use as well as upholding brand equity.
It integrates with other platforms, flexible in design capability and has killer statistics to help you understand key metrics. The only thing it doesn’t do is sing sweet melodies. And still, they are announcing some new features soon.
SproutSocial
It is without question that every tech business needs to be using social media. It has many benefits. It’s affordable, fast, convenient, affordable, and convenient. Felt like deja vu there for a minute.
The key is not just having social media channels, but using those channels to gain valuable insight to your target market. Using SproutSocial gives Lockr the ability to search for our market, respond quickly to questions, and ultimately share ideas and get great feedback.
SproutSocial makes it easy to be social on multiple channels simultaneously.
WordPress
The best content management system in the history of man. Enough said.
