As an entrepreneur I believe that the sky is the limit here for tools. I’ve been asked many times about the tools I use, and decided it was worth a post.
Many are obvious, others are app building specific, but used together, these can help you streamline your business and save you lots of time and money.
I created a quick list of the online tools (many of which I pay $7 – $25 per month) I use all the time:
- Stripe (easy payment processing)
- github (code storage & sharing; I have 2 paid accounts)
- Slack (amazing team sync/async communication)
- Heroku (low-cost/scalable servers for developers)
- LastPass (secure password storage; I’m an enterprise user)
- AMEX Receipt Match (makes expense reports quick and painless)
- Asana (organization with less emails; I pay for this too!)
- Quickbooks (Industry standard, use the online version; I pay)
- Shyp (easiest way to ship anything, $5 + cost, they pick it up)
- Amazon EC2 (more servers!)
- Pingdom (Service that lets me know if my websites go down)
- Google Drive (I blew through the free 10GB limit on gmail ages ago)
- Shopify (easy eCommerce Storefront)
- Mailchimp (decent mailing/newsletter service)
- CRM software (I’m not a huge fan of any of them yet…)
- Wistia (kickass video service)
- LinkedIn (you’re already on this one)
- Google Apps (business gmail & calendar mostly)
- WordPress (cheap, flexible websites)
- WP Engine (inexpensive, fast, awesome wordpress hosting; I pay!)
- Hootsuite (Social media manager)
- Twitter (dude, get with)
- oDesk (Outsource almost anything)
- Amazon Mechanical Turk (Really cheap outsourcing)
- Zen Payroll (Easy easy payroll)
- Adobe Suite (offered exclusively in the cloud now)
- Keynote (Powerpoint for people who know better. not online)
- Xcode (tools from Apple for app builders)
- Apple’s huge/awesome SDK (for iOS development)
- Spotify (music… all day, all night)
- Quora (used to be a much bigger fan – it’s turning into Yahoo Answers)
- YouTube
- Fiverr ($5 outsourcing & fun)
- IFTTT (if this…then that)
- Evernote (thanks Dick Hoebee for this one.. & the browser extensions)
- Zendesk (white-label online help desk/FAQ/ticketing/etc)
Bottom Line: Don’t reinvent the wheel. C.H.E.A.T. where you can and use as many tools as possible. You’ll not only save a ton of money…but more importantly you’ll use less time building something you’re not any good at and more time innovating on your value-add.
Agree? Use other tools? Let me know if the comments