I often come across your standard “15 best apps for entrepreneurs” or “5 best apps to grow your startup” articles. For the most part they are all generic and include sites/services like Uber, Dropbox, Evernote, etc. Nothing revolutionary here, these are the same apps that tens of millions of people are already using (rightfully so). Hopefully some of the apps below (broken down by theme) are refreshing
Get your time back
1) Calendly: Calendly has greatly reduced my time scheduling meetings with interviewees, partners, vendors, etc. Sync your calendar, setup some rules and reduce the back & forth in your inbox while getting calendar invites sent out automatically. Proof is in the pudding, schedule a time with me here.
2) inDinero: inDinero is an extension of your team that handles accounting, finance & payroll. They provide the software but also the accountants to handle everything for you. Visible actually integrates with inDinero so you can pull your metrics and visualize them!
Close Deals Faster
3) Charlie: Connect your Google Calendar and Charlie will send you a fully detailed briefing about the people you are about to meet with. Charlie will automagically pull in your mutual interests from Twitter, major news about their company, etc. Great for anyone you are pitching or interviewing! It’s a great replacement (and has always been better IMO) than Refresh.io.
4) Conspire: LinkedIn connections are typically not strong and have incredibly low conversion. Connect your Gmail and search for someone you want an intro to. Conspire will tell you which of your contacts has the best chance of an intro based on email activity between the parties. Bonus points: they let you know who you are falling out of contact with.
Travel Smarter
5) RocketMiles: They let you book hotel rooms. Sounds standard right? Wrong. Connect your frequent flyer info and easily earn miles. After you conquer your business travel, #treatyoself (or your team) to a getaway.
6) Hopper: Hopper tells you when to fly and buy. Set some of your future travel plans up in Hopper and they will let you know the best time to buy. Your investors will be happy you are getting that burn down.
7) 7 Minute Workout: When you are on the road you are typically not working out or putting the best food in your body. 7 Minute Workout lets you get some exercise in when you are traveling. For you early adopters they have an Apple Watch app out too.
Be in the Know
8) Flock: Flock is “daily standups for remote teams”. I think it works great for any team though and would encourage any team to give it a whirl. Flock lets you share your accomplishments, tasks and challenges everyday. Our Flock is integrated with Slack so everyone is always on the same page. Protip: add a custom field for “Biggest thing I learned yesterday”, you’ll learn a lot!
9) Intercom: This likely goes against the theme of the post because Intercom is so popular now. However, Intercom is truly the pulse of your user base. It can do so much. Plus now they integrate with your marketing site for logged out users so you can easily see who converted from a lead to user.
10) ScreenHero & Slack: Seems like everyone is on Slack these days. Intra-company email is almost 0 for us. We have countless integrations setup and is the lifeblood of communication for us. We strive to have over 50% of our Slack messages in public channels each week to enhance transparency. We also found an amazing gem called ScreenHero. I can see why Slack acquired them. ScreenHero is an amazing ScreenShare and voice tool for you team. Our remote dev team loves it especially.
What did I miss? Shoot me some of your favorite apps & “hacks” I’ll make sure to update over time!
-Mike
