Episode 504 | 15 Tools We Use to Run Our Business

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2020

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week we chat with Tracy Osborn (@tracymakes) as we discuss 15 of the top tools we use to run our businesses. As a followup to a previous, popular tweet, we thought we'd give an update on what tools we continue to use today, as well as share some of the new tools we have started to use. While tools are necessary for founders, it's important to find a good balance between good-enough and perfect when it comes to evaluating which tools to use. As Tracy says in the show, "It's a good lesson for founders because they often want to build something the 'right way' from the start. Many times there are tradeoffs and sometimes you have to use the tool that has constraints so that you can work faster. It might not be perfect, but it gets the job done." Are you using any of the tools we mention in the show or have a tool you think we should use? Let us know in the comments! The top 15 tools we cover 6:04 #1 Calendly vs YouCanBook.me 7:45 #2 Slack: how and why we use it 12:20 #3 How we use Notion for permanent documentation 16:21 #4 Google Drive vs Dropbox for Business 18:42 #5 LastPass for Business 20:05 #6 Dasharoo 21:57 #7 Squadcast.fm & Castos.fm to run this podcast 23.57 #8 Drip & RightMessage for email marketing 25:15 #9 Trello for personal business (vs other task management tools) 26:57 #10 Squarespace for websites 30:35 #11 Voxer push to talk audio vs text messaging 32:52 #12 Keynote for conference talks and eBook PDFs 36:02 #13 Tweetbot vs Twitter.com 38:08 #14 Buffer 39:29 #15 Submittable and Pipedrive 42:20 BONUS: FrontApp for email collaboration Links from the show Tracy Osborn | tracyosborn.com Tracy Osborn on Twitter Rob's tweet on tools used | Twitter Calendly YouCanBook.me Discord Discourse Basecamp Notion Dasharoo Lastpass Sunrise KPI Trello Establishing a High-Performance Productivity Stack with Tracy Osborn | MicroConf on Air Squarespace Voxer Guides: 18 Things SaaS Founders Should Know | Startups For the Rest of Us Zencaster Squadcast Castos

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this week's episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. This week,
0:04.6	Tracy Osborne joins me on the show once again, and we talk through 15 tools we use to run our
0:09.8	business. In this case, the business is microconf and tiny seed. And in fact, we actually run
0:15.5	through more than 15 tools, but it seemed a little ridiculous to put how many tools we actually
0:20.2	mention in the
0:21.2	title. This episode idea is Swiped Whole Hog from the Tropical MBA. So hats off to Dan andine
0:28.1	over there for coming up with a great episode format. And I felt like we could share similar,
0:31.9	similar knowledge and different tools and our thoughts on how we use them and why. But before we
0:36.3	dive in, I received an email from
0:38.1	Sharud Agarwal, and it's regarding episode 499, the two-parter that I did with Jordan Gall on this
0:45.2	first six stages of SaaS growth. He says, hey, Rob, long-time listener, first-time emailer. I've really
0:50.4	enjoyed listening to the podcast for a long time now in all its different formats. However, your recent two-parter with Jordan Gall has been one of my favorites. I've been thinking
0:57.9	about why it was a favorite. The obvious reasons are that I can match my journey with yours and
1:02.4	Jordans and figure out what I've done differently slash similarly and what may come next.
1:07.2	But thinking more, I realize that these episodes filled the huge gap left by the end of the startup podcast by Gimlet Media.
1:14.5	I think pretty much everyone in startups have been saddened by the decline of that series.
1:18.4	However, I imagine it was a very difficult series to pull off.
1:21.5	I think your format could replace it with a lighter version, less editing, less raw emotional content,
1:26.4	but still going through the stages of a startup's life and expressing the feelings and decisions that had to be made along the
1:31.9	way. Love what you're doing. Keep it up. Thanks, Sharud. So thank you, Sharud, for writing in. This
1:37.4	type of feedback helps me understand, not just if someone likes it, but why they like it. And I've
1:41.7	already been giving thought to, are there other episode formats like that where I can bring on another founder and compare our paths or, you know,
	...

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