23 Cool Tools for Social Media Marketers

Looking for some new apps and tools to add to your social media marketing toolbox?
Wondering which graphics, analytics, and productivity tools can help streamline your workflow?
In this article, you’ll discover 23 tools and apps shared in the Social Media Marketing podcast’s Discovery of the Week.
23 Cool Tools for Social Media Marketers by Mike Stelzner on Social Media Examiner.

#1: Taco

The Taco app lets you combine tasks and tickets from different places, such as Trello, Evernote, and email, into one master to-do list. It’s a major timesaver.

Organize your to-do lists from multiple places with the Taco app.

Sign up for free at TacoApp.com and connect it to all of your other services. Taco will connect to more than 35 services such as Asana, Basecamp, Evernote, Highrise, Slack, Wunderlist, Gmail, and even an RSS feed.
Taco is a free desktop app and has a Chrome extension. Plus, you can use it on mobile if you bookmark it on your mobile browser.

#2: Grammarly

Grammarly is a great way to spell-check your social media posts. Even when you post something on social that you think is perfect, people sometimes comment with corrections. You either misspelled something or used the wrong spelling of a word. Grammarly fixes that.

Grammarly is like spell-check for social media and other online 

posts.

 

Grammarly is software, as well as a browser extension. Download the native app for free on your Mac or Windows computer. Then drag and drop documents and it will do a spelling and grammar check. There are also browser extensions for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, which do a live check of whatever you type on the web.
The program analyzes your writing for improper word usage, too. It highlights any errors, just like standard spell-check. Once you see a problem, you can fix it.
Grammarly’s free program has a lot of functionality, but there are paid upgrade options available, which do even more intense checks and suggestions.

#3: Typeform

To create cool forms on the web, try Typeform. You can create a questionnaire on Google forms or SurveyMonkey, and Typeform similar, but it’s much more visually appealing.

Typeform helps you create cool, user-friendly forms on the web.

Go to Typeform.com and get started for free. Typeforms can include information, payments, and registration. It’s optimized for mobile. You can even create a form on a mobile device and see how it looks as you create it.
It’s fun to take their surveys because it’s easy, looks cool, and has an awesome user interface.
Typeform is web-based and works across any platform. The basic plan includes unlimited forms and responses. Upgrade to the pro and the pro plus versions for a monthly charge, which give you a custom thank-you screen and priority support. Plus, you can remove the Typeform branding.

#4: Twitter Analytics From AgoraPulse

While Twitter Analytics gives you information about your tweets and the audience for your Twitter account, Twitter Analytics from AgoraPulse is a free tool that allows you to compare your Twitter account to others.
For example, say you want to compare the number of followers you have, the quality of your interaction, or the amount of Twitter activity with the accounts of your competitors or peers.

Compare your Twitter analytics to other accounts with AgoraPulse.

Go to analytics.agorapulse.com, authorize it to access your Twitter account, and click through the confirmation email. Then add the other Twitter accounts that you want to compare. You can see over the last 30 days how much engagement other accounts are getting, as well as interactions or conversations per tweet. There’s a really great Twitter-specific dashboard for all of that high-level data.
If you’re doing a weekly or monthly report to show how your Twitter account is doing compared to others, or even if you’re in an organization that has multiple Twitter accounts, list them off using this tool and you have quick, easy reporting.

#5: Grytics

It can be a hassle to identify the most engaged people in the Facebook group you run for your business. Grytics is a great tool to analyze your Facebook groups.
Grytics gives you statistics based on your most active members, engagement, and activity scores. Plus, you can see which were the top posts in your group.

Analyze your Facebook group activity with Grytics.

When you open a post from your Facebook page’s insights, it tells you how many people liked it and breaks down reactions and clicks. Grytics gives you that kind of data on each Facebook group post and then carries that over into the group members. Possible applications could be rewarding engaged group members and giving them a public shout-out.
It’s a desktop tool you can get by going to Grytics.com. There’s a free version that provides a bunch of basic data. Then it moves up to premium, pro, and enterprise versions, and each is only a small step up – $12, $25, or $55 per month – based on features.

#6: Patch

Patch, a smart portrait editing app for iOS, automatically edits your images and simulates a blurred background effect that lets the subject of your photo stand out.

The Patch app blurs the background on your mobile photos, 

which improves subject focus.

Open up an image inside the app, turn up the intensity, and in 10 seconds the image is processed from a cell phone selfie into something worthy of framing.
You can use images from the built-in camera on your phone, uploaded images, or imported photos from your camera roll. So if you’re at a conference and take a bunch of awesome selfies, you can process them afterward!
Patch is free in the App Store but offers watermark removal for a $1.99 fee.

#7: Slim Lists for Trello

Slim Lists for Trello is a Chrome extension that’s a cool hack for Trello users.
If you’re not familiar with Trello, it’s a project management tool that’s web-based (and free). The browser extension works in Chrome on both PC and Mac.

Slim Lists for Trello is a cool Chrome extension that allows you to 

fit more on your screen.

Slim Lists for Trello takes your existing Trello boards and reduces the width. Trello has different cards that are ranked and sorted into lists. This will give you all (or at least most) of the information, reduced up to about 50%. Doing this allows you to fit more on your screen.
If you’re not already on Trello, check it out. It’s an amazing tool. If you work collaboratively with many people, Trello is a lifesaver. It also has an app that does real-time communication. You have all of the information and all of the right people with access to it in a nice, neat, organized location.
Go to the Google Chrome store to get Slim Lists for Trello.

#8: Ripl

Ripl, a mobile app that creates images, video, captions, and moving text, is different from other apps in that it lets you easily do a lot of motion graphics.
With Ripl, you can even have text that zooms toward you or on a crawl. Check out the Social Media Examiner Instagram account for examples.


Ripl is free but you can get a pro account version for $9.99 per month, which allows you to remove the watermark. You can also add your own watermark and branding, as well as have access to other pre-populated design templates.
It’s a very cool effect. Ripl is available on iOS and Android.

#9: Senders

Senders is like having caller ID for email. Senders pulls information based on a sender’s email account and lets you know all about him or her.
Senders will give you the person’s name, title, and bio, along with links to his or her Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts. It shares last tweets, their Twitter follower count, and links to the Google search for that person.

Learn about people who email you with Senders.

You can even go into Senders with your own account and edit your information.
Senders works for most email accounts. All you need to do is give Senders permission to see your account and they don’t store, share, or read any of the content of the emails. Senders simply scans and searches the web for people’s contact info.
For now, Senders is free.

#10: OneTab

OneTab is a cool app that helps you manage the overload of tabs on your browser. For instance, you have a bunch of tabs open and you realize your computer is bogging down; however, you don’t want to lose all of those tabs. That’s where OneTab comes in.
Install the Google Chrome or Firefox extension and when you click it, it sends all of your tabs into one tab as a list of clickable links.

OneTab allows you to merge and save all open tabs to look at later.

Let’s say you have six or seven news sites that you check every morning. Instead of leaving them open in your browser all day long and slowing your computer, you can create a OneTab list and they open in one shot.
Or if you’re checking multiple tabs for a project and then get interrupted, you can merge those tabs, put them away, and go back and look at them later. You can focus on what needs to be done in the moment and reload those tabs at any time.

#11: G-Lock Apps

If you send regular emails as part of a newsletter or promotion, you may have seen a reduction in your open rates lately. Maybe your emails get stuck in the Promotions tab or the spam folder.
G-Lock Apps offers a cool solution. Add a simple piece of code to the end of your email and G-Lock sends your email through a filtering system to tell you whether it will go to the Gmail Promotions tab, the spam folder, or the inbox.

G-Lock Apps shows what might send your email to someone’s 

spam folder before you send it.

G-Lock Apps gives you seven or eight dedicated emails you can use to perform all sorts of tests on the platforms you care about most. You can create a segment in your list, send your message to that little segment, and watch the results come in. Then it shows you what’s wrong with your email so you can fix it.

The basic subscription service is $39/month, and it’s worth it to get your emails into your subscribers’ inboxes so they get opened and acted upon. The ROI could be monstrous. There are also premium subscription rates, as well as a $25 pay-per-test option.

#12: Assistant.to

There are a lot of tools available such as Calendly and ScheduleOnce that remove the hassle of scheduling appointments.
Assistant.to is a native Gmail plugin that has access to your Google calendar. Simply press a button inside your Gmail to offer up a few available times, and they get populated into the email you’re writing.

Assistant.to makes it easy to schedule meetings via Gmail.

To set up an appointment through Assistant.to, you need to use the desktop version of Gmail.
First put the other person’s email address in the To section. Then in the email, you’ll see a little “A.” Click that to bring up your calendar and see availability. Select a few different time chunks that you want to offer as options. Then click Add and it pastes them into the body of the email.
All of the times are clickable. After the receiver selects an available time, the system confirms it and adds the appointment to both calendars.
Check out Assistant.to. It’s free.

#13: FUNIPICA

Do you ever find yourself trying to film something either on your laptop, computer, or smartphone and you don’t have a lens wide enough to get everything in the picture? Check out FUNIPICA.
On one end of FUNIPICA (which looks like a big clip) is a monstrously big lens that you clip over the top of the lens on your iPhone, Android, laptop, or computer. You instantly have a super-wide angle with a slight fisheye look to it.

FUNIPICA is a lens clip for your computer or smartphone camera.

This is a great way to take a picture in a selfie mode with lots of people or get a much wider view of wherever you are. So if you’re outside doing a live video show, this will give you the totality of your experience on site.
This product is a 0.36 super-wide lens. Unscrew the top of it and turn it into a 15x macro lens, which allows you to get in really close; much closer than with just the camera built into your device.
You can get the FUNIPICA F515 on Amazon.

#14: Darkness – Beautiful Dark Themes

Night mode is often an easier-on-the-eyes version of the user interface. The white portions of a browser or an app turn to a dark gray or pitch black and the text becomes white.
Now, a Chrome browser plugin called Darkness – Beautiful Dark Themes brings night-mode to your evening web surfing and Facebooking.

The Darkness theme makes your screen easy on the eyes at night 

or in the early morning.

If it gets to be 7:00 or 8:00 PM and you’re still on your computer, switch on Darkness. This is great if you have a hard time sleeping after staring at the bright screen on your computer and it helps reduce eye strain.
Darkness, free for Chrome and Facebook, offers a paid upgrade for additional websites such as YouTube, Twitter, and more. Go to the Chrome Web Store and search for Darkness – Beautiful Dark Themes.

#15: FocusMusic

Similar to Focus@Will, FocusMusic.fm is a cool music tool that helps you focus and get more work done when you’re busy.
In line with the principle that playing regular lyrical music distracts rather than focuses the mind, FocusMusic.fm has electronic dance music, downtempo, classical, and a channel called Rain.

FocusMusic is a simple site that gives you music for focusing.

The beat of the music keeps you in sync and moves you forward through your work at a tempo.
It’s a free, sparse website that does one thing and it does it well. When you open up the URL on any browser (desktop or mobile), you’ll see Play, Forward, and Back buttons, and that’s it. No other distractions to occupy your attention.

#16: Crowdfire

Crowdfire, a web app for iOS and Android, lets you publish to Twitter and Instagram, engage with your followers, clean up your followers, find new followers based on keywords, and schedule based on the best times to publish.

Manage your Twitter and Instagram content and relationships with Crowdfire.

Because Instagram’s API doesn’t allow scheduling, Crowdfire walks you through the process of creating content on your smartphone and allows you to save it in a hopper. The app then pings you at the scheduled time so you can manually publish your post.
Crowdfire is free for one account with limited features but offers several paid account options to fit a variety of business needs.

#17: Speedtest

Speedtest is a simple but powerful tool that lets you test and troubleshoot the download and upload speeds of your Internet connection with the push of a button.

Check your Internet connection with Speedtest.

While super-fast download speed is great, it’s your upload speed that’s critical when communicating with people online in real time. Run Speedtest.net before you run live webinars, use Skype, or broadcast live video to make sure your upload speed is fast enough to let people on the other end hear you.
Ideally, your upload speed should be at least 2 megabits per second, if not more. If it’s not, Speedtest will quickly isolate problems so you can determine whether the problem is with your network, your computer, or so on.
You can access Speedtest from the website and via the app for Android and iOS.

#18: Google Analytics URL Builder Chrome Extension

Google UTM parameters allow you to track the activity around a URL inside Google Analytics. The Google Analytics URL Builder Chrome extension is a free tool for people interested in UTM traffic.
Install the extension and you can quickly create UTM codes after you click a bookmarklet in the upper right-hand corner in your Google Chrome browser.

Select the bookmarklet in your Chrome browser to create UTM 

codes with Google Analytics URL Builder.

Go to the link where you want to add the UTM parameters and click the extension button. The UTM Builder shows up, and after you type in your Source, Medium, Term, Content, and Campaign terms, the trackable URL appears.
You can fill in the form with unique parameters or use a drop-down menu to automatically populate the standard parameters you use most often.

#19: Editorr

Editorr is a great service for text editing. Get 24/7 writing help from real people who will edit your text when you submit it to them. Use them for press releases, blog posts, or even social media posts that are a paragraph or two.

Take your draft text and submit it, either through the web, iOS, or Android app. It goes off to their team and one of their editors claims the job. They edit your words, send them back to you, and point out every change. Fast turnaround time, too.
Your first 100 words are free but you have to buy words as you go. The more words you buy in bulk, the less expensive it becomes.
The starter package is 150 words for $5.

#20: Google Data Studio

Do you ever find yourself perplexed by the reporting on Google Analytics? Google has come up with a brand-new free product that allows you to create visual dashboards easily for yourself, a customer, or your boss. To find it, go to DataStudio.Google.com.

Create and customize visual dashboards with Google Data Studio.

Log into Google Data Studio with your Google account, and you’ll be presented with a blank page where you can create whatever kind of dashboard you want.
In addition to your Google Analytics account, you can connect other sources of data, such as Google Sheets. You can then drag and drop elements such as bar charts, pie charts, tables, geomaps, scorecards, and more onto the blank canvas. You can even include a data range selector and a source filter in each module.
When you’re done creating the report, you can easily share it with other people.
It’s really easy and super-powerful.

#21: Pocket Explore

Pocket, a bookmarking site, recently added Pocket Explore. This new feature curates all of the content saved to its site into a searchable, public news feed, allowing marketers to find popular stories they may have missed.

Pocket Explore, an addition to the Pocket bookmarking site, 

curates content into a news feed.

Pocket knows how long somebody scrolled through an article to read it, how long it was open, and whether they shared it. Pocket Explore uses all of those signals to surface the top-rated stuff.
Marketers can type in “social media,” “Facebook,” “Twitter,” and even “marketing” to find top shared news about these topics. It’s another great resource to find cool stuff.
Pocket Explore is built into the paid and free versions of Pocket and is usable on desktop as well as iOS and Android devices.

#22: Prisma

Prisma, available on iOS and Android, takes your images, whether you take the photos in the app or import them, and applies artistic filters.

Prisma turns your images into art.

Prisma is easy and intuitive to use. There are a variety of artistic filters so you can make your photos come across as brushstrokes, like it’s hand-drawn, Van Gogh or Picasso style, and more. It’s a great way to transform your profile pic into an artistic rendering of yourself.
When you publish your image, there’s a Prisma square in the bottom right-hand corner; however, you can turn that off.
Experiment with your marketing images by adding other artistic elements to them. Also, if you’re doing advertising, this is a cool way to dress up some of your images and make them stand out.

#23: Slither

Want a fun distraction? Pull Slither up in your browser, or download the app on your iPhone or Android. Slither is a game that lets you move around as a snake, along with other players. The goal is to intercept the other snakes, knock them off the board, and eat their dots.

Slither is a fun diversion when you need to take a break.

The game also works in airplane mode and it’s an absolute blast. Check it out. After all, marketers need a break every now and then, too.

Over to You
Social media tools are constantly evolving to help marketers improve their content, save time, and be more productive. Check them out and see which ones work best for you.

What do you think? Have you tried any of these social media tools or apps? What tools and apps have you found useful? Please share them in the comments below.

Source

The Only 14 Startup Tools You Need to Build a Unicorn

Imagine if you had to send marketing emails manually, or keep your records in a tattered binder on your desk.

Every company, even startups, needs to make a minimum investment in SaaS tools for work like email marketing, project management, and tracking sales.

But the catch is that some of these startup tools can cost huge amounts of money, and when you’re a young startup you don’t want to be forking out in excess of $2,000/user/month for just one piece of software.

The point of this post is to explain the minimum viable SaaS stack your startup should invest in, based on what we’ve found out at Process Street in our many (many, many, many) tool-testing escapades. I’ll even do the math for you, and collate the estimated annual cost at the end.

Ready to start building up your toolbox with the best SaaS out there?
Here we go: 

Database management: Airtable

Without Airtable, we’d still be storing data in various random spreadsheets, constantly having permission issues, and be unable to get a proper picture of all our data. With it, we now store all of our marketing and product data in one place that connects to over 750 different apps via Zapier.

Airtable takes you a step further than spreadsheets because it’s a relational database.

Setting up a database sounds harder than it actually is, probably because databases used to have to be made in complex apps or by using something like SQL.

Thanks to Airtable, everyone can have access to the power of a database that can hold everything from SEO data to customers and marketing contacts, all linked together so you can keep the data in a single, automatable, accessible place and stop scrambling to find what you need on your hard drive or inside Google Drive.

Pricing: free, or $12/user/month 

Marketing automation & support: Intercom

Intercom is an all-in-one platform for communicating with your customers, both for marketing and support. Last year we were using MailChimp for marketing automation, and Intercom for support, but we recently switched over to purely running our email marketing through Intercom.



Intercom consists of three products: Respond, Engage, and Educate:

Respond is an awesome support solution, with assignments, notes, automation, team inboxes, and performance metrics. It’s priced from $53/month for 250 customer contacts, but the price doesn’t rocket up as your business grows, it climbs gradually. For example, it’ll cost you $101/month for 4,000 customer contacts (and unlimited team members at every level).



Engage is Intercom’s marketing automation side. It lets you send messages manually at any time, based on user activity (perfect for SaaS and subscription businesses), or drip out a sequence of messages to anyone added to your blog subscriber list. In short, it does everything you’d expect from a marketing automation/email marketing service, but also has the layer of user insights because it’s linked to your product or service, too.

Total pricing for Intercom’s Respond and Engage products: $150/company/month for 1,000 contacts
Integrations: Zapier

Zapier is a platform that builds integrations between apps that wouldn’t usually integrate. For example, Intercom doesn’t have a natural integration with Sumo, but we need to send all blog subscribers (some of which come in through Sumo pop-ups) to Intercom. To solve that, we use Zapier to connect the two together.

And that’s just one of the hundreds of use cases. We even use Zapier with our own product, Process Street, to run checklists and add assignments to tasks when an action happens in another app.

Some of my own Zapier use cases at Process Street include:
Add new tagged Airtable URLs with titles to multiple Buffer accounts at once
Create a Google Sheet of incoming emails for analysis
Listen for the words ‘run meeting’ in our content creation Slack channel to fire off a Process Street meeting checklist
Run a Process Street pre-publish checklist when a blog article card is moved into a Trello list
Automatically tweet all RSS feed content
Add Trello cards in the ‘inbox’ list to Todoist with the same due date

So, as you can see, it’s a tool that helps you cut down on masses of data entry. Want to learn more about Zapier? We’ve written a huge ebook on the topic! Get it here.

Pricing: free, or $18.33/month for 20 zaps and 3,000 tasks 

Process management: Process Street

The scalability of your startup depends on how well new hires can pick up the pace, learn your processes, and start being efficient. Without documented processes, it’s practically impossible to scale because you’ll be spending time explaining tasks to new hires over and over again. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just hand them a process and check their progress quickly?

That’s where Process Street comes in. With Process Street, you can transfer your company’s knowledge to checklist templates that explain exactly how your team is expected to get the work done. This is great for things like sales qualification, blog pre-publish, employee onboarding, or client onboarding. That’s because all of these tasks have a structure and margin for error.

Here’s an example of an employee onboarding checklist built inside Process Street:

As you can see, each step has a checkbox and can contain form fields, images, videos, text, and more — all to help you explain the tasks that need doing, or to capture structured data.

A library of up-to-date, properly documented processes means you can scale your team with little effort and quickly check the work of your organization at a glance from the Process Street dashboard, which shows you how far each task is progressing:



Process Street also has a Zapier integration, which means you can either link checkboxes to actions in other apps (like sending all form field data to a spreadsheet when a task is checked) or run and assign checklists automatically (e.g. when a new card is labeled in Trello or when you get an email with certain text in the subject line).

Pricing: free, or $12.50/user/month 

CRM: Close.io

A CRM is where sales and marketing teams can add leads, communicate with them, and track conversations in one place. It’s an alternative to separate email inboxes, and Close.io is our CRM of choice here at Process Street.

Even the cheapest package comes with unlimited leads, contacts, and opportunities, meaning there’s no cap on the number of companies you can reach out to. But what really sets Close.io apart is its amazing search functionality. Using the app’s own variables (or even custom variables you add yourself), you can quickly filter your leads to get a targeted list. For example, you could get every lead in New York City who you haven’t emailed in the past week but have spoken to on the phone at least once.

I find it useful for marketing, too. We use Airtable to collate contacts we’ve mentioned in our blog posts, then use Zapier to automatically add them to Close.io with a tag; when you search the tag, you get a list of everyone to email telling them they’ve been mentioned, and you can bulk email them a template using the tag as a snippet for the URL of the promoted post.

We also use it in conjunction with Process Street for sales qualification.

Close.io might seem expensive at first, but it also covers the cost of calls and won’t need to be purchased for every member of the organization, like a lot of these tools do.

Pricing: $59/user/month 

Chat: Slack

Slack is a chat app for teams — check our review here. With it, you can cut email out of the equation entirely and focus on using the most efficient kind of interface instead of the long-outdated email.

Inside Slack, you can direct message your co-workers and create channels for each team inside your company. For example, we have a content creation channel where we share resources, have a quick morning catch-up chat, post our WIP articles, and generally communicate a lot more than we would do with just email.

Slack also has a ton of integrations meaning you could take it from being just a chat app like Facebook Messenger to being a fully-fledged dashboard for your notifications.

For example, you can link Slack to Trello and get a constant flow of notifications fed into the relevant channel. If you often work with someone in particular on a board, you can add a Trello integration to that channel and automatically update each other alongside the chat.



Pricing: free, or from $6.67/user/month 

Cloud storage: Google Drive

Cloud storage is one of the most basic requirements for modern businesses. Without it, you’re stuck in the ancient days where files had to be emailed from your hard drive, or accessed through the company intranet. I was always under the impression that most businesses used cloud storage, but when a recent study revealed that only 8% of companies share documents using cloud services, I was shocked.

Here are the usages and benefits of cloud storage:
Store files outside of company servers, minimizing risk of losing resources
Access files anywhere that has an internet connection
Use another server’s bandwidth, don’t clog up your own company’s
Save money on internal storage space
Control permissions and access to all your company’s resources

And, while there are a ton of different cloud storage services out there, we chose Google Drive because it gives you the best value for money and natively integrates with the rest of the tools we use in the Google suite, like Gmail, Sheets, and Docs.

Pricing: $10/user/month including unlimited storage and all G Suite features 

Google Suite vs. Office 365

This little section could be an entire article, but for the purposes of this article it’s worth quickly mentioning that Google Suite and Office 365 are parallel products as far as the tools go (Docs = Word, Sheets = Excel, etc) but the best way to create email accounts and control access for your company domain is to use Google Suite. You can get a plan that we use at Process Street that costs $5/user/month.

However, in some cases it might make more sense to get both. With Office 365, you also get Microsoft Flow (which can replace Zapier in some situations), Microsoft Teams (Slack alternative), and Microsoft Planner (Trello alternative).

I’ll talk more about this later on when we get to pricing, but due to their dominance it’s obvious some companies are looking for a Microsoft-heavy solution.
Project and task management: Trello

Trello is a kanban board app that you can imagine like an infinite amount of sticky notes, lists, and boards.



We divide our team’s functions up into boards, and use lists to denote progress through the flow, from ‘idea’ to ‘work in progress’ to ‘done’. With Trello, all of our team’s work is centralized and it’s easy to quickly see the status for particular tasks or add tasks from other apps using their integrations.

Trello is such an open-ended app you can use it to organize pretty much anything: make an editorial calendar, a list of blog post ideas, a list of growth hacking experiments, or just your personal to-do items. Because of that, it organizes a lot of our day-to-day work at Process Street and has just about every feature you could need.

Here’s an example of a Trello board we use at Process Street for managing our editorial calendar and our blog article creation process at the same time:



Pricing: free, or $12.50/user/month 

Payment processing: Stripe

For subscription businesses (SaaS included), ecommerce, or anywhere that collects payments from customers over the internet, Stripe is an essential tool. Basically, it’s a payment processing API you can build into your software or website to let users put in their credit card details, be charged, and then notify you.

With Stripe, you can accept debit and credit card payments from customers in any country in over 135 currencies. Without Stripe or a similar API, it’d be a pain in the ass.

Pricing: 2.9% of charge + 30 cents per transaction
Source control: GitHub

Most startups are in the software industry, so it makes sense to assume you need source code control and a repository.



While GitHub is most well known as a network for open source software, it can also be used privately as an internal tool to control edits and rollbacks on collaborative coding projects. At Process Street, we use GitHub to push updates live to the server after they’ve been through the review process. That way, we basically make sure nothing’s going live that will break everything.

Pricing: $9/user/month for the teams plan

 

Design prototyping: InVision

If your startup is involved with any kind of digital design, whether that’s UI design or web design, you’ll find it hard to get anywhere without a product like InVision.

InVision was built to combat the problems designers have when trying to show clients and team mates how their design will work, and what it’ll feel like to use. By uploading screenshots of your design, you can build working prototypes inside InVision complete with clickable elements.



And, when you get feedback from your team, they can comment directly on the part of the interface they’re referring to, eliminating a frustrating clarification process.

InVision is priced per active prototype, which means that if you only work on one project at a time, you can use it for free. If you need more, the pricing starts at $15/month.

Pricing: free, or from $15/month

 

Accounting: FreshBooks

FreshBooks is a full accounting suite for startups and SMBs. It includes invoicing, expense tracking, time tracking, tasks/projects, and reporting (for profits, expenses, etc.)

It’s an alternative to managing your accounts using spreadsheets, or even an alternative to hiring an accountant because much of what FreshBooks does negates the need for a dedicated accountant, especially in a small startup.

Scan receipts, request payments, and have everything automatically logged in one place so you don’t run into any compliance issues.

Pricing: from $15/month 

Social media management: Buffer

For an organization without a dedicated social media team (or at least a member of the marketing team that spends a certain number of hours per week managing social media), maintaining multiple social channels can be a huge drain on your company’s time, but with Buffer you can run social media on autopilot.

At Process Street, we combine Buffer with Zapier to automatically add new RSS feed items and new Airtable records. We also have a zap that adds any newly Buffer’d article to all of our Buffer social channels at once. These methods are much more effective than manually adding content, especially for use cases such as adding new posts to every employee’s Twitter feed, too.

Pricing: $10/month 

SaaS metrics: ProfitWell

ProfitWell is a 100% free tool from the creators of Price Intelligently. It works with Stripe, Braintree, and Zuora, all of which are tools for processing payments. So, whenever a customer pays you for your SaaS product, you get free metrics that guide the future of your product and give you an indication of its health.



Pricing: free forever 

The total annual cost for your startup: free plans where possible

The cost of a SaaS stack is different for every startup, so there’s not an entirely accurate way to estimate costs, especially when some tools are priced per company, some are priced per user, and some will only be used by one member of the organization.

Regardless, I’ve tried my best to make an estimate based on assumptions like: the CRM will only be used by one person, Airtable will be used by everyone, etc. In this estimate, I’ve assumed that a startup consists of 10 people, but there’s also a per user cost breakdown for tools the whole company will use.

Phew. Here goes:



Notes:
Intercom costs the same no matter if one person uses it or the whole company uses it. What you pay for is $X/contact, and this example assumes 1,000 contacts
I’ve listed the necessary users for Close.io as 1 because it’s likely to be a shared account with multiple email addresses connected
Stripe has been omitted from the list of costs because it’s impossible to calculate 

The total annual cost for your startup: premium plans without Office 365

Because of the nature of freemium, any growing company will get too big for the free plan in time. For a company of 10, it’s likely some of the tools will need to be paid.

Using the same estimated user counts and going by annual pricing, here’s what you’d pay to use these tools on the premium plan:



Notes:
I’ve kept Trello on the free plan because it’s not absolutely necessary to upgrade when there’s so many great unlimited features already. 

Alternatives: Microsoft Office 365

While we were brainstorming for this article, we realized that some of the tools listed here are bundled together in Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. Namely:
Microsoft Flow replaces Zapier
OneDrive replaces Google Drive
Microsoft Planner replaces Trello
Microsoft Teams replaces Slack

It’s cheaper to get the full Office package than pay separate charges for every product ($12.50/user/month) — but only marginally, because you’ll still need Google Suite otherwise you’ll be using gmail.com email addresses at your workplace. Here’s a version of the table with Office 365 substituting out similar products, saving $120 annually.



While it makes financial sense to opt for Office 365, you’ll still need to pay $5/user/month for G Suite if you want to use a company email and bulk-control the Google accounts of your employees.

So, in conclusion, it’s possible to pay just $2,600 annually for a high quality SaaS stack for your startup. Some tools, like CRMs and marketing automation, don’t come cheap. In contrast, a lot of tools are available for free.

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Why Being ‘Busy’ Does Not Mean You’re Being Productive

Many people see being busy as a badge of honour, believing it shows that they’ve got important tasks to handle, and that they work hard to earn their income. This goes hand-in-hand with the assumption that people who have free time on their hands are not as important or don’t work as hard as those who are always rushing busily around.

This simply isn’t true. Being busy isn’t the same as working efficiently. Busy people who constantly multi-task across different projects often lack organization and planning, which can increase the amount of time it takes to complete tasks by 25%. Being busy isn’t necessarily a sign of success, either – particularly if the pace of work is unsustainable.

If all this sounds familiar, this free time management test will help you assess how you’re coping with your workload and make necessary adjustments to your to-do list and schedule. In the meantime, here are some more reasons why being busy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re productive:

1. Long list of priorities

Busy people have a long list of priorities and struggle to complete everything. They don’t know how to sort their projects according to priorities and are forced to juggle them or multi-task. A long list of priorities makes you less productive and more prone to making mistakes.

Productive people narrow down their list of priorities to ensure they’re manageable on a day-to-day basis. This helps them handle every task or project at one time and complete each of them efficiently and in a timely manner. When you work this way, you have some free time to yourself at the end of the day and aren’t as busy as most people in your position would be.

2. Taking on more projects than they can handle

Some people like to be the go-to person and take on more tasks or projects than they can handle. They don’t know how to say “no” and accept tighter deadlines, new projects, new tasks, etc., without considering the impact these additions would have on their schedule or productivity.

Productive people understand the value of saying “no”. They have a fixed schedule prepared beforehand and don’t accept any changes or additions unless it’s truly urgent. They also carefully consider how much time each task or project would take, before they add it to their schedule. If you struggle to say “no,” here are three guilt-free strategies that should make it easier!

3. Multi-tasking

As mentioned before, multi-tasking can reduce efficiency by 25%. It can also add to your stress and make you feel dissatisfied and lost at the end of the day. People who multi-task are also more likely to make mistakes and deliver poor results. According to research Microsoft has conducted, it takes the brain 15 minutes to refocus on a task after it’s distracted. If you switch between two different tasks, you’ll take longer to complete them both.

Productive people focus on one task at a time and get it done before moving on. Because they’re not distracted when they perform the task, they can complete it quickly and efficiently. At the end of the day, they get more done than people who multitask, and so feel more accomplished.

4. Easily burn out

Busy people are constantly on the go and fill their schedules to the brim. They don’t allow themselves any breathing space in between tasks. Your brain can become fatigued and you’ll feel its effects in the form of regular exhaustion. Most adults can remain focused on a single task for 20 minutes. You can study or work for 90 minutes before your brain starts to drift away and lose concentration. This will eventually lead to burnout and stress. This article will help you identify whether you’re experiencing burnout and give you some coping techniques.

Productive people are aware of these limitations and often segment their day effectively. Once they have finished one task, they take a small break to refresh their mind before moving onto another one; this helps them avoid burnout and stress. They are able to maintain high energy levels and work enthusiastically, which makes them more productive.

5. Getting involved in the process

Busy people are very process-oriented and focus more on the smaller details rather than the bigger picture. They’re also perfectionists that spend more time than they need to on any given project. As a result of this process-oriented approach, these individuals are always busy and stressed. They don’t receive any satisfaction from their job and eventually lose all enthusiasm for it.

Productive people are result-oriented and will take the most effective, efficient, and comfortable approach to their goals. They won’t spend unnecessary time on the details; instead, they focus on the quality of the results. This ensures they get things done quickly and on schedule. They also gain more satisfaction from their efforts and feel better at the end of their workday.

You can be successful, productive, and hardworking without being busy. You just need to plan your day, learn how to say no, delegate some tasks, and focus on personal development. This will help you avoid stress and ensure you have a more balanced lifestyle. The lower stress levels will also have a positive impact on your productivity and skills, so your performance at work will improve, too. You can’t lose – so give it a go.

In what ways can you improve your productivity by not being ‘busy?’ Tell us about it in the comments.

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Stop Procrastinating and Get Things Done – A Guide

We all procrastinate. There’s nothing shameful about that, it’s just human nature. And while it’s acceptable to be lazy from time to time, procrastination can become a very bad habit very quickly. Often we don’t even know we’re doing it. Especially in our age of technology and social media, it’s never been easier to “slightly postpone” your duties by checking your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, only to realize two hours later that you did nothing productive except scrolling (and judging).

Studies indicate that we lose about twenty days in a year to procrastination and activities that bring us no special benefits. Now stop and think about that for a moment. How many books could you read in twenty days? Or do anything else that is good for you, from going on a vacation to spending quality time with your friends and family? Once you put in numbers just how much of our precious time we waste, it becomes clear that we need to do something to make it right. Different people react to different methods when it comes to stopping procrastination, which is why in this article, we’ll give you a mishmash of different tips and techniques that you can try out to get your procrastinating habits under control. Like with every new habit, you need to be consistent and show perseverance in order to have permanent results.

Know thyself

This first tip sounds quite obvious, but it is extremely on point. One of the main troubles we’re facing when it comes to procrastinating is that we don’t recognize the mechanisms behind it. We’re so used to simply floating into procrastination mode that we don’t even notice.

Things and situations that make you procrastinate are usually daunting tasks, something that is excruciatingly boring or it takes up a lot of time you want to spend on something else. You probably encounter these self-imposed obstacles on your job, with your house chores or working on yourself in any form. Every time you feel the need to stop doing something to procrastinate stop for a second and try to understand what is happening in your mind. Are you trying to distract yourself? Have you convinced yourself you work best under pressure? Are you afraid that what you’re doing won’t be good enough? Are you convincing yourself that what you’re doing isn’t that important anyway and praising all the other things you’ve done right?

Chances are that your thoughts are a mix of aforementioned responses you have on doing something you don’t like, but as soon as you recognize them they will become a red flag. Every time this kind of thinking arises, notice it and understand you’re about to go into full procrastination mode. After that, all you need to do is continue working and the thoughts will disappear just as quickly as they appeared.


You don’t have to do it all at once







When we think about doing something we’ve got an aversion towards, you usually imagine hours of work at your table, with no break or rest in sight. Then, when you break this bleak picture by procrastinating, you feel satisfied, though it will only make it that much harder to get everything done.

The easiest way to prevent any job from becoming overwhelming is to separate it into smaller chunks and then work on each of those chunks one at a time. Once you start working on a small task within a bigger one, do your best to focus on what you’re doing right now, and leave all the other parts to the future. That way, not only will the feeling of being overwhelmed be gone, but you will also be more productive with what you’re currently doing.


Make a competition out of it

You can compete with either yourself or the passing of time. Either way try to make it more fun. Even if you’re not a competitive person, assigning yourself with how much time you’ll spend on something in a day will get you into competitive mood.

You know very well that if you don’t get things done in the allotted time, everything else you’re supposed to do (especially the fun stuff) gets pushed back. Why would you want to do that to yourself? If it is a big project that requires a lot of work to be done right away, then break it into thirty-minute sessions, after which you get a five to ten-minute break. Use that time wisely – open your window and let some fresh air in, play with your pet or just let go of your thoughts for a couple of minutes. Naturally, take some bigger breaks from time to time, so that you can eat in peace and for that time, do your best not to think about what else needs to be done.


Distractions – get rid of them







So much of our work is done on computer these days, and that is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. All the social media, fun websites, games, IM with friends that are procrastinating just like you are but a click away, so how can you resist them?

Thankfully, there are millions of people that are in the same predicament like you, and they’ve come up with some very useful apps to limit your procrastination to a minimum. Apps like Stay Focusd or Timeful are there to make you giving up social media as easy as possible, because they can limit your time on certain websites, after which sites will be blocked for the rest of the day. As harsh as it sounds, you’re probably aware that it’s necessary to get things done. There are some who suggest that completely disconnecting your internet connection is a good idea, but if you need the web for your work, then this isn’t really plausible. Other options are that you explore the internet in incognito tab or other security mode, so that even if you’re tempted to check your Facebook, you’ll have to login and that alone is enough to put you off of it.


Don’t wait for optimal circumstances

Here’s a procrastination tactic that provides us with an excellent excuse to fool ourselves and all around us. You make yourself believe that you simply can’t get something done unless this or that happens. While there are situations in which this is valid, most of the time waiting for optimal circumstances is nothing more than an excuse. Face the facts that things will never be perfect – all you can do is try your best and know that if you do not choose your moment, the moment will choose you.


Create to-do list of things you avoid doing







Great strategy for facing all your daunting tasks is to write them down. It’s easy to make a timetable with all different things that you have no problem doing, spend much more time doing all you like and then leave no time for what really needs to be done. When you get all you need to do, create a schedule of doing it and stick to it as much as your willpower allows you. Put the list somewhere where you can see it, either on your work desk or get one of those apps that pops up your to-do list every time you open a new tab.


Get over yourself

Yes, this seems like an advice you get from conceited people, who just happen to be time management gurus and juggle 25 hobbies with their job and volunteer work, but you do need to get over yourself.

Most of the obstacles and challenges about working on uninteresting or difficult tasks are mainly in our head. Even planning to get things done becomes a form of procrastination if you allow it, which is why you need to know when it’s time to start working. No, you shouldn’t wait for the night before deadline to do anything, because it will be sloppy and unfinished and no, you haven’t got enough time to spend an hour watching something on Netflix. Our first advice was to know yourself and our last is to overcome that lazy part of yourself that is so keen on procrastinating.

Like with most rehabs, getting rid of procrastination habits is often a slow process and you need to take it one step at a time to make it work. Don’t procrastinate to stop procrastinating (yes, it’s a paradox, and yes, it happens more often than you think) and know that all you accomplish you’re actually doing it for yourself and your improvement and if that doesn’t seem too important to you, then procrastinate away.

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