A short lighthearted bit
Tools we use
Working remote for over a decade we’ve tried it all
For over a decade our team has been working remote, staying in touch and working efficiently regardless of our location. From the caves of Cappadocia to the Strait of Magellan, we’ve worked our way through a variety of tools and services.
Notes, Writing and Documents
Being a remote team means LOTS of written communication
Current:
Past: Evernote, Dropbox, Penflip, Tettra
Why These Tools
There is no tool that we’ve been more impressed with in the last two years than Notion. They’ve taken the block based editing experience to a whole other level, and continue to build in new features that aren’t trivial and help make it even more useful. Our own internal documents, as well as those that we share with clients, are frequently house d in Notion. If they aren’t, chases are you can find them on …
Google Drive. Specifically, a shared Team Drive. Google won us over from Dropbox primarily for the features surrounding comment control, the in web editor and when they eventually added the ability to navigate files offline on our computers.
Communication
When you aren’t in the same physical space, you have to over-communicate.
Current:
- Slack
- Whereby.com (internal video chats)
- Uberconference (for when you need video + a call-in number)
- Krisp
Past: Evernote, Dropbox, Penflip, Tettra
Why These Tools
Before we were working from home for much of 2020 (and hopefully not 2021, fingers crossed?) our team was often working from the road. Travel is in our DNA and even back in 2010 we believed that with careful technology choices and discipline we could make it work. There has been some great software in the past (RIP Speek, the greatest phone tool ever made) but today, we’re all-in on Slack for messaging, Whereby.com for small group video calls and Uber Conference for external meetings since it gives you a phone dial in and in-browser video without any downloads.
Google Drive. Specifically, a shared Team Drive. Once Google added local file. system integration, we switched from Dropbox since 100% of our documents are in Google Docs/Sheets anyway. The worst part of Google Drive is the inability to control folder-level sharing options which is a frequent frustration.
Project Management
Keeping things in-sync is a big part of what we do, at home, online and on the road
Why These Tools
Why: Just like with our CRM we used to have a perennial discussion on what project management software to use. That ended with Notion. It offers us everything that we need to keep our team on track, and our clients up to date. Specifically, our usage of the Notion kanban board block and it’s ability to create custom views and filters, is fantastic for managing user stories and sprint planning. We’ve written user stories outlining the requirements of entire applications in these boards.
Internally we often rely on Todoist to manage our day to day lists and keep our team from having a heart attack thinking about the number of things that need to get done.
Design
Planning how a product should look and feel requires tight visual collaboration
Development
The way we build things evolves with every project but these are the tools that have kept up with us.
Past: Photoshop, Coda, Atom, MediaTemple
Customer Acquisition and Management
Finding, talking to an keeping track of people.
Current:
Past: Capsule, RelateIQ/SalesforceIQ, Pipedrive
Why These Tools
What CRM we’re using seems to almost be a perennial debate, mostly due in part to the constant barrage of new players in the field and never being totally sold on any one solution. HubSpot certainly satisfies our needs, but it is also the most expensive solution we’ve run with to date.
In addition we use Outreach.io for our outbound email campaigns and just recently we drank a little bit of our own Kool-aid and invested in a website for ourselves that has the flexibility to stand up new landing pages and keep our content fresh into the future.