8 Free Apps That Will Supercharge Your Startup Remote Setup
By: Francesco Perticarari
Tags: Productivity, Startup Life, Venture Capital, Remote Working, Startup Lessons

The Remote App Shortlist

1. Slack

Immediate communication with colleagues is definitely one of the challenges for remote work. So we must rely on tools and systems to stay in touch throughout our daily workflow.

We have used Slack for a while, but thanks to COVID-19 we’ve discovered a whole new level of power this platform has!

Slack has now become the core of our team communication management — and productivity has increased too. When you don’t need an immediate response, dragging a team mate into a side chat can be more disruptive than helpful — this by the way is the case also in non-remote environments.

With your team now fully remote, it might be tempting to ring up colleagues for all sorts of minutiae or requesting videocalls all the time. It’s worse than interrupting someone at his/her desk because you can’t even gauge how busy and focused that person is by glancing at them first.

Leave comments in Slack instead to share details and ask questions. Use the @ symbol to mention a teammate in your comments — they’ll get a notification and be able to reply when they have a minute.

Deal breaking bonus: Slack Apps.

With an entire section dedicated to ‘working from home’, Slack apps and app integrations bring all your tools into one place to manage and share your workflow as a team: even when you’re working from home.

Stay connected to your human colleagues and have even your software tools report to you: your calendar can now tell you about upcoming events, your upcoming CRM tasks will ‘slack you’ a reminder…Even emails and project management changes can now tell you about updates on Slack!

From sharing files with your team, keeping stakeholders up to date on progress, or jumping on to an impromptu video call at the press of a button, connecting your work tools to Slack helps you do your work away from work.

If you want to read more about Slack, you can check out their channel Slack API and the articles posted there by Ellie Powers and her product team.

2. Calendly (+ Google Calendar)

Calendly synchs with your calendar services (i.e. Google Calendar), so instead of wasting time and emails to set a time that suits everyone for a meeting, Calendly synchronises the best meeting time for everyone based on their availability.

It can be one-on-one meetings or group meetings such as videocalls, phone calls or other type of events.

You’ll find Calendly extremely useful for staff report meeting — e.g. the analyst reporting to me can just book a time I’m free on Friday/Thursday for the weekly catch-up.

What’s probably the most useful feature, though, is that Calendly helps you book slots with your customers in a smart way: the slots available for a videocall with you, for example, might only be available between 10am and 12noon, then between 3pm and 6pm but only if there is no conflicting event.

You can set Calendly to space meetings apart to avoid overrunning and to send videolink details automatically. It can also ask the booker to leave details, such as a phone number or the reason for the booking — which Calendly can then reports in the event description and in the notifications to you and your client.

Needless to say: both you and the person booking the slot can then make edits through Google Calendar.

Magic Bonus: Gmail embedding — you can now embed a shortlist of upcoming slots right into an email. Ideal if you want to give a particular shortlist to choose from, say the next 3 days, and only failing these, allow the recipient to explore further dates.

3. Clockwise

Clockwise is the latest addition to our team’s toolset and it works pretty nicely as an addon for Slack and Google Calendar. We use it as a productivity booster by helping us schedule and reschedule meetings in a smarter way. It also helps us not to forget to step out of our office/room and into the kitchen two doors down for lunch!

It helps protect our “Focus Time”

Since we have no clue what the rest of the team is doing when we are not having a videocall, it’s more important than ever to protect each person’s work time. Whilst it might be tempting to respond to emails and Slack messages at all times, the whole team’s productivity will suffer if you fill up your schedule with catch-ups and forget to just get stuff done. Clockwise can help with scheduling Focus Time for each of your team members automatically, so you always make sure to have time to get your work done.

2. Communicate your status with Clockwise for Slack

Do you miss being able to look across the office to see if a coworker is free? The Clockwise Slack app lets you easily communicate your availability by syncing your calendar to your Slack status as an emoji. Even better, Clockwise will automatically put you in do-not-disturb mode when you’re in meetings, so you avoid oversharing when you’re sharing your screen.

3. Use Autopilot to stagger conference calls

Since most homes don’t have two offices, you may find yourself having to take concurrent calls with your partner. Autopilot automatically undouble-books meetings, so if you put your partner’s meetings on your calendar and put your meetings on Autopilot, Clockwise will make sure your calls don’t overlap. Same functionality that will help your work team condense internal meetings and calls to help each team member keep extended periods of uninterrupted Focus Time.

If you want to read more about Clockwise, you can check out Sofia Merenych’s Medium blog.

4. Trello

Trello is an excellent lightweight project management tool. It is easy on the eye and relatively straightforward to use. The generous free starter plan will be enough for your startup from inception until well into revenue-generation or post-fundraise mode.

Techradar gives it a 4 star review complaining about it being “light on features”. However, for us its lean approach is actually a selling point.

Not all team members will be eager to update their status and keep your project management tool up to date, which is a challenge all teams face.

Trello is so visual and simple that not using it takes almost the same time as actually using it. That’s what we wanted from our project management tool: the closest thing to a board with post-it notes and a simple way to assign tasks and save key notes.

An example of a Trello board we use for the fundraising of our VC fund

With Trello, you can create a board for each project and invite to it the right team members.

The card system employed allows team members to interact and collaborate with each other on projects — users can add comments, links, files and photos to project cards.

Trello makes setup a very uncomplicated process which only takes a matter of minutes. You don’t need to enter a mountain of information in order to get started — you only need your name, email, password and you are ready to go.

Trello is available through the website or via a dedicated app for macOS and Windows users. I personally like to have the native app open when I work and to keep it at fullscreen in one of the virtual desktops of my laptop. This has the triple purpose of:

Helping me break down incoming data into an ordered to-do list;

Quickly assigning task to my team during a videocall or Slack chat;

Remaining focused and prioritising tasks, rather than randomly respond to situational events, such as inbound emails, and therefore lose track of where the project is going overall.

Your team can create boards from the main dashboard or from the Boards tab, and each board can be named to suit the project. You can then add in ‘To Do’, ‘Doing’ and ‘Done’ tasks. These can be scheduled for certain dates and times.

If you feel like geeking around and really take Trello to the next level, you can use its Power-Ups to add extra functionality to your boards.

You can add buttons to boards, show previews of attachments on Trello cards, and more. Certain power-ups add a calendar view, voting, Google Drive and many more features. These customise your project and allow you to do more within Trello.

Trello has mobile apps for both Android and iOS. There’s also a Trello app for Slack. The apps have basically the same functionality as the web interface. This makes it easier for you to switch from the desktop to the mobile app.

If you are looking for a system to stay on top of your team and your projects that works across platforms and devices and that’s very simple to use, you will find Trello to be your new best friend. You can manage your team and their tasks through each board you create. Everything is displayed neatly and coherently, and you will have no problem following your project’s progress through this platform.

5. Streak CRM

Irrespective of the type of business you are building, whether it’s a VC fund like in our case, or a tech startup, or even a more traditional one — you probably want to track and manage you client pipelines. No, wait: you DEFINITELY want to track your clients’ pipelines.

That’s what a Customer Relations Management software (CRM) helps you do.

If Trello is our digital pipeline blackboard, Streak is our trusted marketing support manager.

The software has a simple proposition that makes it unique: turn your Gmail into CRM.

Where most of us rely on emails as our direct communication line to customers and prospects, Streak’s approach makes sense.

The CRM plugin focuses on your inbox, specifically Gmail, and groups email threads based on your workflows. It powers up email labelling: emails aren’t just tagged, they’re grouped together in stages across a pipeline. The software is designed to be compatible with the processes in sales, deal flow, product development, support, fundraising, hiring and project management.

Why Streak and not other more famous toolsets that have their standalone software?

On one hand we actually found Streak to be lacking compared to more established solutions. It is still a work-in-progress when it comes to full-suite features — they have mobile apps for example but you can pretty much forget about the Android one being of any use.

Still, we love how Streak integrates by default with Gmail and effectively packages all you’d really need from a full marketing CRM suite into... a browser addon.

And you know what’s the best news? It integrates with Slack! 😱

That means receiving automatic updates when your colleague moves a prospect from, say, “lead” to “negotiation”, as well as notifications for tasks to do on any given pipeline.

Streak might be simple but it has all you’ll need and more to run, track and analyse email campaigns, as well as manage and share contacts and project pipelines.

It comes packed with features that help your team be efficient when working remote. For example, it gives your team a complete interaction history of the people and companies in your pipelines. Each page documents all of the email communication that your team has had with a particular person or company, plus their box details and contact information in one place (and in real time).

It also allows you to set to-do tasks, which you will be notified about automatically when due, schedule emailing, make notes of non-email exchanges with a particular client, and save text snippets that you and your team can use over and over as a template for similar emails.

If you want to learn more about Streak, why not read up on their Medium blog? Brita Ulf and Aleem Mawani like to post about all the amazing things Streak can do for you.

6. Google Drive + Docs

The host of Google Docs and Apps for sharing work comes handy at all times: when a pandemic strikes and you and your colleague need to both work on the same doc from miles aways…even more so.

You can use most of the functionalities for free, even though purchasing G Suite might be a helpful move if you like the Google environment.

I’m personally always a bit skeptical of their ethics when it comes to privacy, so I use Brave instead of Chrome, search through DuckDuckGo and try and limit their tracking my activity outside of their ecosystem.

Nevertheless, working on the browser, sharing on their cloud drive, and make free forms that automatically convert to spreadsheets…it’s just too good an offer for a starting-up business to turn it down. Just be mindful of the Privacy Settings 🙏🏼

Let’s review then what you get if you decide to make Google’s app ecosystem your new online office suite:

Gmail — strange mail provider for someone who uses Brave and searches on DuckDuckGo 🤓, but I have to admit that it just works and has tons of add-ons to supercharge it: Streak being the king of them all for us (see above). If you find certain features appealing, such as sending hundreds of emails, tracking conversations, importing/exporting data from and to spreadsheets, and building customers’ pipelines from within your email provider: Gmail (in combination with Streak) will make your dreams come true.

— strange mail provider for someone who uses Brave and searches on DuckDuckGo 🤓, but I have to admit that it just works and has tons of add-ons to supercharge it: Streak being the king of them all for us (see above). If you find certain features appealing, such as sending hundreds of emails, tracking conversations, importing/exporting data from and to spreadsheets, and building customers’ pipelines from within your email provider: Gmail (in combination with Streak) will make your dreams come true. Drive Storage — considering you get a fair amount of space for free and that you can sync its folders to both Windows and Mac, Google Drive for us is the Dropbox killer and even now that we pay for G Suite and extra space we feel it’s been worth the upgrade from the generous free starting pack.

Storage — considering you get a fair amount of space for free and that you can sync its folders to both Windows and Mac, Google Drive for us is the Dropbox killer and even now that we pay for G Suite and extra space we feel it’s been worth the upgrade from the generous free starting pack. Forms — want to make free online forms, embed them anywhere you want, and build spreadsheets from them? This feature alone might very well be what sold us to G Suite over Microsoft. Gone are the days where we had to juggle data across platforms, pay extra for each service and ask clients to send us stuff via email: with forms integrated with Drive and G Sheet (below), we discovered a whole new level of customer interaction and data flow.

— want to make free online forms, embed them anywhere you want, and build spreadsheets from them? This feature alone might very well be what sold us to G Suite over Microsoft. Gone are the days where we had to juggle data across platforms, pay extra for each service and ask clients to send us stuff via email: with forms integrated with Drive and G Sheet (below), we discovered a whole new level of customer interaction and data flow. Sheets — Ok this one is the bittersweet entry on the list. It’s just such a far cry from Excel that I still use the latter for certain type of financial modelling. The good thing about it, though, is that for your daily spreadsheet use it’s got all you need. Besides, you can edit and even work collaboratively on Excel files as much as on native Google ones, so you’ll probably find it flexible enough to accommodate all your remote working needs. What I find most useful about Google Sheets is the fact that they integrate with Google Forms and (via Zapier) to pretty much any data collecting system you might think of.

— Ok this one is the bittersweet entry on the list. It’s just such a far cry from Excel that I still use the latter for certain type of financial modelling. The good thing about it, though, is that for your daily spreadsheet use it’s got all you need. Besides, you can edit and even work collaboratively on Excel files as much as on native Google ones, so you’ll probably find it flexible enough to accommodate all your remote working needs. What I find most useful about Google Sheets is the fact that they integrate with Google Forms and (via Zapier) to pretty much any data collecting system you might think of. Docs — Want to work on a document with your team at the same time and have the safety of an in-built version control? Google Docs is just what you need. During these days of isolation we ended up using for all sorts of stuff…From brainstorming the content of an important email, to working collaboratively on a single document requiring different people on different sections.

— Want to work on a document with your team at the same time and have the safety of an in-built version control? Google Docs is just what you need. During these days of isolation we ended up using for all sorts of stuff…From brainstorming the content of an important email, to working collaboratively on a single document requiring different people on different sections. Slides — Initially I hated slides and preferred PowerPoint to it. Over time, though, I started to appreciate its version control history and as the team grew, we now find slides much more immediate for collaboration and quick sharing of data.

7. Whereby / Hangouts

If you work remote, you’ll need to do video-conferences. That’s when Whereby and Hangouts come to your assistance.

Why not Zoom?

We’ve been using Whereby since it was called appear.in and use it mostly for daily stand-ups and one-on-one meetings across the organisation. It’s free up to 4 people per room and you can create your custom, fixed room urls.

As a distributed team, Whereby lets us have ad hoc and scheduled face-to-face meetings and working sessions with employees who are spread across two continents and three countries.

Hangouts is also free and, since we now upgraded to the paid G Suite for emailing, online document editing, domain management, etc, Hangouts comes with all the pro-features to host client meetings you’d expect from a serious videolink service. Besides, you can schedule calls and videocalls automatically in Google Calendar. Hangouts also nicely interfaces with Google Slide on your phone, so that you can present to your audience by controlling the presentation on a separate device. The only thing I miss about Zoom is the change of background, which I’d love Google to implement at least for G Suite business users.

Bottom line: when you want a client call with a stable presentation-friendly channel, or several attendees, you can use Hangouts. When you need to jump into an online room always available without downloading any addons, that’s where Whereby comes in.

Fancy keeping up to date with Whereby? Check out the Whereby Medium blog.

8. Zapier

Zapier is an excellent online service that lets you create automated actions connecting disparate business and productivity apps, all without any coding knowledge.

For example, looking at the tools I mentioned above: what if you could link them all together, so that “if X happens in one app, Y is triggered somewhere else”?

That’s where Zapier comes in. If you use a wide range of productivity apps and tools, you need a way to connect them all. The real selling point of these automations (which Zapier calls Zaps) is that you can combine multiple actions and apps together in a single Zap.

In our case, we found extremely powerful to extract data every time a form gets filled in, so that we can perhaps send internal notifications to the team or even bespoke emails to the user filling the form. Meanwhile the data can be processed and tasks added to our project management toolset.

Zapier = more automation = less time spent doing repetitive tasks = less cost & more efficiency = +$$$

As all the apps we discussed here, Zapier has a free starter plan and will only start to bill you when you need more capacity and scalability.