This is a list of my favorite SaaS tools that have allowed me and my brother to operate our business more efficiently and run our business on a day to day basis.
Proposal Software
Proposify
Proposify streamlines the proposal writing process as it provides tools that allow users to create custom-designed, reusable templates so that new proposals can be produced quickly without compromising quality. It’s other features make it possible easily add text, images, and video within the platform’s editor, which is great for anyone lacking experience with complex design tools. One of the best things about Proposify, is just when you start considering canceling the software because of the cost ($30/month), Proposify offers businesses 2 free outstanding proposals at a time, so if your proposal queue is low, you can easily downgrade to the free versions.
Cost: Tall Plan at $19/month.
Design/Interactive Prototyping
InVision
Remember those annoying days of having to send PDFs to your clients for the initial design mockups? Those are long gone, as InVision is the largest and most successful design collaboration tool on the market. It’s features include dynamic prototyping, ability for users/clients to make comments, user testing, version control, and design hand off. For example, on each client project, we can seamlessly communicate, gather feedback, and move projects forward. It’s clients include many enterprise companies such as Airbnb, Shopify, SalesForce, Netflix, but it’s also a great startup tool for designing, collaborating, and keeping track of all your design projects in one place.
Cost: Team Plan at $99/month that allows up to 5 Team Members.
Project Communication
Uber Conference
Are you the owner of a business and do not have a landline?Quickly you will notice clients will start to call or text your cell phone. We do take calls on our cell phones but like to separate our personal and business life. With UberConference, we are able to have a conference number that our existing or potential clients can call in for conference calls. The best part? UberConference is free for up to 10 participants, allows for screen sharing, and gives us the ability to record the conference calls. Another benefit is Uber Conference allows you to schedule calls in advance and automatically send calendar invites to Google Calendar or iCal with the call-in number and pin so everyone is on the same page.
Cost: Free plan (includes up to 10 participants on a call).
Basecamp
Basecamp is the easiest way to manage team projects, processes, and tasks. Basecamp is known for its incredibly simple way to communicate for projects with internal or external stakeholders. For example, we use Basecamp to collaborate on projects, discuss ideas, plan marketing campaigns, share documents – you get the idea. It’s a one-stop shop for all things teams do together. The only knock on Basecamp is that it cannot be customized/change a lot, but its simplicity makes up for all of that.
Cost: $99/month for unlimited users, projects, and up to 500GB storage.
Slack
WE LOVE SLACK! The reason we love slack is because we don’t have to email everyone all day or set meetings all the time. The communication is very informal, so it’s a great, non-intrusive way to quickly get questions answered from coworkers.
Cost: Free plan at $0/month.
Development
Postmark
Postmark is a email platform that is only focuses on transactional emails (i.e. welcome emails, password reset, receipt and invoices, trial expiration, user invitations, comment notifications). Postmark is extremely fast as their servers do not deal with marketing emails. A lot of email solutions such as Mailgun and SendGrid attempt to do both transactional and marketing emails together. Marketing emails get flagged as spam and this leads to Gmail, Outlook, and other email servers to take longer to get to your Inbox. Postmark only focuses on transactional emails and helps email platforms accept their mail in the fastest way possible. No users flag the password reset or order receipt as spam while the 5th J Crew email they received that week may get flagged as spam. Other benefits include seeing what emails were sent, opened, and bounced in their dashboard. See 72 reasons why your emails are going to spam.
Cost: $10/month for up to 10,000 emails.
WP Engine
WP Engine was built as a WordPress specific managed hosting platform. WP Engine saves us time and money as their platform automates a lot of WordPress specific dev tasks such as developer, staging, and production environments for each single install. Other benefits include daily backups, free Content Delivery Network, free SSL certificates, and 24/7 live chat. If you have utilized GoDaddy and other low quality hosts, take a look at WP Engine. It’s a great platforms for developers/engineers to host websites and manage projects.
Cost: $30-$350/month.
Marketing
Convert Kit
To run a successful email marketing campaign and to keep your audience updated about the services or products you offer, you need an efficient + effective newsletter service. The good news, ConvertKit offers a reasonable package with all the features you need to run a successful campaign.
Cost: $29/month.
Business Operations
Quickbooks Online
Quickbooks has been the industry leader in accounting software. Increased competition had us checkout Xero and Freshbooks cause we are millennials and did not want to be boring and use Quickbooks. However, the accountant we use is most comfortable with Quickbooks and the accountant gets what the accountant wants. We could not be happier with the decision. Quickbooks Online does everything we need to do. Useful features such as project costing allows us to track the revenue minus the expenses for each project. Additionally, we setup to weekly reports that automatically email us every Monday to make sure we are making enough money on each project. Other benefits include adding contractors to their platform to speed up the W2 process during tax season and the ease of use of their desktop and mobile app.
Cost: $60/month for up to 5 users, project costing, and managing 1099 contractors.
G Suite
Create and share word documents, excel sheets, presentations, and forms, and share them with your team members without having to send those dreadful edited files again and again. I could go on and on about the features that is offered in G Suite. The best part about G Suite is that it is free, and it is likely that other businesses within the Startup, Digital Agency, Small Business Industry also use G Suite.
Cost: $15/month for 3 users.