Central Communication
Slack
- Startup-friendly, many integrations, amazing interface, reasonable prices for premium
- Freemium pricing model
With Slack's IPO looming, their growth is expected to pass their already incredible reported 10 million daily active user count. Project discussions, important documents, free food announcements: they all live tidily together in Slack. Your team and information in one easily searchable place, collaborating online is as easy as collaborating in person.
Pro Tip:
Agency owners should make custom emoji logos for each client to make it easier to keep track of tasks and conversations.
Communication
Yac (That’s us!)
- Remote team friendly
- Fastest way to talk to a teammate
- Works directly with Slack
- Instant screen sharing, asynchronous messages
- Free up until 3 teammates
Yac is voice messaging for remote teams, no dialing or calling, sort of like voicemail with style. Your teammate will reply with a Yac of their own as soon as they're free. No worries about meetings or scheduling just listen on your own time and stay in sync.
Pro Tip:
Join the waitlist of our Early Access beta to be apart of the next generation of remote communication.
Task Management
Hubstaff Tasks
- Simple drag and drop interface like Trello, collaborate as a team, automate processes
- Flexible yet streamlined
- Ties directly into Hubstaff time tracking for easy project management
Hubstaff Tasks uses the Kanban system taught in lean business techniques. It’s a helpful tool for creative directors trying to do more but manage less.
Pro Tip:
We tied our Hubstaff time tracking with our payment system so now our entire project workflow and payment is managed seamlessly Hubstaff.
Email Manager
Newton
- Keep your inbox tidy
- Snooze emails
- Email Tracking
- Scheduling emails
Email is three decades old and not much has changed with it since. While other technologies have evolved a lot since then, modern email is yet to be created. Newton is a humble attempt at modernizing email.
Pro Tip:
Schedule out follow-up emails in advance and be sure to toggle the "do not send if replied" option incase the person you're reaching out to ends up responding to you beforehand!
Clipboard Manager
Paste 2
- Smart clipboard history manager for mac
- Clipboard history
- Paste between devices
This clipboard manager has been a godsend to our team. You can sync across all your devices, speed up your workflow by having everything easily accessible. It's like having a time machine for your clipboard, a huge plus directors, designers, and founders.
Pro Tip:
If you find something important, just copy it so that way you can always reference it later if needed (Including photos).
Automation
Zapier
- Automate workflows
- Codeless
- Virtually unlimited connections can be made between apps
- Great pricing
Easy automation for busy people. Zapier moves info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work. Mainly use this for things like syndicating content for social media, or automating data into excel spreadsheets. Really the combinations to make your workflow efficient are endless.
Pro Tip:
Our favorite app is a connection between our referral software + Mailchimp + Airtable + Facebook Custom Audience. That way, when someone signs up for our beta, they will be added to our referral list, added as a subscriber in Mailchimp, easily accessible in Airtable, and then we can retarget them in Facebook!
Website Design + Development
Webflow
- Intuitive, responsive web design
- Codeless
- Highly customizable but templates available
- Free to build a site, about $25/month to host
- SSL included in hosting
- One click GoDaddy domain connection
Design, build, and launch responsive websites visually, while writing clean, semantic code for you. Our website was designed completely in Webflow without a single line of code. Since it's based in HTML, you don't lose SEO value or speed like you do with other CMS's.
Pro Tip:
Check out the "Clone" section in Webflow. You can "copy" elements from generous Webflowers with a click of a button and without any code.
Sharing work
Jumpshare
- Send big files
- No downloading necessary to see a file
- View files online
- Freemium pricing
Helps our creatives share their big files quickly, view over 200 file formats online, and collaborate with their teammates and clients. This tool is used most commonly on the fly and that's what we love about it.
Pro Tip:
For hyper efficiency mode, just drag a file into Jumpshare and it automatically copies the link to the file, even if it's not done uploading.
Team Management
Soapbox
SoapBox is a one-on-one and team meeting agenda app that's trusted by over 30,000 managers and their teams. This app ensures that every meeting has a shared goal, agenda, notes and follow-up.
- Collaborate on shared meeting agendas
- Track follow-ups, action items and next steps
- Conversational analytics to have more meaningful meetings
- Suggested questions to prompt better conversations
Pro Tip:
Struggling to find things to talk about in your next meeting? Click the ⚡ at the bottom of the agenda to see tried and true conversation starters to kickstart your next meeting.
Runner up Tools/Sites
- Codepen - It’s the best place to build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration
- Really Good Emails - “The Best Email Designs in the Universe (that came into my inbox)”
- Noun Project - Icons for everything
- Whatfont - You can easily get font information about the text you are hovering on
- Goodui.org - This site publishes the work of awesome companies that actively test UI patterns to see which ones win or lose
- Mobile Patterns - Explore inspirational UI/UX patterns that work
