With our growing team of 30+ around the world, we rely on many different tools to keep our business running smoothly. In this post we have listed them all and split them into different categories to help you understand how we use them. Take a look and see if any of these tools could solve a problem your business is currently facing.
35 tools that @WPCurve uses every day for a growing business, happy customers, and productive team. #WordPress goo.gl/CmLCti – CLICK TO TWEET
Marketing
Infusionsoft: Infusionsoft is a powerful tool to organize and manage clients and email lists, create automated email campaigns. It also has tools for ecommerce such as fulfillment, and referrals.
We use this for our automated emailing and email courses, affiliate program, our CRM/customer database, some website tracking, website conversion forms and content delivery.
We also use a net promoter score survey in Infusionsoft to track how our email marketing is resonating with our list.
Canva: Canva is a web based tool that makes it easy for non designers to create high quality images, particularly for social media.
Our VA’s use Canva to create social media images for each of our blog posts.
Mention: Mention enables users to track in real-time what’s being said about them on the web and social media.
We use it to follow where we are being mentioned and respond to positive mentions with thanks.
Adroll: Adroll is a tool that enables you to advertise to people who have already visited your site (called retargeting).
We only have a tiny Adroll budget, it’s the only form of paid advertising we do.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite allows you to track and manage several different social media accounts from one dashboard. The hootlet plugin allows you to share to your social media directly from the browser.
We use this with our admin team to schedule social media posts and promote new posts we have published. However, Dan has found it to require constant logging in and it often doesn’t load properly the first time. Buffer is probably a better tool if you are just interested in scheduling social media posts.
Skype: Skype allows you to make video calls for free to other skype users or to landlines internationally for very competitive prices.
We use Skype with the Ecamm Call Recorder plugin to record interviews for our podcast.
Related Article: The beginner’s guide to podcasting
ConvertPress: ConvertPress is a tool that allows you to quickly and easily design opt in forms and landing pages for wordpress.
We use this for all of our calls to action in our content and for designing simple landing pages. This tool was developed by Dan and Alex.
Skitch: Skitch is a tool for screen captures and annotations.
We use Skitch for forward facing content like annotations on screenshots for our website reviews.
Management
Lighthouse: Lighthouse is a tool that allows managers to support their teams by facilitating meetings, tracking employee information and providing tips on best practices for managers.
We are using Lighthouse in our management team to schedule 1 on 1’s with each team member. It helps track our 1 on 1’s as a central location for information on goals, work, emails, issues, personal notes, so that we can keep each member of our team on track and growing.
Trello: Trello is used for team task management. It uses a system of cards and boards to create a visual way to track how a project is progressing and who is doing what. It is a very open ended product, so you can customize it to fit the needs of your team or project.
We keep different activities to different boards. We track and plan our our content, delegate tasks to the team, and keep notes for calls and meetings.
We like the email to card feature, where you can automatically create a Trello card with an email. This makes it easy to transfer that email thread into an actionable task list instead of letting it get buried in your inbox. We also use Zapier to create recurring tasks, more on that below.
We have recently been experimenting with a trello board that helps us manage guest writers and ideas for guest content. We’re trying to create an environment where our guest writers can quickly pick up an idea. We’ll follow up with a full post with more details.
Zapier: Zapier is a powerful tool that integrates hundreds of web apps and allows you to automate tedious tasks.
We use this tool to primarily automate our trello board, we set recurring tasks with this zap like drafting a weekly update email, checking for failed payments and payroll reminders.
Custom Dashboard: We have a custom dashboard built with Dan’s Informly software. This tracks a mix of revenue, web traffic, and customer information all in one page.
Dan and Alex check it daily and we use it for management performance meetings and monthly reports.
Google Analytics: Google Analytics is the standard in web analytics. It tracks traffic coming to your site, the behavior of visitors to your site and the demographics (location, browser, device) of who is visiting.
Our main tool to track how our content is performing and where our traffic is coming from.
We also pull information from Google Analytics for our “best of” widget, which ranks the highest converting posts for the month and displays them on the right hand side of our blog posts.
The main conversion goal we track in Google Analytics is email opt ins. Since all of our opt ins come from our content onsite it is easy manage.
Related Article: Actionable analytics for small business
Google Drive: Google Drive is a place where you can store and sync files online and have them accessible from anywhere. It includes a web based word processor, spreadsheet editor, presentation designer and form builder all in one. It has a simple interface and allows for simultaneous editing and collaboration on documents.
This is where we keep all of our processes and documents. We try and log a process of every activity at WP Curve. This keeps things predictable with our diverse team and allows us to manage processes instead of people.
We also use Google Drive to keep track of our key metrics and create simple, yet effective graphs for our monthly report.
You can get many of the same spreadsheets we use to track growth on the 7 Day Startup Resources Page
We use google forms for simple surveys for feedback on our one-off jobs that we are experimenting with now.
WordPress (Obviously, right?): WordPress is a versatile content management tool that allows you to create a website with minimal technical skills. WordPress is open source, so it is endlessly customizable with a massive community of developers creating free and premium plugins.
We’ve built our business around WordPress and use it with WP Curve, and on our personal blogs. WordPress is simply the best content management system for what we do.
Customer Support
HookFeed: HookFeed tracks stripe customers payments. It calculates lifetime value of a customer as well as customers who are “at risk” for failed payments and card expirations, helping you address churn before it happens.
With our recurring payments we are always looking for ways to improve our churn rates. HookFeed is great tool to resolve and prevent failed payments. They have an excellent dev team that has helped us out on several occasions.
Help Scout: Help Scout is help desk software that is a seamless email experience for your customers. It allows for team collaboration on issues, and customer history with saved replies for context. It also has reporting on jobs completed, response time, and customer happiness.
We use Help Scout for logging jobs and issues and communicating with our clients to resolve the problem. We are working on our own system on top of Help Scout to prioritize jobs and better track difficult jobs.
We have also built an integration to help us quickly access client details. Our admin team reports on the key metrics like response time and customer happiness from Help Scout daily in our Slack channel.
Helloify: This is the live chat tool that helps you quickly respond to customer queries. It’s an easy way to get in touch with us from various different platforms.
People send us a message or a question from email, SMS or on the site’s chatbox, the whole team can see it, solve it, and respond. Dan is a co-founder in Helloify.
Communication
Gmail: Gmail is a web based email that is a standard across the web for both personal and business email with Google Apps.
We use gmail for our @wpcurve emails. It’s affordable, easy to set up, and add ons like Boomerang make it a lifesaver. We are set up as a company in Google Apps. Most of our team don’t have WP Curve email addresses so we are still on the free plan, grandfathered in from a few years ago.
Slack: A team communication tool available on desktop or mobile, with searchable chat history. It has a very simple interface and is integrated with dozens of other apps to keep communication easily centralized.
This is our primary team communication tool. It provides a platform for different team chat rooms and private messaging. We use team chat to discuss response times, issues, changes in processes, and for lighthearted conversation.
It also has one of the most polite and encouraging loading screens on the web. I can’t help but crack a little smile when opening the app.
GoToMeeting: GoToMeeting is a tool than can be used for marketing or communication. It allows you to host meetings webinars with features like HD Video, polls and chat to keep a live audience engaged and participating. It also allows you to access a meeting by phone or at a computer, so you can conference on the move.
We use GoToMeeting for team meetings currently, many of the features useful for internal communication during group meetings.
Related Article: How to grow your business with webinar marketing
Jing: With Jing you can capture, annotate, and upload an image or video quickly and easily.
Though this tool is very similar to Skitch, we use this for screenshot and screenshares primarily for internal communication.This is good for identifying problems in processes and providing helpful images that save a lot of time compared to completely written instructions.
Productivity/Organization
RescueTime: RescueTime is great for keeping track of where you are spending time. It integrates with your computer and your browser to track where you are spending your time. It generates a report where you can rate the productivity of the apps and websites you use to quantify your productivity.
I have used this simultaneously on multiple devices before and it does a good job of keeping up and giving me good idea of where my time is spent. The simple process of having the time you spend on your computer measured and tracked can yield big improvements on your productivity over time.
Instapaper: This tool allows you to save posts and articles in an offline format for later reading.
We read a lot of content, it’s nice to be able to save interesting articles for later in one place. Dan uses the Chrome plugin to send posts straight to his kindle.
ScheduleOnce: Is used for scheduling meeting with clients to teams and have a diverse set of features that allows for easy scheduling.
We like schedule once because it integrates nicely with any different calendars and other software, and works well with time zones.
TimeTrade: Timetrade is good for setting up a landing page style appointment for specific blocks.
Alex uses TimeTrade for his individual appointments and meetings. We find ScheduleOnce is better for team meetings.
Evernote: A note taking app that allows for the creation of short lists, notes, tasks, voice recordings and more. One account can integrate on a desktop, mobile, and web app so you have your notes everywhere.
The flexibility of Evernote makes it a great tool for both business and personal use. We use it to store ideas for new content, keep notes. Alex uses Evernote and recommends Jason Frasca’s blog for tips and guides on how to make the most out of Evernote.
Audible: Is Amazon’s app and marketplace for audiobooks. It syncs up on your phone for an easy purchase and listening experience.
Alex and Kyle both have subscriptions. It’s good for traveling and if you can focus for long enough, you can get through a book 3x faster than reading.
Finance accounting and payroll
Xero: Xero is online accounting software for small business. Its online invoicing, mobile app, and fast reconciliation make it a popular choice for accounting.
Dan has been using Xero for years. It makes accounting significantly less horrible than it usually is. Our admin team do most of the books, Dan checks it occasionally when they aren’t sure how to allocate certain things. We also have an accountant who checks it monthly to do a few more of the tricky jobs.
ZenPayroll: This software helps automate payroll and taxes. and allows for simple new employee onboarding.
A business owner’s dream – it’s a simple set up, has useful reminders and a very easy to understand interface. For Alex, paying 941 and DE88 taxes used to be a manual process that would take up 2 hours each month, this takes 2 minutes.
Avery (Windigo Inc.): is our accountant. He’s handy in Xero, supports a number of online recurring businesses just like ours and is provides answers that we can actually understand.
Workspaces
WeWork: Alex’s favorite coworking space. WeWork was one of the fastest growing startups of 2014. Alex shares an office with Brent Shepherd from Prospress. They’re also across the hallway from the Designcrowd US team and have access to great events, activities and even a weekly yoga session.
Wotso Workspace: Dan’s favorite coworking space, where he recently has become very popular…
Logistics
Uber: Uber is a rideshare company that allows anyone with a car to become a cab driver. The process from pickup to payment is handled entirely on the app. So there are no issues with payment.
This truly changed the game with transportation. A good service and a much better user experience than with cabs. They also have great partnerships with brands like Google and Amex, where you earn 2x points when you pay with it.
AirBNB: This is an online marketplace for individuals or agents looking to rent out rooms, apartments or homes for short term stays.
Dan and Alex used AirBNB to book a place for their first annual meeting in Waikiki and will probably use it for the next catch up as well. For the price of a studio hotel room, they were able to get an space in Waikiki that was large and comfortable.
This list is not completely exhaustive, but it is a good overview of most of the tools required to keep a growing remote team running smoothly and customers around the world happy.
Does your business use these tools? Or do you use others that you like better? Let us know in the comments.
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