Starting up – These tools will help you

ArchieIndian Friday, February 5th, 2010

A few days back, I was talking to one of my friends about how young Indian’s these days are taking a plunge into the world of Entrepreneurship. However, it is not a joyride to take the plunge for sure, it is a roller coaster. It is lots of excitement, and yes moments of real fear too. However, Technology should never be mistaken for just Computer Software and Hardware. We are starting to see some very good innovations coming through from India in Clean-tech, Automobiles, Consumer products etc. as well. I will keep writing about these in other posts. Today, I just thought of putting down a few tools which may help these start-ups collaborate and reduce their expenses better. Not every start-up in India gets a $10 million funding, even if its idea is a million times better than its American counterpart which is building a piece of crap.

Google Wave was supposed to be the one stop collaboration tool, but now that we know, it is still in its pre..pre..pre..(repeat 100 times) alpha phase, I am going to put up some tools which people might find useful, and yes the concentration will be on free products. (Remember, we donot have a million dollars to spend, we have to spend out of our pockets to build this).

  • Skype (Communication): A fairly obvious choice, the international audience might think but believe me not every Indian startup is using it. Skype is just not to be used by the internet savvy companies, it is to be every damn startup  in India. You are a mechanical designing company, a web development firm, a media agency or whatever, i suppose it is fine to presume that that you will have your computers and a decent Internet Connection with you. Skype is not only to be used when you have finally got your first American client and you donot have the money to make ISD calls every other day. Use it for your team meetings, when you are working out of different locations, use it out of your Smartphones in your Wifi area in your office. Use it also for the pep talk which you need to keep yourselves motivated when you are working out of your wifi garage. Believe me, Skype conference meetings are better for pep talks than realtime meetings; you donot have to look into the eyes of your best friend when your a trying to point a finger at his work.

    Team Viewer and Skype Together

    Team Viewer and Skype Together

  • Team Viewer (Desktop Sharing): You may think, I am just talking about the Internet firms. But is it not true when you and your friend were working together on you design for a flowchart, or the next kickass car design or the next marketing presentation and were talking to each other on your 1 paisa per second STD call (which kept getting disconnected, i.e if you were not smart enough to use skype), you wished how good would it be if we could work together, talking for free and not need to email your work every now and then. Team viewer is exceptional, less than 2 M.B in size, free for personal usage, work on connection speeds of 256 kbps (I would however suggest you to go for a better Internet speed as you will have a simultaneous Skype call going on ), and works from Windows, OS X and Linux(Through Wine) and the desktop sharing happens just so seamlessly.

    Google Apps standard editions comes for free

    Google Apps standard editions comes with free 50 email ID's

  • Google Apps(Standard edition)(Enterprise Applications) : You are basically starting a company, some of you have not yet left their day jobs, and the one guy who went for an MBA amongst you has registered the company on his name.(Donot forget to register your company, it helps!!). The scene is all set, ain’t it , for the next Google to just come up. But, how can you mail people with email ID’s stating XXXXX@gmail.com. It doesn’t look professional enough. Just set up Google Apps, the standard edition gives out 50 email ID’s free (you email ID will now look like XXXXXX@yourstartuprocks.com), all you need is a registered domain hosted on the internet.(Hardly a 1000 INR = 20 USD).
  • DeskAway or Unfuddle(Project Managment) : Lots of project planning happened when you had your all important discussion for the next 3 months (You did realize that you need to have these all important meetings at least once a week so that the team knows every member is contributing his bit). If you need to do time and project management for yourself,and you need proper milestones to be set up for your team, just go for Deskaway. It just does the job for you. The $10/month edition will work for a startup. However, if you donot want daily monitoring and you would rather love a code repository(and a bug tracking system) and weekly milestones, the $9/month version of Unfuddle rocks. These two tools just work for you.
  • Dropbox(Folder sharing): Dropbox is a beauty. You just want something like this for free. You get the dropbox folder on your desktop once that you have installed it and all the problems you faced while uploading something to Yousendit are gone. Use dropbox as your folder sharing system on the Internet.(Mind you big companies who are trying to compete with you, and they can’t  because their recently awarded intranet fails much more than Dropbox.
  • Social Media : You work 20 hours a day to make the next big thing, sometimes 24 hours because your dreams just don’t let you sleep. However, amidst all this you don’t forget to say hi (on facebook and twitter) to the chick who was your childhood crush who is dating this loser M.B.A who never had the guts to do anything kickass after his engineering or Bachelor’s. She also likes to talk about an old friend of hers (word of mouth publicity) who is making the  most brilliant 1000 Rs (20 USD) solar energy device(which is more useful than an iPad any day), which will help the poor children to study at night and their Mom’s to cook food using the same energy. Use this new age media power and donot hire anyone to do this for you(comes so naturally to you) because you deserve good word of mouth and you can get it from your friends.  Also keeping in touch with this chick may help you win her back someday.

    • This list cannot be complete for sure because there will many more such tools which can be extremely helpful for you to grow up as a startup. If you consider your team to be distributed in three different cities, then the total cost of having this mini intranet will be (Rs 1400*3(Good Internet)+(Free Skype) + Free (Team Viewer) + Rs 500 (for the Unfuddle or Deskaway account )= 4700 per month ~ 100 USD).  Please help me complete this list by telling me what other tools can be used by small sized distributed startup’s.

    Update1: Some More tools suggested by my friends Amit and Rakesh after the post were GitHub, Google Wave in the right way , Basecamphq and Yammer.

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    • Ron
      Very nice article. I really like the project management tool, DeskAway mentioned here. Highly impressed with the tool. Must say thank you for recommending such an awesome tool.
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