How apps improve your startup life
How apps improve your startup life
The traditional go-to solution for managing data like dealflow or sales pipelines is Microsoft Excel. Over time more tailored customer relationship management tools have evolved. Tools that cater to advanced use cases. Such CRM solutions became too large and required too much effort to customize.
Airtable offers a better solution. It’s Excel on steroids.
You can use it for simple tables and easily customize the interface for full blown CRM features. Such as managing tasks, deadlines, progress, and collaboration in real-time. It also works with most other third-party tools and allows for time saving automation. Thereby, it is easy to integrate into existing workflows and also accelerate these with automation. This makes Airtable much more efficient than Excel.
Compared to other project management tools like Asana and Trello, Airtable stands out for its flexibility and customization. With its robust API and powerful features, it can be tailored to specific needs, like managing sales pipelines, tracking metrics, or organizing data. Overall, Airtable is a powerful (no-code) tool for VC investment managers and startup founders looking to upgrade their project management and collaboration toolset that require them to integrate with multiple data sources.
«You can use it for simple tables and easily customize the interface for full blown CRM features. Such as managing tasks, deadlines, progress, and collaboration in real-time.»
“Hey, can you translate that pitch deck for me?” It’s a very common request for an analyst or associate at a VC or startup. Only a few years ago, one would have to go through a presentation slide by slide to personally translate all of it. In which case, you either had to be a genius with languages or you used Google Translate and hoped for the best.
Today you simply drag and drop the pitch deck into DeepL. Boom! Seconds later you find yourself reading the translated version of it. If you have a solid tech setup, all of this is handled automatically through the DeepL API. Detect the language of the pitch deck. Translate to the preferred language. Save it to an accessible location.
Notably, DeepL’s translation quality easily outcompetes Google Translate and other tools. Nevertheless, before sending out a document make sure you proofread your deck after translation. For proofreading, an additional tool called DeepL Writer, suggests changes and corrections for your writing—in over 30 languages. We’re looking forward to the rumored upgrade to the Writer API that DeepL is working on, to improve efficiency even more.
If you want to upgrade your translation processes, make sure to consider DeepL’s APIs and capabilities. It saves hours of tedious work.
«DeepL translations easily outcompete Google Translate and other tools. Nevertheless, before sending out a document make sure you proofread your deck after translation.»
Miro and Trello are certainly familiar to many, but no less worth to be mentioned. Miro is the digital alternative for conducting workshop formats online. It bundles ideas, dashboards, flipcharts, post its in one place. It allows teams to develop and push topics forward together. It's a whiteboard for everyone. Trello, meanwhile, brings your tasks and teams and tools together. It gives you an overview of who is working on what and how you are progressing with your daily work. Trello boards improve the organization of your tasks. With just one glance, you can see all the important information - from things that still need to be done to successful completion. Certain projects can also be linked to Miro. Sometimes I find myself using Miro even in face2face meetings. Why? Because it's handy and good and can be used over and over again - or link different projects together.
A tool you'll love! HubSpot is a platform that can be used mainly by sales and marketing teams. It helps you take over lead generation, marketing automation, managing your sales funnel, etc. The beauty of it is that you can find everything in one place, in one app. Especially in the early stages of a startup, it's important to set up all processes in the right way from the very beginning, so that they scale easily, work intuitively and dynamically. HubSport is a great tool that can help your team scale, grow, and be efficient.
«Especially in the early stages of a startup, it's important to set up all processes in the right way from the very beginning, so that they scale easily, work intuitively and dynamically.»
Sifting through 700 pages of documentation to understand a particular accounting rule? Summarizing 20+ market trend reports and topic deep dives into a 5-page executive summary? Sorting through hundreds of companies to find matches to your investment thesis by reading their websites and company descriptions?
How tedious! But with the advent of large language models like ChatGPT or Aleph Alpha (a notable European competitor to ChatGPT) such research and summarization tasks became far more efficient.
Use ChatGPT to search and summarize answers on questions you have about a documentation. Have it output the major trends (and hidden gems) from tens of market reports. And let it do the heavy lifting sifting through and make sense of unstructured data.
All it takes is a small tech setup. To that end, ChatGPT offers an API that lets you integrate it into a workflow. Thanks to this interoperability you can use the ChatGPT capabilities to enrich data in Airtable, for example.
When it comes to summarization, categorization, and ideation, ChatGPT can give you an edge whether you are a startup founder or an investment manager at a VC. The time saved can be reinvested to build real human connections and push the frontiers of innovation.
«When it comes to summarization, categorization and ideation. ChatGPT can give you an edge no matter whether you are a startup founder or an investment manager at a VC.»
How often does it happen that your computer doesn't want to do what you want it to do, or that you're browsing through folders looking for data that doesn't want to be found? You see, that's exactly what TeamViewer is for. An indispensable tool for your startup life! TeamViewer gives a person you trust, mostly the tekkie on your team, access and full control over your computer – thus remotely. This process saves you so much time. Don't deal with things that others are better at seeing through! Let the tech-savvy people handle things like managing your computer's operating system. Let others help you.
No matter where in the world that support person is, thanks to TeamViewer they can always help you with technical issues from anywhere.
«TeamViewer gives a person you trust, mostly the tekkie on your team, access and full control over your computer – thus remotely.»
I wish I had something like Yokoy when I started my startup. It's a software solution to manage your expenses. You buy something for your work, take a picture of the receipt, upload it to Yokoy, and you're done! The account team makes sure the receipts are filed properly and your expenses are managed or paid in the next billing cycle. I recommend Yokoy to all our ventures: it saves time, money and effort when it comes to invoices. Especially when you travel to conferences and your expenses accumulate, just put everything in one place and save it. Use the time you gain to be effectively productive.