Picking Internal Tools for our Startup
This is the Story of a Journey. A journey to select the internal tools needed for our small almost non existent (we like to call it upcoming) startup. So what are the internal tools that a new startup will need?
You will see us try and travel light as far as possible here with Cheap being more than just a buzzword.
1. Email
We could not use the old gmail, live, yahoo ids. We are now a company and to acknowledge that we needed a new company mail id.
Our first choice was Zoho Mail. We had used Zoho before, for our technical fests or so and it was clearly a winner. Unlike GMail where we had to pay at like $5/user/month, Zoho gave us a free plan for upto 25 mail address. With limited number of users who could use unlimited number of aliases, this was heaven. Zoho. It is.
Except it was not that simple. More on that below.
2. Version Management System
However small our team was, we would have to use a professional version management system for our code. One with a good client, web interface, played nice with git bash and had private repositories.
Bitbucket seemed to be good player in this market. For a small team of up to 5 their service which they claimed to be scalable and build for teams came Free. But there was this one issue. All of us developers were already on github and it was hard to make the switch. So what do we do?
We were all students from college and Github made it ridiculously simple for us to get Student Dev Accounts. Awesome Initiative Github!! This also comes with other perks like Digital Ocean Credits and a Nanodegree from Udacity.
3. Team Chat
This was not much of a choice. Most of us are already on Slack. More than that Slack seems to have somehow captured the dynamism and professionalism and instilled the sense into a sexy inspiring UI. Also for a small team for us, Slack’s pricing plan meant we are going Free on this one.
4. Project Management
This was a big one. Teams however small or big needs a Project Management software for picking them up.
And there was no way we could go wrong with Trello. Trello offered a simple interface on any device that too for Free. It’s powerups and intergrations with other services like Slack and github just made it Better.
5. Shared Team Storage
There was no way we could transfer stuff using hard disks and pen drives. We needed a flexible cloud solution for our files.
This was a hard choice. A very hard one indeed. There were many competitors including Box, DropBox, Mega and OpenDrive. But nothing would prove better than Google Drive. Google has this awesome package called GSuite where they offer both Gmail and Drive for $5/user/month. Even without the email option Dropbox and Box charged just as much (higher). Of course, they tried giving us more storage for it, but for an upcoming Startup in Internet Dry Indian main land 30GB was enough.
So Bye Bye Zoho.
