Tools for startups

Founders in Peru are as efficient and productive as possible with extremely limited resources (money, talent, and time). Teams often waste valuable time traveling across town to a meeting that could be done via a video call. In-person meeting are great, but its also OK to train investors and clients that you are a startup. It will help filter out those that aren’t interested and will be in the best interest of all parties moving forward.

Some key areas in which startups can use tools to maximize productivity are:

• Communicating with a remote team
• Tracking investor interest during a capital raising process
• Managing potential clients through sales process
• Hiring and on-boarding

Tools for startup teams

Internal communication: Most teams are familiar with WhatsApp and use it as a primary means of communication. Slack organizes communication by grouping team members effectively. Evernote is also good for taking notes and saving them digitally.

Organization and planning: Google Docs allows users to access and work on documents simultaneously. Google Drive and Dropbox are great for sharing files. Nicolas Di Pace of Culqi used Trello to help him track potential investors during a fundraising process. Renzo Weber of SimCase introduced me to asana which I have been using with my team. It is great for keeping track of ToDos and sticking to due dates. Nathan Lustig wrote a helpful article with some ideas for best practices as well as tools for remote teams.

External communication: Skype, Hangouts are the most common. However, I have found appear and Zoom to be better for three and four person calls and screen sharing. There are free versions which are very helpful.

Metrics: I still use Excel to look at startup metrics, but have seen some founders, including Nicolas Medoza of Rebajatuscuentas.com, use Google Data Studio very effectively (see below). He has one of the best dashboards I have seen from a founder. Visible is another tool I have heard good things about.

Talent: Posts on LinkedIn, Facebook a Twitter help get the word out. Bumeran is a large job-posting site and some founders use headhunters. Rodrigo Aramburu of BlazingDB has had success hiring tech talent in Peru through Getonboard. You can see an example of his job description here.

Calendars and meetings: Andres Benavides and other founders use Calendly to schedule meetings. Doodle is also effective, especially for organizing meetings with larger groups, like board meetings. I haven’t use these tools, but I do like being on the receiving end since it makes it easy to pick a time for a call and avoids the back-and-forth that can lead to nowhere.

What did I miss? I’d love to hear about tools that others are using.