My must-have apps and tools for running a successful online business

In today's high-tech world software tools for business are in abundance. One of the most common questions I am asked is what tools I use to run my online business. Today I am sharing with you a snippet of the tech setup we operate by and my thoughts on the essentials for any online business.

In today's episode I'm sharing:
– Why file, task and project management systems are an absolute must for efficiency and team development
– The power of ‘brain dumping' technology and the unexpected benefit of synthesising your thoughts to generate new concepts.
– How client delivery apps can automate your communication and streamline your processes
– What marketing and content tools you really need (and which ones are just shiny objects!)
– The importance of solid time management tools to help organise your day

 

Today, I'm talking about something that I get asked quite a lot – What are the must-have tools or what tools do you use in your business? What software do you use? What apps do you use? And yes, they are a very essential part of an online business. 

And personally, like in this business, other than paying my team and paying myself, software is our next biggest expense. This expense has grown a lot over the last few years, as many of the tools that we use have tiered pricing and our email list, our customer base, and our sales, all of these things have grown into the much more expensive plans. 

I'm also always looking at and reviewing what we use, cutting out the ones that we don't need. And if I can find better alternatives than I weigh up, whether we need to switch now, I have always been a bit of a sucker for a new shiny tool, especially when it was just me and my business, but ever since I started growing my team, it's really forced me to start to stick with the same tools, unless we absolutely need to change. 

We stick with the same tools because really it's no fun for my team to have to learn new things. And it's super confusing when nobody knows where anything is saved or what tool to use for what thing. So, we really try to streamline it now. And I try to avoid that shiny object syndrome of Ooh, a new tool when the things that we're already using are most likely good enough. 

It's only when I think, oh, we could be saving a lot of money here or we could be doing this in a more streamlined way that that's when I start to think, okay, can we change this tool? How hard is it going to be, you know, transferring data across? Training my team and how to use it, etc. So this episode, I'm not sharing every single piece of tech that we use because there's a lot. So I'm going to share a couple of pieces of tech that I think are essential for most online businesses. And I've broken it down into a couple of different categories. 

 

File management.

Let's start with file management. Everything we use that goes into Google drive, nothing gets saved to the desktop because if I save something to my desktop folder, and somebody else needs to access it, well, they can't access it without me being online and sending it to them. And then that just creates a whole lot of back and forth of like, Hey, can you send me this? Is this the most recent version? No, we don't want that. 

So everything just gets saved straight into Google drive. If you prefer you could use Dropbox. I don't really like Dropbox that much. And Google Drive is free because we have Google Suite. With all of our email inboxes in the Gmail app. Even though it's hello@stephtaylor.co, it's still within Gmail. So that's all part of the business package that they have. 

 

Project and task management.  

Now, this is something that I think you don't need to get into details of this when it's just you. But it's also something to start implementing in your business when it's just you, because then when you bring a team in, it becomes so much easier to start to delegate and manage tasks and projects more effectively. 

We use Click-Up for all of our project management. I used to write all of my to-do lists by hand. I would brain-dump everything that I needed to do on a piece of paper. That was great when it was just me. But then as soon as my team grew suddenly, I would need to delegate tasks to them, and we'd all want to know where everything was at. So Click-Up became like the single source of truth in some ways. And it's also a great way to start documenting processes so that when you bring somebody else in, it's already there. It syncs with your calendar, which is nice. And we've started using Click-Up docs as well. We used to use Google Docs because that all lived in Google Drive, but now we've started using Click-Up Docs because we can integrate it with all of the tasks in the business as well. 

So, for example, each podcast episode is a task and when I go into outline the podcast episode, I do a Click-Up Doc with the outline and then I record it and then I mark it as recorded, so that Jay and my team know, it's time to go in and edit the recording, etc. So we all know where each podcast episode is at any point in time. 

 

Knowledge management. 

So knowledge management is something that I never really paid much attention to. I was always that person who had 50 different notebooks with all of my scribblings and my inspiration and my ideas in all of these different notebooks. And then, every time I would move house or I would discover an old notebook somewhere, I'd find all my ideas. And it was like, oh, this was a great idea. But because it was stored away in a random bookcase, somewhere in a random notebook, I lost it completely. 

So knowledge management is the process of you're using some kind of digital tool to organise, store and share your information personally like with yourself and also with your team and it really helps to get things out of your brain. When you have those ideas or you think about, oh, I've got this great content topic that I'm going to write about. Get that out of your head. So it's not floating around in your brain taking up precious brain space. 

It's such a waste of brain space when you have those things floating around those open loops. So having it in a sort of repository of ideas means that you can come back to it later, rather than reactively chasing a shiny object. The other thing that I really learned about knowledge management recently is that when you start to document thoughts, concepts, ideas, quotes, learnings, and you start to link them together, you can actually synthesize them to come up with new concepts. And this is where I think thought leadership really comes from. I think this is what sets apart those who really stand out. Those who are saying things that nobody else is saying versus the people who are just regurgitating the same content over and over again. 

The people who stand out are the ones who are taking one plus one and synthesizing it to create five, essentially. And then also something else that I am doing at the moment is starting to build together like a knowledge bank, content playbook. So that my team can potentially, in the future, pull content from that without me constantly having to reinvent the wheel. 

So for knowledge management, you need a really good note-taking app. And ideally, one that allows you to interconnect ideas. I used Apple Notes for way too long. It doesn't have the best organising and retrieving capabilities. 

I've tested a lot of different ones. I am currently using Mem. I really like it. “Reflect” is another great one with those indicating that interconnecting ability. “Obsidian” is really good. And “Roam” is really good. Those four are all that same kind of documented interconnected apps. 

Don't spend too long choosing which one suits you best. Have a play with them and pick one and stick with one because your knowledge management database is only really as good as what you put into it. So ensure that you're spending that time to fill it well. 

 

Client delivery. 

Now, while a lot of your client delivery can be done manually via emails, sending things back and forth, it can save you a lot of time if you're using tools that automate and streamline it. If you're working with your clients or project-based clients in some way. Dubsado is really good. I haven't used it in a while because I don't really do that much client work anymore. 

The only client work I do is strategy intensives and we manage all of that through Click-Up. But if you are somebody who is working with a lot of clients, Dubsado streamlines the process of onboarding. So if somebody signs up as a client, it'll automatically send them the contract. It'll automatically invoice them. It might send them a welcome kit or onboarding emails with a questionnaire, et cetera. They've got a lot of new features since I last used it. And I have a lot of friends who rave about it. So check that one out if you need to streamline your services. 

If you are delivering courses or coaching, Kajabi is fantastic. I mean this is probably the most common question I get asked where do I host a course? I love Kajabi. And I get asked, what are some alternatives? Well, I haven't investigated any of the alternatives in a long time because Kajabi just does everything I need it to, and it does it really well. 

And yeah, like there might be ones with other sparkly features out there, but I don't need all the sparkly features. I'm not spending all of my time making it like the sparkly costs. I'm spending my time delivering a great experience for my students, ensuring the content is good and ensuring that I'm putting my best energy into our live calls. 

Kajabi is kind of an all-in-one tool. So you can use it as a checkout to collect payments. You can use it to send out email marketing. You can use it to create your sales pages. You can even use it to host a podcast now. There are all the different things that you can do there. 

I guess also another one in the client delivery category is communication. So it might be external communication, like communicating with clients, which you could use WhatsApp or Voxer. Or you could combine your internal team communication with your external client communication using something like slack. 

So we use slack here as a way to just communicate internally, but I'm a client of people who use slack for external communications. I get added to a special slack channel where they can message me if they have questions about our projects together or anything like that. 

 

Finances.

Now, this is probably the least sexy one. And I think it's also the one where people don't want to spend money. They try to save money on the finances software, and I'm like, ah, yeah, you can try and save money, but it's going to take you a lot of time. I think it's so important to have some kind of system, some kind of software to track your income and expenses and profit, et cetera.

Years ago when I was a student, I worked as a tax accountant. And we used to get people literally with shoe boxes of receipts and Excel spreadsheets. And it was just a nightmare to prepare their tax returns from all of that. And as a result, they actually ended up paying more for us to prepare the tax returns because it was taking us longer to do it. 

And if they had just invested in a system, if they had just invested in a good piece of software to streamline it all, it would have made our jobs a lot quicker and it would've saved them an accounting fee. We use Zero in this business. It's great. It does everything we need. 

And it's all cloud-based and then my accountant just logs in at the end of the year. And does all of that. QuickBooks is another alternative. They're really good. And then on top of that, using something like Google sheets for cashflow forecasting each week. 

 

Marketing and content.

This is I think, where there's a lot of potential to get sucked into shiny objects is a lot of different marketing tools and you really don't need that much because they all kind of do similar things. So, obviously, you need somewhere to host your website, and if you have a blog, we use Showit plus WordPress for the website, if you're using Kajabi, you could use Kajabi for everything. 

Then you need a CRM. So that's something where you can keep track of your customers, and your leads. That's where you can generally send emails to your audience. Do your email marketing. HubSpot's a good one. Kajabi has CRM functionality. If you're using that for your courses as well or if you really need a free option, could use something like Airtable, but that won't really scale. 

If you are thinking about building a business to scale and grow in the future, start the way you intend to grow because it'll save you a lot of time. Further down the track, you might want to save money now, but it'll save you time later on. 

Then the next thing you need is something to plan and store your content. 

We use Airtable for this, it's free. You could also do this in Click-Up. We don't use anything to shed your content anymore other than like, you know, podcast episodes get scheduled inside the podcast host. Instagram posts get scheduled in Meta’s business suite tool, which is free. 

So we don't actually pay for a scheduler anymore. Like there's no Instagram scheduling tool and you don't need to be worrying about which is the best tool to schedule to Instagram because honestly, just use the one that they give you.

And then you need tools for content creation. Descript is where I record my podcast episodes and we edit them in there. Canva is where we create Instagram graphics, and lead magnets workbooks, basically, workshop slides, any of those kinds of things we create in Canva and then Descript for the recording of episodes, click up docs for writing content. 

And I think in editing video, we've started outsourcing that, but you could use something like Capcut. Those are pretty quick for editing short-form videos. So, don't go too overboard with all the different content creation tools is my advice because it's very easy to get sucked in there. 

 

Time management.

And then the last category is time management. So first up is Google calendar. This is like the single source of truth for my day. I suppose. I'm constantly checking my calendar. What do I have next? When's my next meeting? What's my next call, what do I need to be working on today? My to-do list lives on my calendar as well. 

And I've started using a tool called Sunsama. That is like my to-do list tool. And it lets me plan my to-do list and then it pulls it into my Google calendar. So I can look at my Google calendar and in one place I can see these are the tasks. This is what task I'm meant to be working on, these are my meetings. 

And it makes me feel a bit more organised because my brain is not usually the most organised. So, that helps. And then another really handy time management tool is Acuity. Calendly is also good. Essentially what they do is they create a calendar where somebody can book in with you, it syncs with your Google calendar. So it blocks out times when you're not available. 

And then let's say I'm trying to organise a podcast interview with someone. I can send them my calendar link. It automatically converts into their time zone, which is when you are on the other side of the world to most of the people you speak to. It's really handy having that time zone conversion. So, I send them that link and they can see what availability there is and we can pick a time that works for both of us. 

You can also take payments through Acuity and Calendly. Yes, you have to be on the paid version but this is quite a handy tool if you are doing coaching or any kind of client work, you can actually invoice, and you can get your clients to pay upfront before they book in. Rather than having to chase up invoices afterward. 

 

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