As an entrepreneur most of us wear multiple hats in the organization. Taking care of HR, Finance, Marketing or domain related tasks from time to time. It can get quite overwhelming, what comes to the rescue are various cloud services that solve a particular pain point that you are repeatedly facing as an entrepreneur.
As entrepreneurs I think one of our differentiation is our sense of continuous self improvement.
I want to share my experience of using Cloud Services to make my life as entrepreneur simple.
One of the cloud services we use -wufoo ,has saved hundreds of hours in design , development and testing in thus saving costs and has made my ability to take my new approach to my customer in fraction of time.
This should give insight to fellow entrepreneurs on how I deal with different business problems. Either it will help you or if you have a better way please share it with other rodinhoods.
Tekno Point [13 years] and CloudThat [1 year] are 2 companies that I am part of and where we have used different cloud services to make life simple.
Brief Overview of How TeknoPoint uses Cloud :
Blinksale – Invoicing and Estimates
Wufoo [ my fav ] : Form creation and reporting service
Basecamp: Project Management
Highrise: Leads management [ facing issues with adoption of this one ]
MailChimp: For managing email lists and email marketing
Apart from the different cloud services mentioned above we also use :
– Google Apps: This calls for a separate post in itself 🙂 Mail , Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Drive
– Amazon AWS: For hosting of applications and websites.
– WordPress: For content management on our websites
– Dropbox /Box.Net: For Back up and sharing of files
– iCloud: For Contacts back up if you are using iOS based devices.
Benefits of using cloud services in General:
– Cloud Services are developed and run by entrepreneurs who are passionate about solving the problem that is just part of my everyday problems. You benefit from latest innovation in their respective focus areas at same or even reducing costs.
– Get Started Instantly – Most of the cloud services are ready to use with few clicks and almost require no training.
– Low cost to start and experiment – almost all cloud services have very low start up costs.
– Mobile friendly – Most cloud services evolve into offering app versions to access my data on devices. Blinksale, wufoo, highrise , basecamp all have iOS apps giving you anytime access to your business data.
– They talk to each other – Porting data from one cloud service to another is usually a few clicks. For example when a customer fills up an online form on our website , the form is created using wufoo and in-turn wufoo is integrated with Mailchimp and the data of the customer automatically goes into relevant mailing list. All good and established cloud services talk to each other out of the box. For others you might require help of some programming.
Areas where we are yet to implement Cloud :
– Managing Core HR related activities, I am evaluating a few options , will share once we decide.
– Accounting – all accountants seem to be obsessed with Tally so I have not explored this bit.
– Customer Loyalty Program Management – Yet to find a Cloud service that meets this need.
– Google Analytics – Ya a shame , we did implement but without really lot of thought into figuring out what kind of reports we want to seek . This is underway for our new website.
Last but not the least , our very own Rodinhoods platform runs on a cloud service called Ning 🙂
I am not getting into describing each cloud service individually in this post.
I will detail out necessary ones in additional posts.
Hope this was helpful , please share your questions or a business problem that you are currently facing and I will be happy to suggest a cloud service that can make your life simpler.
Cheers !!
Kamal Kalra
Hi Himanshu, Nice and Crisp post… Here’s my list to add a few
Managing Core HR related activities – try SUMHR ( sumhr.com )
Accounting : https://www.accountingguru.in/features.html
Customer Loyalty – Check out sweettooth ( if you are in ecommerce domain )
Regards,
Kamal Kalra
Samar Jit
Great post! my 2 cents…
I’ve been running my businesses on Basecamp for Years. And Highrise and aWeber for my CRM and emails. I would like to add Zapier to your mix of useful cloud integration apps. And also check out Jolicloud which is a new central cloud repository – you can suggest cloud services to them and they will integrate if they find it worthy.
And Mozy and Dropbox for your data safety and sharing. Especially Mozy! Love that app. Their mobile app gives you directory-style access directly to your data as if you were accessing your main hard-drive!
Himanshu Mody
Thanks Samar for the suggestions , will explore them.
Himanshu Mody
Hello Kamal,
Thank you for suggesting kamal , I am in the services domain offering mainly training and consulting services. Need customer loyalty app for that. Will checkout sumhr
Thanks and Regards,
Himanshu Mody
Himanshu Mody
Hi Samar,
Can you share your insights on using Zapier and Jolicloud , could not really figure their usefulness by looking at them briefly.
Thanks
Samar Jit
Zapier – I will explain with examples…
1. Most people face a challenge of integrating their mailing lists (aweber or mailchimp etc.) with their gotowebinar registratins. So mostly one has to have people signup to their list through the aweber or mailchimp form and then send them the gotowebinar registration link for them to fill again. This causes drop offs. With Zapier, you can link your form to Gotowebinar such that the user only has to fill one form and his details are shared with both apps.
2. Suppose I want to integrate Highrise case creation with Basecamp tasks/events/milesones/message. Done with Zapier.
3. Suppose I want to integrate Basecamp events with GoogleCalendar. Done with Zapier.
Zapier is thus a conditional cross-platform integration/linking tool that helps you link any app to any other app with just a few clicks. and it works like a charm. Similar to IFTTT.com, only far more powerful with far more apps.
Jolicloud – well this is just a central login for all your cloud apps. So I just need one user/pass to access everything from dropbox to googledocs. Makes it easy when you’re using multiple cloud apps for data storage and sharing. I suggested evernote and they may be adding that to their portfolio of integrated apps in a bit. I also suggested Mozy. Lets see. They’re new (in Beta) and their feedback app is a chat window instead of email so the response is instant (and coherent!).
Trust this helps
🙂
Himanshu Mody
Got it Samar !! 🙂 Basically a service to make 2 services talk. Nice.
Thanks for sharing 🙂
Himanshu Mody
Have changed the title and added a para , experimenting with my writing skills 🙂
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
nice!
Himanshu – it will be more meaty to EXPLAIN what you u use say Wufooo for – what do you mean by ‘form creation’ for example?
Can you show page grabs of these applications?
Maybe an embedded PPT from Slideshare (again a cloud service) to help?
Idea being that you can help DEMYSTIFY the cloud for lots of non tech people at the rodinhoods and even present this at the next Open House?!
Himanshu Mody
Wow 🙂 Thank you Alok, Sure , I will work on this and make an entry for speaking at the open house 🙂
Subbaram Gowra
Wondering what would be the “cost of ownership” for 5 years /so on for everything(All your APPs) put together?