Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

5 Crucial Collaboration Tools for Startups

Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash

When working in a startup, like I am, at Arist, team members are often in many places at once. In order to keep our distributed team organized, we use a number of tools for collaboration.

  • Google Apps

This is an obvious one, but Google Apps includes Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and the like. These tools are invaluable for remaining organized and keeping information safe, secure, and centralized for easy sharing.

Gmail is the de facto standard for communication in organizations of all sizes, and makes it easy to contact potential clients and stay in touch.

  • Slack

Slack is incredibly useful for internal messaging. We have channels focused on different topics, including technical, operations, and business development. It’s a quick way to contact team members for whatever we might need, and we’ve integrated many of these tools with it to have one dashboard for notifications and action items.

  • Airtable

Airtable is great for managing data. It’s like Google Sheets on steroids, with an incredible user interface and a plethora of integrations to other tools. Our team struggled to find a suitable CRM platform, so I custom-built our own using Airtable, Google Calendar, Slack, and Zapier.

  • Typeform

While Typeform is expensive, it’s phenomenal for collecting information from potential clients. We have it set up to integrate with Airtable and Slack, so we know whenever a new form is submitted, and we can take action.

  • Zapier

Zapier is critical for integrating all of the aforementioned tools. It can take a few minutes to set up and test integrations (as they call them, Zaps), but they can save hours of work.