I have been involved in developing a premium spices brand www.justspices.in for over a year now. This is my first stint at developing a business full-time after working as a professional software engineer for 4 years. Developing a business is fun and challenging. You face new challenges every day in execution while making sure you keep growing and find new avenues of revenue (that rhymed!) while keeping your values intact. Since I have been in this thing for a year now, I have developed some workflows that help me handle frequent chores error-free and smoothly.
Today, I am gonna talk about tools that help me in my day-to-day business activities
We use Zoho primarily for invoicing and maintain books. While there are a lot of tools that will help you with invoicing and accounting. I chose Zoho for our business because I liked the ecosystem of the Zoho so much. Zoho has a wide breadth of products that are tightly knit together and it’s a web-first platform, meaning everything can be accessed from the browser, it also has nifty mobile apps for each of its modules for a glance. Zoho also has very good multi-user functionality with fine-controls for permission which helps me restrict employees to their domain boundaries.
On top of all of this Zoho has extensive support for Rest APIs for all of its modules, which we will talk about in the Python Section.
I still have the muscle of a programmer. If I see a problem that could be solved by a small program I don’t hesitate to create one. I have set up a Django app that has all the tools I need every day for various tasks, for example- JustSpices.in’s products are listed on various eCommerce websites like Amazon and Flipkart, you need to maintain books for all the sale that takes place on the eCommerce websites. Manually feeding all the transactions can be cumbersome, time-consuming and very much can be prone to errors. Our nifty little Django app helps us to fetch all the orders from various eCommerce sites and call the Rest APIs of the Zoho Books modules to fill all the books.
I have been using Trello for 5 years and I am crazy about it. I use Trello for my many active projects to stay on top of it. We use Trello in JustSpices to track our goals and which Team member is working on which tasks. Trello has a tiny learning curve and new features are added very frequently.
Slack is a perfect communication tool, even if you are running a good old spices company. Our team enjoys using Slack. It was a fun exercise for me to onboard the team on Slack and to answer their naive questions like “Why can’t we use WhatsApp instead?”. Heck, we even use the slack bot to report analytics for our website and alert us on a new order.
Our company albeit small is a heavy user of Google Suite. We share designs and product images on Google Drive. We heavily rely on Google Sheet to maintain various data and calculating pricing. I have no idea how businesses used to run the pre-spreadsheet era. The spreadsheet is godsend business tools and Google Sheet is a perfect tool for teams to work collaboratively
You know what they say once a programmer always a programmer. I have been heavily exposed to the awesomeness of AWS by my previous employers. We use AWS to host our websites and my Django tool is hosted on AWS too.
I hope you enjoyed learning about my essential business tools. If you have any better alternate tools that we currently use, please feel free to drop a message.
Or do want to learn more about the tools that I use please don’t hesitate to shoot me a mail at [email protected]
Peace.