10 Tech Companies I'm Falling For In 2019

While Konmari'ing my closet this weekend, I came to a pretty clear realization. I hoard app t-shirts. I can't help it. I'm a nerd when it comes to learning new software. I enjoy being in the know about new technology and have been known to blurt out “There’s an app for that!” on a pretty regular basis. It is one of the things that I love most about my career; the fact that I am constantly being exposed to the latest and greatest in technology.

In retrospect, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I've held onto more than a few mementos & memories from my favorite app companies.

Looking at all of these t-shirts, I couldn’t help but think about some newer companies that recently have surfaced on my radar. I'm always on the lookout for solutions that may change the lives of business owners, and there are a few tools I’ve come across lately that have felt nothing short of game-changing. I also have been keeping a pulse point on a few companies that are making major strides or shifts in their respective spaces, particularly those that are putting their values into action by launching new features and thought-provoking content.

Seeing as how it’s almost Valentine’s day, and how I constantly have a list off apps I love floating around in my brain, I decided to compile a list of the Top 10 Apps that I’m currently loving so that you could get a sense of what they’re about and how they might benefit you. For the sake of being democratic, I’ve kept things in alphabetical order because honestly, these tools are all so awesome it would be nearly impossible to rank them.

If you haven’t discovered Airtable yet, you’ve been missing out. I came across the tool last year when I was trying to solve a common question: How take project-based work and making it actionable for a team? After trying on several solutions that felt like gussied up To Do lists, I landed on Airtable and never looked back. One might even say I became a little bit obsessed. For those wondering: what can you do in Airtable? The real question is what can’t you do. One part spreadsheet on steroids, one part interactive project tool; Airtable is a powerhouse solution with tons of projects templates to make getting started a breeze. Currently, I use the tool to manage my marketing plan, financial growth projections, client list, and any content-based projects.

I’m going to be honest here and I’m also going to date myself a little. I may be a millennial in tech, but I am also a big fan of desktop based Photoshop. I grew up with that program and it holds a special place in my heart. However, when I discovered the insane price that Adobe is charging for their cloud products, I went out to the internet to search for something else. Luckily for me, a dear friend recommended Canva. Canva is an easy to use online tool kit for building everything from social media posts, to banner images, to slide decks, or PDF packets. It packs stock imagery, templates, and design training all into one powerful product and the per month price point is something I’ll gladly shell out for. The tool makes it a lot easier for me to create marketing that (actually) matters. Even though I absolutely love Canva, I have to say that the relationship has been a little rocky lately. I know their user base is growing really rapidly and it seems like their underlying hosting is a little shaky. It’s not the most reassuring thing to be creating content online knowing you could lose your work to glitches and site instability. My hope is that they will invest in the right areas to stabilize the platform so we can be in it for the long haul.

A couple of weeks ago I was working on solving a fairly common problem that comes up for my clients in the accounting space. I routinely refer to it as “App Fatigue”, although in the case of the firm’s clients it might be considered something like “App Amnesia”. Although apps have expanded the power and potential of firms, clients can often get overwhelmed trying to navigate a stack of solutions, while simultaneously having to remember their logins, and what they're actually supposed to do within each tool. Enter Client Hub. A solution spun out of a real firm experience, Client Hub aims to simplify client interactions by providing clients with a single interface to access all of their apps and resources alongside a conversational interface that allows them to can chat with the firm instead of clogging up inboxes. Although the solution is barely 6 months post-launch, I think that the tool has a solid starting interface and tons of potential to improve client interactions for firms of all sizes.

Hands down one of the companies that I am most excited about right now is Ellevest. Part tech, part people, this company is on a mission to close the investment gap for women. What is the investment gap, you ask? Well, it’s just like the wage gap, only it applies to women and investing. When CEO & Co-Founder Sallie Krawcheck (former CEO of Merill Lynch) realized the the width of this gap, she decided to tackle the problem with a solution designed especially for women. Ellevest* offers a online investment platform and real human financial advisors to help women reach their short and long term financial goals. Also, their CEO is a bit of a badass. If you don’t believe me, check her out on Trevor Noah’s show last week dispelling diversity myths on every level.

Anyone who knows my work history might see it as slightly impartial that these guys made the list, but to me, great tech is about constant innovation, and Fathom is continuing to deliver that in spades. At the end of last year, the company launched a landmark partnership with Intuit that paired their business analysis & reporting platform with the company’s new QBO Advanced product, and they kicked off the new year launching a plethora of new consolidation features. I’m a big believer that any business that’s looking to scale can benefit from the insights that Fathom has to offer, and I am continuously wowed by what their development team delivers. Now that I use the solution with my own clients, I find myself constantly saying “Fathom can solve for that.” when someone describes the kinds of reporting & insights they’re after.

I’ve always been a fan of Gusto from a cultural perspective (in case you were unaware their original office was a “socks only” environment full of free snacks and puppy dogs and their new office is an eco friendly designer dreamhouse/converted warehouse that is like mecca for but for people who worship technology), but now that I use their platform regularly, I get what all the hype is about. Simply put, most payroll solutions are absolutely terrible, particularly on the employee facing side of the product. You’d think platforms that literally pay you money would make people happy, but pretty much every tool out there completely sucks. Except for Gusto. Their automation is unparalleled, their customer service is top notch, and the firms that I work with that use it feel like the company actually cares about them. Needless to say, Gusto has been a game changer in the payroll space, and I’m excited to keep using them and watching them grow in 2019.

Sometimes tech companies come surging onto the scene, and sometimes they slowly rise to the top of their space at a more premeditated pace, refining and fine-tuning to deliver a product that customers can’t live without. In my experience, Practice Ignition is leaning in the direction of the latter. For those who don’t know their platform, it was originally launched to help accounting firms automate the engagement letter process. However, they have been strategically adding key features such as their business dashboards and payment processing, and with each new rollout, they are becoming an even more essential solution to their clients. I personally leverage PI inside my consulting firm to handle all of my client engagements, and the piece of mind I get from their automation is unparalleled. I am a firm believer that anyone with a service-based business can benefit tremendously from implementing this app. PI seems to be on the same page as me on this one, as the company is starting to expand its scope to now work for anyone business looking to streamline and automate their client contracts, proposal, payments, and business management.

We live in an era of information, and now more than ever, people are clamoring for educational content. It's one thing to be the consumer of this type of content, and it’s a whole other thing to be the person trying to create, produce, and deliver it to an eagerly awaiting audience. For people looking to create online training modules and get them into the hands of your customer, Thinkific is the perfect platform to build your online community and deliver the high-quality educational content. I originally used Thinkific as a tool to build an online certification program for accountants, and I was blown away by how easy their tool was to use and how much I was able to customize the content. Since that time, Thinkific has gone through a superb rebranding initiative and doubled down on their commitment to helping creative entrepreneurs deliver top-notch training content. As a company, they are not only are they creating tools for to build better online education, Thinkific is also empowering creators through their own content & online events. If you have ever thought about taking an online course or adding online course work as a way to build passive & recurring income into your business model, Thinkific is the platform to do it with.

The biggest thing I am trying to tackle within my own business this year is ROI. To be more specific, I’m trying to figure out the best way to measure ROI as a service-based business. I asked several friends in the consulting space about their own strategies and wasn’t exactly wowed by what I learned. Long story short, most processes involved a lot of manual effort. Luckily for me though, my phone was listening into all these conversations, and suddenly I started to see ads for something called Timeular on Instagram. Timeular offers time-tracking technology that is paired with a smart device that sits on your desk. The diamond shaped device has 8 sides which you assign to different business areas, and each time you flip it to a particular side the device will track the amount of time you are spent on that activity. The device can pair with their software on computers, phones, and tablets, and in addition being able to track by activity, it allows you to assign a task to a client (using the ‘@’ symbol) or to a particular project or job (using a ‘#’ symbol). The result is clear, crisp time tracking that allows me to understand my ROI by client or by project. If I charged by the hour or wanted to monitor scope creep, it also provide me with accurate timesheets. However, there was one major bonus about Timeular that I wasn’t expecting. The productivity increase. There is something about having the physical object on your desk that keeps you from switching tabs and dilly-dallying on social media because you feel like you’d have to flip the cube and track it. Sounds like a bit of a psychological hack to me, but it seems to be working, and it doesn’t surprise me that Timeular now sells to entire teams on the claim of increasing employee productivity.

Some may say I’m saving the best for last, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that. Zapier has hands down one of the easiest solutions for my business and many others in recent years to fall in love. For those of you that aren’t familiar, Zapier is a platform that allows individuals to create custom micro integrations or “Zaps” using “if” and “then” style logic to automate tasks and in turn, save you a boatload of time. For example, in my business, I’ve built a Zap so that whenever someone signs up for a webinar they will receive a follow-up email, a calendar notification, be added to my mailing list, and then received automated reminder emails about the session. Do you know how much time and energy that would take to do manually? Way too much time. That is just one of the infinite number of scenarios that Zapier can solve for, and honestly, once you realize how much you can automate with this tool, you are probably going to fall in love with it like me and their 1 million other users have.

If you couldn’t tell by now, I could go on all day talking about tech companies I adore and the tools that are changing the game for business owners around the globe. It’s not just business related tools that I fall for. In my personal life, I am currently obsessed with Littlefund, an app that I was begging my developer friends to build until I discovered the same ideas was already in beta. But I’m curious to hear feedback from you. Do you use any of these tools in your life or your work? What solutions have been game changing for you so far this year? Let me know what tools you’re currently in love with in the comments below.

*Disclosure: I am working with Ellevest to start conversations about women and money. The SEC requires me to let you know that if you decided become a client, I will be compensated.