Apps that will game-change your emerging fund business

Thanks mostly to Silicon Valley, for pretty much anything in business, 'there’s an app for that’?

But the fund management industry has a complicated relationship with tech, it loves investing in it but is Dickensian when it comes to using it.

I was that person - setting up, running, building and exiting asset & fund management businesses in the last 20 years, I rarely plugged in, adopted or welcomed the latest tech. As a result, so much of the time, I was busy fool; wasting hours per week booking meetings, struggling to get data out of one platform into CRM, paying fortunes to people to run payroll, not engaging on LinkedIn, tasks scribbled in notebooks, agencies designing documents & websites…and so it goes on.

My own epiphany came about from a random meeting with a fund manager in Dallas in 2019. She had installed a new metric for measuring internal success of $1m of revenue for each member of staff. ?To achieve this, she had installed over 20 pieces of software and apps whilst removing 6 FTEs & closing an expensive office. The total cost of the software pack she bought was $1760 per month. The penny dropped. ??

So, this week’s letter highlights just a small selection of the tech we use & love, perhaps you will too. (By the way, we don’t have any referral codes, we don’t get paid any commissions, this is purely our lived experience.) ? ??

We reckon you will free up a minimum of 1 hour per day within a week of installation and that’s 500 extra prospecting calls per year alongside a raft of other cost savings, client delighting & thinking time benefits. ? ? ? ?

Hi, I’m Simon, I find, fund & support emerging fund managers entering the UAE by co-investing with global investors. Please do subscribe to this weekly letter & follow me here. Thank you. ? ?

CRM?

folk ?

Stunning customer service with intuitive set up and crucially easy connectivity to LinkedIn so you can get data out into a maleable, taggable and usable?environment.?

Call transcripts?

Krisp

Not only does this kit record your calls, it summarises the actions, bullet points and suggests next step activity. ?

Diary?

Calendly ?

Remove 100% of your back & forth arranging, booking, reminding and thanking people for meetings. You’ll notice the benefits within a day! ??

Website

Fiverr

Less than 10% the cost of a traditional bricks and mortar agency, wherever you are, whatever language you want to deal in, there’s a rated designer waiting to engage. ?

Client satisfaction?

Typeform

Design and send elegant Q&A links to your investors and partners every month, gather & analyse their feedback and data all in 1 place. ?

Digital Design?

Canva

Templates & easy drag and drop for absolutely everything you’ll ever need to create for your business.?

Video?

VEED.IO

Creating AI videos about your firm & captioning videos recorded on your phone, all made beautifully simple. ??

Tasks?

Asana

Every task & project logged and visible to every team member. ?

HR?

Deel

Run your contracts, payroll payments, policies, handbooks & training all through 1 superb platform ?

I hope this letter leads directly to you saving literally hundreds of thousands of dollars per year - please tell me how you get on & do send me all the tech kit you use too. I've got the bug now!

Thanks for reading, subscribing, liking and commenting. It really means a lot as inspiration to write to you 52 times a year. ?