Don’t Waste Your Time and Money with Those 5 “Productivity” Tools
You’re not saving time with those tools?—?instead, you’re losing money by spending your time with migration and manual?work
As an entrepreneur, what’s your most limited and valuable resource?
Most probably, you will say: money. As a founder of a B2B SaaS company, I will say: time. Money can be earned from customers or raised from investors, so it is a renewable resource. Time is not.
Since we started our company in 2015, we have used a variety of productivity tools?—?presumably to make our lives easier and use our time more effectively.
Some of these tools are worth every single dollar, while others have sucked out tons of my time and hence cost way more than advertised. All tools we used took quite some effort for proper setup and configuration?—?as long as these efforts are one-off, that’s fine. Whenever a tool generates recurrent efforts, replace it immediately.
Stop Spending Time With These Productivity Tools
1. Credit cards issued by some fancy expense app?provider
Expenses are a pain in the back of any company?—?it’s time critical, they get audited, and costs can easily get out of hand. So no wonder new tools enter the market?—?all of which try to sell a combo of credit cards and expense apps.
We tried it. Due to the restrictions in the credit card market, most of these solutions use prepaid credit cards. Google, Microsoft, and AWS don’t accept prepaid credit cards. So we ended up having an AI-based expense app but still doing manual expense reports with Excel lists due to the limitations of our credit cards?—?reimbursing our employees who used their private credit cards or PayPal accounts to pay for the Google, Microsoft, and AWS services.
We stopped the experiment. We went back to corporate credit cards issued by our bank. Believe it or not, I am happily paying a 100–200 $ annual fee per credit card. Because they work worldwide, we don’t need to spend time with workarounds and manual reimbursements anymore.
2. Google?Chat
We dislike Microsoft 365, so we are using Google Workspace. As a cost-conscious startup, we thought we don’t need Slack because Google Chat is part of Google Workspace and can be used as a company-wide chat platform.
Wrong. No huddles, no integration for CI/CD tools. The cost for Slack weighs up in increased dev efficiency within days, especially if your developers are spread out over multiple locations (which is the norm today, really).
3. Google?Groups
Besides personal mailboxes, every company needs function mailboxes such as [email protected] , [email protected] , and [email protected] . In the beginning, we wanted to save a few dollars by using Google Groups instead of setting up additional Google Workspace accounts.
Don’t do it. Especially for HR matters and supplier invoices, it’s unprofessional to accidentally lose or oversee correspondence, or not be able to reply from the same email address. Spend those 12 $ per month per mailbox from the beginning, and you’re all set.
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4. Note-taking tools
Note-taking is important, both for individuals and for notes you want to share with your entire team. Whilst I strongly believe every person should be able to choose their preferred note-taking tool for individual notes (I use Obsidian), every company needs a tool to share notes?—?meeting minutes, specifications, processes , etc.
We have experimented with a variety of note-taking tools with sharing functionality: Confluence, OneNote, and Notion. The truth is that no note-taking tool is perfect, but all of them are acceptable.
Don’t even consider migrating your notes between such tools. A 1:1 migration is usually not possible, and you will spend lots of time manually migrating attachments, vector graphics, and more. I’d rather suggest you’re using your time to build or sell your product instead.
5. Self-hosted file-sharing clouds
Yes, “the cloud” is evil. That’s why many people still mistrust OneDrive and Google Drive, especially for business purposes. Both solutions are enterprise-grade, and offer a choice of server location (at least in the professional plan). Microsoft and Google employ more IT security guys than you could ever afford as a company, so do you think your self-hosted file-sharing cloud is more secure?
Don’t do it. Usability and integration are way worse than Google Drive or OneDrive, and backup functionalities are somehow limited. I can tell you from experience what happens when a non-tech guy accidentally deletes a top-level folder in your self-hosted file-sharing cloud, and you cannot simply restore it. Immediate urgency, hectic during business hours which should rather be invested in doing sales calls.
Key Takeaways
As much as you might like productivity tools, restrain yourself. You could spend your entire time evaluating, testing, and migrating productivity tools?—?but I’ve never seen a company with its prime business purpose of fumbling around with productivity tools.
Here is my key advice:
Growing a company ?? in troubled times ???? is a marathon.
As a tech entrepreneur ??, active reserve officer ??, and father of three ??????, I can help you with ?? practical entrepreneurship and resilience advice for all aspects of life. To the point ??, no fluff, because entrepreneurs are busy.
When I’m not busy, I get my rest and inspiration in the beautiful mountains ??? around Zermatt ????.