Baloise Holding AG
Baloise Holding AG
03/29/2023 | News release | Distributed by Public on 03/28/2023 23:05
Make it easy on you! How apps improve you startup life
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Make it easy on you! How apps improve you startup life
Boas Bamberger, James Sanders
March 29, 2023
Mobility, Digitalisation, Startups
These days, there's an app for everything. Every need, no matter how small, is covered. Every service, no matter how important or unimportant, is offered. In the jungle of all these helpful tools, we took a look around and summarized the apps that could be helpful in your everyday startup life.
Airtable: The Upgrade from Excel
The traditional go-to solution for managing data like dealflow or sales pipelines is Microsoft Excel. Over time more tailored customer relationship management tools have evolved. Tools that cater to advanced use cases. However such CRM solution bloated up and take much effort to customize.
Airtable offers a better solution. It's Excel on steroids. You can use it for simple tables and easily customize the interface for full blown CRM features. Such as managing tasks, deadlines, progress, and collaboration in real-time. It also works with most other third-party tools and allows for time saving automation. Thereby, it is easy to integrate into existing workflows and also accelerate these with automation. This makes Airtable much more efficient than Excel.
Compared to other project management tools like Asana and Trello, Airtable stands out for its flexibility and customization. With its robust API and powerful features, it can be tailored to specific needs, like managing sales pipelines, tracking metrics, or organizing data. Overall, Airtable is a powerful (no-code) tool for VC investment managers and startup founders looking to upgrade their project management and collaboration toolset that require them to integrate with multiple data sources.
Airtable | It's Excel on steroids.
«You can use it for simple tables and easily customize the interface for full blown CRM features. Such as managing tasks, deadlines, progress, and collaboration in real-time.»
Boas Bamberger, Mobility Data Scientist
DeepL: The Upgrade from Human Translators
"Hey, can you translate that pitch deck for me?" A very common request for an analyst or associate at a VC or startup. Some years ago one had to walk through it slide by slide, in order to translate every bit and piece. Either you were a language genius or you used Google Translate and hoped for the best.
Today you simply drag and drop the pitch deck into DeepL. Boom! Seconds later you find yourself reading the translation of it. If you have a solid tech setup, all of this is handled automatically through the DeepL API: Detect the language of the pitch deck. Translate to the preferred language . Save it to an accessible location.
Notably, the quality of the DeepL translations easily outcompetes Google Translate and other tools. Nevertheless, before sending out a document make sure you proofread your deck after translation. For proofreading DeepL Writer adds another helpful tool that suggests changes and corrections for your writing-in over 30 languages. Looking forward to the unofficially announced Writer API DeepL is working on, to improve efficiency even more. If you want to upgrade your translation processes, make sure to consider DeepL's APIs and capabilities. It saves hours of tedious work.
The quality of DeepL is remarkable.
«DeepL translations easily outcompetes Google Translate and other tools. Nevertheless, before sending out a document make sure you proofread your deck after translation.»
Boas Bamberger, Mobility Data Scientist
Miro und Trello | Collaboration Tools
Miroand Trello are certainly familiar to many, but no less worth to be mentioned. Miro is the digital alternative for conducting workshop formats online. It bundles ideas, dashboards, flipcharts, post its in one place. It allows teams to develop and push topics forward together. It's a whiteboard for everyone. Trello, meanwhile, brings your tasks and teams and tools together. It gives you an overview of who is working on what and how you are progressing with your daily work. Trello boards improve the organization of your tasks. With just one glance, you can see all the important information - from things that still need to be done to successful completion. Certain projects can also be linked to Miro. Sometimes I find myself using Miro even in face2face meetings. Why? Because it's handy and good and can be used over and over again - or link different projects together.
HubSpot | Marketing, Sales & Service
A tool you'll love! HubSpot is a platform that can be used mainly by sales and marketing teams. It helps you take over lead generation, marketing automation, managing your sales funnel, etc. The beauty of it is that you can find everything in one place, in one app. Especially in the early stages of a startup, it's important to set up all processes in the right way from the very beginning, so that they scale easily, work intuitively and dynamically. HubSport is a great tool that can help your team scale, grow, and be efficient.
«Especially in the early stages of a startup, it's important to set up all processes in the right way from the very beginning, so that they scale easily, work intuitively and dynamically.»
James Sanders, Senior Ecosystem Developer
ChatGPT: The Upgrade from Manual Text Research and Summarization
Sifting through 700 pages of documentation to understand a particular accounting rule? Summarizing 20+ market trend reports and topic deep dives into a 5 page executive summary? Checking up onhundreds of companies to find matches to your investment thesis by reading their websites and company descriptions? What an investment of time! It'll keep you busy for days and weeks to do the work.But with the advent of large language models like ChatGPT or Aleph Alpha (a notable European competitor to ChatGPT) such research and summarization tasks became waymore efficient.
Use ChatGPT to search and summarize answers on questions you have about a documentation. Have it output the major trends (and hidden gems) from tens of market reports. And let it do the heavy lifting sifting through and make sense of unstructured data.All it takes is a small tech setup. To that end ChatGPT offers an API that let's you integrate them into a workflow. Thanks to the interoperability you can use the ChatGPT capabilities, for example, to enrich data in Airtable. When it comes to summarization, categorization and ideation. ChatGPT can give you an edge no matter whether you are a startup founder or an investment manager at a VC. The time saved can be reinvested to build real human connections and push the frontiers of innovation.
«When it comes to summarization, categorization and ideation. ChatGPT can give you an edge no matter whether you are a startup founder or an investment manager at a VC.»
Boas Bamberger, Mobility Data Scientist
Team Viewer | Technical support from anywhere
How often does it happen that your computer doesn't want to do what you want it to do, or that you're browsing through folders looking for data that doesn't want to be found? You see, that's exactly what TeamViewer is for. An indispensable tool for your startup life! TeamViewer gives a person you trust, mostly the tekkie on your team, access and full control over your computer - thus remotely. This process saves you so much time. Don't deal with things that others are better at seeing through! Let the tech-savvy people handle things like managing your computer's operating system. Let others help you.
No matter where in the world that support person is, thanks to TeamViewer they can always help you with technical issues from anywhere.
«TeamViewer gives a person you trust, mostly the tekkie on your team, access and full control over your computer - thus remotely.»
James Sanders, Senior Ecosystem Developer
Yokoy
I wish I had something like Yokoy when I started my startup. It's a software solution to manage your expenses. You buy something for your work, take a picture of the receipt, upload it to Yokoy, and you're done! The account team makes sure the receipts are filed properly and your expenses are managed or paid in the next billing cycle. I recommend Yokoy to all our ventures: it saves time, money and effort when it comes to invoices. Especially when you travel to conferences and your expenses accumulate, just put everything in one place and save it. Use the time you gain to be effectively productive.
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