10 Must-have apps every startup needs right now
by Biplab Ghosh

We all like things that make our lives a little easier and this is even more true in our working lives. Startups are known for moving quickly-it’s what we love about them. But moving too fast without knowing whether everyone is working on the right things can stall your momentum, or even kill it. You can’t just wing it.

These are the 10 must have Apps all startups should be using,

1. WhatsApp

WhatsApp is without a doubt the most popular app today and it’s also arguably the best messaging app.On 2 March 2016 WhatsApp launched ‘Documents’ to its instant messaging service, enabling users to send and receive PDFs. Given most of us are familiar with WhatsApp’s user interface, this is an easy and reliable way to transport documents around a small yet growing startup team.

2. Todo

Todo offers shareable and fully editable to-do lists that are ideal for collaborative work. This app provides colour coded tags, time and location details, Siri integration and space for additional notes. While a simple concept, this app hosts a quick and easy way to promote team-based organisation throughout your startup.

3. Zoho

Invoicing and time tracking (from Zoho) offers financial tracking and invoice/expense management with multi-account functionality. The app can create invoices and even receive payments.

4. Trello

Trello is essentially a work and life planner and project management tool. With Trello, users can create boards and invite co-workers to interact and edit documents, customise workflows and add and assign tasks. In addition, users can upload photos and videos, attach files and add editable checklists.

5. Slack

Slack makes it easy to organize team conversations into different channels, such as engineering, admin, or finance. In addition, Slack integrates well with external systems including Twitter, and various source control systems. This helps keep everyone up to date. To cover sensitive details there’s direct messaging and private groups. Private messaging groups can also be created for circulating sensitive information and multi-channel chats can be created too, so separate group chats for, say, marketing, sales or support teams can be made.

6. Quip

Quip is a team-based collaboration and organisational app that offers chat, docs, task lists, and spreadsheets all in one place. It’s essentially lots of different ‘apps’ in one with offline support extended to all its functions.

7. Evernote

Evernote is a multi-device collaboration app that aims to encourage the sharing of ideas, documents and photos. Users can create shared documents that can easily be edited by all staff simultaneously. Evernote offers time-tracking functionality to map productivity and exploit areas of under-use.

8. ExpenseBot

As the name suggests, ExpenseBot keeps track of receipts and mileage logs. Users can take photos of paper receipts and ExpenseBot will add the date, amount and a name. Travel logs are also available for managing productivity and billable hours.

9. Nuzzel

Nuzzel is a great way of finding interesting stories and news from your Facebook and Twitter feeds. It integrates both social profiles and delivers the information it thinks you’ll find interesting. This is a great app to use while commuting to stay on top of current industry news.

10. Inkflow

Inkflow is for the brainstorming ones out there. If you’re the one who gets ideas when you are travelling your way home or when you are at a restaurant with no pen or paper in sight, then this one’s for you. Inkflow helps you note things down or even re-imagine your ideas in a visual manner by sketching and drawing. You also create PDFs of the same and share with your colleagues right away. The only issue of the Inkflow is that it is only available on Apple stores but many alternative apps are available on Android.