Tools
This is Bootstrap Web. We're back. Jordan, how's going, buddy? Good, man. How you doing?
Brian Casel:Doing good. So, so I thought, you know, today, we'll we'll just, like, dive right into it. We've we've done some update episodes, like, last week, so we're not gonna get too much into the updates. Today, it's a tools episode. I don't think we've Yeah.
Brian Casel:We've really done one of these, at least not in a in a while.
Jordan Gal:So Well, try to take the high road and the know, the almighty, the more you focus on tools, the less you focus on customers thing, we're just gonna geek out a little bit because tools are important. They're so important that as you and I were listing the tools that we use, we we forgot so many of the little ones that we use just in our normal they're so ingrained in our workflow that I was finding tools that I use while just searching for other tools.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. Yep. I should really just look at my credit card statement to see, like, all the different SaaS that I'm subscribed to. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I try not to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I I guess that's a that is actually a good point just to make up front. Obviously, it's not about the tools.
Brian Casel:For everything that we list today, there are probably five to 10 other tools that you could use just as well, and it doesn't really matter. It's really all about the strategy. But today, you know, yeah, let's just kinda geek out and and talk about the the tools that that we are using, both software and physical equipment around here and and just kinda geek out a little bit on that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Let's let's do it. And these are this is at least for me, this is not in order of like significance. This is just what came to mind as I started listing things out.
Brian Casel:Exactly. And I tried to put together some categories. We'll we'll try to go, you know, like so so the categories that I jotted down here so far, and I'm sure we'll jump around quite a bit. Personal tools, so just things that we're using ourselves and not necessarily like with our teams. Communication productivity, another one is payments slash accounting slash HR, customer support related tools, marketing tools, sales tools, pro what I'm calling production development design.
Brian Casel:So any tools related to that. And I added in podcasting because, you know, we do this podcast and you and I each have our own other podcasts that we do so we can talk about some tools there. And, yeah, I'm sure we'll mix and match different categories. So why don't we just hop right into it? Why don't we start with the personal side?
Brian Casel:Like, what what are you, what are you thinking like on the personal front?
Jordan Gal:Alright. I'm gonna be a little non conventional here with my first one. This right here, no one can see it besides you. This is a Casio this is a Casio solar powered calculator.
Brian Casel:Look at that thing.
Jordan Gal:Super simple, you know, just like the numbers and the basic functions.
Brian Casel:First of all, let me just describe this to the audience. That that is like it looks like a like a vintage
Jordan Gal:I like the vintage look.
Brian Casel:Just like Really old. Oh, yeah. Like, I can't believe that thing actually turns on. Oh, and it's got the, the solar panel Uh-huh. The solar panel
Jordan Gal:This is the real deal.
Brian Casel:Battery thing. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:They still sell it on Amazon. So I I get a new one every, like, you know, three, four years once it gets too cruddy. Wow. But but from a very early age working with my dad in the family business, you know, one of the things that he instilled on me was the only thing you need in business is this little thing, this little straight up straightforward calculator.
Brian Casel:I mean, almost wanna see like the paper print roll come out of the top of it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You're not wrong. Yeah. So I I use that all the time. I I I like very basic calculations and to be able to think you can't get too complicated when you use that thing.
Jordan Gal:You just, you know, you say, okay, what if I spent $5,000 and it brought back X number of clicks and it brought back this conversion? It's just like very straightforward math. Doesn't get you fancy with the Excel sheets and month by month calculations and percentages of growth. It's just the basic fundamentals of business.
Brian Casel:Well, that's a good one to start off with. Actually, for me, the calculator, which, you know, same deal. Like, I I, you know, gotta do a quick calculation a couple times per day. I'm gonna geek out here on on the Mac stuff. But on on the Mac, I just hit f 12 and I get to the the dashboard widgets.
Brian Casel:And actually, there are only two widgets that I use. I don't go crazy with the widgets. One is the calculator. So it looks like kinda what you have, but it's a digital version. And then the other one is the calendar.
Brian Casel:And I I use actual calendar for appointments and everything, but I but I use the widget here just to just to tell me, like, what day is it again? You know? And and, like, sometimes I'll be like, you know, what's what what's the date of next Thursday? Just real quick. Right.
Brian Casel:If I'm setting use
Jordan Gal:the the calendar in Gmail?
Brian Casel:No. I do. But I mean, like, when I'm when I'm when I'm working on something and I need to quickly reference what today's date is or what's the date of next Tuesday or something, like, if I'm emailing someone and and I'll them like, yeah, I'll I'll talk to you on Thursday the what is that? Is that the twenty seventh or,
Jordan Gal:you know? Right there for you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I just feel like, know, hit f 12 and immediately I I see my count my the calendar and the just a quick, like, calendar day. What else?
Jordan Gal:Landing zone. The the dock that I can put my MacBook Air into and then I can work on an external monitor and an external keyboard. And and Apple has that really good wired keyboard that I absolutely love. And then the other thing to mention there is I bought these nice Bose speakers, and it was kind of like an indulgence, but my brother was like, trust me, just spend the $100 on it and you will not regret it. And I freaking love these things.
Jordan Gal:So they're just really good, strong, good sounding speakers.
Brian Casel:It's like Bluetooth speakers?
Jordan Gal:They're not Bluetooth. They're just they're wired and they're just like, they're perfect. They they, you know, they get you jamming when when you wanna put music on. Yep.
Brian Casel:Very cool. Well, actually, that front, pretty similar setup. You turned me on to the landing zone. I I got one of those as well. It's a really cool dock, especially when you have all these, like, external peripherals.
Brian Casel:So I I've got the MacBook Pro hooked up to the landing zone, and it's actually up on I don't know what
Jordan Gal:the One of those stands?
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's a stand. I don't know, like, the brand or whatever, but, you know, it kinda raises it up. And then I've got the 27 inch Dell external monitor. I've got, like, a Logitech webcam.
Brian Casel:Like you, I have the wired keyboard because that's the only one that has the numbers on it for some reason. I don't know why the wireless one doesn't. So all that is hooked up to the landing zone dock. Speaking of Bose, I don't have speakers, but I I use the Bose noise cancelling headphones, you know, around the ear, really comfortable. I really love these things.
Brian Casel:I I literally wear them every single day. If I'm not on a call with someone, I'm wearing these things and
Brennan Dunn:Really?
Jordan Gal:And it doesn't bother you after a while?
Brian Casel:No. Because I I just hook it up to to I connect it to the iPhone and I listen to Spotify whenever I'm working solo, know, unless I'm on a call or something. But
Jordan Gal:you just like, I don't care if the mailman comes here. I don't care if the dog is dying in the other room.
Brian Casel:Well, you know, like if I if if wife leaves me in charge of like the baby, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna wear these things, obviously. But, but actually, that's also the reason why I do wear them because, you know, when she's home with the kids, and these are pretty thin doors over here. So, you know, I I just gotta have all noise shut out, and then I throw on Spotify. And I think I talked about this before, but I I really like working to instrumental music. I I can't really work to anything with lyrics because once I hear lyrics, I just can't write or I I just can't think straight.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I I take I took your advice on that and I created like a productivity playlist in Spotify that's that has no words basically. And and I find myself going back to that when I wanna concentrate.
Brennan Dunn:Yeah. I I go through a couple
Brian Casel:of different playlists somewhere like instrumental hip hop tracks, some are kind of electronic stuff. Every movie that we watch, I go and find the the soundtrack and and and the like the especially like the electronic film scores and I put those all into a playlist and I really like listening to those. I like that. Yeah. People do that with video games also.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Video game tracks because they're meant to be an adventure that keeps you going, keeps you interested, it keeps you engaged.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'm not a video game guy, but there are a lot of really good soundtracks to to video games these days. Yeah. So that's kind of the working setup. Actually, just speaking on the speaking of that, I I now I use a standing desk.
Brian Casel:It actually goes up and down. It's the IKEA one, so it's got the electronic up and down. I try to stand up every day for most of the day, definitely in the morning, and then usually I I put it down in the afternoon, which is usually when I'm doing calls. I don't I don't really like to stand up while I'm on calls because
Jordan Gal:Oh, I do the opposite.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I kinda like sway around what if I'm standing. So I, you know, I try to sit down when I'm doing a call.
Jordan Gal:See this thing I have? It's a it's a Plantronics headset because I have a phone. I like a phone phone, not my cell phone, that came with this monstrosity of a freaking package from Comcast. Yeah. So I use this this head headset.
Jordan Gal:That's like a wireless headset. That's where I do all my all my phone calls, and I stand up and I grab my lacrosse stick, and I I start twirling. Nice. And that's that's like my, you know, like baseball bats that people like to hold. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:That's my normal call. Alright. So that's that's it for me on the the personal front. Oh, just one last thing. The Pilot g two gel roller black fine point seven millimeter pen.
Jordan Gal:If anyone who uses it knows exactly what I'm talking about. These the the g two pilot pens.
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've got a couple of those. Yeah. I don't really write too much though.
Brian Casel:I I I've I've tried several times to to get into using a written notebook. I just it never stuck for me. I I just can't do it because I just you know, I flip between the computer, the iPhone, the iPad. I need my stuff to sync and
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's funny. I go opposite. I've always used the written. I keep trying to to adapt to like a like a web to do list. I mean, that's yeah.
Jordan Gal:We're we're already there. What what do you use for like the main organization of what you need to do?
Brian Casel:Okay. So just like personal apps, not with the team.
Jordan Gal:Oh, you you separate them?
Brian Casel:Well, just I don't know. I just kinda kinda listing things here for this episode. Like, I I use Apple Notes, just the the built in Apple Notes app. That's basically my notepad for, like, jotting down quick stuff to like, when I jot like, right now, I'm looking at an an Apple notes thing because I'm, you know, just notes for this episode or whatever. The reason I like that is because it just instantly syncs across the computer to the iPhone to the iPad.
Brian Casel:You know? I could pick things up if I'm if I'm out or if I'm come back in. I talked about Spotify. I use Day One app. I think I talked about this a few times.
Brian Casel:This is kind of like a journal app that I use. I don't write in it as often as I used to, but what I try to do is I try to write in this at least once a month, and it's kind of a I use it as like a business journal. And that and this is where I jot down my thoughts around, like, big decisions and also planning goals for planning goals for the month, planning goals for the year, kind of assessing how the year has gone or or how a quarter has gone and and try to this is where I do a lot of my big big picture thinking and just and just like Journaling. Journaling, basically. It's it's really all based around the business though.
Brian Casel:It's not like personal stuff. And I I like day one because it has it's like password protected. Not that I'd really need that, but it's just it it's like a legit journal where they give you that and I don't know. It it just it works really well. I use one password for my personal password saving and and again that syncs across my devices.
Brian Casel:So that's Yeah. That makes it use pretty
Jordan Gal:LastPass and kind of love hate it, but it works and
Brian Casel:I've tried LastPass once and it's just too clunky for me.
Jordan Gal:It's a little clunky. I tried to switch to one password and I had that thing. And I'm I'm not I'm not techy. So, you know, Ben and Rock make fun of me all the time because I always get stuck and they're like, god, we have to help you again. I tried one password and it got, like, screwed up in between.
Jordan Gal:I couldn't get my this password. It was diff different from the desktop app that didn't match the why? And I just, like, lost my mind. Was like, hate you. I'm going my full ass pass.
Brian Casel:Yeah. With the team, we we use a tool called Meldium. That's a way to save passwords and accounts and share it with a team. And it's nice because we were able to give certain members of the team access to certain passwords. Yeah.
Brian Casel:That's super important. It's also really easy because, you know, we're we're logging in and out of different accounts on on on different sites pretty frequently, especially like the the the team team members. So it has this Google Chrome extension where it's like you just search for the thing that you wanna log into and it just opens up a new tab and logs you in. And it's like just super smooth.
Jordan Gal:And I like those password things as much for the ease of logging in as for the fact that I have different passwords, different crazy passwords Yeah. For each thing. And it kind
Brian Casel:of encourages having a strong password, right? Yeah. That you don't have to remember.
Jordan Gal:Password for you. Yeah. Just hit copy password. You know, back in the day, like ten years ago, used to have the same password for like, you know, 500 things which is just not smart at all.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Little tools that I use, Droplr, I use like a thousand times a day, which is What's Droplr? D r o p l r. It's it's for snapping screenshots.
Jordan Gal:Oh, yeah. I use Snagit for that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I I like Dropliver because you can, it's it's really easy to to put notes like, arrows and boxes and circles and stuff. And then Can you
Jordan Gal:then, like, grab a URL of the image you're working at? Yeah. That's that's the most useful thing. I I use Snagit plus Dropbox. So I'm sure it's the same thing with Droplr plus whatever service you use
Brian Casel:to Yeah. Well, I I don't put it into Dropbox. I I just host it on Droplr.
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's nice.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I should I pay I pay $10 a month for Droplr basically. And and like, all of our procedures and stuff, which we do in Google Docs, I put a ton of screenshots in there. And, you know, there's like a thousand links to droppler throughout our procedures basically. Flux is something that I just use I just started using about a month ago.
Brian Casel:I heard it on some podcast.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Why does that sound so familiar?
Brian Casel:I don't really work too late at night, but when I do, what Flux does is it it kinda it doesn't dim the brightness of your screen, but it changes the color profile to match the time of day. So once you get into like the late night hours or the very early morning hours, it kind of it changes the hues of of the screen. So it's so it becomes like warmer colors, kinda yellow and orange and and red, which is much easier on on the eyes as it gets later in the day. And then, like, right now, we're in the middle of the day, so it's, like, kind of full color, more like like, I guess, colder colors, if you will. You know, from time to time, I'll I'll just wake up in the middle of the night and can't sleep, or I wake up super early and and and I get, like, an extra hour or two that I wanna hop on the computer and work and it's like four or five in the morning, you know, it's still dark outside so having flux it just automatically makes it like pretty easy on the eyes.
Jordan Gal:I like that. Check that out. What about the big ones, man? What about the big ones?
Brian Casel:Like what?
Jordan Gal:Like, like customer service, right? I use intercom for chatting and messaging and then I use help scout for email. Yeah. So overuse Gmail.
Brian Casel:We use help scout pretty heavily. That's what we use to email with customers, and we also use it to email, like, sales leads. So we've got two mailboxes set up in Help Scout, one for sales and one for support. We call it support, but it's really like our service line, basically. The reason why we use that and not just Gmail is we've got multiple people on the team and we want every all of our clients to email one email address at audience ops.
Jordan Gal:And then you just assign from there?
Brian Casel:Yeah. We assign from there. And I actually worked out this worked this out recently because we it used to be we used to have one project manager, and now we have three. And it it was easy when we had one because she just handled all incoming mail there. But now we have three.
Brian Casel:So each of our three project managers set up automation workflows in HelpScout so that any email coming from a client that you manage is automatically assigned to you.
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. We we haven't done anything like that, but that's that's great.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's not like a 100% foolproof, but it it really helps to to, you know, to to make sure that things don't really fall through the cracks.
Jordan Gal:What about to dos, man? You're avoiding the question. What do use
Brian Casel:for your to do it? Right now, I use Trello. I've I've gone back and forth between a couple different things. I've used I
Jordan Gal:just get stuck on Trello. I just keep staring at a bunch of stuff and I'm like, I have no idea what to do next.
Brian Casel:Well, for like, for my personal use, I used to use Todoist for a while. I kinda I don't know for for whatever reason just stopped using that.
Jordan Gal:I'm I'm on Flow right now. I freaking love it. Was it you who who helped
Brian Casel:bring I you was using Flow. I I I was starting to use Flow with the team for for us to to manage bigger projects within the team. But we've since just killed Flow and just went back to Trello. Like, we've always used Trello for our production stuff, but then we started having all these internal projects going on and we wanted what a way to organize those. But but the team just kind of preferred Trello, and I kind of prefer it, so we just brought it back into Trello.
Brian Casel:But in in Trello, aside from the boards that I share with the team, I do have one private board of my own called that I I just call work. And the way that I organize this board is I've got today, I've got this week, this month, this quarter, and this year.
Jordan Gal:I just end up never ever ever looking at the ones beyond today. You know, I move a bunch of stuff into today, I don't finish all of them, then they sit there in the today column and I move a few more things into the today column and then that was don't actually get done. I just I never get past that. Everything off to the right just gets ignored forever and I'm
Brian Casel:like, alright, that's that that doesn't work. And I'm not a 100% consistent with this, but what I try to do is, you know, first of the month, I'm always thinking about, alright. What are the big goals for this month? Usually, like, four or five projects that I wanna ship by the end of this month. I I think about the same kind of thing every Monday about what what what needs to get done this, you know, before the end of this week.
Brian Casel:And and then my daily routine, you know, in the morning when I'm when I'm drinking coffee, I usually, like, open up the iPhone, open up this Trello board and figure out, alright, what are the things that need to get done, like, today and tomorrow, basically. I I usually, like, list a bunch of stuff that that takes me about two days to complete. And, you know, that's kinda like the go to personal productivity thing. Of course, there there have been months that go by where I just totally forget about that board and things. Oh, I know.
Jordan Gal:Crazy. It's like why why did we create that board if it's really not actually that important? Yeah. Yeah. What else?
Jordan Gal:I like a little site called everytimezone.com.
Brian Casel:Oh, I was just looking at this this morning because I was doing
Jordan Gal:some scheduling It allows you to move your cursor and show you what time it is at anywhere in the world. And it highlights your time zone. So it kind of basically shows you at 4PM your time, it is, you know, 11PM London time and and so on. Because we are we're all over the place. Ben right now is in London, and then we'll be in Paris next week, and then he will be in Slovenia with Rock, and I'm back in Portland, and I was just in New York for a layover, and I was just in Berlin for a few days.
Jordan Gal:So it's like I I feel like I and then our customers are you know, the first app was like relatively limited to The US and then a little bit of Europe and some Australia. And then this new checkout app is is insane. It's everywhere in the world. So whenever trying to schedule, constantly have every time zone open to like suggest times and along with that, I use Calendly.
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah.
Jordan Gal:How about you use Calendly also?
Brian Casel:Absolutely. Use it myself. Our team uses it for scheduling calls with clients, for scheduling calls with leads. Yeah. Calendly is is perfect.
Brian Casel:I I also have been using I use Zapier pretty heavily for a lot of things. And, Calendly is on Zapier, so we can and we use Slack, obviously. And and so when a new lead comes in, we use Zapier to put that into Slack into our sales channel. And then when that person schedules their demo through Calendly, that also gets notified in in Slack. Nice.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Calendly is is the shit.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I like Calendly. I need to check out a pointlet because my my friend here in Portland runs a pointlet. So I'm gonna I wanna give it a try.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I think a while back I used a pointlet, but then I don't know, Calendly came along and I kinda, no offense to to Appointlet, but that that one just really started to work for us. Oh, how about, like, calling? Video calls, conferences, one on one calls, sales calls, team calls, what because I'm I'm I'm going back and forth between like four or five different tools right It's the worst
Jordan Gal:the worst category. It's the one category no one has gotten right. And I okay. So Skype ends up being used a lot. Yeah.
Brian Casel:You and me are on Skype right now.
Jordan Gal:We are on Skype. And Skype ends up getting used with customers as like a default. It's almost like everyone understands Skype. You know, it's not like any weird new tool. So we end up using Skype a lot.
Brian Casel:Skype is like PayPal. Right? Like it's the only reason people still use it is because the whole world uses it. Yes. And it's it's and it's like one of the worst tools that you could use for this, but you know that like chances are the other person has it.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And it's easily agreed on. And We used Appear, which is such a cool tool for a really long time. It's just web based video chat. So you just have a link, we just have a Cardhook specific link and you just hit slash appear, enter in Slack and it boom, it creates the link and everyone goes there.
Jordan Gal:And when it worked, it was the best. And then for a few weeks, it just had enough trouble that we were like, what are we supposed to do? You can't spend five to ten minutes every single time you're trying to have a quick meeting. It's like defeats the whole purpose. So we we decided that the only way for us to go to have easy stand ups was basically desktop software.
Jordan Gal:So right now we're using Zoom.
Brian Casel:Yep. That's what we've done.
Jordan Gal:We've done GoToWebinar in the past and now now we're at on Zoom.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So with us, we're we are now using Zoom as well for for internal team meetings that have multiple people on them. Okay. So every Thursday, I do, like, a a manager's meeting. There's usually, like, four or five of us on that call.
Brian Casel:Zoom is perfect for that. And, yeah, the same I I use the Slack integration, so I just do slash Zoom and it pops up the the call. And then so that's really good. On Slack, by the way, for for one on one calls, occasionally, I'll do one on one calls with the team. I just use Slack's call feature.
Brian Casel:Really? Yeah. Which is really it it's not video, it's just audio, but it's it's really reliable and it's super easy. So if you're Interesting. If you're in a DM with someone, you can just hit the call button and it gives them an audio call.
Jordan Gal:Really? Yeah. I have not tried that. Might I might give that a try. Oh, look at that little phone.
Jordan Gal:I've literally never seen it before.
Brian Casel:I know. Every time I do a call with someone, they're like, I didn't know Slack had this feature.
Jordan Gal:I had no idea. If they can nail video, they will just destroy that entire category.
Brian Casel:Exactly. Exactly. Think it's coming.
Jordan Gal:And they have they have the didn't they acquire a company?
Brian Casel:I don't know.
Jordan Gal:I think maybe they acquired a video company. I remember reading about it being like, eventually that's gonna happen. And when it does, it's gonna make life a lot easier.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The audio call, I think just came into Slack like two months ago. But yeah, we've been using that a little bit. Zoom for for larger team meetings. I'm so I, you know, I talked about last week how we're doing sales demos now.
Brian Casel:Before we did that, we used Skype for all all of our sales calls. And if the person didn't have Skype, then we we would call them on their phone using our Skype because that that's what allowed us to record. We we used to use Skype call recorder to record all of our sales calls. Now that we're doing a visual demo, and I know you could you could share your screen with Skype, but what we what we're now trying out, I don't know if we're gonna stick with it, is UberConference. UberConference is is pretty cool because it's what I like about it is that it's not a video call.
Brian Casel:Like, us and and the person are not gonna be on on on a webcam video, but it allows the person to see our screen. Or, like, we could share our screen and show them our our our demo.
Jordan Gal:So you're you're on, a phone call? Or
Brian Casel:It's a it's a web based audio call, but
Jordan Gal:Are are you calling them or you guys are both logging in? There's Excuse me. You're both calling in.
Brian Casel:There's no login required. They just go to our URL. Oh. Okay. So we we like, in in the lead up email, we'll say, you know, go to this URL when the time comes and and then they just they don't have to log in.
Brian Casel:They just have to, you know, connect their microphone or or they could call in. And then we show up as well, and then we just kinda share our screen and and we're talking. And UberConference automatically records the call, which is nice. And yeah. I mean, it it's been working out okay.
Brian Casel:It's been a little bit buggy. Like, my sales guy has been having some some issues with the microphone and stuff. So we I don't know. We might look at we might just go to Zoom for for the sales calls. I'm not really sure.
Jordan Gal:Do does the client then need to download Zoom? Or they
Brian Casel:can go to URL? That's a good question. Like like what I like about UberConference is they just go to the URL. Right. Right.
Brian Casel:Right. I don't know. I yeah. I I wanna find something that's seamless for the client. They don't need to download something.
Brian Casel:They don't need to log in. We can't rely on on everybody using Skype because we we do talk to leads who just believe it or not, we've actually had a few leads that just don't use Skype or
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I've used join me and it works well, but for it is unreasonably hard to figure out how to like do little things, which makes no sense. It's it's doesn't do that many things. But it's great to just be like, go to, you know, join dummy slash card hook, and the person can see the screen. But then trying to talk them through how to join the call is, like, ridiculous.
Jordan Gal:It's like press this button, it's under this menu, and then go
Brennan Dunn:here where it should just it should just be so so obvious.
Brian Casel:At this point, I I really feel like Google Hangouts is is dying a slow I mean, it's it's gonna be remain around, but it's just so terrible. Like
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I still if you if my life depended on right now to start a Google Hangout right now, I don't think I could do it within sixty seconds.
Brian Casel:Dude, I this morning, I was trying to do that, and and I I was, like, logged in to the wrong Google account. I had to verify my stupid YouTube account and, like, that and then and it's like, you have to you have to verify your YouTube account. I was like, click the link, and then they're like, you're verified, but the Google Hangout still doesn't work. It's like, are you kidding me?
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's It's for some reason, we still use Google Hangouts with my mastermind group, probably because it's the nice thing is that it's connected right to the calendar, so you get
Jordan Gal:So once you once you get that link in the calendar, you just click that link.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But it's it's awful. And and like the quality is terrible too. Like, you know, I'm using this Logitech webcam and it works fine on every other call, but on Google Hangouts only, I'm like super blurry. Like, who knows?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Alright. What else, man? We use Spritly for development. And so it's used primarily by Ben and Rock.
Jordan Gal:But whenever I see a bug, whenever I see something weird, I see a misspelling in the admin, I can just go to Sprinly, add a task, assign it, and then I know it's in the queue. It's not gonna be forgotten. Yeah. Cool. That's a cool tool.
Brian Casel:For development, like when I'm working with the developers on our WordPress plugins, we've got everything in GitHub. And I use the the official GitHub Mac app to to up like, update code and things. And then inside GitHub, I'm using a tool which I really like called ZenHub. And what that it's a Google Chrome extension. All the developers installed it.
Brian Casel:I have it. And it adds a Trello like Kanban board inside GitHub. So GitHub's issues kinda sucks because you can't for some reason, GitHub doesn't have this built in, but you can't, like, prioritize issues or you can, but you can't really, like, drag and drop them into a priority order. And and so what ZenHub does is it it takes the native GitHub issues, but it lays them out in drag and drop Kanban board. So so now, you know, we we have, a this is the bugs list.
Brian Casel:This is the feature roadmap, and this is high priority, this is low priority and that kind of stuff. Nice.
Jordan Gal:A cool one I use not the way it's intended to be used is Yesware. Okay. So Yesware is like a full featured, you know, sales email tool. Allows you to do a whole bunch of different things and like these, you know, saved replies and for cold emailing, I don't use it for any of it. I just use it for being able to track.
Jordan Gal:So I've I've tried HubSpot's tracking email thing. I've tried a bunch of other ones. None of them are as good or perform as well for me as Yesware.
Brian Casel:Interesting.
Jordan Gal:You know? And it always scares me that my emails are going into spam because I'm including that pixel.
Brian Casel:Yes. That's what that's what scared me too.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And I I didn't I turned everything off for a while because of that, but it's just so valuable.
Brian Casel:Have you found that at all with Yesware? Like, it's always getting through?
Jordan Gal:I mean, there's no way to know, but I haven't had any issues of, like, what are you talking about? I didn't get any of your emails or anything like that that would pop up every every few weeks.
Brian Casel:For a little while, couple months back, I was using HubSpot's Sidekick. Yeah. And and then I found, like, several people were like, I never received that email.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. So that's I I did the I had the same issue. That's why I turned it off and took off a few weeks. But then, you know, there are just some conversations that are just like, I have someone right now I'm trying to chase down, you know, for to close their account at $500 a month.
Jordan Gal:It's just so valuable to see if they open the email or not, to know when I call them, like, if they just didn't open the email and didn't get it or if they open it three times and just didn't get back to me. I, like, am more prepared for that phone call.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Help scout has that feature, but I I don't know how accurate it is, but you could see
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I'm a little baffled by HelpScout at times.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I mean, you know, I don't use HelpScout with my personal email, but we use it for the team email. And at least there, we could see, like, if the person viewed an email or supposedly viewed it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I like to know where to find it. I don't Don't ask.
Brian Casel:What else? How about sales? So we're using Pipedrive, which I started using on on your recommendation, which really works.
Jordan Gal:Landing pages, I still use Leadpages.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So we're using our own landing pages plugin for that.
Jordan Gal:I kinda dig Leadpages new editor. Okay. Just makes things a lot easier and the integration with Drip which I use for email is now super solid and obviously will continue to improve as, as they get closer and closer together after the acquisition. So, yeah, the connection between, just Leadpages overall, the editor has gotten a lot better and the integrations issues has just gotten a lot better. So now to connect to GoToWebinar, connect to Drip, it's just like it's a lot easier than it used to be.
Brian Casel:For a while, I was just creating custom landing pages, like a page template on on the WordPress site. Now we use our our own landing pages plugin from audience ops. And for webinars, I I've been using custom landing pages for that. But now I'm working on just like an internal plugin for generating our webinar landing pages because those have extra things like the date and and the and the form and and then the and then, like, the live webinar page. So by the way, I'm I'm actually putting together a webinar for next week, and and I'm doing it the same way that I've been doing webinars for for the last couple years now where I I don't use like GoToWebinar.
Brian Casel:I don't I don't use a lot of these webinar tools. I just like to have full control over the whole sequence of emails and the layout of the page and the call to action and everything. So the the registration page is just a landing page with a drip form. And then in drip, I've got the tagging and automation set up on the back end when somebody registers. I queue up some broadcast emails to to lead up and follow-up on on the webinar.
Brian Casel:And then the webinar page, the live webinar page, I I actually use Google Hangouts for this. It's not perfect, but it but the nice thing is that you can do the live webinar on air, embed that in the page, and as soon as it's over, like, immediately, it converts into a YouTube recording of of the webinar. So you don't have to, like, set up a separate recording. And then I embed a chat role widget, which is like the chat box on the webinar page and that that takes care of that.
Jordan Gal:That's nice. Little DIY webinar page.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So that's that's how I do that. What else do we got here?
Jordan Gal:I use harvest for really quick invoices. Some of our bigger customers required invoice. So I go in there, set it up, and then have it recurring and all that. I could always go in and see how much they freaking owe us because they're so slow.
Pippin Williamson:You know? Anyway.
Brian Casel:Only, only one or two customers. Actually, our European customers
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:Ask for the the invoices with VAT. So for that for a while, I was using FreshBooks, and and it was actually the same FreshBooks account that I've had open since, like, 2008, when I was doing when I was like a freelancer doing a lot of invoicing. And and I just recently closed that account after I don't know how many years, just because I I just wasn't really using it. And then so now for invoices, like, we send the the basic Stripe receipts, but we don't really have invoices. So if if customers ask it ask for it specifically, I just have like a a template Google Doc.
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's funny. That's we have the same issue. We have the same issue. And we've we've built a full billing page with invoice history, download PDF, the whole thing, and just haven't launched it because we are so busy with everything else.
Brian Casel:Yeah. For SaaS that that makes sense to have.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. And there there's a cool, service that does it for you. I just didn't wanna get married to it. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Right. They like creates a billing that that exact thing that I just described.
Brian Casel:Is that is that Quaterno? No. That doesn't no. It doesn't sound like Quaderno is is a cool service because they if you use Stripe, especially, they they like they generate invoices. And and they're they're European based SaaS, so they you can easily generate invoices with with VAT and everything if if you're using Stripe.
Jordan Gal:Nice. Yeah. I'm trying to remember what the thing is called. Yeah. But we just didn't wanna get married too because we knew if we went that route, then we will basically be paying them forever for something that we could really just do ourselves.
Jordan Gal:Might have been a stupid move because we we haven't launched it.
Brian Casel:So how about actually speaking of that, like other other things related to payments, accounting, HR, How do we get how about we get into that category a little bit? So obviously, payments. I I'm still surprised that I I still get emails from time to time, like, what do you use to accept credit cards? Like Stripe, how could you not use Stripe?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. For for businesses like ours, it's it's you should just use Stripe. There are some limitations. Some people can't use Stripe. You know, we've we've delved a little further into the Shopify world of people who are like, you know, hardcore marketers, and a lot of the stuff they sell, Stripe will not accept.
Jordan Gal:Things like supplements and dietary stuff like that just seem to come up. So people have Braintree and I don't know, it really shouldn't be an issue, but sometimes it is. It's it's why SamCart, why that app exists. It's basically it's literally just a checkout page for for like consultants and info products and that sort of thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. For for info products specifically, I use Gumroad. That I still use Gumroad to sell the productized course. At one point, I I was gonna just migrate that into Stripe and set up like a I don't know, like a custom checkout process, but Gumroad was just so easy to set up and I never got around to updating it that it's you know, so for, like, one time downloads or one time purchases, I think Gumroad is is is good for that. Especially if you're doing a recurring service.
Brian Casel:I mean, Stripe just makes so much sense. For accounting, I'm using Xero, but I don't really use them. Just my bookkeeper. I
Jordan Gal:use Bench.
Brian Casel:Oh, you do? Okay.
Jordan Gal:That bookkeeping service. I have a love hate relationship with them.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I looked at them for a little while, but I I ended up going with Xero and then hiring a a like a bookkeeper who specializes in Xero.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I might end up doing that. And and I might regret using Bench because of it because it's Bench has its own system. So I'm not using something like Xero where it can just easily be migrated and basically just change the login.
Brian Casel:Yeah, that's kinda why I went that route because I could always just change the bookkeeper but
Jordan Gal:I just like the so Bench is amazing in that I just send stuff there and I just email them but you know you know me on this stuff, I just freaking hate this side of business so much.
Brian Casel:Oh my god.
Jordan Gal:Every time I get like a message from them like, hey, Jordan, you know, we need you to update x and y. I'm just I hate them for no for no reason. They're like, they're trying to help me. Yep.
Brian Casel:So I use I use Gusto for all the payroll now. Not not all, but most of the team gets paid through Gusto. That that includes The US based actually, anybody US based gets paid through Gusto. The contractors, the w two employees, that all gets paid through Gusto. I had, a a tweet storm this week.
Brian Casel:I I just converted a third person from contractor to w two this week, and this is the third different US state that I had to get registered in.
Jordan Gal:Oh, yes.
Brian Casel:I mean, I I'm just gonna go on a rant here
Jordan Gal:for for
Brian Casel:a second. It's depressing. I mean, I spent, like, three full days of this week when I should have been working on other stuff trying to get my business registered in the in the state of Minnesota, but they they've got, like, three different agencies that you gotta get registered, like, the business, then register with unemployment insurance. You gotta get a a code from over here. They give me the code, and it's, like, seven digits long, but Gusto is telling me it needs to be eight digits long.
Brian Casel:And it's and then I gotta get on stupid phone support, and they don't even answer for two weeks. And it's like, my god. So Yes. It's infuriating. You know, Gusto and Gusto is fantastic.
Brian Casel:I love Gusto. It works so well, but there's nothing they can do about this, but they can't handle the initial setup, the initial registration. Because like you as the business owner, you have to go to those government websites.
Jordan Gal:No one can help you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, I wish there was a done for you service that We
Jordan Gal:just talked about this. Yep. This is the most painful thing. It doesn't get used on a regular basis. So I don't know if it makes sense as like a productized service, but it does drive you nuts.
Brian Casel:It's a one time pain. Once you get over that one time pain, although if you have employees in different states, it's like, you know, that can be a several times pain, but, you know, so that's that. The the other in terms of in terms of payments and stuff, I still use PayPal to to pay the teammates in The Philippines. For a little while, some of them were were originally hired through oDesk or Upwork, and then I moved them onto just direct PayPal. And, like, they just send me a PayPal invoice, and and I pay them that way.
Brian Casel:So now that's how all of them get paid. I do have three people on the team who who were hired through through Upwork and still get paid through Upwork, the developers and the designer. So that that actually just makes it really easy. Unfortunately, they have, you know, higher fees than most, but but those teammates have lower rates than the rest of the team. So, you know, it's not too bad.
Jordan Gal:That might be it, man. Looking through my list. I'm sure there's other stuff that
Brian Casel:we I've got a couple of stuff on, like, production dev design. Like, when I'm I I don't do too much coding or even design stuff anymore. But when I do if I'm coding, I still use Panic Coda for that, which is a couple years old now. I I think it's still a pretty good tool. It's not perfect.
Brian Casel:There are some things that frustrate me, but I'm way too disconnected from coding to even think about switching tools at this point. You know, I still use Photoshop for a lot of things. And when I'm mocking up something, I I heavily use Balsamiq. Whether it's for mocking up a landing page or even just like mapping out like a flowchart of of automation stuff, I use Balsamiq for a lot of things.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And and if we get into Balsamiq,
Brian Casel:I do a
Jordan Gal:lot of pen and paper and then I literally take a picture of it and I upload it to Slack. Yeah. You know, I'm like, this is what I mean, you know, and then they're like, oh, okay, why would you do that? And we get into the conversation that way. My guys like Sketch.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I've heard a lot of good things about that.
Jordan Gal:Photoshop competitor? Yeah. Do you guys use anything for, like Envision?
Brian Casel:I really like Envision. We don't use it a whole lot right now, but I've used it in the past.
Jordan Gal:It's very useful when you need it.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I mean, if you're working on an app like you guys are over the long term, mean, it definitely makes sense to use Envision.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, we've actually started using Marvel app.
Brian Casel:I don't know that.
Jordan Gal:Which is which is very similar to Envision. You know, just screenshots that you can upload and then you can comment on.
Brian Casel:Cool. Just a little, like, utility tool that that I like to use is called ColorSnapper. So any web designers out there, what this allows you to do is, it's got a little keyboard shortcut. You can snap any pixel on your entire screen and then instantly copy the six digit color hex code.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's so useful. I use color picker. Okay. Chrome extension, same same kind of thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah, cool.
Jordan Gal:You know what else I use that's super super important to my normal day to day is Wapalyzer.
Brian Casel:What is that?
Jordan Gal:Pretty silly name, but it basically tells you what technology is being used on the page that you're on. And for us, that's really important to see like what e commerce platform someone's using. I can just open someone that someone that just signed up who is like, I need the custom, you know, JavaScript code, I look and I see it's WooCommerce, and I can say, actually, you don't. We have a plugin for that. You know?
Jordan Gal:Or I can see it's asp.net, and I'm like, we don't want to work with you under any circumstances. So it's yeah. It gives you like these little little clues.
Brian Casel:How about how about like web hosting and stuff?
Jordan Gal:I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, we use like DigitalOcean and other stuff and Amazon Web Services for for distributed stuff that I don't know what I'm talking about. Yeah. But we use DigitalOcean for for the most part.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We use WP Engine for all of our sites. I mean, like our own well, so AudienceOps is on WP Engine. My personal site is on WP Engine. They've been they've been great over the years with a few hiccups here and there.
Brian Casel:I I I have noticed in the past year, their data centers have have come under attack, which which took my sight down for a couple of hours a a few times, which, you know, I don't obviously, for a web host, you don't wanna see that happen too often.
Brennan Dunn:It's like
Jordan Gal:the most nightmarish Yeah. Like service to be in web hosting.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But I mean I mean, that being said, they I don't wanna give them like a bad review here because they've been really solid, especially for a WordPress site.
Jordan Gal:It's the nature of their business. Yeah. If you're not 100% perfect, it's it's a problem. So they're they are awesome. I've used them in the past too.
Brian Casel:What I also like about them is that you can send them it's not like they're WordPress customer support, but it but if there's some kind of issue with a plug in and it seems to be breaking your site, like, you can you can kinda shoot them an email and and they'll kinda look into it for you and tell you, like, it looks like the issue has to do with this plug in over here. You know? Their staging site is is really easy to work with as well. Just maybe, like, real quick, like, podcasting. We we've been using Blueberry hosting for the audio on this podcast, for hosting the audio.
Brian Casel:The the site, I actually I think is on a shared like, Bootstrap web site is is on my shared, host monster account, which is where I put, like, you know, lower traffic sites.
Jordan Gal:And the the Podcast Motor.
Brian Casel:Podcast Motor has been doing all the editing for us, doing a great job there.
Jordan Gal:Yep. The uploading and every once in a while taking down an episode upon request.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The the microphone that I'm using now, I just got this about a month ago. I'm using a Shure, s m 57, which is kind of like the go to mic for any sort of vocals in in, like, recording and music and and and performance worlds. It's not used so much in podcasting, but, it's it's like the same level of quality as, like, the Rode Podcaster. It's like a dynamic microphone.
Brian Casel:And so the the Shure SM 57 is not a USB mic, but on Amazon, they sell a USB extension that converts that kind of microphone connection to a USB. So that works pretty well. We can probably go on and on, but this this might wrap it up.
Jordan Gal:I think we we covered almost everything, We geeked the hell out. I don't know. You know, there's a few people still listening to this that that enjoyed or were taking notes or were trying to yell at us through their, through their speakers to like, why would you use that?
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:You need to use this thing.
Brian Casel:I guess we should also mention drip. I mean, I'm I'm using drip for for all the email marketing tool. Mhmm. All of the email marketing stuff.
Jordan Gal:So Yep. I yeah. I mentioned that earlier when when with regards to the the connection with with lead pages.
Brian Casel:Yep. Cool, man. Cool, man.
Jordan Gal:Oh, and the audience ops, obviously.
Brian Casel:Audience ops. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We use them too. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Pretty good. Pretty good. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Cool, man.
Brian Casel:Alright. It's nice to catch up with you.
Jordan Gal:Till next week. Go back to sleep for one. Alright. Good. Alright, man.
Jordan Gal:You be good. See you. See you.
