DEV Community: Remote Tools

Choosing a tool stack when you are a remote worker

hrishikesh1990 — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 14:47:00 +0000

You might be wondering right away what I mean by a tool stack. It essentially denotes a set of tools that neatly integrate into one another.

Why do you need a tool stack?

Let me start with an example. Consider you are a heavy Gmail user - you use it for both personal and business purposes. Now, staying in the Google ecosystem like Google Docs, Sheets, Hangouts etc. has plenty of advantages. On the contrary, choosing Skype for video communication or Dropbox Paper for writing will surely have you sync data and manage notifications across products.

Fireflies.ai - Syncing data across products and Automation

Now, you may think the Gmail example is a little too obvious. But consider the Fireflies.ai's team for example. Using completely diverse tools like Slack, Google Meet and Hubspot CRM leaves them with the problem of syncing data across these products. However, Fireflies.ai has made a smart choice by investing time and effort in automation tools like Segment, Zapier and Autopilot which helps the data flow across the team without any friction. The team is big on Automation - you can read more about it here.

Plutio - One product to rule them all

On another extreme is team Plutio. If you haven't heard of Plutio already, it provides everything you need as a freelancer or a small business owner from projects and tasks to proposals and invoicing. Quite obviously, the team uses Plutio for everything. Yes, literally everything!

You can find these and many other interesting tool stacks on remote.tools. Check out what tools remote teams are actually using in their day-to-day work.

In summary, you can't pick tools or products individually in this day and age. You have to first consider how the ecosystem will look like and then start fitting tools in. This is more so critical when you are a remote worker or when your entire team is remote. It is also wise to invest some time on getting the right automation tools configured for your ecosystem.

P.S: Remote.tools is now live on Product Hunt. Do show us your support there :)

Remote Tools 2.0 is round the corner!

hrishikesh1990 — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 12:47:21 +0000

This post was originally published on Flexiple Blog. Hit subscribe to get early access to Remote Tools 2.0!

Remote working is no doubt rewarding, be it for companies or their employees. We, at Flexiple, are also big believers in remote working. In fact, our tech team is distributed across geographies and it has worked well for us, as we have been able to find the best guys to work with us.

However, it has its fair share of challenges as well. Each time we faced one, we sat down to search & evaluate tools that could help us. This can be pretty mind-numbing – we couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a central repository of tools that had already been analysed for remote teams to leverage!

So, we took it on ourselves and launched the first version of remote.tools – a repository of 100+ handpicked tools & resources in 20+ categories for distributed teams. The product was a great hit, and further also gave us a great insight into additional features that could be extremely helpful to the remote community.

Enter Remote.tools 2.0

While chatting with numerous users of remote.tools, we realised their need:

To be able to find & market remote-first tools
To connect with other remote working evangelists

This is what we bring to you in the version 2.0 – a platform to find the best remote products, market your remote-first product, all while engaging with a vibrant remote community.

So, what is it?

We offer two key & exciting propositions:

1. Find new products to solve your challenges

Be it products that solve your specific use case or ones that are popular amongst the remote community, you can find them all!

Find products by browsing through the latest added or the most popular in the community:

OR choose from 20+ categories!

Also, interact with other members to find out why they chose a particular product over others!

2. Market your remote-first product for free

Place your product in front of 5000+ members of remote.tools and acquire new customers for free! Also, receive feedback and engage with potential users of your product.

Further, share your awesome story with the remote community.

Cannot wait to get started? Get early access…

We are going to launch the product in early March. Do subscribe to our mailing list and we will drop you a personal note on its launch!

4 tools to help you scan documents on the go

hrishikesh1990 — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 10:16:19 +0000

Scanning documents is the one thing you would just want to get done with. It is the routine task that needs to be done right but you never enjoy doing it. Gone are the days when you had to physically go to a machine and scan the documents. Nifty apps help you do that just anywhere within a few seconds.

We have handpicked a few apps that do a great job of scanning documents. We love to review useful tools, especially relevant to remote working. You can check our collection across other categories at Remote Tools.

Scannable

Scannable by Evernote is a document scanning app only for iPhone. It has an automatic scanning functionality that scans very quickly. It has a nifty integration with Evernote which allows one to organise scanned documents neatly. Even though its OCR is not the most advanced, its conversion of business cards into phone numbers is extremely useful.

The official description is very apt,

Scannable captures the paper in your life quickly and beautifully, transforming it into high-quality scans ready to save or share. Whether on the go or at the office, send paper on its way and move on.

Scanbot

An easy-to-use scanning app with a pretty UI. It packages this with numerous nifty features such as background uploading to cloud, smart naming, a good OCR and even a PDF editor.

Scanbot's official page lists out what the app is capable of,

Scanbot is the easiest and fastest way to create high quality scans with your iPhone, iPad or Android device. When you scan a document, Scanbot makes hundreds of decisions to capture the document perfectly, crop the document, straighten it and apply a filter.

Prizmo

A Mac-only app, Prizmo is more than a document scanner. With Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities across 23 languages, it supports extraction of text from an OS X app and to perform various other edits to documents easily.

Prizmo folks go on to describe the powerful nature of the app,

An innovative scanning experience for the Mac. Prizmo is a scanning application with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in 23 languages with powerful editing capability, text-to-speech, iCloud support, and translation into 59 languages. Prizmo can be used by everyone, thanks to its support of VoiceOver.

CamScanner

An app that allows for easy scanning of documents and sharing in various formats across different channels. As the input is from a phone camera, it also does a good job of readjusting the fringes for any background elements that are mistakenly captured.

CamScanner's official description simply lists of features the app has to offer,

Mobile Scanner, Easy Scan & Share. Office documents snapshot & Smart image doc management. High-resolution scan & image editor available. Hand-written annotation & Customizable watermark generation. Available on both Android and iOS.

That's all for now! We will be back with a new set of interesting tools.

Lessons from two of the most successful side projects!

Suvansh Bansal — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 08:31:22 +0000

As a builder, you need inspiration to work on a side project that will not only help you learn and grow but also build an app that is useful to the wider community. But such ideas are hard to come by!

Generally, ideas for side projects fall under two categories -

Time-consuming and hard to build
Not useful to a wide audience

At Flexiple, we too were faced with a similar problem while ideating. That is when we read about Unsplash by Crew.co and Betalist by Openmargin which helped us in coming up with a product - Remote.tools that garnered amazing reviews.

I am sharing the learnings we gathered from these products and the journey of the builders.

Unsplash by Crew.co

What is Unsplash?

A website that makes it easy to acquire high quality stock photos.

What is the story behind this?

While creating the homepage of their website, they were unable to find a good quality stock image that was also affordable. So, they hired a photographer to click a few photos. SInce, they just needed one, the rest would likely be unused.

Recognising that even others must face the same problem, they created a simple website (using a $19 tumblr theme) and uploaded ten photos, with the promise of “10 new photos every 10 days”.

What is/was the impact?

It began generating 11 million unique visitors each month and became the main referral source for Crew. Dial forward a few years, Crew was sold to Dribble, as the founders decided to instead focus entirely on Unsplash!

Learnings

Leverage your existing resources when building a new product
Build cheaply and quickly

BetaList by Openmargin

What is BetaList?

A place to discover upcoming startups and get beta access to them.

What is the story behind this?

The founder, Marc Köhlbrugge, was finding it tough to get beta users to test his product, Openmargin. He figured getting published in TechCrunch would give him those users — clearly, easier said than done.

To achieve it though, he created a basic prototype (again on a Tumblr theme), that contained a list of a few Beta startups (including Openmargin). The sell: “Be the first to discover and get access to the latest internet startups”.

What is/was the impact?

The clincher in this case, though, was the mail(s) to TechCrunch. Marc’s bet worked out and TechCrunch published an article about BetaList. Even Forbes, went on to write an article about BetaList.

Of course, Openmargin got the beta users it needed. Interestingly, once again, the founder instead started pursuing his entrepreneurial passions through BetaList, given the immensely positive response to the product.

Learnings

Once again, build cheaply and quickly
Have a good plan to market your side project beforehand

In the next blog, I will be sharing the lesson we learnt while building Remote.Tools (https://remote.tools) and its impact.

Till then, do share your experiences while ideating or working on your side project with us.

If it is a remote-friendly product then we would be happy to include it in the second version of Remote.Tools too!

Schedule meetings like a boss

hrishikesh1990 — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 12:25:59 +0000

One mail that hits my inbox every morning at 5AM is my schedule for the day. However, all of that scheduling had to be done manually – either someone blocked my Calendar or I had to do it myself. Well, that was before I was introduced to some amazing scheduling tools.

In our last post, we spoke about 4 nifty tools that help boost personal productivity. In this one, we touch upon productivity at work with focus on helping you schedule your meetings. We love tools that solve a specific use case because they do one thing and do it right. Read on to see for yourself if this is apt for these set of tools as well.

Calendly

A simple tool that removes the pains from scheduling meetings by creating a poll to decide the most convenient time for all. Has integrations with Google, Office365 and other tools, making it easy-to-use with the current product you are using.

Calendly’s official description is concise and apt,

Calendly helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails.

Doodle

Doodle simplifies getting a consensus whether to schedule a meeting or deciding on a place to meet. It executes this through a polling functionality. It also has native apps on both, Android and iOS. It bought Meekan in 2016, which is an AI chatbot that integrates with popular team chat collaboration tools such as Slack, and helps in easy scheduling of meetings.

In Doodle’s own words,

Get together with Doodle. The simple way to decide on dates, places & more.

Vyte

Vyte is a relatively late-entry into this space and this is reflected in the modern interface of the tool. It largely offers similar features as Calendly and Doodle, with a price point close to Calendly, primarily banking on better UI.

This is what folks at Vyte have to say about the tool,

Smart all-in-one scheduling tool. Packed with powerful features that will save you time and ease all your headaches.

That’s all for now! Keep watching this space for more interesting reads.

P.S: We have handpicked a host of tools across 20+ categories at remote.tools. Do let us know how we did 🙂

This post was originally published on blog.flexiple.com

4 tools to make you as productive as Elon Musk

hrishikesh1990 — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 13:23:17 +0000

Productivity has been the buzzword over the past few years, in the tech world and otherwise. There are a plethora of nifty tools and apps to save those precious minutes in every aspect of your work and personal life. Ranging from note-taking to daily to-dos to web activity monitors, you name it and there’s a productivity app for it.

In context of remote working, personal productivity takes the front seat. In this article, we have handpicked four tools that we absolutely love and use in our daily routine. These tools are simple yet very effective. Each of them solves a pertinent problem every individual battles on a personal level. Read on to know more.

Space

Distractions are a serious concern, with the biggest contribution from social media – the Space app helps us tackle this wastage of time. The app introduces a delay of ~10 seconds when one tries to access any social media website/app – this lack of instant gratification has been found to prevent users from using these social media apps. Created by Dopamine Labs, who are at the forefront of neuroinformatics in technology, this is something that definitely deserves a try.

Available on iOS and Android.

Forest

Forest tackles the distractions of various applications too, albeit in a different fashion to “Space”. It uses the growth of a sapling to a tree as a visual motivator to help users abstain from spending time on certain apps/websites. Has two ways of tackling time wastage: blacklisting and whitelisting websites/apps. Also, has a good-feel factor of doing environmental good as it also partners with organisations to plant actual trees.

Available on iOS and Android.

Take a break

It is pretty easy to lose track of time while working. Take a break reminds one to relax after periodic intervals as a precaution of the possible ill-effects on our health.

The description on the Chrome Store is succinct and apt:

Continuously staring at the computer can cause headaches, blurred vision, neck pain, fatigue, dry eyes. “Take A Break” extension tries to help you avoid or reduce these problems. It reminds you when to take a break while you are surfing the Web.

Figure it out

Figure it Out cuts out the pain of managing multiple timezones arising from a geographically distributed team. It has a beautiful interface on Chrome that depicts time zones and other details easing coordination.

Available both as a chrome extension and a more recently launched web app.

Liked what you read? Check out more of our selections across a host of categories at remote.tools.

This post was originally published on blog.flexiple.com