photo credit: Torley

Following is a list of useful collaborative tools to help your startup ‘virtually’:

1.Meetup (Event organizing/Crowdsourcing)
What can be better for startups than to create some events locally or attend some – meetup is a great way to network and meet potential business partners. If you’re developing in Joomla, then organize a Joomla meetup or if you’re looking for writers for your blog then attend a blogging meetup. Meetups can be organized and attended according to the area you belong to - excellent tool for promotion and networking. 

2.CrunchBase (Startup Promotion) 
This is a great way to gather information on what everyone else (other startups to be specific) is doing. CrunchBase is a great source to tap into the startup market and check what is happening out there – who’s getting funding from who, how much of funding, new launches etc. If your application by chance gets attention from TechCrunch staff, it can have a massive effect. I know of a case where someone who had their startup featured once on TechCrunch and generated 300 leads from TechCrunch itself.

3.Yammer
Yammer is the Twitter of your startup. It resembles Twitter, but is totally private, so that only your employees can see what you are working on, what coffee you are having or what you thought of the latest episode of Friends – a  dead-simple collaboration tool that all startups should use.

4.GoPlan (Task Management)
It is a simple and effective task management application (or a to-do list application) that allows you to quickly organize a project, share it and see its progress. Features such as tasks, milestones, discussions, and calendar make this application more interactive.

5.Zoho CRM
It is a free Customer Relationship Management System that you can use to manage customers, sales and opportunities. It is a free application for anywhere up to 3 users and has a lot of nice features including an API, dashboard and inventory management.

Let us know what you think of these applications and also suggest others. We at Vinfotech use these apps quite extensively. We also help building such applications. Get in touch with us for your development and design needs.