edocr.com just like others, need a vast number of external services to function, both as a product and business. From a business perspective, below is a list of web services we rely upon to make our life and our stakeholders lives bit easier:
1. Assembla – edocr.com is my second tech startup. I operated blindly with first tech startup where daily development progress was not visible to me. Today, thanks to Assembla, I am fully aware of the current status of product development. In addition, assembla captures our specifications and knowledge share between the operational team and the development team.
2. Google App – primarily used as mail server for our business emails. Other services include Adsense (soon to be discontinued), webmaster tools, analytics and alerts.
3. Salesforce.com – we have recently started using SFDC as our CRM product. It integrates well with Google mail. We need to integrate with edocr.com database in the future to remove manual uploading of new users.
4. Support system – we have tried uservoice, get satisfaction and zendesk in the past and believe Zendesk might provide the ultimate solution. A decision needs to be taken on this in 2010.
5. Twitter – all time best collaborative platform for edocr.com. How do we use it? We crowd source input for functionality changes and introductions, and knowledge acquisition. In addition, its a great tool for customer acquisition. The built-in auto-tweeting function promotes our users and customers’ documents.
6. Mailchimp – provides monthly communications with our user and customer base. Recent issues with corporate credit card has prompt us to review use of mailchimp. The key problem arise due to the need to segment our userbase. It would be suicidal to manage this process both on salesforce.com for CRM purposes and on mailchimp. We need further thought on continuous use of mailchimp or similar email marketing tool, perhaps within the saleforce.com platform.
7. Yuuguu – screen share for demos. Exploring the possibility of using Yuuguu for webinars in 2010
8. Skype – Instant messaging and chatting both for product development, operational management and customer service and acquisition.
In the past, we used various other products for collaboration, e.g. huddle.net, basecamp, etc. The intention is to narrow down the number of brands used so as to reduce duplication of effort.
Update 1
9. Paypal and HSBC – payment collection
10. Billingboss.com – invoicing – trialling Xero for accounts including invoicing
