There’s nothing quite like the entrepreneurial mind: ambitious, often confident to the point of hubris, but undeniably driven to success. That’s why the most successful entrepreneurs employ the best and brightest technology to help them make the most of their strengths.
You’ll often see annual lists of the best mobile apps for entrepreneurs but it’s worth doing your homework to find out what apps work best for your entrepreneurial business. Chasing every flash-in-the-pan app that comes out of Silicon Valley can be a tremendous time waster. Let’s look at five of the most enduring apps that have helped entrepreneurs to grow, manage, and adapt their businesses to a fast-moving, highly mobile world.
5. Voxy
Voxy is a language-learning app like no other. It teaches entrepreneurs who speak other languages to learn better English by inserting critical and complex words and phrases into everyday activities. It’s also a “smart” application in the truest sense of the word, as it identifies a student’s unique needs and applies fresh content based on the user experience, rather than relying on static content. Instead of writing lessons for an entrepreneur, the app customizes real-world content that is relevant to the entrepreneur and incorporates that material into lessons that are customized to an entrepreneur’s language skill, interests, and goals.
4. Basecamp
Basecamp as a mobile app becomes a workhorse for busy entrepreneurs who are trying to manage a lot of different projects and data on the fly. The company has been around since 1999 and its patented web-based project management tool has become the go-to app not only for entrepreneurs but for project managers, marketing firms, publishers, and many other industries.
3. Slack
Do you Slack? You should. This cloud-based team collaboration tool started out its amazing life as a messaging function originally designed for a now-defunct videogame. It offers dynamic chat rooms (channels) that can be designated by topics as well as private groups and direct messaging. It’s a favorite of many entrepreneurs because it integrates into many of the services the entrepreneurial aquarium already uses, such as DropBox, Box, Google Drive, and many others.
Slack provides mobile apps across a lot of platforms including iOS, Android, and Windows Phone in addition to web browser access through macOS, Windows, and Linux. With 750,000 daily users, it’s one of the most dynamic business-to-personal use success stories.
2. Trello
New York City-based Trello offers a powerful web-based project management application that is available on most mobile devices. It’s a robust tool for entrepreneurial teams and has been used for such diverse applications as project management, real estate management, internal bulletin boards, and case management.
Trello uses something called the Kanban paradigm for managing projects, lending the platform a nice visual representation of where any given project is in the food chain. Projects are represented by Boards, which contain lists. Lists contain cards, which correspond to specific tasks. As these tasks are completed, the card is passed from list to list. Like its competitors, Trello is also venturing into other apps, most recently integrating its technology with SalesForce.
1. Dropbox
It’s hard to believe that Dropbox is barely ten years old, given that the file-sharing service has become an essential mobile tool for entrepreneurs on-the-go and has grown to host files for nearly 500 million users around the globe.
Offering cloud storage, file synchronization, a personal cloud, and client software, Dropbox uses a freemium business model, giving basic users a set storage size. Entrepreneurs who are dealing with a lot of material or large files such as audio, video, or graphic design material may be interested in the company’s Dropbox Pro subscription, which bumps the user’s storage space up to 1 terabyte and also offers advanced sharing controls and a remote wipe that users can employ to erase the Dropbox folder from their devices if it comes online. Dropbox has mobile apps for iOS, Android. and Windows Phone smartphones and tablets.
