The beauty of the new digital landscape is that small town and rural entrepreneurs have totally unrestricted access to talent. One of the issues, though is that remote locations do not have pools of talent close by.
So it’s vital to have easy and good forms of collaboration. The market for oftware and applications for team working is a very crowded space. Finding the tools that really work for you is tough.
In my College, we use Google and all its apps (like google docs) as a standard, but I have never found them to be intuitive and easy to use, even though I have been using them for the last three or four years.
So now, as I am in the process of establishing a new startup, I wanted to find something good, so that my co-founder, based in a small town in Ireland, and I could work together in a way more efficient than huge strings of emails with attachments and phone calls. What I found was Glip.
Glip is a team conversation platform to plan, share & organize work. They claim that teams can jump right in, with zero learning curve, and do better work together. No technical skills are required to use Glip, and it boosts productivity from the very first user. Glip removes communication barriers with built-in text and video chat and includes file sharing, tasks management, shared calendars and more, all seamlessly integrated.
My experience was a little different. It has been quite a steep learning curve, but what turns that into a small problem is that customers, even a mini-customer like me with a two-person team and paying nothing, are given great support. I am a newbie to Glip, but Dave Hersh, on of the co-founders responds to my request for help almost immediately and even on the weekend. The three co-founders have been around together in the real time communication field. They have done other startups and sold them. Principally it was Multiply, in social networking and commerce, which they sold to Naspers, Inc a major South African global platform operator.
Big Lesson
For me, the support I have been getting from Dave is an object lesson in how to integrate all aspects of creating and delivering a seamless experience to clients. It’s my painful experience that tech startups are all too often excited by their own wizardry that they forget why they are in business.
I have had a few disappointing ‘customerships’ recently. One involved supporting a new entrant to the hotspot area—Karma—that I backed on a crowdfunding site. Delivery was due last year, then early this year, then April… this year, next year, sometime, never! Very disappointing, especially since customer care and communications seems weak and disrespectful.
Not so with Glip. Long may it continue.