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In this episode of Moni Talks Tech, Moni will introduce you to five tools that she uses every day to make her business run smoothly and save herself a shit ton of time.
Moni Talks Tech (and other things) is a show hosted by Monika Rabensteiner, a weird Austrian lady, who went on the journey to start her own business and is now here to tell the tale. But not only that: she will be caressing your earbuds with tips and tricks around tech tools and design - everything you need to make your online business work smarter not harder - and look better in the process.
Welcome to Moni Talks Tech and Other Things, the podcast where service based business owners and coaches like you can walk away with simple tips and tricks to level up your business and defeat the ultimate end boss, your dreaded tech set up. Are you ready for this then? Let's go.
Welcome to another episode of Moni Talks Tech and today we are talking about tools. And I do love my tools. The right kind of tools can make your life so much easier and it's just incredible. And sometimes we just faff around with a lot of different kinds of tools that maybe do the same thing or do something else and we hate them all but the right ones, they can make you happy, they can make your life easier. And today, I will introduce you to five tools that I use every day to just make my processes run smoother and run so much better.
The first one I recently re-fell in love with is Slack. Slack is basically something that you can compare to if you've lived through the nineties. , it is a better version than IRC chat rooms. You can create workspaces for every client that you're working with or you create one for yourself and have different channels that can have a topic, whatever topic you want, and then you can just chat with your client in there and have client communication go on in there. In general, I liked it, but with clients, I sometimes still had to use Voxer, for example, because people love their voice chats and it wasn't really possible for a while, at least not to that degree. But now, and this is kind of recent, as of whenever you listen to this episode, Slack also has voice messaging, but not only do they have voice messaging integrated into the app now, the game changer about this is that it also automatically transcribes your voice message.
So if you're not that voice message kind of person or you can't listen to the voice message right now for a lot of different reasons, then you can just click on the transcription button and then you can just read through it. And it also comes with timestamps. So for example, if you have an issue and the transcription is wrong, you can just click on it and it will jump immediately to that part of the voice message where that particular thing has been said, and you can listen to it immediately. And I mean, isn't that absolutely incredible? I love it. I want everybody to use Slack. Now, not only because of that, but also because you want to separate your work conversations from your everyday life. You don't want this all to be constantly on your phone. You want to be able to turn notifications off.
And you can't do that with every other app too, and I'm very aware of that. But if you use WhatsApp for your client communications, you just immediately know that sometimes people might also want to talk with you that are not work people and your friends and your family want to reach out to you, and all of a sudden there's this work message in between of all of those messages and it's just annoying. And same goes with every other platform Messenger. A lot of people use Voxer client communication, and I don't quite understand why they do it because the voice audio is horrible. I mean, I know you based on a walkie-talkie, but why the fuck do you need to be so on brand that even the voice message audio qualities like a walkie-talkie from 1998? Let me know. I would really love to know.
So once you've got the communication out of the way, then you want to get the project management tool. And I have seen them all. When I say that, I mean it. I've worked with Trello, I've worked with Asana, I've looked into Monday, I had Mind Master, I had them all at some point, I had them all. And in one of the teams that I used to work in, an online business manager joined and she introduced us to ClickUp. And while a lot of people might think this is too big of a ball for them to handle, do not underestimate the power of ClickUp. And the reason being that I haven't seen another project management tool in which you can organise dependencies. And this means, let's say you are a bigger team, you have multiple people working on a task, and for it to be delivered, you need different kinds of things.
So with dependencies, you can make sure that the person that is responsible for a task knows that their task is blocking another one, or that you are blocking something for someone else, which creates different kind of responsibility in the team and just makes it way more visible where bottlenecks are and what is going on. So while it might be a bit of a steeper learning curve for a lot of people, it's still one that I would suggest everybody move to because it simple, it will change the way you work in your team immensely once you've figured everything out and figured every quirk outt. So for the dependency alone, go with ClickUp. Everything else is kind of similar. Have spaces, you have lists that you can organize, you can have different kind of views, You can have kanban views like Trello is. You can have lists like Asana does.
You can make it the way you need it to be, but the dependence is alone. Let me tell you, game changing. How often did you go to a meeting while you were still working in your corporate career and we're thinking this meeting could have been an email. There is also some kind of version of this when you work online because you're gonna hop on a video call with with a client of yours, or you read this email that is like 15 miles long and whatever, then you still didn't get what's going on. And they have this back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And sometimes recording a quick video would just help everything along. And for this Loom is incredible. It's not Zoom, Zoom is the video call software, but Loom is this nice little tool that makes it possible for you to record a quick screen share on your computer, and as soon as you click stop, you automatically copy a link that you can forward to other people and explain the situation.
You don't need to go on a two hour meeting with somebody and waste your time. You also don't need to fall into a back and forth of emails for the next 30 minutes with a horrible outcome. And everybody's confused. You can't just record a quick five minute video, send a link over and make everything really clear. So Loom is just really great to do that and really, really easy to use.
Now, the next thing might be a bit elaborate, but at the same time, I've fallen in love with it and I think you will too. Airtable, you might be wondering, what the fuck do I even do with Airtable? Well, Airtable is the love child of Microsoft Excel and Acess. And you also might be thinking, Oh my God, why the is she talking about a tool that does spreadsheet?
It's kind of not, it's kind of not really a spreadsheet, it's kind of like a database, but it can change your life. You can use it as a tool to deliver content to your clients, to project manage if you set it up nicely. I personally use it for my accounting. I created my own accounting database the way that I needed it, and it changed my life. It changed the way I do accounting. And if you know me, which you get to right now, but accounting is the bane of my existence. I hated with a passion. I wanna rather fake my own death and go to a deserted island and never talk to anyone ever again than do my accounting or anybody else's accounting. I admire people who go into this deliberately because this is the worst discipline on the planet.
But as a business owner, you have to do it. You need to know where your money comes in, where it goes out, and you need to have an overview of this and oh my God, just thinking about an Excel spreadsheet is gonna make me wanna roll over like a turtle on the back and not move ever again or something. But then I realised that, hmm, I could potentially also try this with Airtable. And I created my own database, which will soon be available for you to download aswell. If you want to. You just need to read the show notes for that. And it is has changed everything for me. It's so easy to fill in data. It pulls everything I wanted to pull. I can create whatever kind of report I want, and it's just amazing and I really love it. A couple of other clients have also used it as a project management tool internally, but also externally for every client. So to deliver content and to deliver whatever you need to deliver. Also Airtable works really nicely.
And then the cherry to top this wonderful cake off is Zapier. And Zapier is this magical little thing that will in the end, save your time and save you money. Because Zapier is the magic tool that will create automations. And you want to automate as much as you can and things that make really sense for you. And if tools can't do it natively, Zapier very often can create the automation and the connection between tools that aren't usually connected. So let's say you wanna book a call and you want to collect all these leads that come for you. You don't always wanna go into your Calendly or into your Acuity.
Wherever you booking in your calls, you can set up a Zap that connects the two that will then push your data over into a spreadsheet, for example, if that's where you collect your leads or if you want to note whenever you get the payment in Dubsado and want to push it into Airtable, you can connect it as well with this app. There's so many different kinds of Zaps and almost every tool that you use online has some ability to connect with each other. And this will work through Zapier. And this is really the magic tool that you want to have a look at because it can really, really save your time. You need to figure out and you need to have a look at all the tasks that you do manually on a daily basis. And then go into Zapier, have a look. If any of those are so monotonous and so repeated that you can create this app that will do it for you and all of a sudden, boom, you will have shit ton of time saved just because you connected those two together.
A small bonus tip when it comes to apps is Spotify because you wanna really vibe and have a great time when you do work. And sometimes you need good music for that and listen to a bit of Lizzo and some other epic motivational tunes. So yes, you also need to get Spotify or Apple Music, whatever flow to your boat in whatever environment you're in, but listen to good music while you work. That will just improve your mood and your life massively. So that's it. Those are my five tools that every online business owner needs to use to make their lives and their business easier. And if you need any help with any of them, just reach out. You can find me on Instagram at MoniRocksYourSocks, and just slide into my DMs. I will not be offended and I can't wait to chat with you.