In case you don’t know what SaaS means – Software as a Service

In my spare time, I’ve been known to startup small projects, such as WordPress plugin development. Basically I knew nothing about the business when I started, and I guess there’s still a lot to learn.

Over the course of time, I have gone through a lot of trial and error – resulting in me trying to find solutions for the problems I ran into. Here’s a list of apps I use to make live easier. Trust me, once you get paying customers for your software, you need every little bit of help you can get!

Listed in no particular order:

Google Apps: I’m sure most of you are familiar with this. For every new project I start, I create a new apps account, so that I’m sure ALL my email gets handled by Google. I can create new users in my organisation on the fly, and easily share documents with people that I’m working with. Highly recommended if you want to keep everything accessible in one place on the web.

TaskForce App: This is a great task manager widget that fully integrates with Google mail. Simply install, login, and you’ll keep track of whatever tasks you or your team needs to be doing. I actually use it more to quickly dump ideas into as soon as I have something i think is worth looking into later. Oh yeah, and it’s completely free.

UserVoice: I have only recently started using this, but I’m already in love with it. Previously I used to have a separate “support forum” and a “ticket system” for my users. Everything was locally hosted, had different logins, forums got spammed all the time, ticketsystem would lose tickets etc. It was a headache to handle. Then I discovered UserVoice. Now my users can browse a dynamic knowledge base, submit support tickets, leave suggestions for improvements in a public page, where others can vote for ideas, and help me filter out great additions I could offer my users. All I do is login to the admin panel, and I can keep track of everything in here. This isn’t completely free, but starting at $5 per month, its a no-brainer if you take customer satisfaction seriously.

Zopim: If you want to capture your leads while they’re browsing your product site, this app is a great help. It’ll give visitors the opportunity to get in touch with you, or one of your staff members, immediately. We live in an “instant culture” and you will really miss out on sales opportunities if you do not try and engage with your leads ASAP. There is a free option, but this is pretty limited. You get what you pay for.

Less Accounting: Since 99.9% of my business consists out of services and digital products, most of my payments are received through PayPal. The Less Accounting software automatically keeps tracks of all my income and expenses. All I have to do is login to see how poor I am, who still owes me, and who I still owe. Makes it a lot easier when having to decide any expenses that need to be made – I’ll know exactly how much I can spend. Comes with a cool iPhone app too, which lets your digitalize any receipts you might get.

TimeDoctor: The ultimate Virtual Assistant time tracker. This thing kicks ass, and is completely free! You get your VA to install this app, and you can log in to your online admin panel and see exactly what they’ve been working on, and how long. There’s an option to store a screenshot every minute, so you can browse through them to make sure your VA is doing what they are getting paid for. There’s no fooling the system, if no activity is being detected, it will put the user in a break mode, meaning no hours will get logged.

Hope these are of some use to you