List of recommended free tools for running a small business (including Basecamp and Highrise)

"Running a Small Business – Free Tools" offers advice on tools that help with scheduling, project planning, invoicing, and everything else that goes into any other small business. (The author runs a recording studio.) Two of the tools recommended are Basecamp and Highrise:

Project Planning – Basecamp

Basecamp from 37Signals is an excellent project planning tool. I’ve tried pretty much all of them and like the way Basecamp works the best. Their web interface is fantastic, and it’s almost fully functional on the iPhone too. We use the Milestone feature to set date-specific deadlines (finish mixing by x date) and To-Dos to set unbounded goals (get new mic cables). We try to finish the To-Dos on a weekly basis. We use the Writeboard feature to brainstorm and to lay out our weekly meeting agenda, and occasionally use the Messages feature to share files or links that we don’t want to lose in emails.

Contact Management – Highrise

Highrise is 37Signals’ contact management tool, and it’s ideal for us. It’s really quick and easy to add contacts, and we have people tagged as ‘band’ and sometimes more specifically as ‘bassist’, ‘violinist’, etc. so we can quickly find someone if we need a session player. We also tag bands as ‘prospects’ so we know who to follow up with. The great thing about Highrise is that it’s free for 2 users and up to 250 contacts (you have to look carefully for this plan on the signup page, it’s in small text). We’re close to 250, but when we hit the limit we have to clean contacts out, which is a great way to keep our lists up to date. Another neat feature of Highrise is their ‘Dropbox’. When you’re emailing with someone who’s a contact, you can copy your personal dropbox email address on the message, and it’s automatically added to the contact as a note.

See the full list.

A novel idea: Use Highrise to keep track of fictional characters' lives

HOW TO: Write a Novel Using the Web offers a toolkit for using the web to write a book. Highrise is suggested as a way to track the "lives" of all your characters.

If your story is very character heavy, keeping track of all the people in your novel, who they are, and how they interact will be vital to making sure the continuity isn’t interrupted. It may seem silly to treat your fictional characters as real people, but using an online CRM application like Highrise (which offers a free account good for 250 characters), can be a great way to keep track of the people in your book. Create an entry for each character and treat them like real people, attaching notes about their interactions, histories, and characteristics as you write.

Highrise is "especially suited" to small groups of lawyers and solo firms

Opveon University is a resource that aims to help legal professionals be more efficient. The site recently published an overview of Highrise for Law Firms:

Highrise is a tool created by 37signals to help individuals and small business ingest and organize the plethora of information that we get each day through simple communication with other people. It does a superb job of organizing our client interactions. It can do the same for yours...It’s a wonderful tool, especially suited to small groups and solo firms.

Read the full piece.

Highrise helps Inchoo follow-up with prospects

In "Manage your contacts effectively – where have all my post-its gone?", Aron Stanic of Inchoo discusses Highrise.

Let’s say I’ve just received an email inquiry from a new prospect. When sending a response, I can instantly Bcc the email to my Highrise dropbox making the communication transparent and easily trackable for myself and, most importantly, for the rest of the team as well.

I’m able to upload and/or import basic contact information about the new client together with her/his picture (sometimes being good with the names simply doesn’t cut it), corporate information, other notes and – yes – even feed the profile with their Twitter updates so I can see what the client is up to in real time.

While some of these features can strike you as purely cosmetic, there are others that really stand out. I can create task lists for each contact (making sure I don’t forget sending that quote or a follow-up email), add pending and any previous deals to them and tag them accordingly.

It happened a couple of times that I’d make a follow-up on a prospect who needed some small Magento tweak a month ago and decided to go with another developer. He had experienced some problems and was very much relieved to hear back from us and ask for our help with a larger deal that we would then land. Who knows if I’d have remembered to make that follow-up had I not created a task two months ago.

Read the full post.

"Run your home more like a business" with 37signals tools

101 Tools to Run Your Home More Like a Business:

Home life seems to get more and more complicated as days go by. There are chores, paperwork, and lots of maintenance to deal with, but your home doesn’t have to take over your life. By using tools that streamline the work of businesses, you’ll find that it’s easy to get things done. Read on and you’ll find 101 tools that will make your home run like a business.

Included on the list: Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, Campfire, and Writeboard.

The Star-Ledger: Highrise is a a new breed of CRM that emphasizes simplicity

"New programs can help firms rid themselves of their Rolodexes" [The Star-Ledger] says that while you might think of CRM software as being a tool for mega-corporations (or costing mega-bucks), relatively affordable web-based versions of CRM software are now available. Along the way, Highrise gets a mention.

For many businesses, especially small businesses -- a law firm, say, or a niche retailer -- the idea of embarking on an effort to move to a CRM system can seem like a daunting task. Yet with a new breed of CRM, the emphasis is on simplicity and ease-of-use, as well as helping you run a business without the need to configure and install complex software. You pay a monthly fee, and then you can forget about the technical end of maintaining the CRM software...

Highrise, offers a free plan, for two users and 250 contacts. A $24-per-month plan provides up to six users and 5,000 contacts, while the $149- per-month plan allows for unlimited users and 50,000 contacts. I particularly like the description used by 37 signals, the makers of the Highrise CRM: Highrise is a great way for business to keep track of who talked to whom, what was said and what needs to happen next. The software excels in the way it blends contact management, to-do lists and other features. You look at a contacts page in Highrise, and you have a window into your communications with that person, notes from meetings, background and any tasks related to the contact...

If you're working on your own, you can certainly try to make do with sticky notes, a simple address book and your memory. But if multiple people are working on projects together, maybe even in far-flung locations, then coordination becomes essential. Given that an increasing number of small businesses now operate in a virtual environment, or have telecommuters, the need for tools to know who's doing what is even more important. Just beware: Even these streamlined CRM services won't do much for you unless you actually use and update them.

Read the full article.

Web dev company compares web apps and says "none of them hold a candle to the suite that 37signals offers"

CHROMATIC, a web design and development company, recently shared the most important web-based tools that it uses to run its operations. Three 37signals tools made the list: "There are tons of different collaborative, organizational, and contact management applications available on the web. However, none of them hold a candle to the suite that 37signals offers."

Basecamp is the ultimate project management application (it’s also the most popular - a status that is very well deserved). Our clients are constantly blown away by our ability to communicate quickly, organize project-related information efficiently, and maintain punctuality with our project milestones and deliverables on a consistent basis...Our clients love Basecamp, we love Basecamp, you’ll love Basecamp. Period.

Backpack is an invaluable business-organization tool that will help keep you organized. If I had to choose a favorite from the 37signals suite, Backpack would be my choice.

Each time we get a call or e-mail, whether it be for a RFP request, a designer/developer/marketer looking to join our team, or a discussion with a client about their project, we use Highrise to take notes. We then assign specific tasks to the contact’s file (create a proposal, schedule a conference call, etc) and set SMS/e-mail reminders so that we never miss an event, task, appointment, etc. It streamlines the entire process of contact and lead management...Highrise will make your life a lot easier. Count on it.

The rest of the list offers some other great tools too.

Highrise turns two

Last Friday (March 20) Highrise turned two. We couldn't be more proud of how much it's grown since it popped out of our dev servers and onto the internet. Here's the original post that launched Highrise back in 2007.

For the past year or so, Highrise has been our fastest growing product on a month-to-month revenue growth basis. And lately it's really taken off. We see Basecamp-like growth patterns which has us very excited.

For fun we've posted some growth charts below. We love the slow and steady curves. No sharp bull or bear markets — just steady predictable growth.

BTW: Highrise Deals were launched last October so the chart is shorter and steeper. We expect this to take on a more steady form as time goes on.

To everyone who uses Highrise: Thanks so much! We really hope you're finding it useful. To those who don't, how about giving it a try? It's the best way we know to keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what you need to do next. It helps you prepare for that next call, that next meeting, that next conversation. You'll be amazed at how amazed other people are when you're better prepared.

Eric Lee: Trade unionists should try getting organized with Highrise

In Keeping the organizers organized, Eric Lee talks about using Highrise to stay organized as a trade unionist.

Trade unionists talk a lot about organising, but how well organised are we ourselves? I've tried lots of tools over the years with the goal of being better organised, including personal digital assistants (PDAs), PC-based software, and most recently web-based tools. Most recently, I've gotten hooked by a fantastic service called Highrise...

Union organisers can use Highrise to record all contacts, to note who has joined and what they've agreed to do, and who are potential members. Once a union exists in the workplace, Highrise could be used to maintain membership records and details of contacts between members and the union.

I'm sure there are loads of expensive systems out there which do the same thing. And I'm sure that people have hacked together ways to do much of this on an Excel spreadsheet too.

But to be able to access all your contacts from any Internet-connected device (including your cellphone) – that's extraordinary...

I think that any trade unionist who tries Highrise will instantly recognise the potential.

Read the whole piece.

Highrise one of "Top 10 most useful webapps of 2008"

Evan Bartlett is a member of the business development team at Angelsoft. Lifeinlists is his digital sandbox and he recently published his Top 10 most useful webapps of 2008 there. On the list: Highrise.

Highrise
Highrise became a big-small contender in the CRM space this year by adding Deal tracking and full data export. Not to mention, no CRM comes close to making it this easy to keep track of your contacts in detail. After falling off the wagon with Salesforce (multiple times), SugarCRM, and PipelineDeals, Highrise is the only one that became critical to my day-to-day activites at work.

Thanks for the mention Evan.