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Mavenlink – Online Collaboration Tools

Mavenlink

Mavenlink provides browser-based team collaboration tools that enable anyone to deliver client services using a centralized dashboard panel. It  offers time and invoice tracking, collaborative file sharing and email integration.

The company offers several pricing plans; the free plan allows up to 3 active projects, while paid plans charge $39/month for individuals or $79/month for small teams.

Mavenlink is integrated with PayPal, in the sense that payment or invoices can be made or received using PayPal. The site offers full integration with the Google Apps platform. In May 2011, the Google Apps Marketplace selected Mavenlink as their first recommended staff pick in the entire Marketplace. The site gets around 10’000 unique visitors each month.

The service was founded in 2008 by Ray Grainger, Sean Crafts, and Roger Neel. Ray currently acts as Chief Executive Officer. The company currently operates in Irvine and San Francisco.

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WorkFlowy – Organize Your Brain

WorkFlowy

WorkFlowy is a browser-based to-do tracker tool which allows users to organize their tasks in an hierarchical tree-based structure.

The app allows each to-do task to be marked with one or several tags for easy retrieval in the future via tag-based search. In addition to the traditional site, WorkFlowy has a special version dedicated to mobile devices.

The app features on its homepage a list of impressive testimonials, one of them being from Matt Cutts, head of Google webspam efforts, which states that the project has become one of three tabs that he keeps open in the browser, along with Gmail and Google Calendar.

The site was launched in September 2010 by co-founders Jesse Patel and Mike Turitzin. It has around 10’000 visitors on a monthly basis and it has been featured extensively in tech blogs such as TechCrunch, TheNextWeb and LifeHacker.

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Evernote – Remember Everything

Evernote

Evernote makes it easy to remember big and small things from your life using your computer, phone, and the web. It is basically an advanced to-do tracker with native apps for Windows, iPhone or the web, that keep themselves synchronized over the Internet.

Evernote has the ability to search for text contained inside the uploaded pictures (you can see this feature in action here) or it can act as a publishing platform. It offers two plans: free and premium. The later is available for $5/month or $45/year and it offers uploads up to 1 GB each month, top priority support and advanced collaboration features.

The Evernote’s website traffic experienced significant growth in the last months; the company also managed to land $50 million dollars in new funding from Sequoia Capital, which confirms that things are going well for the company nowadays.

Although Evernote seems to be a well-established company, things weren’t always that good, especially at the beginning. Evernote co-founder Phil Libin shared during a video interview how close the company came to a full stop: a $500’000 investment arrived just hours before a planned shut-down as Evernote was previously unable to meet payroll expenses.

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FreshDesk – A better way to manage customer support

FreshDesk

FreshDesk is an online helpdesk system providing small businesses the required tools to offer support to their customers.

The service includes ticket tracking, email integration, ticket time SLAs and a simple integrated contact management system.

Prices for the service start at 9 USD / month and all plans are being offered with a 30-day free trial.

The site impresses via its simple, clean and aesthetic design. It makes things easy to use and intuitive to learn, which is clearly one of its main advantages in attracting eyeballs to the site.

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Time Off Manager – Track Vacations on the Web

Time Off Manager

TimeOffManager.com allows companies to keep track of vacations for all the employees using a web-based management system.

Traditionally, leave of absence is being tracked via email, with the obvious disadvantage of no centralized up-to-date situation for each employee with the number of vacation days used until now and the number of vacation days remaining. If we add to the feature list the desire to track the left-overs from previous years, the situation complicates pretty fast.

TimeOffManager comes to the resque. It offers a 15-day free trial to test the product and its interface, and then it charges 25 CAD for up to 15 users (then tends to reach 0.75 per user per month as the number of users increases).

The team is from Canada and the domain has been registered since 2007, but Compete doesn’t have enough traffic info to show a traffic profile for the site. The signup form on the site requires 11 fields just to get a trial allowing you to check-out the app interface, which is a little too much for the short attention span of the 2011 web surfers. Ideally I’d like to see an integration with Google or other 3rd party login providers to be able to sign up and play with the app almost instantenously. I hope the project evolves in this direction or finds another way to get the desired traction.

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InvoiceMachine.com – Invocing, Simplified

Invoice Machine

The InvoiceMachine.com is an online service which simplifies your invoicing and makes it beautiful.

The service takes a new clever approach to online invoicing. Its beautiful and simple-to-use interface makes producing professional looking invoices a very pleasant experience.

The site has a freemium model for up to 3 invoices per month; it charges money starting with the 4th montly invoice, up to a maximum of 48 USD per month for unlimited invoices.

The interface is beautiful, simple and elegant, and Compete shows the site enjoys around 5’000 unique visitors each month. Based in Sweden, the product team is lucky to have found the right combination – the right set of features in a nicely-packed beautiful interface.

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Minutes.io – Take Notes and Share Them Right Away

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LessMeeting.com – Improve Your Meeting Process

Less Meeting

LessMeeting offers tools to simplify / improve your meeting process and make it more effective.

The features offered are either web-based or integrated with Outlook and consist in tools aimed at planning, running and following up on the meetings in a better, structured way. A meeting should result in a set of action items that can be followed-up via the LessMeeting interface by the team members which participated in the meeting.

There’s a 30-day free trial; afterwards the service costs $12 per user per month, with discounts available for 10+ users and 100+ respectively.

I was impressed by the site’s usability; in fact, it turns out that the project’s creators paid special attention to keeping their site simple and usable; they wrote a great blog post about this, which you can check here: Lessons Learned For Startup User Signups. If you feel you’re waisting an important amount of time in your meetings, give LessMeeting.com a chance and you might be surprised how effective things can get.

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CountdownCalendar.net – Counters Made Easy

Countdown Calendar

CountdownCalendar.net offers a simple and intuitive way to create countdown calendars on the web.

The widget being generated can be customized with different colors; different text can be shown next to the actual count-down counter.

This service is currently free as they don’t charge anything for the count-down creation. The site currently operates on an ad-supported revenue model.

The service was launched in October 2010 but failed to attract significant traffic since then, according to Compete.com. Nevertheless, I find the service effective and the interface intuitive enough to give it a try next time I need one of these count-down timers 🙂

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Capturely.com – Awesome Coming Soon Pages

Capturely

Did you ever had a project that wasn’t quite finished yet, but you wanted to have something simple to show for, until it got ready? Capturely.com offers you exactly that – with the added bonus of collecting the emails of the people interested to hear about the big launch event.

You can choose between several templates available for the “Coming soon” webpage, and you have direct access to the site’s CSS. Prices start at $5 monthly for one page or $15 monthly for up to 7 coming soon pages.

The site is great for validating ideas before starting to work on them. If you have several ideas, you can make a Capturely coming soon page for each one of them, then send some traffic or advertisement towards them and see which one takes off by capturing more emails interested about their launch event. In this way it can be avoided to work for something that nobody is interested in using.

The domain got launched in October 2010 and had several thousands unique visitors in November 2010 but afterwards it seems the traffic dried up according to Compete. There are minor comebacks at the beginning of this year but nothing serious; personally I like the idea and I hope the app catches on.

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