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Trello – Organize Anything, Together

Trello is a collaboration tool for teams which organizes pending tasks and keeps a big-picture overview on a project’s remaining tasks.

The service is innovative due to its special use of configurable lists (that can be named at the discretion of the user). Each list contains cards describing the tasks required to be performed; these cards can be dragged from one list to another, have people added or assigned, and the changes made to them are automatically synchronized everywhere if there are other opened browsers displaying them.

According to the Compete.com data, the site gets at least 10’000 unique visitors per month.

Trello was launched in September 2011 by Joel Spolsky. Joel is a rather popular figure whose beginnings can be traced back in 2000 when he founded Fogcreek together with Michael Pryor. Since then he has launched a range of successful services, including FogBugz and StackOverflow. In September 2011 the Wired magazine named Trello as one of “The 7 Coolest Startups You Haven’t Heard of Yet”.

Lanyrd – Social Conference Directory

SimpleNote – Sync Notes Across Devices

SimpleNoteApp is an app for keeping notes and synchronizing their content across different devices and the web. On the app’s website there are 10 reasons mentioned for using the app, including universal access to the notes’ content, instant search, secure transfers as well as good publishing and organizational tools.

There are ads, however they’re unobtrusive and barely noticeable. For a $20 annual premium account the user can disable the ads and gain the ability to sync memos to Dropbox.

According to Compete, the app consistently received around 10’000 unique visitors each month during the last year.

The app is produced by Simperium, a startup based in San Francisco. The company was founded by Mike Johnston and Fred Cheng and received funding from the Y Combinator startup accelerator program in the summer of 2010.

Asana – Task Management for Teams

Asana is an online task management solution for teams, founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and former engineering manager Justin Rosenstein. During their tenure at Facebook they’ve noticed a huge overhead in trying to keep teams organized and on the same page; as a result they’ve left Facebook together to pursue the opportunity of building a web-based tool which addresses this problem.

In trying to avoid what they call “work about work” they’ve build a webapp aiming to be:

responsive – just like a desktop app;
intuitive – to the degree where it can replace pencil and paper to-dos without causing inconveniences;
collaborative – to allow users to get big picture overviews on the current state of the project without having bits and pieces spread over in each employee’s notebook.

During 2011, Asana tested what they’ve created with real customers via a private beta-testing program. The results have been encouraging; on 2nd of November 2011 they’ve announced the general availability of their app to the public.

In November 2009 the company managed to raise an initial $9 million series A funding round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz, which supported the 2-year development efforts leading to the public launch. Their traffic during the beta program generated around 10’000 monthly unique visitors to their site, but this number is expected to rise as anyone interested in using Asana in their teams can now sign-up for free.

Freshbooks – Manage Invoices Online

FreshBooks is an online invoicing service that allows freelancers and small business owners to create, send and track online invoices and estimates for their customers.

FreshBooks also offers the ability to purchase stamps in order to physically deliver the invoices for those users that want to save time and avoid interactions with the post office. Nowadays the company claims to send more invoices each month than the number of hairs on one person’s head (which is around 100’000).

The service sees more than 100’000 unique visitors each month. In addition to the free plan the site offers 3 paid plans, starting at $19.95 per month; the paid plans offer additional number of clients that can be tracked as well as the ability to add multiple staff users to the same account.

The company was founded in 2003 by Mike McDerment and Joe Sawada. Mike acts nowadays as the company’s CEO; its headquarters are located in Toronto, Canada. The company’s team currently includes more than 50 full-timers, including positions such as recruiters, web developers, art directors and software developers.

List.ly – Collaborative Lists

List.ly is an online tool for building collaborative lists. Upon sharing the lists, other users can contribute to them or see what others have added. Each entry in the list can be voted upon, in order to produce democratically a ranking order.

Lists can be easily embedded in external websites. The List.ly homepage features trending lists that get the most attention. A search bar for retrieving lists by keywords is also provided.

List.ly was launched in April 2011 and currently it attracts consistently over one thousand unique visitors each month, according to Compete.

The service was formerly known as twtpickin and it was founded by Shyam Subramanyan. In his Google Profile he is currently listed as founder for BoomyLabs.com .

Mavenlink – Online Collaboration Tools

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.

WorkFlowy – Organize Your Brain

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.

Evernote – Remember Everything

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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Trello – Organize Anything, Together

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Lanyrd – Social Conference Directory

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SimpleNote – Sync Notes Across Devices

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Asana – Task Management for Teams

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Freshbooks – Manage Invoices Online

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List.ly – Collaborative Lists

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Mavenlink – Online Collaboration Tools

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WorkFlowy – Organize Your Brain

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Evernote – Remember Everything

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