Over the years, we’ve shared all of the tools that we tend to use on our business to run our systems everyday and you guys always love when we share the ins and outs of what we swear by. Since 2020, we’ve found so many of the apps that we once loved have obviously changed or no longer are able to give us everything that we need as we evolve & grow.
Today, I wanted to share with you guys some of the apps that we swapped, what we swap them for, and why in hopes that it may be helpful for you in your business too!
From Planoly to Later.
We used Planoly for years for both our clients and our own accounts. However, when Facebook and Instagram merged it felt like one headache after the next. Our accounts were constantly being logged in and out of and everything was disconnecting every single other day.
Now, don’t get me wrong, we can handle a lot of the heavy work but when it comes to managing your clients’ accounts on top of yours we want things to work seamlessly and smoothly. Planoly continued to log our clients’ accounts out almost daily – which meant we were losing analytics and other important data and having to continuously login which can be a serious pain when you’re having to track down access codes. Our clients are just as busy as we are – no one has time for that.
We also felt that Planoly didn’t offer enough in terms of managing different social platforms. For example, one thing we were lacking was the ability to schedule our Pinterest pins, TikToks, and Instagram stories.
After doing a lot of research we ended up switching to Later, and it honestly has been the best thing for our business and our clients’ as well. I personally love that we can schedule Pinterest content, Instagram stories and feed, Facebook, and so much more from one spot. It makes everything so much more effortless and just makes more sense in my opinion to have everything in one spot versus using several different apps for several different pieces of content.
From Shopify to ThriveCart.
Now this is going to come as a shock to a lot of you because you know how much we love Shopify. But, it didn’t make sense for us to keep our digital downloads & our (newly revised soon) template shop on Shopify when our website was on ShowIt. It also didn’t make sense to put our website entirely on Shopify, either.
We felt the process to check out was a little too tedious for our clients and customers to go from the shop on our ShowIt website to our Shopify checkout page and then have to use a third-party app to deliver what we needed to and have it look the way we want it to.
We swapped to ThriveCart because it allows us to build in several things, one of them being payment plans. Now, I’m definitely not going to tell you to get rid of Shopify so don’t even go there (haha!)
If you own a physical business and you don’t have several different websites to manage, Shopify is the way to go. If we didn’t have our agency already on ShowIt, we would have been absolutely fine with putting everything on Shopify but it just didn’t make sense for us.
Another plus: ThriveCart had a one-time lifetime use payment plan. SO, instead of $400 for one year at Shopify, we paid $600 for a lifetime usage license. SO, we saved thousands in the long run.
Mailchimp & Flodesk to Klaviyo for clients.
One definite thing has changed on the client-facing side of things and that’s why we started recommending Klaviyo over Flodesk or Mailchimp. Now, if you haven’t heard of Klaviyo it’s truly life-changing.
If you have a Shopify store you deafly need to be looking into it. What we love the most about it is that the data is more customer driven and it’s a lot more rich whereas Flodesk has beautiful templates but not much else past that.
If you’re creative or a service-based business, we definitely still say to stick with Flodesk or Mailchimp as it does what it needs to do. We use Flodesk actually and I love it, however, for e-commerce customers it definitely makes more sense to utilize the smart data that comes from Shopify and really build out the workflows and automations where you can so you can make sure that you’re getting the money that’s being left on the table.
Overall, I do believe that year after year as a business owner it’s so important to streamline your systems and see what you’re using the most and what you could expand upon. For example, in the last year we really expanded how much we use ClickUp as a team. We also added Voxer for communication, Gusto for payroll, and Miro for sharing designs with clients & requesting feedback.
Since we’ve been expanding our team, I want to ensure we go into the second half of 2022 completely in sync, streamlined, and efficient. I don’t necessarily want less – I just want smarter. I personally love to do an audit quarterly and yearly to make sure that we’re not wasting money on software that we aren’t using and ensuring the software we need is doing the most work for us. Like Dubsado for example, ugh…it’s genuinely the best.
And, while some of these apps may only be $15-20 per month, that really adds up if you’re “add to cart” happy like I am. For such a long time I would just buy something because someone recommended it and I’ve really come to learn the importance of making sure it works for me and my team before diving in.
So tell me – what did you get rid of in business? What have you streamlined?
