Our favorite digital tools for building startups: Workflow Management and Research Edition

Spoiler alert: Slack and userinterviews.com are our must haves

By: The Studio Team at 25madison

In the words of our CEO Steven Price, “instant gratification isn’t fast enough.” In our early-stage world, speed and efficiency are paramount. To that end, our digital toolset is critical to enable fast communication, learning, development, creation, and deployment. Over the years, we’ve tested out dozens of digital tools, ultimately landing on the below run-down of our must-haves for workflow management and research (keep an eye out for future articles on our favorite creation and marketing tools). But we’re always searching for new tools, or new ways to use old tools. So please reach out with your own pro-tips and must-haves. We’re all ears.

Til then, we’ll be busy working away in our go-to platforms:

Workflow management

slack: Communication Hero

It may be the most obvious tool on the list, but it’s absolutely the tool we can’t live without. When slack was down for a few hours in early 2021, our team felt stranded — how do we communicate now? Email? Say it ain’t so.

What we’ve found most useful within slack is to set up a separate slack workspace for each of our incubated companies, which allows the company to add any full-time employees, contractors, and agencies to that slack instance while allowing members of the 25madison team to hop between. Plus, it lends the ability to call team members 1:1 in an instant, no scheduling required, which mimics the feeling of stopping by their desk.

With our workday attention being more and more managed by slack, we see it emerging as a new marketplace for innovation through apps like Donut, Polly, and Watercooler. In fact, we’re getting in the game ourselves. Check out one of our latest projects: Axl, a new productivity app delivering personalized, calendar-aware breaks and healthy actions.

Notion: Company wiki

Notion has become our favorite tool to easily archive and reference important company docs and notes. For each of our…