3: The Parallel Entrepreneur Toolkit

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PARALLEL ENTREPRENEURS NEED TO FIND every ounce of efficiency available. Software tools are critical, and the best ones are those that let you manage multiple businesses with a single account.

Here’s a list of tools that are built for parallel entrepreneurship.

Upwork

The best way to stay lean is to pay only for the help you need. Upwork makes that possible. I have used Upwork (and its previous iterations, Elance and Odesk) at each of my previous companies. I also hired my editor and designer for this book through Upwork. It is built for the modern freelancer and entrepreneur and to be successful with your own parallel entrepreneurship I highly recommend you use it too.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is best for business intelligence and people tracking. It makes dashboards for critical activities, registration and conversion funnels, and even sends email messages to users. It’s the best $150 you can spend each month, especially because you can share the same paid account across all of your businesses.

Heroku

In addition to being my preferred hosting platform for its reliability and ease of use, it’s also perfect for parallel entrepreneurs. Not only can you host multiple businesses on a single account, the free hosting accounts are quite generous. You can spin up a website and let it build SEO for months or years—for free.

GitHub

GitHub is an online code repository that has become a cornerstone of the internet development community. It is well-documented, reliable, and inexpensive to safely store the code for all of your websites. Since you’ll need a repository for each business, and GitHub was always designed to have multiple repositories per account, it’s literally built for parallel entrepreneurship.

Stripe

Stripe is best for payment processing and also lets you view multiple business dashboards without having to log in and out of different accounts. It’s built for the modern parallel entrepreneur.

Scripted

Scripted released a product for a single entity to manage multiple Scripted accounts and this makes it a great tool for agencies as well as parallel entrepreneurs. I’m a co-founder of this company, so of course I stand behind both the quality of the writing and its tooling to manage multiple businesses at once.

Trello

Trello also makes it easy to create multiple boards. You can create a board for each of your businesses and easily toggle between them. You’ll probably keep Trello open in your browser all day.

Facebook for Business

The agency features in Facebook are perfect for parallel entrepreneurs. You’ll create a single business account and then assign multiple pages and ad accounts to that business account. This makes it easy to manage the ad campaigns in a single place for all of your businesses.

G Suite: Gmail, Google Analytics, Google AdWords

G Suite is built for multiple businesses, and because most entrepreneurs have a personal Gmail account and a business account on Google Apps, they’ve also made it easy to toggle between accounts without needing to log out of anything.

Segment

Segment is useful for managing all of your on-page JavaScript libraries from companies like Mixpanel and Google. Their interface is intuitive and easy to manage multiple businesses at once.

Quickbooks

By making it easy to toggle in between separate business accounts or run a single set of books with classes for each business, QuickBooks belongs on your toolbelt.

Unbounce

Unbounce is a great landing page generator. You can add multiple domains to your account, allowing you to host landing pages for all of your businesses on one account.

Apple Mail & Apple Calendar for MacOS

Instead of G Suite, you might also consider Apple Mail and Apple Calendar. Because email is such an ongoing need, constantly toggling between four Gmail tabs for your email may not work well. Apple Mail aggregates the messages from multiple G Suite accounts into a single inbox and associates the correct sending email on replies.

Similarly, Apple Calendar aggregates all of your business calendars into a single view. It’s another big time saver.

HubSpot CRM

There aren’t any CRMs that allow you to aggregate data from multiple accounts, unfortunately. HubSpot will allow you to create a CRM for each of your businesses for free. You’ll need to log in and out of each one, though.

There isn’t currently a CRM for parallel entrepreneurs. A business opportunity, perhaps? Go for it!