What should I use to keep track of everything?
I've always been glued to tech-related products and startups. I love it.
But now I find myself in a small but profitable operation that needs to grow; it's in the food industry (through a small e-commerce platform).
For any tech project, it was as easy as going to Trello, Jira, TemWork... one of those classical PM's to assign tasks, keep track of things, and more.
But this time though, it's chocolate instead of code :P. I need something to track sales and clients (CRM), inventory (and be aware when it's running low), make my financial statements easier, and also have the task/milestone functionality.
I've found several options, but I wanted to get your input as this is new for me.
So what'd you recommend? Any advice regarding this new venture is always welcome! :)
Thank you!
I'd say you need a CRM. I'm co-founder of Tapdesk CRM. You should try out Tapdesk. Our product feature is currently in beta. You can track inventory, orders. You can even create and launch a no-code responsive product web page. We are also adding a shipment management to the product feature.
I'll check it out!
I recommend a data lake but I'm biased...
The whole reason I built Lakebed is because every biz has data spread across accounting, inventory, CRM, Google Analytics, ecommerce, etc. If you build something custom to pull all the data together then you're somewhat locked in because you're invested time/energy/money in utilizing data from the existing systems.
If instead you leave CRM system to do what it does best, manage customers. Leave the inventory system to manage inventory. Leave the accounting system to manage finances. Then, dump the data from those disparate system into a data lake (like a data warehouse but better) and build reports/analysis/dashboard from there. Then in the future if you change systems you just need to dump the new data into the data lake and your reporting keeps working as expected.
I'm looking for the first few customers and/or test cases. I'm happy to look at building you a dashboard. As an example, there's a video on the Lakebed site showing, in real-time, taking 2 different data sources and building a visual dashboard in just 3 minutes: https://lakebed.io/in-action/
Even if you're not interested in Lakebed or a dashboard I'm happy to chat and work through solutions with you.
P.S. Analysis that shows when inventory is running low is sort of after-the-fact. As you grow you might consider analytics that shows website visitors, orders, and inventory. Then you can start seeing patterns and you can identify when orders might increase, which reduces inventory, so you can order before inventory is low.
Yeah! I thought of guesstimating it and then getting more accurate through sales-inventory experience. That's great advice.
I can tell you've put a lot of work into lakebed.io (/credits is pretty impressive). However, I'm dealing with enough risk already, I'd rather start small and keep adding APIs/data dumps. Much like a data lake. I guess the challenges will be to find decent specific software with a decent API I can tap into. Which I assume is the way you do it, right? Or is it more manual?
If I may, lakebed.io's design looks a bit dated. The watermark and synthetic voice-over make it look a bit unprofessional. I'd also advise against gifs of more than 5s.
I wish you the very best of luck!