Why Designers make the Best Leaders
March 10, 2023
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Having a meeting or two is an inescapable part of every work day but you can escape the hassle of scheduling them with Calendly. It works with your phone or laptop calendar to automate appointment scheduling. Calendly saves time and cuts the stress of back-and-forth emails spent on deciding appropriate meeting times or reschedules with clients.
“Does 2 pm work? How about 4 pm? Okay, I’ll call you in an hour to know if you will be free” becomes past tense.
There are free and paid plans used by over 500,000 people across the world. It can be connected with and used in Gmail, Slack, LinkedIn Messaging, Recruiter, Zoom, Hubspot, Sales Navigator and Mailchimp
Founder: Tope Awobona
Kippa is the all in all financial management app that functions as a bookkeeping app, bank account and inventory management tool for small and medium businesses.
As a business owner, you can use Kippa to track sales, expenses and debt. You can also use it to create and send professional invoices and digital receipts to your customers. It also has an automated payment system that sends reminders to your debtors to help recover debts so you don’t have to be chasing them up and down.
Founder: Kennedy Ekezie-Joseph
The best part of running a business is collecting payments. Paystack makes that easy. With Paystack, you can accept payments from both local and international customers, wherever they are in the world. You can accept payments from internationally-issued cards or via Apple Pay, display prices in USD, and also get settled in USD.
The process from signup to receiving real payments takes less than 15 minutes and for you, a non-trusting, short-tempered Nigerian business owner, this is the way to go. You get your alerts sharp sharp.
Founders – Ezra Olubi and Shola Akinlade
Don’t want to spend all your business profits on the latest iPhone? You need to build a saving culture. How else but with Piggyvest?
Piggyvest is an online savings and investment platform with different savings plans tailored to meet the different needs of its customers. You don’t have to worry about skipping a day off work to queue at a bank. Just create an account on PiggyVest and start saving with an added interest of up to 13%.
Saving can be done daily, weekly, monthly or through the automatic save option which deducts a predetermined amount from a primary account at a set time. There is also a Safelock feature which allows you to lock up money until a particular time.
Founders: Somto Ifezue, Odunayo Eweniyi and Joshua Chibueze
You’ve heard about how only saving has never made anyone wealthy? Well, as a business owner you know you save to invest. Chaka is an investment platform that allows Africans buy and invest in local and global stocks.
Usually, one would engage the service of a brokerage firm to buy stocks and then anxiously wait through a complicated onboarding process. Chaka has simplified the process and made it accessible so you can make your investment choices right from your phone.
Chaka facilitates access to assets listed on the Nigerian stock exchange, American stock exchanges as well as global blue-chip companies from 40+ countries around the world. All local equities are offered through a locally licensed brokerage firm registered with the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), Central Securities Clearing System (CSCS), and regulated by Nigeria’s Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC).
Founder: Tosin Osibodu
Konga is the Onitsha market of the online space offering products of various categories including but not limited to clothing, shoes, home appliances, electronic devices, books, baby items, foodstuff, groceries and personal care items.
This e-commerce site caters to over 50 million buyers. To become a seller on Konga, you have to register for a SellerHQ account and fill out the required form with accurate information, after which you will be assigned a support officer to your store who would create a SellerHQ account for you. After this, you can upload product images and information and boom you have an online business for buyers to purchase from.
Founder: Leonard Nnamdi Stanley Ekeh
You shouldn’t become Ajala the Traveller because you own a business. For some, it’s the daily search for people going to Abeokuta or Kano on their WhatsApp status because they need to make a delivery. With GiGGo, you can request shipment pick-up from the comfort of your homes or office for timely delivery within and across cities at the best rates.
GiGGo is a delivery and logistics service that picks up and delivers items of all sizes across all states in Nigeria. They also provide overseas shipping for delivery outside Nigeria.
You don’t have to run after a delivery man, with GiGGo, you can ship multiple items to the same location and track shipment progress after creation. Other features of the app include; seamless shipment creation on the go, shipment history dashboard with the status of each delivery, shipment calculator, a wallet to fund deliveries
Founder: Chidi Ajaere
Sabi is a B2B trade platform enabler that helps businesses like yours grow and increase their revenue with services such as loans and access to the best product prices in the market. With Sabi, you can track your performance digitally through the sales and inventory management tool, keep track of customers, and use capital loan financing to broaden your supply chain.
The Sabi App has a product catalogue where you can browse products and order a variety of goods. There is a store to manage day-to-day business inventory and generate sales reports. There is also the Sabi Wallet that serves as a payment tool to help carry out transactions seamlessly, receive and make payments and save money.
Founders: Anu Adasolum and Ademola Adesina
If you have been thinking of a way to manage your staff, SeamlessHR is the solution. This is an HR tech startup that provides technology solutions to businesses to manage HR data and workflow. Their offer includes Human Resource Management, Leave Management, Disciplinary Management, Reporting & Analytics, Payroll Management and Performance Management.
What SeamlessHR does is handle the HR processes of a company efficiently from the hiring point to the moment each staff exits the company. You can choose from two subscription levels. The first is the Core HR while the other is the Premium HR. The Core plan costs N1,000 per staff per month while the Premium plan costs N2,000 per staff per month.
Founders: Emmanuel Okeleji and Deji Lana
Tix is a self-service ticketing platform for event creators and businesses. Imagine you make crochet items and you are planning a training for upcoming crocheters. You don’t have to worry about scheduling or the nightmare of continually picking calls and describing the place and time of the event. With Tix’s online ticketing tools, you can create, share and collect payments for your live and virtual events.
Tix integrates ticketing, admissions, payment technology, virtual venues, and promotion and audience engagement tools to simplify operations and drive sales for event creators.
Founder: Folayemi Agusto and Nosa Oyegun
These apps would help your business and other small and big businesses to organize tasks, teams, and make better use of every work day.
At Toast Creative Studios, we are particular about the growth of businesses like yours, we would love it if you check out our work and follow us on Instagram.
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Wow… This has been very helpful. Thank you!