Our Toolfinder service and approach
“Make sure that you always have the right tools for the job. It's no use trying to eat a steak with a teaspoon and a straw.” -Anthony T. Hincks
Our Toolfinder service is an easy, low-cost way for you to pick our brains on tech problems you might face as a business person. Whenever you need to decide on a tech solution (generally, software), just send us a note and we can provide some high-level guidance.
You could save thousands of dollars and many hours of frustration with our Toolfinder service. Let's illustrate this with a story that happened to me. In 2012, I wanted to build a website for an investment fund I was running. I wanted the website to feature various investment quotes I believed in. I wanted the website to essentially feature this sort of quote "slider" interface almost full-screen.
In my mind, this was a pretty simple project. I found a coder out of India on Fiverr, Guru. Guru started working and within a few days, he had a working prototype going. But then, I kept finding small bugs, which I felt ruined the image of professionalism and competence I was aiming for. Something was almost always out of place. If I could get the design to work on a desktop screen, it wouldn't work on mobile. Or vice versa. We were engaged in never-ending cycles of revisions. Weeks went by and I was paying the coder thousands, for a project that had started with a quote for a few hundred dollars. At some point, I concluded the design just wouldn't work. Web development was still still pretty primitive back then especially for mobile browsers. It wasn't really the coder's fault.
A few days went by and I discovered a website builder called Squarespace. For about $20 per month, anyone could build a website - no coding expertise needed! Within a day, I was able to get my slider interface built perfectly on desktops, mobile and tablets. The only small compromise I had to make was that the quotes would be in image format rather than text. This hardly mattered, everyone said the site was snazzy.
I didn't know about Squarespace (it wasn't as big then as now - they even advertize during the Super Bowl now). The minute I found about this tool, everything changed. If my coder even knew, it wasn't in his interest to tell me how Squarespace would make my project easy-peasy. That's why the Toolfinder recommendation service exists. We believe knowing the right tools makes all the difference.
To be clear, we are not big fans of Squarespace around here in 2024. It makes for very basic and slow websites. We have moved well past that. But depending on your specific circumstances, it can get the job done. Later on, we'll profile a $1B hedge fund that uses Squarespace. We hope this parable convinces you of the value of our Toolfinder service.