Messaging Apps for Your Business

Business Brain, the show for entrepreneurs, episode 427 for Wednesday, March 1, 2023. Greetings, folks and welcome to. Welcome back to the Business Brain show here at BusinessBrain Show. We are the show where we take our business brains and apply them to all kinds of things in our lives. Our business lives, our personal lives, because it's all just our lives. And our business brains can help us maybe make things a little bit better or at least see things a little bit differently here. Back here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm.

Dave Hamilton and still here in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean.

I got a lot of travel.

How are you, man? How was the traveling?

Good. I'm home for like six days. It's amazing. I. Yeah, Lisa and I were in, in Mexico seeing fish on the beach over the weekend, which was great. Fish? The band. Not. Not just fish. Rolling up on the beach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was great. It was, it was fun. It was good. And then next week I head off to Vegas for podcast movement and then straight from Vegas to Austin for some of south by Southwest. Some the of.

So sounds like a good, good plan.

Yeah, yeah, it seems like a good plan. You know, hopefully it all works out to be productive.

That's cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I look forward to hearing about it.

You will hear about it. We will, we will record at least one episode while I'm. While I'm on the road. Yeah, it's unavoidable with the trip that long. Yeah. Which is fine. I mean, I, I don't mind the idea of recording on the road. I think it always sort of changes the perspective of things and I like that.

Sure.

The logistics of recording on the road for me are kind of a pain in the neck. Only because I have set up such a great system here in my studio. Right, right, right. You know, on the road I have to figure out like, where am I going to put my microphone? And I don't get to mix my signals the way I like because I've got to do it all from, you know, my laptop. I don't. But you know, this is First World Problems podcast.

Yeah.

It's all about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaking about communication.

Yeah, man, we were just, we were.

Just having a conversation before we started recording all about apps. We were talking about, we have a new sponsor coming on that has an app or service called Notion and we're learning about that. And then we start talking about Slack. And I was lamenting the fact that I have trouble getting non technical people to stick with Slack. As part of our community, you know, like the main communication tool. And it quickly kind of falls back into texting back and forth. And that is very problematic because they're not all iPhone users. So you know how that can be challenging in a group of Android and iPhone mix. It's very tough.

Yeah.

And so, you know, there's.

Well, there's a lot to unpack here. The first is I'll start with the texting thing. Especially having been in Europe twice in the past year, I really, really miss out on. I lament the fact that here in the US the way our technology and the pricing for our, our communication services evolved, we got to a point where we were comfortable using texting to communicate with each other. Like we were willing to pay for it because. And I'm pretty sure it's because we wound up getting, you know, what I'll call unlimited texting included in our plans. Early enough in the process used to have to pay for every text message you sent and received or you'd buy, you know, a block of them that would be included in your plan or whatever. Right, but. And no one ever used it because it was like, well, I can't use up my, my texts, you know. Yeah, but then, then that changed, right? We, we got unlimited talk and text and then you pay for data. And that happened early enough that we all started using texting. And I, I mean, at the time I'm sure that was great and I was happy about it at the moment. Now I, I am upset that that's how it evolved here because I see how it evolved in Europe and over there they got reasonably priced data before they ever got unlimited texting. And the byproduct of that is culturally they use texting less. Far, far less. The countries where I have been recently, it's WhatsApp is the sort of the default. Everyone with a smartphone installs WhatsApp. It is the way they communicate. Even iPhone users, iPhone to iPhone don't use iMessage, they just use WhatsApp. Now the nice part about WhatsApp is that it is a fully modern data centric texting app. So you know when you've got a group text, like if you've got a group text with, well, if it's an SMS or an MMS group text, which is what happens if you're not on an iPhone or at least one person in the group isn't on an iPhone. It just uses sort of the default mms. And it's awful when you try to send pictures or videos or Something in there, it's just like it crunches them down and makes them awful. That doesn't happen with WhatsApp because WhatsApp is a modern messaging platform. Like iMessage is a modern messaging platform. But yeah, over in Europe and I found, we talked about this on one of my other shows and I found someone sent us, I didn't find it. One of our listeners over at Matt Geekeb sent us the results of a study where they looked at what the most popular messaging app was in any given country. Now, they did not include SMS in this. So it's a little misleading because it'll tell you that Facebook messenger is the most popular one in the US and that is true if you take mess. If you take SMS out of it, I think. Yeah, yeah, right. You know, but, but throughout most of the world there were a hundred and something countries that were part of the survey and over a hundred of them, WhatsApp was the, was the winner and then Facebook messenger was very much a close second. And then there are, you know, there's some others or whatever. But it's a very interesting thing being in a culture like where we were just were in Italy or where we were in Greece over the summer where WhatsApp is the default and it's just so much simpler and it's really nice because as a, as a foreigner traveling there, I buy a data plan for my phone but I don't buy extra texting on my main number. But it's great because everybody uses WhatsApp. That takes part that happens over my data plan and so I can just immediately immerse in this like Airbnb host and Everybody just uses WhatsApp and it's totally fine. So that's great.

Yeah, it's a good solution.

And like we just, we will never get there here though. That's the problem is we're already entrenched on sms. It's not going to happen happen.

I mean even the messages like trying to keep everybody on the same page, sometimes they, it bumps out into a separate message. Trying. I mean it's a disaster.

It's a disaster. Yeah.

And so coming up with a, you know, an app or a way to communicate with, with groups that you know, are in my experience, non technical and I love Slack, I use it every day. Yep, there's lots of benefits. I understand how it works, but I've just seen that non technical people, regardless of age, what they do is they'll just stop interacting with it and then they go back to text and then you have to say, well, I posted that into Slack, or I linked it here, and it's a battle that you lose it.

Everybody has to. I've experienced this. My business life is. I'm easily able to keep in Slack. And it is. To your point, it is imperfect. It's not intuitive enough for people to just, like, people don't start using it and instantly see the benefit. It's. It's a hurdle for them. And even technical people, it's a hurdle for. But, you know, I guess we're willing. We're more used to technical hurdles. And so, like, it happens. But with the bands that I play in, technically, all three of them are on Slack. One of them is going to fall off of Slack because of exactly what you said. People just not being willing to invest the time to get there. One of the bands I'm in, everybody's a nerd. And as soon as they experience Slack, they were like, this is so much better. I'm like, yeah, I know. Like, that's why I suggested it, you know, And. And it's. And that band's fine. That's fully immersed, fully entrenched. The. The. The second one I didn't think was going to happen. And we have people in that band from, you know, mid-20s to mid-50s. And it was two of the mid-20s people that were like, yeah, I don't get this Slack thing. Let's just go back to texting, you know. Yeah, no, please don't. Because not everybody's on an iPhone, you know, And. And they finally. I made the plea at a gig. I usually don't try to try to, like, you know, convert people, but I made the plea at a gig once. I was just ranting and I'm like, no, like, we're missing out. We really are. And the other people were like, okay, let's try it again. And now we're there. Like, everybody's on board, and it's totally fine. But it did take a, you know, a begging and pleading scenario to get people into.

What about. Have you. Have you used Microsoft Teams, which is their Slack competitor? Right?

Yeah. I have never successfully. Let me put it that way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting because I do see more and more people. Something that I interact with is like, oh, let's. Let's schedule this in teams. And, you know, this kind of thing. And I wonder if that's.

Is it better than Slack? Like. Like, in terms of the. It's different. The intuitiveness.

Yeah, I think it's maybe more intuitive. And almost everybody has office right on their computer and it's kind of baked in and so I've talking to like I know my daughter uses it for her their business and it just people tend to adapt to it perhaps a little easier.

Interesting.

We need to explore it. If you use teams tell us how it is or if use something else. Feedbackusbrain Show Sh o w I'd love to hear you know or use you know Google Hangouts or what is it? How do you keep your groups connected? It would be great and we can share it here on the show and get you entered to win a MacBook Air this year, but there's a ton of them.

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You're contrarian.

Well, no, it was I got sick and tired of paying the subscription for it and very rarely using it. But here's the thing. I say that I never start a document in Office. If I'm going to start a spreadsheet, I do it either in Google Docs or in Synology Office. Which is.

Okay, yeah, sure.

Which is the Synology makes network storage devices. So Synology Office is like Google Office in that it's all based in a web browser, but instead of it being hosted by Google, it's hosted on my Synology Disk Station. Right. Which is great. Private. It's all those things. That's cool. That's where I start all my documents, if I'm going to start a spreadsheet locally. And again, it's rare that I would do this, but it happens. Then I would use Apple's numbers, and that's largely because of. I'm very comfortable in Excel and obviously all these other things are pretty much derivatives of Excel. You know, they use all the same. A lot of the same commands and all that stuff. My issue with Office and why I started using numbers and pages instead of Office is Office just. It's so bloated. It takes so long to load that if I just want to get going on something, I just want to be able to get rolling now, all of that. So I never will launch. I never would launch any part of Microsoft Office to start a document. I'm either doing it online or I'm doing it in pages or numbers on my Mac. However, I get Excel spreadsheets from people all the time. Word documents as well, but spreadsheets that I need to collaborate on. Now, I do not recommend using, like, Apple's Office, Apple's numbers to Excel conversion. Well, I mean, if, yeah, if you were to send me an Excel spreadsheet and I could open it in pages, it will convert it, but that's the key. It converts it to a numbers document. I could make my edits and then convert it back. What you get back will look different to you than what you sent me, not just because of the things I added to it, but because of these double conversions. It's a nightmare. So when I'm trying to work with clients which are, you know, people that'll send me, like, they want a proposal for me. So we'll put together the proposal, we'll send it back. I don't want it looking wrong to them. I don't want it breaking their formulas, which. Which it does in these conversions. So I found. I'm like, okay, but I still don't want to. Like, now. Now I'm being a contrarian. Like, there was a logical reason to find myself in this scenario. And then it was like, I'm going to stay here. Dang it. Uh, and I started using this app called LibreOffice, which is. Yep, it's. It's part of the Open Office suite of apps, which is Microsoft fully, you know, 100% Microsoft Office compatible, but for free. And LibreOffice is the one that is the most Mac like of these, and it's 100% free. And you can do, you know, you can do PowerPoint, Excel, Word, like, it's got all of the things in there. And when you open a document with it, when you save it, you know, you can choose to save it in like the Open Office format, which I don't. I just choose to save it in Excel, but it's truly natively opening and saving as Excel, not converting on the fly. Yeah, and it works great. Like, I, I use LibreOffice probably every day now because we do a lot of stuff with Excel proposals and it's. And it's fine. But yeah, it's. So I'm, I'm. That I'm sort of. I've got my. I found myself in a contrarian scenario and I stayed there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I. Back to the kind of communication and flow and you know, we, we did. We've talked a lot about remote work and, and we did a whole episode on communicating and keeping things going and just find, you know, finding the app that I guess if people, if, if they work for you and you're telling them this is the platform we use, they. They're going to embrace it because they have no. They have no choice. In my case here, where I have problems with it is people that don't have to do it. I say, right. I hate that.

No, like, that's my problem. In the bands that I'm in, I'm not the boss. I'm just Dave Bang Drum, you know, that's it.

Yeah, yeah.

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's interesting part of it and I'm, I'm. Like I said, I'm looking forward to learning about Notion and seeing what they have. They have. It seems like they've combined a lot of these functions and.

Yeah, I'm not sure if Notion would be built to. I need to learn more about it. And we will.

Me too.

But I don't think it's built to replace Slack. I think it's built to work alongside it.

Sure.

So I, I'd be curious to hear from all of you. What do you use? And, and if you do use Slack and you. And, and you've been nodding your head as we've been going along here. You know that. Yeah, yeah. I've had trouble onboarding people. What have you learned? Have you learned any successful tricks? Share those with us. We'll share them with the audience here. And, you know, everybody gets to win. So. Speaking of winning feedbackusbrain show and if your email is featured in an episode, you're entered to win that MacBook Air this year. Good stuff. You got anything else for him, Shannon?

No, that's great. I'm focused on communication.

I love it. Yeah, same, same. Thank you, folks, and thanks for listening. Thanks for all your tips that I know you're going to send us feedback at Businessbrain show. And yeah, keep living that charm line. See you next time.