Our goal at PetaCrunch is to help businesses deliver top quality results. We do this by using a unique, expert team of clients and suppliers, working closely with you from the outset to ensure a smooth, successful relationship. That’s why we’ve created this ultimate guide to boost your company.
Whether you’re a small startup or a global enterprise, you’ll find tools here which make your work easier and smoother. This is a live document and if you want to share your recommendations or collaborate on it, write to us.
Table of Content
- Best Laptops for Remote Work
- Best Monitors for Remote Work
- Best Software Tools
- Best Business Books and Online Courses
So as you can see we will start with hardware (laptops + monitors), to go into software tools which will boost your company’s growth (from sharing notes to marketing efforts) and end with online business education (books + courses).
Our 3 Favourite Tools
ConvertKit is our favourite email marketing tool. It allows you to easily create landing pages, newsletter forms and automations to keep contact with your audience.
Easy to set up and great to use.
Evernote is the best way to organise notes across various platforms. You can easily share them with others or keep them private just for yourself.
Absolutely recommended!
BlueHost is one of the most popular website hosting services. BlueHost allows you to host multiple domains under one account, and they are very reliable.
All you can dream about when it comes to hosting.
3 Best Laptops for Remote Work
In our digital world, there’s nothing more necessary than a good laptop – or at least a good tablet/phone. Here’s our top 3 when it comes to efficiency.
1. New Apple MacBook Air (13-inch, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD Storage) — Space Gray
Brief: A laptop experience with little to no compromise
The new MacBook Air is a beautiful, piece of kit. From the glossy, magical user interface to its unmatched connectivity and stunningly powerful components, it’s a thing of engineering. Buy if you want to have the most smooth experience possible. Open the box and work right away.
2. Dell XPS 15 laptop 15.6″, 4K UHD InfinityEdge Touch, 9th Gen Intel Core i7–9750H, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4GB GDDR5, 1TB SSD storage, 16GB RAM, XPS7590–7565SLV-PUS
The Dell XPS 15 is one of the most gorgeous laptops we’ve seen in years. Beautiful in both form and function, it’s a desktop replacement in every sense of the phrase — it’s ultra-premium without the premium price tag.
The 4K display is a big selling point as well, despite its minor shortfalls.
3. Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 7th Gen 14″ Ultrabook — 1920 X 1080 — Core i7 i7–8565U — 16 GB RAM — 512 GB SSD — Windows 10 Pro 64-bit — Intel UHD Graphics 620 — in-Plane Switch
Brief: Great business performance for any Windows user.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is probably one of the most used business laptop right now. Every corporation has them, but is it good? Well, yes. As a business machine, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon has a fantastic performance.
3 Best Monitors for Remote Work
Once you have a laptop, the thing you need for a smooth work is another monitor. The best monitor on Amazon right now is:
1. Sceptre E248W-19203R 24″ Ultra Thin 75Hz 1080p LED Monitor
Whether you want to have the best remote work experience or watch a movie, the SceptreE248W-19203R monitor is the way to go. 1080P resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels) delivers stunning color and picture detail on a 22 inch screen. A 5 millisecond response time displays action sequences with the highest Degree of clarity.
2. Sceptre 24″ Curved LED Monitor Full HD 1080P
This 1800R curve monitor with the curved display delivers a revolutionary visual experience with a leading 1800R screen curvature as the images appear to wrap around you for an in depth, immersive experience.
3. Acer SB220Q bi 21.5 inches Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS Ultra-Thin Zero Frame Monitor
The Acer SB220Q bi 21. 5″ Widescreen LCD IPS display combines stylish ultra-thin functionality with amazing 1920 x 1080 resolution, allowing you to enjoy High-Definition display in the comfort of your home, whether you’re working or watching a movie.
Best software tools for business
Once you have set your home office it’s time to organise your remote work. Any successful business needs to:
- track and share notes (texts, images, code)
- store data on a cloud to make it accessible 24/7
- organise sales and marketing efforts into a CRM
- make sure all data is safe
First of all absolutely the best organisation tool you can use is Evernote. It allows you to write notes online/offline, share them across multiple devices and with other people. In business version Evernote nothing is lost: meeting notes, web pages, projects, to-do lists.
We use Evernote together with cloud solutions and the best cloud office provider is Microsoft. Microsoft 365 allows you to have a virtual disk of 1TB+ with a variety of office tools directly running on the cloud, which means you can access them anytime and anywhere.
It can be your hub for teamwork: Microsoft Teams brings all your groups and resources together in one place. Need help? Get access to call or chat support around the clock with Microsoft 365 experts.
If you’re looking for the best CRM platform, look no further. Hubspot is simply the best.
Whether you want to increase leads, accelerate sales, simplify your processes, or build a powerful website, HubSpot has a solution to help you grow better.
You can access both:
- marketing suite: all the tools you need to run complete inbound marketing campaigns
- sales suite: sales tools for your whole team to shorten deal cycles and increase close rates.
Finally, for your online security a good VPN is a must. VPN allows you to mask your IP and allows a secure, private connection to the internet. It’s especially important if you travel a lot or using a public wi-fi to connect.
To feel safe, we recommend NordVPN. Easy to setup, easy to use, one of the largest VPN providers in the world. Satisfaction guaranteed.
On the other hand if you’re a growing startup and you’re building or rebuilding your website, then you need a good hosting.
If you’re just starting then Kinsta is a great solution for WordPress Hosting and much more. For just $100 monthly you get 5 WordPress installs, 30 GB disk space and free 24/7 support .
If you already have a website then look into Scala Hosting. They provide comprehensive hosting services, from shared hosting to private VPS servers. Everything you need at any scale you need.
Enterprise solution starts at just $63.95 monthly and offers a server with 6 CPU Cores, 8GB RAM, 80 GB SSD. It’s perfect if you already have a team of software engineers in place to help you configure it.
Best Business Books and Courses
We believe that the most important tool for growth is education. Knowledge boosts growth like nothing else. That’s why we include in this text a section on the best business books and courses you can find online.
Let’s start with business books and then discuss business courses you can find online.
Business Books you should read
There’s nothing better than a good business book in your free time.
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson is a book about creative minds, who push boundaries, go against their eras and reinvent how things are done. Now an absolute classic when it comes to innovations.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Zero to One is an absolute classic by a billionaire co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. This concise book explore what it means to make a difference and how to build a company with a potential to become a unicorn.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
The Lean Startup introduced a lean methodology into a business world and shows how to use it in order to build a great company from scratch. The lean methodology gained thousands of followers after this publication. Another classic on our list.
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs is a book by a billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur, who popularized the methodology of Objective Key-Results. It is a fantastic mix of theory with very practical use cases from the world’s greatest companies.
Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Principles: Life and Work by a billionaire hedge fund manager shows how a great company culture allows you to achieve spectacular results. The author underlines often that he wouldn’t be successful without building a proper culture first.
The Everything Store by Brad Stone
The Everything Store is a story of how Amazon raised from a small online book seller to a global behemoth which operates across many industries and is constantly growing. Read it to understand why it’s always ‘Day One’.
Best Business Courses for Startups
When it comes to online education Coursera is definitely the best platform. Especially right now as it offers a Netflix-like subscription model, where by paying monthly fee you can enroll to as many courses as you want. There’s no better way to complete your education than doing it remotely, through Coursera, when you want.
Let’s review the best business courses on Coursera.
Excel Skills for Business: Essentials
Let’s start with fundaments: everyone in business needs to be comfortable using Excel and this course provides you the essential Excel skills you need.
Effective Business Presentations with Powerpoint
Creating an effective business presentation is crucial for any business at any stage. Whether you’re making a sales pitch, an internal presentation or trying to get funding with a good VC pitch, you need to know how to create a great presentation. You can learn in this course from experts from PwC.
Entrepreneurship
Wharton’s Entrepreneurship Specialization covers the conception, design, organization, and management of new enterprises. This five-course series is designed to take you from opportunity identification through launch, growth, financing and profitability. With guidance from Wharton’s top professors, along with insights from current Wharton start-up founders and financiers, you’ll develop an entrepreneurial mindset and hone the skills you need to develop a new enterprise with potential for growth and funding, or to identify and pursue opportunities for growth within an existing organization.
Final Note on Tools for Startups and Enterprise
Thank you for reading this far. We plan on expanding this list regularly, so stay tuned and subscribed to our newsletter.
If you have any suggestions on what to include next, feel free to write to us.