Small business productivity isn't about individual focus — it's about how many operating surfaces the team can cover without dropping any. The eighteen apps below map to the full surface area, with brief notes on what each one actually solves.
Communication (3)
- Slack / Microsoft Teams — team async chat
- Zoom / Google Meet — external video calls
- Loom — recorded video explanations
Documents (2)
- Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 — docs, sheets, presentations
- Notion — wiki, project pages, knowledge base
Tasks & projects (2)
- Asana / ClickUp — project management
- Linear — engineering-specific workflows
Customer relationships (2)
- HubSpot / Pipedrive — CRM, scaled to team size
- Intercom / Crisp — customer messaging
Money (3)
- Stripe — payments
- QuickBooks / Xero — bookkeeping
- Ramp / Brex — corporate cards with built-in expense tracking
Marketing (2)
- Mailchimp / ConvertKit — email lists
- Buffer / Later — social scheduling
Automation & AI (2)
- Zapier / Make — connects the tools that don't integrate natively
- ChatGPT / Claude for Teams — drafting, summarising, analysis
Security (2)
- 1Password for Business — shared credentials
- A cloud backup (Backblaze / Arq) — data insurance
A minimum viable small-business stack is six of these: Slack, Google Workspace, Notion, Stripe, QuickBooks, HubSpot. Add the rest as specific frictions appear — not proactively, not aspirationally. Every added app is a new surface to maintain.
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