By Jill Duffy I had a hard time fully wrapping my mind around Podio (free to $9 per month per user), an online business tool for project management and communication, until I saw it in action. Podio is something like an online social network, like Facebook, only for businesses, and a little like a project management platform, such as Basecamp or even Asana, while somehow managing to be so much more than either.
As an online project management application, Podio is flexible and open. It is whatever you want it to be. For a small business owner who's ready to grow—someone just at the brink of being able to keep all the business' processes, workflows, and clients in her head—Podio may be the perfect next step. It certainly takes some work to get it there, though, but Podio really is an ideal tool for a small business owner with a clear picture of how her business operates.What is Podio?The best way to describe Podio is to think of it like a social network, where different people have their own accounts that are unique to them and their relationships, with a project management platform layered into it. Relationships can be between people (direct report to manager, for example) or between people and projects (e.g., lead designer on Project X).All the tools you'd expect to see in a social network, such as a chat app and email-like messaging space, are at your fingertips. Likewise, you can look at any user profile to learn more about the person, such as title and contact information. An area for workspaces is where you create and manage individual projects or clients.Some users have the power to assign tasks and responsibilities to other users, add deadlines for tasks, and handle other things that are typical to project management.What makes Podio a little different, though, is in the level of customization you can put into an account. Because I found it difficult to recreate the inner workings of a small business and actually test the customization fully on my own, I visited a small startup company that uses Podio as its primary work tool to see how Podio actually plays out in reality.Podio in Action
Vert Mobile , a marketing and digital media company in Atlanta, started using Podio about two years ago when the company looked like it was ready to grow. Since then, Vert has gone from about three employees to having 12 in house, plus a few occasional contractors and freelancers. Kevin Planovsky, one of the company's co-founders, showed me Vert's Podio account from front to back: how it works, the customizations they've made, and the people at Vert who use it (which is everyone, and then some, including as clients).Planovsky is clearly the brains behind the structure of Vert's highly customized Podio account. From my own use of Podio and conversations I had at Vert, it's clear to me that any business' success with Podio starts with a person who understands the structure of the business well enough to map it out in Podio. The tool is actually very simple to use. It's knowing what you want to do with it that's the biggest hurdle.Vert uses Podio for almost all internal communication, with email playing only a very minimal role. Podio acts as their hub for not only projects and tasks, but nearly every aspect of the business, including gathering job applications during the hiring process. (They used Podio to set up a Web form, which they then made live on a website, and anytime an applicant fills out the form, all the data saves to a Recruitment workspace of Podio. Pretty neat, right?) They set up Podio to be their fax machine and capture incoming voicemails. They use it to praise employees for completed work. It's central to nearly all the day-to-day operations.
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