The Collaborative Toolbox

Effective Tools Create Greater Scale

Rachel Aliana
7 min readApr 10, 2023

This article is a part of the book “How to Build Thriving Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.”

John M. Culkin, notable media scholar wrote, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” (Jouhki). Refrigerators, ovens, and microwaves shape the types of food we eat and our feelings towards it. Cars, trains, and airplanes shape where we live, where we work, and where we play. Cell phones, computers, and the various apps on them shape how we entertain ourselves, the friendships we make, and the people we date.

The tools entrepreneurs have at their disposal shape the kinds of problems they confront and the scale they tackle them at (Steininger). Community Information Designers (CIDs) can have a transformational effect on founder success by helping them find tools that can amplify the trajectory of their businesses.

Tools Shape Approach, Scale, and Execution

Prototyping tools like Sketch and Figma can help non-technical founders showcase sophisticated wireframes that years ago would demand a design firm. Wix and Squarespace can help all founders set up web pages to gain an initial understanding of product interest that five years ago would demand a computer engineer.

Tools also enable more efficient business processes outside of the product. Hubspot helps founders organize various leads within the sales pipeline, Zendesk automates customer service, while Mailchimp streamlines marketing campaigns.

Tools can also be mental approaches that help founders better understand how to build companies efficiently. The idea of the lean startup, is a methodology that founders can use to test whether they have product market fit before they invest fully into the build out of a product. Meanwhile the idea of human-centered design helps founders design products with a deep understanding of accessibility and usability that can increase user retention.

The Advent of AI

In the last few years AI has increased the productivity of a single individual across every major start-up vertical. AI helps founders better understand the competitive landscape from the get-go to see where their companies can find underserved customers. This was the case with AI company Quid that helped Netbase President Bob Goodson analyze gaps in the wearable devices market. In minutes Quid helped Netbase see clusters of start-ups launched in the wearable tech industry, what sub-market these start-ups tackled, “how competitive and developed each sub-sector has become, and whether it’s being heavily invested in” (Greenwald). This analysis would have taken a consulting team weeks to gather and analyze this data, which by that time might be crucially out of date.

AI can also enhance the data analysis capability of founders to better understand customer response to already launched products. AI helped company UBREW iterate on its formula of beer based on customer purchasing data faster than traditional customer discovery (Greenwald). What is more, the AI system developed to understand customer feedback over time learned which questions are the most effective to ask, making both the product and the product development process more refined with each iteration.

AI can also help with a company’s customer service efforts. Chatbots are estimated to solve eighty percent of typical user inquiries, which enables small teams to save time not answering repetitive queries (Larche). The data from each customer service interaction can also be analyzed so that founders can discover recurring themes in customer interactions to pinpoint problems with their product or services.

AI art generators like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion can create novel illustrations in hundreds of different art styles with only simple text prompts. The cost to use these platform range from free to a handful of cents per query. A traditional designer would cost $40–200 dollars per illustration (Metz). With human artists it also takes time to find an artist with the founders’ desired style, create and sign a contract, and go back and forth on rounds of revisions to get to a finished product. The advent of AI has made it possible for one person to do the work of several, with a faster turn around time.

The Collaborative Toolbox

To utilize any tools, AI or otherwise, founders first need to know about them. Many first time entrepreneurs are unaware of many of these tools or do not know how to integrate them into their processes. As a CID you can play an important role to make founders aware of the tools at their disposal through the creation of a Collaborative Toolbox. The Collaborative Toolbox is a library of tactical tools for building start-ups. An important facet of the toolbox is that community members can also add assets to it, which enables founders to gain access to tools that CIDs themselves might not be aware of.

The Collaborative Toolbox importantly lowers the cognitive load a founder must exert to search for new tools available to them. It is a skill to consciously think of choosing the most effective tool for a problem, and energy to evaluate whether it is worth the time, money, and effort to use a new tool (Trujillo). A founder that switches from Excel to an online accounting program needs to consider potential new variable costs if the new tool runs on a subscription model and the learning curve to learn a new software. For founders that are resource constrained with little time and money to experiment, they tend to stay with already known tools, locking them in to inefficient processes. A high quality Collaborative Toolbox not simply gathers together resources but organizes them in a way that can speed up founder decision making and lower mental barriers to switching to more effective tools.

But the true power of a Collaborative Toolbox is not in helping founders find any one tool. Its power is seen over time as it helps widen the mental map of what founders believe they can achieve. This process might happen slowly. A student might initially go to the Toolbox to understand what is the easiest platform to build a basic website to teach accounting to other students through fun, short videos. They happen to see in the Collaborative Toolbox that their university has audio and video equipment that can help them develop higher quality videos.

That knowledge might sit in their head for months. But when this founder has built their website, they can now imagine a next step where they develop more professional quality videos. These higher quality videos can in turn open up new revenue streams as local businesses want to use them to teach new employees accounting.

How to Set up a Collaborative Toolbox

The first step to create a Collaborative Toolbox is to designate a location for it on campus. This space simply needs to have a five foot wide blank white wall. A design lab, library, or entrepreneurship center would be ideal locations.

Create a grid on a cork board with places for people to pin flashcards, or a cloth tapestry with see-through plastic pockets.

The board should be created with four main sub-headings on the Y axis: Marketing, Sales, Product, and Customer Service. Other potential groups to add to the list:

  • Video Production (audio and visual equipment that can help founders create high quality promo videos and other media)
  • Website Creation (should include both computer languages as well as no-code platforms such as Wix and Squarespace)
  • Finance (tools to track revenue and growth, how to set up a bank account, and how to understand a profit and loss statement)
  • Human Resources (How to onboard an initial employee, pay them, and understand the necessary taxes)
  • Fundraising (How to develop a pitch deck, how to find and evaluate potential Angel, Seed, and Series A investors, and how to communicate progress to investors)
  • Software (licenses to design tools or programming suites that students get discounts on)
  • Hardware (audio equipment, video equipment, 3D printers)
  • Education (classes people can take, internship opportunities, accelerators the university is affiliated with)
  • Mental Models (human-centered design, lean startup model).

On the X axis create labels: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced.

The board would look something like this:

A potential layout for a Collaborative Toolbox Installation

Next, design flashcard-sized cards that students can pin on the board. Each card should come with:

  • The name of the tool
  • A one or two sentence description of the tool
  • How much the tool costs
  • Approximately how much time it takes to get up and running with the tool
  • A link to where the students can access the tool.
An image depicting a potential card layout for the Collaborative Toolbox

There should be a stack of flashcards with this design located near the Collaborative Toolbox board. Anyone from the university and the wider community should be encouraged to add tools to the board.

Curation and Digital Translation

Around once a week the Community Information Designer should check for what cards have been added to the board. The new cards should be checked for accuracy, and then uploaded to a digital version of the Collaborative Toolbox.

The simplest way to host a Collaborative Toolbox online is via a Google Sheets accessed through the entrepreneurship website with read-only or comment-only access. However, universities are encouraged to create more visual, interactive, and searchable websites for founders to easily explore the tools they have at their disposal. Advanced Toolboxes might also have the ability to search by product stage, costs, or industry sector, or provide email addresses of mentors that can provide insight and assistance.

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