Kit#11 Sanja Zepan
| First name: | Sanja |
| Last name: | Zepan |
| Country: | United States |
| Occupation: | Startup founder |
Where to find Sanja online:
Sanja, what do you do?
I’m a founder at HomeyLabs, a startup that made Homey – Chores and Allowances app that enables children to save money in virtual saving jars that can be connected to their savings or checking accounts opened at their bank of choice, while helping parents teach their kids responsibility through chores.
What is your background?
I have a master’s in communication, and during my studies I focused on family communication, and how new technology plays a role in it.
What I learned during my studies, and during writing my thesis, shaped Homey a lot – we implemented a lot of features with the goal of making tech a helpful, but not overwhelming or time-consuming, part of family life, instead of something families fight about.
At HomeyLabs, I’m responsible for communicating with our users, and figuring out how to bring their needs into features of the app. And since I have work experience in digital and content marketing, I’m also responsible for our growth.
But, like almost every other early stage founder knows, we all do million other things to that are necessary for running a startup.
Your favorite tools to help you with your work?
Our team is remote, so we used to use slack for chat and then skype for daily standups. Discord enables us to have both, as it has much better voice chat options (especially if the whole team wants to be on the call!).
We primarily use trello as a scrum board, and we also have boards for linking to our resources.
AppFollow keeps track of all our app reviews coming in, and feeds them to a Discord channel through a bot. This means we get to see our reviews as they happen, and don’t have to visit iTunes connect or Google developer console every day.
Canva is a super easy to use “graphic design” tool for social media images. It’s especially useful for those cases where ROI of launching up Photoshop is just not there.
This is the framework we used to create a custom dashboard just for us. It helps me with customer support, it shows our analytics, our KPI’s everything. It’s easy to feed things from different sources into it, and customize it to your own needs.
We work with bloggers a lot, so we have a lot of content to share. Buffer helps us share that over time, without us needing to press the “tweet” button every time.
There’s not much to say about google sheets – they are less capable than excel, but enough for my needs. I also use the add-ons a lot, if I need certain extra features.
Your favorite tools on a personal level?
We use Homey to schedule all of our household chores. It’s our ledger that keeps us accountable, so everyone does their share.
We use Out of Milk for coordinating shopping lists. We believe it prevents impulse shopping, and it also makes it easy to remember everything we need.
It’s old and ugly, but everyone uses it, and that’s what matters when you’re trying to schedule meetings.
This is app makes tracking portfolios super easy, and it looks really nice.
Your absolute favorite tool in one sentence?
Of course my favorite tool is Homey! :) Having things in order at home (you know… clean home, happy kids) is the best support for doing good work. But, if our homes are a source of conflict for us, then it’s hard to ever really relax there. Family is everyone’s primary unit, and making sure things are organized and positive there, should be our top priority.