These are the five favorite tools of Exakt Health CEO Philip Billaudelle

The start-up relies on classics such as Slack and Notion - but also has some insider tips.

Mr. Billaudelle, what are your five favorite tools?

Our five favorite tools at Exakt Health are loom, miro, notion, google meet, slack. As a remote-first company with employees all over Europe, all our communication is done online. All tools therefore also have in common that they simplify online collaboration for us.

Which is the most important tool for you?

Perhaps the only insider tip among these tools is loom. We've been using loom like all the other tools since our inception in January 2021. Loom makes it easy to record a video message from your screen and share it with colleagues. For example, if I need to provide feedback on a complex proposal or document, I often just record a short video message rather than leaving lots of little comments in a document or writing a long email. This gives the recipient much better context to my comments and we avoid misunderstandings.

You mentioned miro as a second tool. Why do you use that?

Miro is an online whiteboard with countless extra features that we use especially for online workshops. It's a great tool for brainstorming sessions with Post-Its, diagramming complex processes, or creating screen wireframes - all live and collaborative. Especially practical are the many whiteboard templates, which make the preparation for a workshop, for example, very easy, because they already provide a certain structure.

Also on the list is Notion. What do you like about it?

Notion is more or less the memory or the "second brain" of Exakt Health. Here we document all our knowledge, processes and plan our project work. In our remote setup, documentation of company knowledge is of great importance. Since there are no office communications and far fewer opportunities to exchange information verbally, we run the risk of information asymmetries arising. Then especially new employees simply lack essential information to do their job well. That's why we try to record all important decisions in notion, summarize results from meetings and workshops, and write general how-to articles in notion. This is certainly a bit of a hassle in the beginning, but by now we've gotten used to it well and it makes our job easier and us more efficient.

Google Meet is a classic as a tool. Why did it make your top 5 list?

As in many companies, Google Meet has become irreplaceable as a video conferencing system for face-to-face communication. Basically, though, we don't have many meetings and try to replace meetings more with asynchronous communication via our other tools. But we still prefer to do short stand-ups or all-hands meetings via Google Meet. We use Google Meet mainly because it combines very well with the other tools from Google Workspace and in the startup world most employees are already used to it compared to Microsoft Teams for example.

That leaves Slack. Why is this an important tool?

Slack is our instant messaging tool of choice. We use it to coordinate our work or to quickly clarify minor in-between questions. But we also often use it to socialize, sharing private topics and sending (funny) memes. Slack beats its direct competitors like Teams mainly because of its multiple third-party app integrations.

Thanks for the interview.

About Philip: Philip Billaudelle is the founder and CEO of Exakt Health, a Berlin-based health tech startup that is digitizing physical therapy. Previously, as one of the early employees of N26, he helped build the mobile bank in various leadership positions in the product management and data science team.