These are Exakt Health CEO Philip Billaudelle's five favorite tools

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

Mr. Billaudelle, what are your five favourite tools?

Our five favorite tools at Exakt Health are loom, miro, notion, google meet and slack. As a remote-first company with employees all over Europe, all our communication takes place online. All the tools therefore have one thing in common: they make online collaboration easier for us.

Which tool is the most important to you?

Perhaps the only insider tip among these tools is loom. We've been using loom like all the other tools since we founded the company 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 give feedback on a complex proposal or document, I often just record a short video message instead of 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 it?

Miro is an online whiteboard with countless extra features that we use for online workshops in particular. You can use it to conduct wonderful brainstorming sessions with post-its, display complex processes in a diagram or create screen wireframes - all live and collaboratively. The many whiteboard templates are particularly practical and make it much easier to prepare for a workshop, for example, because they already provide a certain structure.

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

Notion is the memory or "second brain" of Exakt Health, so to speak. This is where we document all our knowledge, processes and plan our project work. In our remote setup, documenting company knowledge is very important. As there is no office grapevine and far fewer opportunities to exchange information verbally, we run the risk of information asymmetries arising. New employees in particular simply lack the essential information they need to do their job well. That's why we try to record all important decisions in writing in notion, summarize the results of meetings and workshops and write general how-to articles in notion. This certainly involves a certain amount of effort at first, but we've gotten used to it in the meantime and it makes our job easier and more efficient.

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

As in many companies, Google Meet has become irreplaceable as a video conferencing system for direct communication. In general, however, we don't have many meetings and try to replace meetings with asynchronous communication via our other tools. But we still prefer to have short stand-ups or all-hands meetings via Google Meet. We mainly use Google Meet because it can be combined very well with the other tools from Google Workspace and most employees in the start-up world 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 issues. But we also often use it to socialize by discussing private topics and sending (funny) memes. Slack beats its direct competitors such as Teams primarily thanks to its diverse third-party app integrations.

Thank you for the interview.

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