Tools for Running an iOS Consulting Studio

Insightly

Insightly’s biggest selling feature is its integration with Google Apps. If you’re using Google Apps for email and other business services, Insightly might be the right choice for you. The downside is you need to use Google’s web portal to access the built-in features of Insightly. The feature set is a little richer than Highrise, but its interface can be more difficult to navigate.

Salesforce

Salesforce is the leader of CRM systems; it’s a beast of a software package that does it all. The downside of Salesforce is it undoubtedly contains a large number of features you have absolutely no interest in using — and the price tag reflects this. However, if your organization is large or is planning to scale quickly, then Salesforce might be the solution to your growing organization’s CRM needs.

Source Control and Versioning

If you’re into the code game, then you need to have some sort of version control system in your shop. Without it, you’re running the risk of losing or corrupting all of your most important assets — your code and other associated elements that make up your products or services. Organizations that lose their core assets don’t tend to stick around for very long! :]

There are a lot of tools to version and manage your code, but here are a few of the best:

GitHub

Shared source control is important for everyone from solo developers, but a good version control system is an absolute necessity when working with larger groups like contractors, employees, or even clients.

GitHub makes it easy; from pull requests and code review to complex team management, GitHub does almost everything you’d expect in a good source control system.

Changes

Git, for all of its great features, lacks a really great tool for performing file diffs. Many organizations have attempted to build the ultimate diff tool, but several ones worth a mention are Black Pixel’s Kaleidoscope and Apple’s Diff Engine in Xcode.

At the end of the day, I keep returning to Changes as it has a great minimalistic interface and gives me the direct interaction with my code that I’m looking for.

SourceTree

Although I’m a big supporter of command-line Git interaction, many developers prefer a visual app to manage their source control activities. SourceTree is a feature rich Git Mac app that makes branching, cloning, creating submodules and everything else in the Git toolkit simple and easy.

Hosting

I started my first consulting company with $5 to host a website. An iOS development shop doesn’t really need more than a simple website and email address to be in business. However, keep in mind that your website reflects the professionalism of your organization, and the days of clients flying in to visit your offices before choosing you for a project are quickly fading.

Building a solid, fast, and beautiful website is an absolute must for mobile consulting shops. Although not all of us are born web designers, the following services will provide a solid back end to your website or online service.

A Small Orange

A Small Orange is my go-to hosting provider; while I’ve had a number of problems with their customer support, in the end they have always been able to resolve my issues. Their service has fantastic uptime and bandwidth and has handled traffic spikes even during the most demanding product launches. Their plans are surprisingly affordable for the amount of computing power they offer.

Digital Ocean

When hosting APIs and other backend services, Digital Ocean is my provider of choice. Their super fast SSD backed servers start at very low prices and have a lot of scalability options. They’ve recently edged out the legendary RackSpace in terms of offerings.

Heroku

Heroku is a fantastic hosting provider during project staging and development. Their free plans are a great way to start developing quickly, pushing off worrying about payment until later in the process. While Heroku can scale to accommodate production environments, the cost of their service scales accordingly.

Parse

Parse is an easy and affordable way to build out server APIs for simple iOS apps; this ease of use is great for clients or teams that aren’t experienced with PHP or Ruby on Rails. Parse also offers analytics and push notification frameworks for more advanced business requirements.

Even though it’s easy to use, Parse has its limitations. As your app’s requirements grow and mature, it can be fairly easy to work yourself into a corner where Parse is no longer be a viable solution. This frequently requires a completely new server build-out, or worse, a sacrifice of your apps features.

Check out our tutorial on Parse to get started: How To Easily Create A Web Backend for Your Apps with Parse

HockeyApp

While TestFlight remains a large and popular player in the field of over-the-air app distribution, HockeyApp is my preferred supplier for its uptime and ease of use. If you’re still manually emailing IPAs back and forth to clients, HockeyApp is worth looking into. As a bonus, HockeyApp has features beyond distribution and hosting, including crash collection and analysis tools.

Where To Go From Here?

The tools from this article are supplementary and should solve a particular problem or save you some time. Business owners often find themselves neck-deep in third-party solutions that promise to make their lives easier, but in the end just complicate matters further. Remember to keep things simple – the most important tools to ensure your success are the ones that brought you to this point!

To be successful in business, study those developers and companies you admire and read as much as possible about the mistakes others have made and the lessons learned as a result.

Check out some some lists and reviews for tools to help you on your way if you want more reading (or podcast listening!) to do:

• App Mockup Tools Reviews
• App Mockup Tools Reviews Part 2: Briefs, OmniGraffle, and Balsamiq
• iOS Dev Tools: The raywenderlich.com Podcast Episode 4
• Going Indie: The raywenderlich.com Podcast Episode 5

If you have a tool or service that your shop just can’t live without, come share it with us in the discussion below!