Thanks to the boom of the internet, there are many free online tools available for small businesses to use. These tools can help you manage your business better and save you lots of time.
Today I am going to talk to you about some of the best free online tools for business available on the net to help you run your business without spending lots of money.
TRUiC Business Name Generator
If you’ve already got your business idea squared away, your next step is to choose a business name. Deciding on the right name for your startup is important and can be a lengthy, difficult process. With the TRUiC Business Name Generator, you are provided with unique names for your startup based on the industry and general information. The best part, it’s free!
Pricing: Free
Google Docs
Within the extensive resources offered by Google, Google Docs is the way to go for assistance brainstorming. This free platform operates as a blank document with optional templates, automatic saving, and unlimited shareability among team members. Additionally, Google Docs has plenty easy to use privacy settings for your own brainstorms.
Pricing: Free
Coggle
Create notes and develop mind maps on your own or collaboratively with Coggle’s brainstorming platform that makes working easy as an individual or as a team. Coggle is free to start, and if you find it’s not your cup of tea, you have unlimited diagrams that you can refer back to even if you cancel your subscription.
Pricing: Free – $8/month
Startup Planning Tools
TRUiC Business Plan Generator
Your startup’s business plan is the roadmap to the steps needed to achieve important business milestones, and it’s absolutely necessary. Fortunately, with the TRUiC Business Plan Generator, you can easily craft a business plan to outline the first three to five years of your business’s life cycle cost-free.
Pricing: Free
LivePlan
LivePlan is kind of a catch-all platform that allows you to create a business pitch, make a budget and business forecast, and compare your numbers with competitors all on one platform. Not to mention, you can connect the app with other business tools such as Quickbooks or Xero to easily manage your startup’s finances and oversee budgets with the LivePlan dashboard.
Pricing: $15/month – $20/month
Leanstack
Leanstack is the industry leader for lean startup tools. From business planning to mentorship, Leanstack provides startup entrepreneurs with the tools to develop a plan for a sustainable business model that is primed for rapid growth.
Pricing: Free – $120/month
Market Research Tools
SurveyMonkey
Market research is a crucial part of improving customer satisfaction and growing your startup. SurveyMonkey makes distributing surveys to customers and employees super simple so that you can gain the invaluable information they have to provide.
Pricing: $25/user/month – $75/user/month
Business Development
SBDCNet
SBDCNet provides valuable information for entrepreneurs on everything from industry reports to conducting market research to industry-specific resources. For entrepreneurs that are just starting out, SBDCNet also provides an extensive list of reports of small business ideas that will help you gauge the potential success of your startup idea.
Pricing: Free
Communication Tools
Slack
Every business owner knows that communication is key to operating a successful business. With Slack, communicating within your team is quick, easy, and intuitive. Unlike communicating through email, users use instant messaging to chat with individual team members, public channels, and organized private groups. Additionally, you can add an unlimited number of members to keep communication strong as your startup grows.
Pricing: Free – $12.50/user/month
PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOLS FOR STARTUPS
Lifesize allows startups to have video, web, and audio conferences along with the option to record and share meetings. It also makes it easy to integrate video from almost any platform available, giving your startup the look and feel of a top-tier business without the top-tier cost.
Join.me is one of the best options when it comes to connecting and collaborating with your team. This tool gives startups the ability to share audio, video, whiteboard, live chat and enable users to share control over their screen. The rich range of annotation and remote access features also makes this tool great for sales demos.
Join.me can be used for free, but to lift the participant cap to 5 and host unlimited meetings, you’ll have to buy a plan starting at $9/user/month.
Zoom — ranked the #1 meeting tool by Gartner in 2018 — is a fast and reliable video conferencing software that works great for internal and client meetings alike.
It features screen-sharing, annotation, and cloud-hosted meeting recordings that you can automatically upload and share. A great use case to keep your team in the loop is to use a fixed room for recurring team meetings and integrate it with Slack to automatically share the recording with participants afterwards.
Zoom’s pricing starts at $14.99/host/month — and just one host can have up to 100 participants.
SCHEDULING TOOLS FOR STARTUPS
The worst part about trying to schedule a meeting with someone is the four emails that it takes to nail down a time.
Calendly takes care of that process by simply allowing you to share your calendar link with whomever you choose and letting them select a time you are both available. You can include a Calendly link in emails, or place a widget on your website to help schedule demos or meetings, making it perfect for time-pressed startups.
Doodle allows you to compare availability times for a large group of people and decide on the best time to meet.
With Doodle, you connect your current calendar with your guest’s via the platform so there is no unnecessary bouncing back and forth. It also has a mobile app that works with all major devices, making it perfect for the startup owner on the go who needs to coordinate with multiple schedules.
SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS FOR STARTUPS
Scheduling, publishing, and analyzing all of your social media posts can take up a lot of your valuable time.
Buffer allows you to “set it and forget it” when it comes to promoting content through various social channels. Add multiple posts to the end of your publishing queue and drip them out on a schedule. For added convenience, you can add the Buffer Chrome extension and quickly queue up any article you find while browsing online and quickly share it with your social followers.
Quuu integrates with Buffer to offer startups an easy way to manage their social feeds (without wasting time on curation). The way it works is simple: first, you select your niche. Then, you get hand-curated content as suggestions for your Buffer account. After that, just pick the content you think will resonate with your audience, and share share share!
It also works for content promotion. For $40, you can add your own content to the Buffer suggestions list other users see, and get hundreds of clicks, shares, and impressions for cheap.
Echosec is a tool that helps businesses combine social media posts with geographic data.
It helps you identify hyper-local trends and build targeted social media audiences for your next campaign. The tool helps startups truly understand how (and where) people are talking about their brands. These are valuable insights to increase engagement, conversions, and grow your business.
eClincher, like Buffer, allows you to curate, queue, and share online content with its Chrome extension. It also suggests pieces of content that may fit your niche, saving valuable curation time.
eClincher gives you the ability to recycle past social media posts — a powerful strategy, whether you are running a specific campaign, or if there is a gap in your content production.
Google G Suite
Antonio Grasso of Digital Business Innovation Srl shares, “We are a startup and we start using Google G Suite for all of our documents, emails, meetings and many other functions. It gives us the ability to read and write all the documents 24/7 on all devices without limitations and without the hassle to make backups.
For a startup, it is very important to focus on growth and be effective while writing a document or planning a meeting or creating a presentation.”
Al Tepper of TepFu adds, “It has a free collaborative office suite, storage, email and calendar in the cloud. It is at the core of my business. I’m honestly not sure how I’d run my business without it.
Honorable mentions
Ruby Rusine of Social Success Marketing recommends Google Keep due to the following reasons: “As a business owner, a tool that I find highly essential for productivity is a note-taking tool.
My requirements are super simple:
- It should be accessible and syncs across at least 3 to 4 devices.
- It should have a search feature within regardless what device I use.
- I can use it to collaborate with teammates.
I recently stumbled upon Google Keep when searching for a replacement for a popular note-taking tool I used. Google Keep meets all the above requirements for a note-taking tool, but on top of that, here are some of the features that make me like it more:
- Its ability to grab texts of screenshots and convert it into an editable document. If you, like me, love to take screenshots of ideas for inspiration, then you will love this tool.
- I can highlight a note that I am working on by pinning it, so it stays on top no matter how many pages (ideas) I dump in there.
- I can color code my notes based on our internal categories. For example, I use green for clients, yellow for my company and blue for personal notes.”
Slack
Vinish Garg of vhite recommends this tool due to the following reasons: “Team communication is much more effective with Slack. It has been a game-changer for our team to get rid of pain points of emails, to stay in sync for product and for a shared understanding of our work and progress.
And Darren Fiander of Cheshire Cat Marketing adds, “Communication is crucial within any company, especially for startups. At its core, Slack is a beefed-up instant messaging and collaboration system. Through a large library of integrations, Slack allows you to centralize all your notifications, from sales to marketing, human resources and much more, into a singular place where your startup can discuss and take action on each.”
Dashboard Reporting Software
Do you know which activities will help you hit your monthly goals? Dashboard tools should allow your team to easily track which tactics improve your metrics. Your dashboard tool should do more than sit on the wall on a TV display- it should drive weekly adjustments to your strategy.
Google Data Studio
Tim Brown at Hook Agency recommends this tool due to the following reasons: “Google Data Studio is an amazing tool for startups because it allows you to visually track all of your website metrics from Google Analytics, Google Search Console and even spreadsheets, and aggregate them into one dashboard.
There are tons of free templates for download, and it’s relatively intuitive to get started and plot out what you want to track most. I find it useful to have high-level traffic numbers, conversions, and I even add the trend-lines for sales conversations, and social media – via a separate KPI spreadsheet I have connected.
My absolute favorite feature is creating custom metrics that translate websites into conversions into estimated revenue via it’s ‘Scorecard’ feature. It’s so helpful to think of website contact submissions and phone-calls (tracked through something like CallRail) as estimated revenue – based on the average customer lifetime value of a client or customer – and the average closing ratio.”
Track metrics from 60+ sales, marketing and product management tools with a free Databox dashboard. Here’s an example of a pre-made Google Analytics report.
Marketing Tools
At an early stage, you probably only have time to develop one strong marketing channel. That could be organic, social, email or another channel.
You should be able to connect your marketing efforts to sales or signups at a later date. When you decide on a marketing channel, you should see a clear pathway towards improvement in one of those metrics. Fortunately, most of the tools listed below have strong integrations. Or, they can be tracked within Google Analytics, which can then be integrated with other tools.
Instagram Marketing & Advertising
Vladimer Botsvadze at Botsvadze Global Digital Marketing Solutions recommends this tool due to the following reasons: “Instagram presents a unique opportunity for brands to connect with their customers in a meaningful way. Instagram is the fastest-growing social media site with 800 million users. 59% of internet users between ages of 18 and 29 have an Instagram account. There are 25 million businesses on the platform.
Brands on Instagram enjoy regular engagement with 3%-6% of their total followers. Engagements on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can be less than 0.1%. 36% of marketers use Instagram, compared to 93% of marketers who use Facebook.
You should focus your campaign on achieving one or two goals from your following. Showcase for your products and services, build your community, increase awareness of your brand, showcase company culture, advertise to potential customers and update the account with company news.”
SEMrush
Kaushal Soni of Soni recommends this tool due to the following reasons: “If you want to learn about your website or want to know about your competitor’s website, then SEMrush comes in handy.
To start, you have to do is enter a URL and run a search. After that, you will be provided with a variety of data, all of which can be used to boost your SEO efforts to the next level.
First, you can start by reviewing the backlinks data. This is good if you want to know how a competitor is performing.
After that, move on to the “top organic keywords”. This show the top keywords of competitors and you can move forward from there.”
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams comprises all of the tools startups need to communicate with team members, including video conferencing and instant-messaging tools. The perks don’t stop there; however, Microsoft Teams also allows in-app document editing with Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, allowing you and your team to seamlessly brainstorm and complete important projects.
Pricing: Free – $20/user/month
Kixie
Kixie is a Voice Over IP System that is available on a pay-per-user basis so that you are only paying for the services your startup needs. Kixie’s services can be used on desk phones, mobile devices, and desktop applications with detailed reporting through their customer relationship management (CRM) service.
Pricing: $29/month – Custom pricing
Startup Funding Tools
Conclusion
When starting a business it can be daunting trying to find the right tools to help you set up and run your business. There are a ton of choices out there, and it can be hard knowing which one will fit all your needs. For many people paying for online tools can be a cause of concern because they don’t have a lot of money to spend.