New startups need all of the help they can get. The two most important tasks which a startup needs to do is marketing and product development. These two tasks become pretty hard for a small business without the right tools.
The best entrepreneurs have a checklist of tools that they need to develop their business, which you can get here.
Accounting & Finance
As a small business, it’s important to have an efficient system to track sales transactions and employee payroll. Here’s a few online tools that can help your small business:
Gusto – an online payroll and benefits platform designed for modern businesses. Gusto makes payroll for your small business simple and affordable. Try 2 months free.
Wave
Wave is a free online accounting tool for startups and small businesses. The website helps you track all your expenses and incomes, and also helps you with your taxes when the time comes – thus, can help you save a lot of time & effort, usually involved in these procedures. As the screenshot above depicts, this resource is quite reliable for having received media coverage from prominent players such as Forbes, CNBC, Bloomberg, PCMag.com and Inc. You can even set up a separate personal account to keep track of your various passive income sources and personal finances.
Customer Support
Pleasing your customers is one of the most important roles as a small business. Here are a few online tools that can help you provide excellent customer service support:
Desk – customer support software that makes customers happy. Features business tools that grow with you including multi-channel support and productivity tips.
Design
Design elements are crucial to draw in customers through marketing efforts. Here are some online tools that can help you create effective and compelling designs:
Canva – easily create beautiful and professional looking designs for your marketing strategy. Canva’s suite of online design tools are perfect for small businesses.
Pablo – social media images made simple. Easily format images and annotate your message to create easily shareable graphics for your social media presence.
Pixlr – online suite of image editing tools. Pixlr’s online tools are great for small businesses and allows you to create professional graphics easily and affordably.
Legal
Owning and operating a small business is a lot of work, and these online resources will help you make sure you are following all laws and regulations:
Docracy – the web’s only open collection of legal contracts and the best way to negotiate and sign documents online. These online tools will help you operate legally and effectively.
Rocket Lawyer – online legal documents and advice. These online tools can help you incorporate your business or stay in compliance.
SuretyBonds.com – the nation’s leading resource for surety bond information that helps small business owners get their business license.
Marketing
Marketing efforts are key to making sure your business’s content is seen by users. Here are some marketing hacks to help get you noticed and generate leads:
MOZ Tools – the best tools for online marketing and local small business marketing. Stay ahead of your competition with MOZ’s online tools for SEO and local marketing.
Buzzsumo – online content research tool. Buzzsumo allows you to research what’s popular online and how that content can relate to your business.
Optimizely – website testing tool to optimize experiences for your customers. Create the best experience for your visitors using Optimizely’s online testing tools.
Glasshat
Glasshat comes across as a super-efficient SEO tool that helps startup owners in planning their SEO and other digital marketing activities. This tool prepares a list of activities and also educates new entrepreneurs why a particular activity is important for their startup. While using Glasshat, it would be a good idea to add the Yoast SEO Plugin to your WordPress website so that you can mend your web content as per SEO guidelines.
MailChimp
To run a successful email marketing campaign and to keep your audience updated about offers, you need an efficient newsletter service. This is where MailChimp comes into the picture. MailChimp is a name that probably needs no introduction to the tech world. The good news, MailChimp offers a free startup package with all the basics features. Paid services begin from $10 per month. Alternatively, you can also take a look at ActiveCampaign and see which one of these suits you prefer.
Aytm
There are plenty of survey tools available in the market today. What sets Aytm apart from all those tools is the fact that it not only helps you in creating a survey form, but also helps you in reaching out to the right audience that will be interested in taking these surveys. A Quick tip: keep your questions open ended to get better insights.
Operations
These operations tools will help your small business increase performance efficiency and productivity:
Bplans – starting a business made easy. Check out Bplans’ complete guide to business planning to outline your growth plan.
Zoho – the operating system for business. Zoho’s online tools for managing your business.
Google Apps – best online productivity tools for small businesses. Google’s suite of apps for small business are perfect for collaborating and operating efficiently.
The Name App
To have a unique and easy to remember business name is important for brand recall.This particular tool saves you the struggle of finding the right domain name for your startup. What’s more, it also helps you in checking the availability of the username and in deciding social media profile names that resonate with your business. Simply login to The Name App’s official website or download it on your Apple device’s App Store (Sorry, Android Users, you’ll need to make do with the website for now).
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services, commonly known as AWS, is a web hosting service offered by the ecommerce mogul Amazon. Probably, one of the most dependable web hosting service available presently, AWS is scalable, flexible and currently offers over 90 services including database storage, content delivery, and other features & functionalities.
Asana
Asana is a web & mobile based project management tool that was built for improving workflow at Facebook. Eventually, and inevitably, the efficiency of Asana made it a prominent name among almost all startup owners across the world. This project management software allows users to assign tasks as per their status, add assignees & get activity feed, view log reports, and a lot more. If you want explore further, we recommend Trello, an equally efficient project management system.
Sales
Sales is often a stressful task that is critical to maintain your cash flow, and these technologies can make life much easier for your sales team:
- Spiro – your personal sales assistant. This management tool helps you stay in touch with sales prospects and close more sales.
- Square – making commerce easy. This simple POS systems for small businesses features tools for every type of business.
- Shoeboxed – organizes sales documents and receipts and turn them into data. This online tool helps you digitize your physical sales docs.
2. GrowthHacker.tv
GrowthHacker.tv is a place where you can watch interviews of successful growth hackers and entrepreneurs who have made a mark in the digital world. The interview videos keep on playing on the website in a loop, which is accessible to visitors for free. But if you want to access a past video recording, then you would need to signup, which is paid. But wait, that’s not all. If you are visiting the website for the first time, you might get a promo code to access site’s content as a premium member for a week.
3. Moosend
Creating email campaigns can be easy. Delivering them at the right time, though, can be hard. That’s why you need an email marketing automation platform like Moosend to get started. Moosend will give you access to automation features to create, schedule and track the performance of your email campaigns. You can get to know Moosend through their free forever plan, offering unlimited emails for up to 1,000 subscribers. The paid plans will give you access to advanced features starting at $10 per month.
BrandCrowd
There’s nothing more important in starting a business than your logo. Logos provide that unique brand that customers will come to recognize. That’s why Logo design should take center stage in startup planning. Often, however, logos get very little thought and even less budget. If that’s the case for your business, you can turn to an online logo maker tool like BrandCrowd. With a minimal investment and a little time and effort, you’ll get a logo perfect for you. You can customize the colors, layout, fonts, and more. Then you can download your logo instantly and start sharing it with the world.
BrandCrowd also offers thousands of social media design templates that you can customize. If you’re a budding business, chances are you will need to post on social media regularly & BrandCrowd provides designs you can easily tweak to suit your brand message. It’s also cool that the templates are automatically customized with the colors from your logo – meaning you get a consistent brand message across all platforms.
Conclusion
In this article, we have collected a list of must have startup tools that will significantly save your startup time and money.