Have you started a business or thinking about starting a business? Knowing which online business tools to use can be a challenge. Aas a founder you would need the best resources at your disposal
So, you’re looking for the best resources for startups? Great! But where do you start? There is so much information on the net available to startups. So many tools; so little time. The following list of startup resources is hand-picked by business leaders and entrepreneurs, who searched for the best tools throughout their entrepreneurship journeys. These products helped them build successful online businesses.
Finance & Fundraising Tools
Focusing on financial balances is crucial for startups. It is important to understand and record where the revenue is coming from, where it is going, and how will the startup perform in the upcoming months.
Investors admire entrepreneurs who incorporate calculated numbers in their pitch deck. However, you cannot do everything with just a pen and paper. You will require one of the following financial startup tools in order to accomplish your goals.
Foundersuite
Foundersuite is an amazing tool to raise capital for your startup. It brings structure, speed, and efficiency in fundraising and investor relationships. It offers CRM tool for managing your investor funnel, a searchable venture capitalist database, and an Investor Updater tool that helps in creating monthly progress reports.
It also includes Startup Docs – a comprehensive set of templates and spreadsheets like pitch decks, founders’ agreements; as well as FoundersMarket which is a set of curated deals on popular products.
Pricing:
Basic Free
Silver $44 per month
Gold $62 per month
Agent $150 per month
Crunchbase
A leading startup platform for entrepreneurs to explore innovative organizations. It lets you connect with experts and pursue new opportunities together. More than 50 million entrepreneurs, investors, market researchers, and sales professionals trust this tool for startup to make their business decisions. Many startups from all across the world rely on Crunchbase to power their applications.
Crunchbase Pro lets you access any startup, investor, or funding data through their web interface. It offers features like advanced searching, customized lists, personalized alerts, and CSV (Comma-Separated Values) exports. Some big names amongst their customers are Samsung, Honda, Nvidia, Shell, MixPanel and Harvard. It is truly a great tool for entrepreneurs.
Pricing:
Essential Free
Pro $29 per month
Enterprise Custom
Fresh Books
It is an all-In-one startup invoicing and accounting software solution. Fresh Books makes your startup bookkeeping fast, convenient, and secure. It automates your financial tasks such as organizing expenses, invoicing, tracking payments and following up with the clientele in just a few clicks.
You can view your financial statuses via Profit and Loss Statements (PLS), taxation summaries and expenditure reports. It can categorize the fees of your credit card transactions and provide a summary against all deposits on its dashboard. You can also integrate it with MailChimp, Paypal, Basecamp, and Zenpayroll.
Pricing:
Lite $15 per month
Plus $25 per month
Premium $50 per month
Custom pricing for 500+ billable clients
Startup Ideation Tools
It’s a fact that the first step is always the toughest. The ideation phase of any startup is crucial but once you know what industry you wish to work with, and what type of product you’re going to sell, things get clear, and with the assistance of the following startup tools, you will have a clearer direction of how to proceed further.
Germ.io
This tool for startup helps you better manage your business concepts and ideas. You will never lose the big picture of your startup idea with this resource. You can validate your concepts and share your vision by flaunting your big picture.
Germ.io helps you evolve your business idea by providing the ‘next steps’. Consequently, you will be able to shape up your business idea with ease. It lets you create actionable strategies by helping you with your how’s, what’s and why’s.
Pricing: Free version available
Squad Help
Squad Help assists you in finding an ideal name for your business. However, they do not limit their services to just business names. Instead, it also assists in finding the perfect name for your app, book, product or service, etc.
You can start a naming competition and engage thousands of experts as you’re guided through their agency-level naming process. You can also explore their hand-picked compilation of premium names that are available for immediate purchase.
Pricing: For as low as $199 per contest.
Javelin
To keep it simple, this is a one-stop solution for lean startups when it comes to customer development. A platform for innovators, Javelin can help you identify customer needs and validate new products. You can measure your product’s market fit with the assistance of their pre-designed surveys. It allows you to save time as the speed of workflow increases.
Pricing: Free to Signup
Clarity
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a fresh entrepreneur or an experienced businessman. Every entrepreneur needs actionable advice at one point or the other during their entrepreneurial journey. Clarity ensures ambitious entrepreneurs receive valuable pieces of advice from industry experts.
It helps you connect with industry leaders from all across the globe. These Clarity experts can help you overcome any challenge that you might be facing at any stage of your entrepreneurial journey. Whether it’s scaling your business, raising funds, researching market trends, or sharpening your skills, this tool for entrepreneurs has got you covered with the best business advice.
Pricing: For as low as $1 per minute on phone calls.
Mindmeister
This web-based mind-mapping tool lets you collaborate and brainstorm with experts in real-time. Besides ideation and project planning, you can use this startup tool for creating presentations. Mindmeister allows you to turn mind-maps into dynamic slideshows.
Moreover, it integrates with MeisterTask – a task management tool – allowing you to turn your ideas into actionable tasks.
Pricing:
Basic: Free
Personal: $4.99
Pro: $8.25
Business: $12.49
Startup CRM Tools
As soon as you’ve your first few loyal customers, it is the perfect time for your startup to invest in the best CRM tools for a startup. A CRM tool can prove to be a great help for your startup as it frees up so much time which you can spend productively on converting new leads. Some of the best CRM tools for startups are:
CRM by Hubspot for Startups
Hubspot CRM is a great pick for startup owners. Honestly, you don’t need the frills, but you can use assistance with the data entries of your business. HubSpot centralizes your contact list. It helps you by automatically logging customer interactions, and extracting the data from the web to generate information about your potential customers.
Some salient features include:
- Customize Views
- Deal and Task Board
- Hubspot Marketing Synchronization
- Drag and Drop Communicator
- Social Media
- Company Database
- Email Connections
- Sidekick Integration
- CRM Details
- Templates, Tracking, and Scheduling
You can begin by using their free version, which is simple yet powerful. However, if your startup demands additional features, you can always opt for their paid versions. It’s one of the best startup tools available online for entrepreneurs who care about their customers.
Pricing:
FREE
STARTER $50 per month
BASIC $200 per month
PROFESSIONAL $800 per month
ENTERPRISE $2,400 per month
Salesflare
Salesflare has an amazing integration with both Gmail (including Workspace) and Office 365, gathering a ton of information from your inbox and meetings, tracking email opens and clicks, powering email templates, and offering a handy sidebar that allows you to use Salesflare 100% from your inbox.
Some of our favorite features of Salesflare are:
- Visual, drag-and-drop sales pipelines
- Email and website tracking
- Email signature sync
- Automatically enriched company and contact data
- Email templates and sequences/workflows
- Relationships strength indicators
- Automated reminders to follow up, answer emails,
- Business card scanner
- Out-of-the-box and customizable dashboards
Salesflare’s pricing is simple and fair for startups. Unlike some other CRMs, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg if you want to use all its functionality.
And if you’re an early-stage startup they even offer a big discount, which you can ask for on their live support chat.
Pricing:
GROWTH $29 per month
PRO $49 per month
ENTERPRISE $99 per month
Startup Launch Tools
Launching a startup is never easy. From its ideation to execution, there are multiple factors that play a significant role in determining a successful launch. Nonetheless, there are multiple tried and tested startup tools that can help you launch your startup successfully. They include:
Beta List
Beta List is a pre-launch system that helps your startup gain the traction it needs for a successful launch. The best advantage of this platform is that you can put your startup idea in front of an exceptional community of savvy business enthusiasts, and garner valuable feedback from them.
Beta List has helped over 3,000 startup founders to better understand their customers with the help of qualitative and quantitative research to ensure they are creating the right product for their right audience.
Pricing:
Hobby Free
Startup $129
Funded $299
Cloudways
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that offers sustainable growth and lets you focus on growing your business while it takes care of your website hosting. Cloudways provides excellent feature set helping you scale your startup with ease.
Exclusively for Startups: Cloudways offers mentorship, growth tools, and discount on Cloudways platform through the Cloudways Startup Program.
Pricing: For as low as $10 per month
Product Hunt
This is the ideal go-to launch platform for startups. Product Hunt showcases amazing new products every day. It’s a brilliant platform for product-loving enthusiasts. They can share, discuss and geek about all the new products, websites, mobile apps, and tech other creations.
It can conveniently assist you to launch your product or more importantly, your startup successfully. The website operates on a system for user comments as well as a voting system which is similar to Reddit. With its pre-existing community of testers who are willing to try out new products, launching your startup had never been easier.
Pricing: Sign up for Free
Startup Marketing Tools
A solid marketing strategy demands a flawless implementation of processes so that startups can get the best bang for their buck. Proper implementation of a startup marketing strategy requires tools to monitor, analyze, and evaluate any marketing campaign. Hence, the following marketing tools for startups are a must-have in order to ensure effective implementation of processes.
Hunter.io
Hunter.io assists you in finding business emails within seconds. By simply searching any domain, it will provide you with all the email addresses that are connected to it. With 200+ million email addresses indexed, it’s one of the most powerful tools for finding email addresses in order to connect with the relevant experts for your business.
Pricing:
Free
Starter $49 per month
Growth $99 per month
Pro $199 per month
Enterprise $399 per month
Mangools
Mangools is a set of five Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools for startups like KWFinder, SerpChecker, SerpWatcher, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler. It helps startups to create effective SEO workflows.
With Mangools, you can find all the right keywords, analyze the search results in any location, compare yourself with competitors, track your keyword positions and boost them all with powerful backlinks.
Pricing:
Basic $29.90
Premium $39.90
Agency $79.90
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the best social media marketing tools for startups which is used across the globe by well-known startups, mainly due to its easy UI and affordable pricing plans.
You can schedule up to 30 posts across any social media platform with its free plan. It will help you to measure the ROI (Return On Investment) of your social media campaign, and keep track of the impact that is being created, all under one umbrella. Moreover, you can also link two RSS feeds and different apps such as MailChimp, YouTube, Dropbox, and other startup tools.
Pricing:
Individual (1 user 3 social media profiles) Free
Professional (1 user 10 social media profiles) $19 per month
Team (3 users 20 social media profiles) $99 per month
Business (5-10 users 35 social media profiles) $599 per month
Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps you to track the traffic coming on to your website. It allows you to identify what’s working and what’s not. When you know what isn’t working, you can fix it to enhance your customer engagement and user experience.
Moreover, it helps you create much better digital marketing campaigns and ultimately, increase your conversion rate. You must use Google Analytics in order to achieve greater results for your startup with continuous evaluation of data and monitoring online marketing strategies.
Pricing: Free as long as you do not exceed 5 million impressions per month.
CallHippo
A powerful Voice-over-Internet-Protocol(VoIP) service provider, CallHippo is a market leader in providing business phone numbers. A great tool for start-ups and mid-sized businesses, CallHippo has a wide array of innovative features that improve sales capabilities and agent performance. It enables managers to monitor calls, track key performance indicators, and provide real-time feedback to increase bottom-line results. With third-party integrations, a user-friendly interface, and high-level customization.
Pricing:
Bronze : $20 Per Month – (For Startups)
Silver : $35 Per Month – (Ideal For Small Team)
Platinum : $55 Per Month – (Preferred For SMB Sales, Support & Marketing Teams)
Startup Design & Development Tools
For someone who’s about to start a startup, things become difficult to a breakdown in terms of design and development. If you take the wrong first step, things may become complicated in the future and it’s difficult to turn back. To refrain from putting yourself in such circumstances, here’s a list of the best design and development tools for startups.
Unsplash
Unsplash is one of those startup tools that offer high-resolution stock images so that you can create visually appealing promotions and campaigns for your startup. The world’s most generous community of photographers contributes actively to this platform.
Their huge library of over 1 million stock HD images – and hundreds more being added every day – will certainly let you find the perfect images. You can find inspiration from the new images they hand-pick each day or use their search feature to download precisely what you’re looking for.
Pricing:
WordPress
One of the most popular CMS that requires no introduction is WordPress. This free, open-source content management system is based on PHP and MySQL. Its primary features include a plugin architecture and a template system to build attractive websites.
It offers responsive designing, social sharing, multiple page styles, auto upgrades, and support, a vast variety of widgets and plugins, theme customization, SEO and much more. It is an ideal platform for fresh startups to build their websites and generate online traffic with ease.
Free to use
Conclusion
There you have it! A list of the best startup tools curated after thorough research and consideration. They hold the power to maximize your potential and increase your ROI. But, whichever tool you choose, do make sure that you also use high-speed ecommerce web hosting. Each of the resources in this list is beneficial for startups in keeping their business operations quick, convenient, and efficient. If you use them wisely, you can conveniently flourish your business with better prospects and experience sustainable growth for the many years to come.