Looking for what tools does a startup need? Free tools for small business? Best free tools every small business should have?
A lot of startups are lacking essential tools for running their business. They are either investing way too much money on tools that are not really useful or are missing out on basic yet important things that can help them build their business.
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).
Cloudways
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting provider that is built for online businesses. Based in Malta and serving a diverse global audience, Cloudways is all about simplicity and freedom. From the choice of five industry-leading cloud providers to 50+ 1-Click platform operations, Cloudways ensures that visitors do not have to face slow loading websites and security issues. Platform features include free SSL certificates, IP whitelisting, unlimited staging sites and a high-paying affiliate program.
Hootsuite for Social Media Management
As a new business, it’s okay to want to dream big, stay up-to-date, and want to get up on everyone’s social feed as soon as you launch.
But perhaps you think it’ll be costly, stressful, and difficult to manage.
Well, I’m here to tell you it’s not.
With just a simple dashboard, friendly interface, plus an easy onboarding process, you’re good and ready to start managing your social media with Hootsuite.
And yeah, it’s free!
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to manage multiple social media profiles across different networks of choice. You also get to schedule your posts, track engagements, and keep track of useful analytics that contribute to your business’ growth.
The free version of Hootsuite allows only a single user and social media accounts. That’s more than enough to get you started on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin or perhaps Instagram — pick your favorite three.
Read on: See a few more tips on how to boost your content marketing team’s productivity.
Create Charming Marketing Videos with Animoto or Promo
Videos are powerful marketing content and you should pay attention to them to get the best out of your marketing investment. And isn’t it even more fascinating how horribly easy it is to create an intuitive marketing video that coverts today? Either you use Promo or Animoto, the two software allows you to create marketing videos from scratch or turn an existing video into a marketing video easy and fast. They come with a drag and drop editor, a massive score of templates and compelling music to add sizzling effect to your ads.
Customer Relationship Management
There are lots of CRM applications available for startups, but HubSpot CRM (a new tool from marketing king HubSpot) is one of the best free options to improve customer service, not to mention your own business strategy. You’ll have access to tons of features, such as:
- Tracking email conversations, companies, contacts, deals, and tasks
- Allowing you to invite other team members for free (because there’s no per user charge) when you create a new account
- A clear dashboard that displays any current deals you have, recent tasks, and important emails
- Automatically syncing up with all your platforms, like website, emails, and social media
- Since it’s always working in the background, no need to log emails or calls
- Creating custom fields and filtering to find contacts immediately
- Drag-and-drop communicator which allows you to send emails and calendar invites, place calls, and record notes in one place
The free version of HubSpot CRM allows unlimited users and contacts and gives you a robust set of tools, but you can always upgrade to the Premium version which enables you to integrate it with HubSpot’s full marketing services (starting at $200 per month).
Basecamp for Project Management
Want a one-solution-fits-all software that is of high adaptability to your site? Basecamp brings the team and yourself closer together for discussions, chatting, tasks management, files transfer and editing, and more. Basecamp beats Slack to the dust with its exclusive features except you may go for slack instead of Basecamp because the latter costs you $99/month while the former is absolutely free.
Here’s the kickoff. If you’re looking to build a small business online, Squarespace may be the best CMS (content management software) for you. Reason being that it’s incredibly easy to create a site with especially with the drag and drop feature. And moreover, there are just more than enough award-winning themes, templates, and plugins that are SEO-wise available at your disposal. WordPress, on the other hand, has more features than Squarespace and gives your site the superpowers Squarespace can’t. Therefore WordPress is best for your big business creation.
Hyperise
It is well-established that the human brain processes an image way faster than text. Hyperise is a SaaS tool that lets you add hyper-personalized layers to an image which captures visitor attention and improves conversion rates. With Hyperse, you can use your website visitor’s IP address or a prospect’s email address to build an enriched profile that includes the website logo, company details, website screenshots, user profile images, etc. to personalize your image or landing page with such information.
With a new company there are bound to be questions or confusions that arise. By creating a marketplace of answers, Quora has established itself as a pivotal resource for gaining information, informal polling, and voicing your own opinions publically. Simply create a free account and post your first question or answer. You can follow topics that interest you to gain access to exciting conversations in your line of work, or you can start a feed yourself and see how the topic develops. If you discover an interesting fact, you can easily share that information to your social media outlets, and continue the conversation on your platform.
Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/Forms
A Free alternative to the MS Office suite, the office tools offered by Google help startup owners to create and share word documents, excel sheets, presentations and forms, and share them with their team members without having to send the edited files again and again. Its accessibility options further ensure only selected people can view the files, and you can also see who made what change to the file, as well as the entire edit history.
SemRush
SemRush is an all in one marketing toolkit that helps startup owners in carrying out their competitor research easily and effectively. SemRush’s other prominent services include technical SEO audit of your website, semantic core collection, ideas for generating organic traffic, and so on. From ecommerce moguls like Amazon to the Entertainment Conglomerates like Disney, many prominent names have trust in SemRush.
Calendly for Schedule Management
Nothing kills a business faster than missed, or late appointments with prospects.
It doesn’t matter if it’s scheduling work shifts, events, conference calls, or meetings, without the proper management, it all falls apart.
And yeah, it’s never easy keeping track of everything especially if you don’t have an assistant to help you out.
This is where Calendly comes in to streamline the whole process while taking the load off your back so you can use your time for something better.
Calendly is a free, and easy-to-use, online appointment scheduling software. It pretty much takes care of scheduling your appointments, events, and meetings based on your availability.
Zoom for Video Conferencing
Gone are the days where you can’t have a good business network without being there in person to either create it or manage it.
Video calls and conferencing have bridged the gap with networking in such a way where you can actively meet, and engage with your customers just as if you’re there in person.
There are a lot of web-based applications out there that can help you with your video calls, but none like Zoom.
Zoom is the number one service of choice for video conferencing and currently has over 300 million+ users all around the world, with an A+ rating on trusted websites like Trust Radius, G2, and Gartner.
As a startup, Zoom helps you connect better with your audience as it is built to support businesses of all kinds —including yours.
The free plan on Zoom allows you to host up to 100 participants at a time, plus you get unlimited one-on-one meetings which are quite okay for a new business.
Conclusion
Every one of these startup software tools has competitors. Many competitors have their ardent defenders and adherents. But if you have the luxury of starting from scratch and want the best of the best SaaS tools for startups, these six tools are what you want.
Software does not only make the difficult things easy, they also reduce cost and time of production. Thereby increasing productivity. If getting the best out of your business matter most to you, the list I’ve provided up there is a gem.