A startup is a newly emerged business. It doesn’t use sophisticated techniques and therefore it has the least amount of expenses. Before starting a business, there are a lot of things to consider. Every business requires a different kind of tools because every business requires different kinds of processes to run properly.
Business Tools Free Download is intended for Startups in order to make their lives easier by providing the simple yet effective tools in an easy-to-use interface
Need a checkout page for the one thing you are selling, and don’t want to create a full-blown site? Sell One Thing is what you have been looking for. Quickly create a checkout page that integrates with credit card payments.
Invoicing is just one of the many things this fantastic tool does. Among the other features are sales and inventory management, which allow you to easily keep track of your stock, and monitor sales analytics.
If your startup provides any kind of ‘white glove’ service, you’ll want to be invoicing for that in a compliant way and managing your accounting with the help of software. For those purposes, Online Invoices is ideal.
HR & RECRUITING TOOLS FOR STARTUPS
As agile as startups need to be, it’s a mistake to ignore ‘corporate’ functions like HR. It’ll just cause compliance growing pains as you scale. Luckily, there are tools you can use that won’t break the bank.
BambooHR makes hiring, transitioning, and recruiting smoother than ever with easy onboarding tools and applicant tracking features. Add in the ability to track time-off, performance management, e-signing, and BambooHR is one of the more convenient tools for HR and recruiting for any startup.
Freshteam takes the entire hiring process and condenses it into a single dashboard, making it easy for a single manager to gain control and visibility over multiple candidates in the funnel.
Recruiting fast and making informed hiring decisions is essential for scaling startup, so a tool like this is necessary to avoid losing opportunities due to lost email chains and scheduling errors.
Freshteam doesn’t just manage active candidates, either — it also allows you to source and filter top talent so you can find your newest growth marketer or front-end designer with ease.
Living up to its name, Gusto delivers automated essential HR and payroll services to clients. Gusto also assists with end of year taxes, ACA compliance, and summarizes critical information into a single console.
With Gusto, your startup can hand off the complex calculations so managers can focus on more important work.
GoCo helps startups manage employee benefits and payroll by leveraging both an intuitive SaaS platform and its connections with 250 certified industry professionals. GoCo lets you entrust HR functions like benefits and payroll to its partners, and use its online tools to manage onboarding, offboarding, compliance forms, org charts, and more.
For $6/employee/month, you can have burdensome HR tasks largely handled for you.
TRAINING TOOLS FOR STARTUPS
Skillshare makes learning on their platform fun and easy. Remember Trello? Skillshare has classes you can take to learn that software and become a wizard in less than an hour.
If you’re looking for something a little more advanced, Skillshare has that covered too. It has courses for every professional discipline, from finance to marketing to software development. Train your team on critical job functions for as little as $99/user/year!
UX/DESIGN TOOLS FOR STARTUPS
UXPin provides prototyping, documentation, and design systems for creative teams looking to unify their resources and work smarter. With UXPin, designers can build UI toolkits and asset libraries before combining them into prototypes that can be used internally and for user testing. Documentation can be generated automatically, which alleviates every designer’s least favorite task.
With prices starting at $19 per month, UXPin is perfect for startups, small agencies, and freelance designers alike.
There is a reason Invision is one of the most-widely used design collaboration tools in the world — they have made the process as simple as possible without sacrificing functionality.
With Invision, both clients and team members can leave comments on the prototype, making collaboration much easier. It also integrates with Sketch, PhotoShop, and Illustrator, so you can use your favorite tool for design before pushing the prototype to Invision for testing.
Chameleon gives you the power to quickly build user experience experiments for your product. Create product tours that help to easily onboard new users, or highlight new features with native-looking tooltips and modals that can be A/B tested.
The difference between using something like Chameleon and hardcoding these UX features into your product is that Chameleon makes it possible even for non-technical teams to run tests and deploy in-app content, when announcing new features or welcoming users.
TESTING TOOLS FOR STARTUPS
Loop11 is an online usability testing tool that helps startups gather user feedback about a product’s functionality and experience.
For example, if you wanted to test how a new feature would be adopted by your main user base, you might first run a test that gives insight into how easy the feature is to discover and use within the app.
Using a web form and a no-code environment, you can get self-serve usability tests complete with exportable data that you can use to tweak your product.
Founded in 2009, Unbounce is one of the pioneering landing page building and testing tools still on the market. It allows marketers to rapidly build high-converting landing pages and get the metrics they need to make optimizations.
In addition to being the go-to landing page tool for marketers, Unbounce provides pop-ups and sticky bars that can be used on existing pages to promote a launch, capture leads, or get social followers.
Lucky Orange provides a comprehensive dashboard that ties demographic information with heatmap data to give you a 360-view of exactly how visitors interact with your site (and why they didn’t convert to customers).
With heatmaps, you can monitor the usability of any page on your site and see where users clicked and scrolled to. This user pathways and friction points, so you can make powerful optimizations and increase conversion rates.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
Intercom isn’t just one product — it’s a helpdesk, a knowledge base, a chat bot, an NPS survey tool, a CRM, a product analytics data warehouse, and even an email marketing platform. Phew.
If you want to run your customer-centric operations all under one roof, Intercom is the tool a startup needs to invest in. It has native integrations with many products you already use, like Salesforce and MailChimp, but can be enriched with data from over 1,000 others apps via Zapier.
Process Street lets you turn boring process documents into interactive checklists that can be assigned to team members.
It’s perfect for building a usable and up-to-date library of workflows so your team always knows how to tackle a specific task like upselling or new employee onboarding.
It integrates with over 1,000 other apps, so you can do a lot of tasks automatically — send contracts, process payments, and update database records in the apps you already use.
The business plan starts at only $12.50 per user/per month.
Olark is a live chat tool that makes it easier to convert visitors into customers. Olark has a feature that allows you to see the last pages a visitor viewed, giving you the context you need to deliver laser-focused messaging and follow up.
Drift is a live chat widget for marketing sites that combines speed, automation, and personalization. It allows you to integrate with Intercom, Hubspot, MailChimp, and Slack to ensure customer conversations are surfaced wherever you are.
Drift prides itself on being the world’s only conversational sales platform and uses bots to automate the sales process. LeadBot qualifies your website visitors, determines which reps fit certain prospects best, and books the meetings — even if all your staff are asleep.
Totango is a complete customer success platform for SaaS companies that provides product and revenue analytics that allow you to make better decisions about how to treat existing customers. Is churn your biggest problem? Did that new feature really help with adoption? Totango has the answers.
Desk.com is helpdesk software that allows you to provide customer support from anywhere — web, desktop or mobile.
Integrated natively with Salesforce data, it provides features that allow you to make data-driven decisions about customer needs in real-time. This will allow you to care for the customers you already served, increasing customer loyalty, and field the requests of new leads with additional context.
REFERRAL SOFTWARE
The power of referrals is at an all-time high. If you don’t have a plan for gaining quality peer reviews and distributing affiliate offers, you’re closing off one of the best channels for growth.
Referral SaaSquatch is a referral program management tool that helps automate the process of enrolling, rewarding, managing, and tracking your referring customers.
D
Communication Tools
Once the hierarchy of decision-making expands beyond the founders, communication becomes even more critical.
However, if you stick only to email and desktop apps like Slack, you’ll become inundated with updates and little to no context included.
With the right tools, you’ll be able to organize this constant stream of messages, updates, and projects in order to stay productive and sane.
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).
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.
Also Read: 9 Growth Hacking Tips & Tools for Startups & Ecommerce Businesses
InvoiceBerry
Create and send invoices with ease thanks to InvoiceBerry. InvoiceBerry is an online invoicing software designed with small businesses in mind. The software allows you to create professional-looking, customizable invoices as well as keep track of your finances and generate various reports. Thanks to InvoiceBerry, you can automate and streamline your invoicing workflows, save your precious time, and focus on growing your business.
Xtensio
Xtensio is a collaboration tool every startup needs to create stunning presentations, pitches, reports, case studies, agendas. Its drag and drop functionality makes it easy to add images and videos, resize, change backgrounds and more. Any changes automatically save and sync across all device for all users. More importantly, it promotes brand consistency as users work under a customized dashboard.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is the answer to all your questions pertaining to customer support. From ticketing to tracking to FAQs, Freshdesk can help you sail through the ocean of customer support without breaking a sweat. Freshdesk offers startups a 30-day free trial, without having to enter the credit details. It’s other top features include multichannel helpdesk, automation, reports & analytics and a bunch of team specific products, such as for sales, admin, etc.
Hootsuite
This list wouldn’t be complete without Hootsuite, the most popular social media marketing management tool among startups. This nifty tool can help you manage over 35 most popular social media networks from just one dashboard. With Hootsuite included in your social media marketing mix, there’s no more clutter and missed out opportunities from social networks. Hootsuite saves the day, everyday
Need expert advice on planning a better social media marketing strategy?
Optimizely
Conversion Rate is one aspect that each and every business depends on. We all know how important A/B testing is to ensure your ecommerce startup (or any business for that matter) is able to covert efficiently, and hence, Optimizely. The name is synonymous to A/B testing in the business world and helps you in fine tuning your webpages to ensure high conversion rate.
BetaList
Beta List is a prelaunch traction system that lets you list your startup before launching it, absolutely free of cost. Free submission entails a waiting period of two months after submission, while getting listed within a couple of days simply needs a nominal fee of $99. The prime benefit of this platform is that you get to showcase your startup idea in the community of business enthusiasts and get valuable feedback from them.
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.
AngelList
AngelList is a platform that every startup must know about. Not only does it help startups connecting with potential investors, but also helps them find experienced professionals who would be interested in working for them. Unlike other job portals, on AngelList, professionals & startups require no middle man to connect. On the other end, it is also a good platform for investors to explore potential startups they would be interested back financially.
LinkedIn owns one of the world’s largest sets of enriched data on companies and their employees. With that data, you could pull up a list of eligible leads in seconds, based on company size, growth, connections, industry, location, or basically any relevant factor.
But it’s not going to let you do that with a standard LinkedIn account.
For data-powered prospecting, you’ll need LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator lets you build targeted prospect lists and reach out to them in-app, saving you time sifting through unqualified leads or hunting for email addresses.
Mailshake is the simplest tool for running cold outreach. Whether you’re running sales campaigns or promoting your latest piece of content, Mailshake makes it easy to build automated, personalized email sequences.
It comes packaged with pre-written email templates and AI that analyzes your messages for wordiness and spammy phrases, all with the aim of making it fast to reach out with messages that convert. Plus, it’s just $29/month — affordable for small startups, especially considering the ROI.
NerdyData is a search engine for source code. At first, that might not seem like it applies to your startup, but think about this: If you’re an Intercom competitor and want to find (and poach) all of intercom’s customers, all you need to do is search NerdyData for everywhere the Intercom widget appears on the web, and you’ve got a list of leads.
The same goes for any web technology. NerdyData helps you enrich customer data by revealing a lead’s tech stack and letting you integrate that data with your existing sets. A must for any SaaS startup.
ClickFunnels allow you to quickly create attractive custom landing pages for your products and accept payments over Stripe and PayPal. It’s ideal for membership sites, online courses, and limited-time offers, but also gives startups a way to make their first landing pages, even without a development.
Proposify rolls proposals, document signing, and payment processing all into one platform, to give you a conversion-focused way to close more deals.
Potential customers can view proposals on desktop or mobile, check embedded content, sign in one click, and even pay in-app. This takes the friction out of earning new customers and leaves you to focus on the next big win instead of paperwork and follow up.
Spotio is a field sales management tool. The tool is optimized for use on mobile and shows exactly where leads are geographically located inside defined territory maps. This helps door-to-door sales teams save time and get better visibility over reps, leads, and territories.
Spotio has a whole suite of features dedicated to route planner, territory management, rep tracking, prospecting, and lead management so you can keep your lead list fresh by tapping into the tool’s rich database of prospect information.
Conclusion
Because we believe that Startup Toolbox will be the most comprehensive and unified set of essential business tools out there for you to success, we kept all the features very simple.