A great business idea can come from anywhere. Whether you’re working on a startup, or you’ve been in business for years, this list of small business tools can help you grow your online presence, streamline your operations, and work with the best products to help run your business smoothly. For most startup businesses, their greatest challenges are the lack of resources and capital. They feel inadequate, frustrated and under-confident about their business. Maybe you want to be a grand success! A grand success is something great beyond what anyone had, though possible, especially in a new undertaking. It means ruling your country or some state, taking control of your life, making something that started small into something that is large and important.
Slack
Slack is another best tool for startup mostly used and is among the fastest-growing business application in previous years. Millions of people and companies around the world use Slack to connect their teams at one platform, using Slack you can create multiple channels to discuss different projects and topics, or you can have a private conversation through one-one chat. Slack also allows you to integrate with other applications such as Gmail, drive, trello, share files and to find messages, notifications. A large number of startups and companies use Slack to simplify their communications including Airbnb.
Features:
- Organised conversations
- Searchable history
- Collaboration
- Face-to-face and face-to-screen
- Integrated file sharing
Pricing: The standard plan starts from $3.20/mo to $6/mo for the plus plan.
Free Version: Free version available for small teams for an unlimited period of time.
ClickMeeting
This is another one of the startup tools that you should have. It is a webinar platform that can help you in building important partnerships without the need of leaving your office. You will need to begin by creating branded invitations for your sales presentation or online demo. And then get all the leads from your email list into this application to send the invites directly.
As soon as one of the lead accepts the invite, you can have a virtual face-to-face meeting with them to offer them a live demo of your product. ClickMeeting additional features that would help you include the use of whiteboard technology to share information, and screen sharing to display anything from your system. It is a great app that will help you get a lot done sitting in your office.
Wrike:
You’re likely wearing multiple hats in your company to control costs and keep operations nimble. Having a versatile work management solution can come in handy. Wrike lets you prioritize goals, streamline workflows, and get more done faster. Maximize resources, improve collaboration with your key stakeholders, and keep track of project progress, all with Wrike.
Trello
Each day, there might be many things that distract people from their goal. To overcome this, it is important to organize all the tasks and work towards a goal. Trello is one of the best startup tools for this. You can easily create tasks and share it with your team to keep their goals in mind. In fact, you can create notes for each and every tiny little thing like the code components, marketing plans, or anything that your team needs to build for your business to roll freely.
In fact, Trello helps in managing a project very easily. You will be able to assign tasks to the right people and get updates about it. Trello also allows you to create a CRM that is easy to use and that manages your contact information of all your leads. You can keep all the detailed notes of every interaction with yoru leads store in Trello to access and analyze in the future when needed.
Trello is a Kanban-style list making tools that are helpful in project or task management. You can create boards, lists, and cards with labels, checklists and due dates to organize your team’s projects and tasks and simply drag and drop them to track progresses. There are also a lot of Power-ups (essentially apps for Trello) that you can add to Trello to supercharge its already amazing functions. The free plan is adequate for most small startup needs but is limited to 10 team boards and 1 Power-Up per board.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $9.99 per user per month.
SentiOne
Being a startup is not easy. You need to give time and understand all about your industry and company so that you can successfully handle your brand and connect with your target audience. In today’s digital business landscape. And since there are many different platforms and digital landscapes in the world today, it will take a lot of your time for monitoring all these things. That is where SentiOne comes in handy. Known as one of the best startup tools, it is a social listening platform. It allows you to tap in directly to what the world is saying about you and your industry on any of the social media platforms or important websites.
Basically, this tool will also scan all the forums, blogs, and news websites online. It would also help you in tracking your brand reach and the sentiment by buzz and word-of-mouth marketing. In short, you will be able to reach the hearts of your audiences easily by understanding what they want with this application.
MailChimp (Marketing Automation)
Whether you have launched a new product or you want to run a successful email marketing campaign you need an efficient email marketing tool. MailChimp is a name that probably needs no introduction when it comes to email marketing and newsletter service. MailChimp comes with a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers, being on the top in the email marketing field, MailChimp provides the best email servers that help you a great overview response, open rates and clicks for your email marketing campaigns.
Features:
- Social Media
- Landing Pages
- Digital Ads
- Postcards
- Automation
- Reports & Analytics
Pricing: The essential plan for one user starts from $9.99/mo to $299/mo for the premium plan.
Free Version: Free version available with all the basics for businesses that are just getting started.
Google Drive
If you already have a Google account, using Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) is a no-brainer. It’s completely free to store and share with 15GB of space in the cloud. Additionally, you can collaborate with others and edit the documents right in the app.
Asana ( Project Management) best tool for startups
Asana is one of the best tools for startups for project management, that helps teams to coordinate and manage their work. The efficiency of Asana made it prominent among all new businesses over the world. It empowers companies to move quicker by ensuring everybody knows the team plan and procedure and who is doing what by when. This tool allows the project team to assign tasks as per their role, add team new members & get task activity, view reports, and a lot more. Companies such as Uber, Google, PayPal, Facebook and some world’s greatest team using this tool to keep the work on track and increase productivity.
Features:
- Timeline
- Portfolios
- Workload
- Automation
Pricing: The premium plan starts from $10.99/mo to $24.99/mo for the business plan.
Free Version: Free version available for individuals or teams just getting started with project management.
Kipwise
Kipwise is a knowledge management tool that helps teams build up their company knowledge hub easily. It offers powerful Slack integration, browser extensions and is integrated with Google Drive, Trello, Airtable and more, so you can save and retrieve team knowledge easily, wherever you need them.
Some key features that help teams enable better internal knowledge flow:
- Powerful Slack integration – Handy slash command and Slack Actions to create and search for team knowledge. You simply don’t have to leave Slack to build up your knowledge base.
- Real-time collaborative editor – With rich embedding options, your team can edit the same doc at the same time and create visually appealing documentation easily.
- Content review process – Set designated reviewers for your collections to ensure content is always up-to-date and accurate.
Pricing: Starting from $16/month for 10 users.
HubSpot (CRM)
Building a relationship with customers and making your sales process efficient to increase conversion rate, HubSpot is among the best tools for startups that provides a free CRM tool. It has a lot of great features from report automation to tracking everything from the sales pipeline, with detailed reports on sales activity, productivity, and individual performance, you’ll never be in the dark about how your team is tracking toward quota, and you’ll have all the data you need to coach your team to success.
Features:
- Contact management
- Contact website activity
- Companies
- Deals
- Tasks & activities
Free Version: Hubspot provides free CRM tool with many features
Pricing: Hubspot provides Growth suite with CRM and marketing and sales tools, pricing starts from $113 for starters to $4200 for enterprises.
Conclusion:
Growing a startup is not easy. Keeping cost low is often one of the goals for small startups to survive. But to grow your business and enhance productivity, investing money in adopting the right tools can often save you more costs than the price of the tools themselves.