Are you thinking about launching a business? Are you already working on growing one?
You need to invest in the best tools that can help you optimise, automate, and improve every working part of your business—from sales and marketing to employees and customers.
We know you are savvy, dedicated and passionate about your new business, but with more productivity and time tracking tools being introduced every day, how do you know which ones will help you spend the right amount of time on the right tasks?
It’s a tough decision, right?
These online tools can help start-up companies to simplify their business processes and do a lot more to get important things done.
From marketing and social media to recruitment, customer support and sales, we’ve compiled the list of the best tools for startups to help you grow your business in 2016.
Project Management Tools
As your startup begins to grow, you might find keeping all processes in control and sync to be a tedious task.
Many issues can distract you and your team from daily productivity, and you do have to keep your team on the same page.
Good coordination and communication are crucial for a new company, luckily, you can find many project management tools that can help you to manage the workflow and stay organised all the time.
Asana: organise your teams, easily assign tasks, decrease email overload, tag content, and conversation and keep everyone focused.
RememberTheMilk: organise, share and split your tasks using an electronic calendar, to-do list, and all-in-one task management tools.
Basecamp: coordinate project administration and communication for your teams and across your departments
Trello: organise projects, tasks and communication for you or smaller teams
Calendly: schedule appointments, interviews and meetings quickly (the tool integrates with Google Calendar)
Evernote: take notes, collect interesting content from the web, archive and organise your work and your team’s work and sync between all of your devices.
Join.me: review documents and designs, do product demonstrations and transatlantic web conferences and presentations
Slack: communicate smoothly with your team and coordinate your work quickly
Productivity and Time Management Tools
The most precious resource for startups is time and you need to utilise your time in a productive manner. With these tools, you can also plan future tasks and projects more effectively.
RescueTime: track time and optimise your work by monitoring your computer use
Toggl: track time across your team and improve your workplace productivity
Pocket: Save helpful content and resources to read them later
Google Drive: share documents and work from anywhere
Medium: provide simple way for your team to securely and easily access the cloud tools across any web service
Social Media And Content Management Tools
You need original content and an excellent, well-thought social media strategy. Period.
An active social media presence is fundamental to any business new to the Internet. But social media platforms and networks have a unique audience, and with different users, comes specifics needs, interest, usage, imagery and “rules.”
Social media can help you to introduce your brand to millions of people worldwide, and create meaningful, lasting relationships with your users, clients, fans. But if you want to put your business ahead of the game, you need proper tools to do it right.
Hootsuite: Popular social media tool to schedule posts, tweets, analyse and manage online reputation and brand mentions.
Scoop.it: publish, find and create content in an easy and meaningful way for better social media marketing.
Content Marketer: connect with influencers, build relationships on social media and promote your content to reach more people.
Buffer: Schedule social media updates and promote your content effectively
IFTTT: do more work by connecting different project and organisation tool with social media and productivity tools (for instance, every time you save useful content to Pocket and add it instantly to a new board in Trello)
Buzzsumo: curate and discover top quality content and see what your competitors are publishing
Narrow: build a targeted following on Twitter
Resources, Analytics Tools, Useful Blogs, and Websites
HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform where you can find great information on social media and email marketing, SEO, content management, analytics and more.
Moz is an industry inbound marketing leader that provides automated research and analytics tools for better SEO.
Brand24 is a tool that helps you to monitor your brand, product, and services and measure the popularity around it.
Optimizely is a platform that will help you run A/B tests to optimise your website and influence interactions better.
SumoMe captures website leads and gathers traffic data to increase brand awareness.
Google Trends: target the right customers online by searching for the popular content, and discover what your target users are interested in
Google Alerts: Create alerts for your industry and learn what others are searching or writing about, and create alerts for your brand and get notified when someone mentions it anywhere on the web
Google Analytics: tracks and reports website traffic by gathering data about your customers’ interests and behaviour across ads, videos, websites, social tools, tablets and smartphones
Adwords: Google’s advertising system, one of the most valuable tools to advertise online.
RankTrack: track your competitors’ search rank, learn about the trends in your industry, see rankings for YouTube videos and Google Places, see rankings for your site, discover the potential keywords to target your audience.
Best Tools For Marketing Strategy
Surveymonkey: design surveys easily, distribute and collect data and gather meaningful and valuable insights.
Emaze: create stunning presentations of your startups for mentor sourcing and VC pitches, using amazing design templates
Piktochart: design and make appealing and eye-catching infographics for presentations and pitches.
Mailchimp: create and analyse email marketing campaigns, manage subscriber profiles and send better emails to reach your users.
PowToon: introduce and announce your startup with short videos for pitch presentations or your website.
Animoto: Create professional-quality videos from photographs, video clips, easily and entirely unique.
Canva: Create and design graphics for social media and blog
Pixlr: a cloud-based photo sharing service that includes a number of photo editors, from simple to advanced, one can use on PCs, tablets, and smartphones
Prezi: present your ideas on a virtual canvas with a cloud-based presentation software and a storytelling tool
TinyJPG: make websites and blogs faster by compressing JPEG images by 40-60% while keeping it quality
Screen Recorder: capture still shots, record videos and make annotations on the obtained items, and share it live during a conference call
Sway: create a web-enabled presentation from your iPhone, tablet or laptop and share easily via email, messaging or social media
Fontello: build custom fonts with icons and create a unique text branding for your startup
CRM Tools
Every business is looking for a better way to grow, and Customer Relationship Management software and tools can make all the difference. To find the right business strategy, information is critical. Here are some great CRM tools that can help you to gather valuable data, improve interaction and connect with your customers and above all, provide excellent customer support.
Doorbell: collect in-app user feedback for free for websites, iOS and Android.
Zendesk: build a help centre and organise a live chat with your customers.
Intercom: automate interaction with clients and prospects
Help.com: capture leads, increase conversations and provide excellent customer support
Get Satisfaction: connect your business with customers and foster better relationships, accelerate sales and improve customer support using an online customer engagement community platform
intercom.io: see who is using your product or service and find an easy way to get in contact with your clients sending target messages and emails triggered by time and their behaviour
UICloud: define customer experience for any app
Financial Management Tools
Managing finances can be a daunting task; without the proper tools to keep track of your finances, the task may be even more challenging and intimidating.
Effective utilisation and management of your initial funds is critical, and these tools can help you to manage your budget, assess profits, spend wisely and run your business efficiently.
Mint: categorise and analyse your budget, manage finances and have insight into your expenditure plans.
Expensify: track your expenses and get reports easily and without a hassle
Wave: track your expenses and income and handle your invoices, payroll system, and bills
Yodlee: link your accounts, view all balances and transactions, analyse where your expenses go and pay bills and transfer funds from your account for free
BodeTree: visualise your income, expenses, and profit in real time and get daily updates of your business’s finances
Bench: get your business a personal professional bookkeeper
Best Tools For Networking, Potential Partners and Team Members
Networking is an important part of growing your business. At one point you will have to recruit new people, meet or find people from your industry, search for angel investors, learn more, help your team members improve their skills and more.
Luckily, there are many ways you can grow your business by making your team stronger or your network bigger.
99designs: the world’s most popular marketplace for graphic design or you to find experienced and able freelance designers;
AngelList: a website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers where you can find investors and potential partners
CoFoundersLab: connect with compatible partners, entrepreneurs and co-founders that want to join your startup
Homerun: recruit professionals and experienced job seekers, create authentic job openings and review applicants faster and easier.
Upwork: the world’s largest online workplace for savvy businesses and professional freelancers
Recruiterbox: simplify the hiring process and receive and manage job applications efficiently and quickly.
Bunchball: improve online engagement and work on better customer loyalty using game mechanics
Meetup: meet fellow entrepreneurs in your region and industry and facilitate offline group meetings
Free Invoice Generator: create invoices in PDF and ensure a standard and convenient form for invoicing every order
Termsfeed: create elaborate legal documents in minutes: Privacy Policies, Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use, Terms of Service or Return and Refund Policies
PRLog.org: promote your business by creating a killer press release for free
Coursera: help your employees improve their knowledge and skills and grow in their careers with free online classes from 120+ top universities and educational organizations
Udemy: develop job-related skills by mastering a particular subject or create online courses on topics of your choosing;
edX: learn more in your field of interests from top experts and professors from the best institutions in the world;
Clarity: receive valuable insights, acquire strategic tactics , and get business advice from experts, thought-leaders and fellow entrepreneurs;
Codecademy: attend free coding classes in eight different programming languages and learn from advanced coders;
GitHub: host and share your open-source software projects, discover and contribute;
Kickstarter: showcase your project ideas, gain recognition, raise funds, find other interesting and ambitious projects;
Do you have a tool to recommend? Tells us about your best tools the comments.
