What comes to your mind when you hear a word Startup? Is it a bunch of young developers – hipsters who come to the loft-style office by electric scooter with a craft beer in one hand and a smartphone in another, taking selfies on the way and chatting about the weekend plans in the bar downtown? That’s how it looks from the side but what is a startup anyway? Surprisingly it doesn’t have a clear definition, everyone has a different answer instead, despite this fact, the term “startup” has become a familiar part in business vocabulary and often is described as a fast-growing company. According to Investopedia, a startup is an enterprise that is in the early stage of its operations.
Every new startup is dreaming of coming as far as Facebook, Apple, Google or Amazon. It’s a great inspiration assuring entrepreneurs that a crazy idea born in the small dormitory room can be developed into the life-changing software or services for customer life being today. All you need is the idea, investor, motivation to move forward and great tools to operate the newly born business. We can help you with the last point by introducing to you the most reliable applications to start your business.
1. WordPress
With over 65 million websites and blogs created on WordPress it becomes a number one software for your website CMS. The features and layouts are suitable not only for blog site but also for e-commerce store or other business organizations.
2. G Suite
It is very unprofessional to contact your business partners using your private email address, G Suite will separate the foundation of your business essentials from your personal life. Beyond email, you get a bunch of the standard apps such as calendar, docs, sheets, slides, note-taking tool, website builder, templates, and Hangouts – sort of the chat tool.
3. Invoicely
At some point you will be taking your project out to the market and this is the stage where you will start generating revenue. Invoicely will help you to not drown in the pile of pending invoices but help you organize smooth transactions from anywhere in the world.
4. Trello
Become a project management guru with the help of Trello. This super simple tool will keep your tasks, team members, and goals organized. It looks like a corkboard with pinned notes to it. Create a project and drag it through the whole “to do/doing/done” process.
5. Atlassian
If you are familiar and more advanced in project management, your pick has to be Atlassian Starter Program. This package includes so popular Jira and Confluence which allows all team members to access the status of releases and deliver the project to the finish line faster.
6. Google Analytics
As soon as your website goes live don’t forget to install Google Analytics. Get your ship a rudder in form of the analytical data you get out of this tool which collects information about your visitors’ behaviour when they land on your site.
7. Hotjar
If you want to understand your website user better – get Hotjar on board. The tool is generating heat-map for each visitor and analyzes his activity. You can see what grabbed his attention the most to focus on or optimize the weakest parts of the page. What’s the most appealing – it’s free!
8. UpCounsel
At one point or another, every startup will need legal help. Hiring a law firm or a full-time attorney can be expensive. UpCounsel is the solution which provides a marketplace of attorneys and matches them with the customer (startup) based on the type of the legal help needed.
9. Slack
When it comes to team communications, daily emails and text messages overflowing your inbox are not the right solutions. Bring the team together at Slack, where you can chat, send files, create closed groups and private conversation all at one platform. It’s a fast and easy way to share information.
10. Renderforest
You can create a 10-second brand video in just 10 seconds with online video maker Renderforest. In four easy steps the video is ready and only one click is sending it to all social media platforms. Easy as that – choose the template from the library; add logo, text, animations, and colors; select the preferred music track; preview and post. This is a great platform to create marketing videos with no extra costs.
11. Hootsuite
Social media today is not a trend anymore, it’s a part of our every-day lives. This is where business is looking for potential customers. Hootsuite will help you manage all your social media in one place. More to that the tools is tracking your competitor brands and keeping you in the loop what content is engaging your audience.
12. Facebook Business Manager
Facebook emphasizes itself as a great B2C two-way communication tool in reaching your target audience. When “unlocking” Business Manager page you get access to Ad accounts to run targeted promo advertising, page insight data, product catalog, pixel and many more.
13. Adwords
Bring in new traffic, leads and customers for your startup business. Everyone is on Google now and it is becoming difficult to crown the pedestal as every business is looking for the first page position. Pay a reasonable price and get a guaranteed place on Google search results at the top.
14. MailChimp
Even though emails are considered outdated, this type of information sharing is still considered as an essential tool to share business newsletters. MailChimp is a powerhouse here. You can automate the email flow and send targeted email based on user actions, for example, when registering or clicking on a specific link.
15. SurveyMonkey
How do you know whether you are doing right or wrong, whether the audience is liking your product/service? Ask questions! SurveyMonkey is a top-notch survey tool to collect opinions of the people who really matters to you. Monitor results, summarize and create open reports to share with the audience or your team.
16. Upwork
There is no need to create a team of 50 professionals to run your startup. Hire freelancers who can take care of any project you have at your table. Upwork is a great platform which gathers applicants with different skills. Find your and get the job done.
To sum up, this is just a small part of all the useful tools out there to help you develop your startup. Back in the days, listed tools were just startups, and see how far they come. Use these amazing apps and become a company to include in the future list of tools for startups.
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