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While many digital tools can do wonders for startups by saving tons of time, increasing your team’s productivity, and removing many obstacles from your rocky path to success, choosing the best solutions from gazillions of apps and services with similar functionality is no picnic.
Be it an online PDF converter or a content management platform, there are many alternatives out there to get you confused. That’s why we have thoroughly researched the topic and collected ten tools from different categories that promise the best value for money.
10 Essential Tools for Startups: How to Save Time and Boost Your Business
1. Slack
Surely, you can do with emails or popular messengers like WhatsApp or Telegram when sharing information with your team members, but neither of these tools can match Slack when it comes to centralizing, speeding, streamlining, and searching through internal communications.
In addition to public and private channels, direct messages, audio and video calls with screen sharing, notifications, polls, file sharing, and reactions, this cloud-based platform offers convenient threads, advanced search options, complete protection from spam messages, and 10 automated workflows and app integrations even in its free version.
2. Notion
This is one of a few collaborative platforms generous enough to create a special 6-month free plan with built-in AI for small business projects. It allows users to take notes, construct to-do lists, schedule tasks, share bookmarks, and use numerous paid and free templates for knowledge and task management, project tracking, workspace creation, content planning, and whatnot.
Apart from assembling customized pages using different types of blocks, including calendars, kanban boards, spreadsheets, databases, and media files, the users of Notion can generate ideas, write and improve content, make summaries, solve arithmetic, and translate text pieces with an integrated AI assistant.
3. Canva
Canva is everyone’s favorite in the world of user-friendly graphic design. Whether you need to create shareable posts for Instagram, inform the public about your brand’s announcements through flyers, or impress an investor with a memorable presentation of your startup, you will be able to pull off the job with no designer skills under your belt.
The online platform gives access to over a million professionally made templates, a thousand ready-to-use designs, and three million stock pictures and graphic elements — all in its free version. You can customize a template by changing fonts, choosing color combinations, adding text and images, or altering other elements in an intuitive editor.
4. PDFGuru.com
Not only presentations but also all kinds of documents are now created and stored in PDF format. PDFGuru.com is a secure and easy-to-use platform that lets users redact PDF online from any device without the need to download special programs and trudge through complicated instructions.
Need to merge PDF files from different team members into one document? PDFGuru can do it. Want to sign a contract remotely? The tool got you covered. From compressing files to protecting sensitive data with passwords, this online service makes dealing with PDFs a breeze. Besides, it works as an online PDF converter offering at least a dozen options for transferring data into convenient formats.
5. WordPress
Widely known as the most popular content management system, WordPress helps to start a blog, create a portfolio, and launch an online store with no knowledge of coding languages at all.
Although its free version is not very suitable for doing business, you can switch between plans ranging from $4 to $45 per month and get the right set of features for your business needs, including automatically handled updates and backups, a vast array of themes and plugins, monetization and SEO tools, and integrations for marketing and analytics. Alternatively, you can opt for the self-hosted WordPress.org option and enjoy better control over your website and greater technical freedom.
6. Hootsuite
When your company’s profiles are scattered across a host of social networking sites, it might be tricky to implement a solid social media strategy without a solution designed for planning, publishing, analyzing, and improving your content. Hootsuite is one of the most comprehensive marketing tools for business needs in this niche because it connects up to ten social accounts to a single dashboard for only $99 per month.
You will be able to schedule and publish an unlimited number of posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok, boost engagement with best-time-to-post recommendations, monitor trends, get AI-powered hashtag suggestions, compare your performance against competitors, and more.
7. Mailchimp
Email marketing is very much alive, if you wonder, and Mailchimp makes it much more effective and uncomplicated at zero cost, provided that you have no more than 500 contacts and are planning to send no more than 1,000 emails per month.
Listed among top solutions for small businesses by G2, this marketing automation tool offers a choice of email templates, a subject line helper, signup forms, a CRM solution, landing page builder tools, a marketing calendar, surveys, social posting, 300+ integrations, and detailed analytics for tracking performance and optimizing campaigns.
8. Gusto
Even with a handful of people working on your startup project, you need to pay salaried and hourly workers, calculate and file taxes, fill and store multiple HR forms, track time off, and manage employee benefits. According to PCMag, one of the best payroll and talent management tools for startups launched in the USA is Gusto, which provides easy payroll processing via a cloud-based platform.
Alongside the listed features available in a starter plan for $99 per month plus $6/mo per person, the payroll management software has advanced hiring and onboarding options, time and project tracking tools, workforce costing reports, and performance reviews included in other plans.
9. Google Analytics
If you want to know how users behave on your website, you need to use a web analytics service like Google Analytics that collects the necessary information and delivers it in easy-to-grasp reports. The free tool by Google calculates your web traffic, shows its sources and your audience’s location, slices and dices your visitors’ demographics, spotlights landing pages, tracks conversions, and generates other useful metrics.
Based on them, you will be able to evaluate your marketing strategies and channels, pinpoint gaps in website design and positioning, rethink advertising campaigns, and find more areas for your online presence improvement.
10. HubSpot
When speaking about all-in-one business tools for startups, we cannot fail to mention HubSpot’s extensive suite of marketing, content management, web analytics, SEO, customer support, and sales solutions.
This platform comes with a nice pack of free features for customer relationship management, lead generation, workflow automation, billing, and many other tasks, but it also offers premium-level software with a discount for startups. If you happen to qualify for the program, you will get powerful tools for streamlining your customer service and boosting sales with up to 90% off.
Conclusion
Obviously, some emerging businesses may need additional tools besides an online PDF converter or a payroll service. Depending on the specifics of your startup, you can consider app integration solutions for automated workflows, password management software, email finders, outsourcing platforms, file storage systems, e-signature tools, SEO services, productivity trackers, and other helpful apps.
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