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Startup 101: The tools every Startup needs to succeed.
If you’re reading this, its probably because you’re considering pushing your Next Big Thing idea into the open waters of the startup ocean.
Starting a business is a beautifully frightening thing — its where opportunity and risk coexist, some sort of Schrodinger’s Cat of success and failure. Your best bet at success when building a business is laying the groundwork with the right tools.
Whether you’re bootstrapping your idea with a couple friends in a garage or just closed a round of funding and are looking to set up shop in an office space, the tools you use to build, grow, and measure your business are absolute X-factors in your chances of success.
While different verticals diverge or specialize in some of the realms below, here are a few tools I really like.
Project Management and Team Communication
You’ll definitely need a tool to communicate with team members and plan, organize, and track upcoming tasks and key project milestones. While this market is loaded with a number of fragmented tools, its best to keep it under one roof — for an all-in-one workplace.
Nifty combines the best of the tools in this space into a truly all-in-one workflow management tool. Nifty serves as your communication and workflow management solution that would otherwise be broken into various tools with multiple subscriptions. Think of it like Slack meets Trello meets Dropbox, and then more.
For more project management tools, check out our best project management tools article.
Sales / CRM
A CRM tool is something that really ought to match the size of your business and your sales strategy, which is why we certainly wouldn’t advocate for Salesforce at this stage.
Nothing wrong with keeping it simple from get-go. Mailchimp is an easy-to-use and actually kind of fun CRM to leverage for early marketing and sales operations as you scale your outbound efforts. Mailchimp Alternatives – On the other hand, Mailchimp’s reporting tools and automation recipes are slightly elementary. In that case, you should explore Mailchimp alternatives.
Salesmate is a clean, intuitive CRM that grows with you. By leveraging plugins and voice / messaging features, Salesmate is a scalable solution for your sales team.
If you’ve chatted with one of those speech bubbles on a website recently, there’s a good chance it was through Intercom. Intercom is a strong CRM that tracks leads through your website and affords you on-site communications as well as your own Help article ecosphere.
Its comprehensive suite of tools and innovative features underscore why, even when compared to intercom competitors in the market, it remains a preferred choice for enhancing customer engagement and support
Voila Norbert is one of the most accurate email finder tools on the market. Perfect if you’re trying to increase the quality and success of your cold email campaigns for either link building, sales, or general business development. Many link building agencies also use Voila Norbert for their cold email outreaches.
Cashflow Management
It’s important to be on top of your books in every stage of business and track business expenses, but I realize that you’re probably not of a finance background. A good tool will make this very easy on you.
Sperse is graceful cashflow management and financial outlook with automated propulsion and predictive forecasting, making your current and future financial states as clear as day.
If you’re exploring financial options for your business, you might also be interested in understanding the SBA loan application process, which can provide additional financial support. Services like Advancepoint Capital could also offer business loans through traditional lenders.
Check out this article about Empower review
Data / Engineering
This is where your business vertical begins to shape your tool decisions. E-commerce sites and physical products will have much more limited development overhead than a SaaS product.
Jira is a powerful, thorough development SaaS management tool that is exceptional for tracking bugs and testing code. While Jira is popular amongst developers and their managers, its learning curve and functionalities are not beloved amongst general teams.
An excellent tool for SaaS startups to hot rod integrations to and from your platform to other major players. A Zapier integration can add tremendous value to your tool and for your customers.
Centus
Centus is a cloud-native localization management platform that facilitates the seamless localization of websites, applications, software, games, and documents. The software focuses on helping businesses manage and streamline the process of adapting their content, software, or products for different languages and regions. Localization is crucial for businesses operating globally, as it ensures that their materials are linguistically accurate for diverse audiences.
Analytics
Analytics tools can get extremely powerful and can result in a sort of informational rabbithole, but if you’re a SaaS startup, there’s really no getting around this, even at an early stage.
Google Analytics is a powerful, free way to track your website’s engagement and use flow. By allowing you to understand aquisition channels and user journeys, you can see what areas of your site thrive and which may need more fine tuning. This is essentially mandatory for all websites, regardless of vertical.
Mixpanel is key in understanding who your leads are, where they come from, and how they convert, especially in the case of digital products. A well-designed Mixpanel dashboard gives you critical business data and insights in just a quick glance.
Visualize your customer’s painpoints by viewing their cursor experiences on your platform. While this has value across many verticals, this is exceptionally potent in the SaaS realm.
Mopinion
Mopinion is an all-in-one user feedback software for all of your digital channels that enables one’s brand to communicate directly with their consumers on web and mobile.
Vacation Tracker
One of the best features that Vacation Tracker offers is the dashboard which gives everyone a full overview of their leave status as well as their team members’ upcoming leaves. If you’re an administrator the dashboard offers the possibility of creating and managing teams, adding leave types, setting notifications, exporting reports and everything else you need for effective leave management. Pricing plan is very suitable for Startup’s and small businesses.
Product Information Management Tool
A product Information Management Tool is important for startups and businesses in the eCommerce industry. It allows teams to collaborate seamlessly and gets rid of messy spreadsheets. It also allows you to get your product to market faster and easier, which is essential to compete with big enterprises.
Plytix PIM
This is a Product Information Management (PIM) system that is specifically built for small-to-medium companies. It is a user-friendly and affordable PIM that integrates with your CRM to create the perfect tech stack for your online business. With Plytix’s PIM, you can edit product information on multiple channels at once and ensure that all your product data is optimized for product listings so that your products are more visible on all the different channels.”
Are there other types of tools you’d like recommendations for? Let us know in the comments below! ✌️
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