I got an email yesterday asking me to recommend some tools for startups to use when starting out, things like the best way to track marketing campaigns and the best task managers out there. Simple things that you wouldn’t think about and things that startups wouldn’t make a priority — because most of the time it’s about building a product and getting that product to market.
No ad to show here.
So in response to that mail, I have put together a list of eight essential tools that every startup arsenal should have. Bear in mind you might not need all eight though. It all depends on the type of company you have and what you want to achieve as always.
Startups are generally on a budget, and LaunchRock is great if you don’t have the cash to hire a developer to build you a fancy landing page before launch. With it can build a “coming soon” page for any platform. The service is also great for building your site and growing your community. It allows you to customise the page for your company’s needs.
LauchRock also includes an array of services that can help you turn your business into a success, with essentials like branding and design, mobile development and a crowdfunding strategy to boot.
If you need a service to help you with your email marketing efforts, this is the one you should use. The platform comes with a “forever free” package with about 40 features to play with like personalised forms, designer templates, social sharing and different types of analytic tools tailored to your company’s needs. The free plan allows you to send up to 12 000 emails to a subscriber base of 2 000, that’s pretty cool when you’re just starting out.
Infographics are cool. So get creative on your company’s blog post about what you’ve been up to and any data you’ve gathered with this cool infographic maker. Just follow the easy steps the service provides and you’ll soon be making great, informative graphics.
The service has a selection of themes to choose from. There many other services that offer this solution, but we also like Infogram and Piktochart.
Very few startups understand marketing and how to go about it. Even more they don’t understand how to measure their marketing efforts. Hubspot has created grader.com, a set of tools designed to measure and analyse your marketing efforts. The grader.com grades include four key areas of achievement:
- Marketing.Grader.com grades your entire marketing channel and its efficiency.
- Book.Grader.com is for book authors and measures the ways they market their books.
- TwitterGrader.com measures a users, reach, power and authority on Twitter.
- Search.Grader helps you understand the keywords your site is ranked on and measures how good your SEO is.
Possibly one of the most important tools on this list, this service helps entrepreneurs write their business plans. The process of writing a business plan can be tedious and complicated, but Enloop offers a step-by-step guide to entrepreneurs wanting to solidify their business idea and how they intend to execute it and make money. In essence, the service writes the plan for you. All you need to do is feed it the write information and edit where needed.
Working remotely can sometimes be a drag. Documents need to be signed and that’s really difficult when all the parties involved are in different parts of the world. Couriering documents is so 2002, so use Echosign instead. This online electronic signature software allows you to send, e-sign, track, file documents and contracts securely. Easy peasy all done.
I am not sure most entrepreneurs are actually all that good with numbers or money, especially when it comes to keeping an intense track on it. Startups can’t really afford accountants. Enter Expensify. According to the service, it makes expense reports that don’t suck. It tracks company expenditure, handles your bank statements, credit cards and receipts, which in turn helps new companies come up with spending regulations and it also syncs to QuickBooks and most accounting software suites.
I mostly like this service for its name. However if you are having trouble setting and following through on tasks for your new company then you need Wunderlist. Running a new company is hard, there are a million and one things to do and a million and one meetings to get to. This task manager will help you get things done and with more than three-million people using it to manage tasks and to-do lists, it most be worth a try.
Image: Bigstock
