Startup Tools: A List To Start, Build, And Grow Your Business

Startup tools ease the process of building a new business. The thought of doing it all without any help can be daunting, but once you get familiar with convenient and easy-to-use tools, it becomes less intimidating.

Usually, the primary concern of every aspiring entrepreneur is keeping their startup costs as little as possible. However, there will be unavoidable investments in an online business, so it is best to find the most suitable tools to minimize operational costs.

Everybody needs guidance when it comes to starting something new. No matter how capable you think you are, digital platforms and tools are always out there that will increase your knowledge and help you grow a successful business.

There is no such thing as the "best" startup tool. Each is effective in its way. The tricky part is finding the ones that will help operate your new business well, boost productivity, improve customer relationships, and save you money. The ideal tools reduce overall costs, but at the same time, provide access to capital through their efficiency.

The tools you choose should sustain you today and support your growth in the future as the company scales. This is important because the company must maintain its operational efficiency without breaking momentum as it grows stronger.

Before getting down to the best startup tools for your new business that will provide quality benefits at a reasonable price, let's look at the fundamentals of a strong startup.

Requirements For Startup Success

Starting your own business is like becoming a parent. For the first couple of years, everything is a rollercoaster of emotions, chaos, revelations, and small wins. It is about fostering relationships, getting by the tough days, and fulfilling your mission of contributing something substantial to the world.

These are three factors that lead to a stable startup commencement:

• A team of dedicated people that share your values and mission
• A service/ product that genuinely helps people and solves problems
• A business plan that gives you a strong roadmap for the future
  

Having one of these components is unfortunately not enough. All three are essential for a successful startup and a productive work ethic and structure.

If you don't have these requirements yet, hold off on beginning this journey until you do. Otherwise, you may likely end up becoming a part of the 90% of startup businesses that fade into obscurity. To avoid this failure rate, plan accordingly.

One of these factors has a massive impact on the other aspects. The types of startup tools you choose to manage your business can make all the difference in upholding the other requirements.

Therefore, we understand this and designed a multifunctional and collaborative tool like our logo maker, which is perfect for startups.

Below, we cover all the primary startup tools you will need with brief descriptions under each business sector:

Startup Tools

Here you will find the best startup tools to help you with productivity, marketing, finance, accounting, website development, and customer relationships.

Productivity

Slack

Slack is a team communication platform, also considered as a messaging application. The tool is free to use, which is ideal for a startup. The idea behind Slack is to make communication between colleagues easier, but with advanced features that improve collaboration. It is intuitive and straightforward.

What Slack does the best is keeping interactions and tools entirely in sync. Most processes within Slack are convenient and seamless. Not only is all the information safely archived, but the mechanism is also compatible with iOS and Android. Starting a business is hectic, and you will constantly be on the go. With Slack, you will have the data with you at all times.

Google Drive

Google Drive is a cloud storage service that processes all transactions and activities in real-time. Most companies benefit from its worldwide access to content, making collaboration easy.

Your information is stored in the cloud, accessible anywhere and anytime as long as you have an internet connection. These files are updated automatically, so you always have the latest version available.

Google Drive is one of the most reliable startup tools for business productivity around the world. It's easy to operate and highly effective in most situations.

Trello

Trello is a project management and visual collaboration tool that helps you prioritize and organize projects in an easy, flexible, and efficient way. A Trello board is a series of lists with various cards attached to them that have tasks listed. The tool is packed with powerful features and automation.

What makes Trello unique is its layout, which is an intuitive and open-ended display that helps you organize any task. Trello provides countless possibilities to help make your startup more organized and convenient. The best part? It's designed for business beginners in mind.

Asana

Asana is one of the world's most efficient and project management software teams, regardless of a big or small work community. Like other systems, it lets teams plan, share, and organize their work in an easy and convenient structure.

One of Asana's biggest perks is that team members and collaborators receive updates on finished tasks, so everyone is up to speed on the progress. It creates a unified understanding of where the business is heading and what is left to achieve.

Users get basic tasks, searches, and archives in the free version, making it an essential to-do list for up to 15 team members— perfect for a startup setting.

Marketing

SEMrush

Digital marketers all over the world trust and swear by the effectiveness of SEMrush. It is a platform used by many businesses, big and small. Major companies such as Forbes, Paypal, Hyatt, and Philips, use this tool for their marketing operations. SEMrush has a massive database of over 120 million keywords and 46 million domains.

As a startup, it is imperative to have a proper content marketing plan for your new business, and your keyword strategy should be the bedrock of it. With this feature, you can curate content that will have a higher likelihood of exposure and traffic.

Hunter‍

Lead generation is a crucial aspect of every startup and one of the most cost-effective ways to find the leads is through email communication. Did you know that email marketing generates $38 for each $1 spent, which provides astonishing ROI?

Email communication offers a cost-effective option for generating leads when it comes to startups without external funding. However, a certain amount of automation and detailing is essential to reach satisfied ROI, and that’s where Hunter comes in handy.

Hunter offers an all-rounded solution for email marketing including email finder and verifier, campaign management, bulk tasks, valuable APIs, and much more. It makes a prospecting process way more effective since you can find the verified email addresses from key people in the matter of seconds.

Furthermore, Hunter offers a quick solution for managing your email campaigns which automatizes your outreach efforts allowing you the access to statistics which gives you the opportunity to test what works and what doesn’t.

Sked Social

Did you know that you have a 77% chance of receiving 192% more traffic from your social media posts when you adhere to a specific posting schedule?

Many companies get great results when they have a social media posting schedule as it builds consistency online. Sked Social helps over 10,000 brands with their social media post scheduling and has a vast arsenal of positive ratings and feedback— most of them focused on how the tool improved their business and social media strategy.

Sked Social's startup tool is helpful for small brands and large-scale businesses from all around the world. The startup tool enhances user productivity on social media efficiently and effortlessly.

It allows for auto-posting in virtually all platforms and a future visual layout of posts you haven't published yet so you have an idea of how your account will look to viewers ahead of time. They have a free 7-day trial for you to learn the ropes and see if it suits your business model.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email automation tool that provides you with all the marketing tools you need in one place. As a startup, you may not have all the information about the world of marketing. Mailchimp recognizes this and provides world-class technology and support to help startup companies launch, build, and grow to meet their visions and missions.

Mailchimp takes pride in the fact that they help small businesses do big things, and they do this by serving all the right tools and guidance every step of the way. They have every marketing service you would need to reach and resonate with people.

If your startup doesn't have contacts to market to yet, you can get a headstart with Mailchimp's marketing and design tools. So when the day comes that you've grown your network, you are ready to go!

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service that helps you obtain the most value for your startup website. It may take some time to familiarize yourself with the platform and utilize it well with everything it has to offer. However, if you start with the basics of Google Analytics, you can gradually build your knowledge and work it to the best it can offer.

The insights and forecasts you gain from Google Analytics can help you improve your marketing strategies, better serve your audience, and obtain more customers.

GetProspect

Another comprehensive lead generation tool is Getprospect. Even though it is an alternative to the Hunter, it can offer a different approach. The main difference is the ability to search for leads on LinkedIn. LinkedIn email extraction works great for targeted lead generation, networking, and marketing.

Why so? First of all, it has an extensive leads database with search filters that allow searching people by position, location, company, or specific keywords. That way, a salesman can add to the research, segmentation, and prospecting.

Simultaneously, GetProspect offers a convenient Chrome extension to get people’s emails from the LinkedIn search. Imagine finding a lead on LinkedIn and immediately adding them to your CRM. Besides, it is compatible with Sales Navigator and can be integrated with other software via API or Zapier.

Adzooma

Adzooma is a digital marketing platform designed to make digital marketing easier and more accessible for SMB’s. With a range of easy-to-use tools, Adzooma allows you to optimize and manage your Google, Facebook and Microsoft advertising accounts in seconds under one roof.

It is powered by a unique opportunity engine that analyzes your accounts and creates customized recommendations to improve your campaigns. Even better, most of them can be implemented with a single click directly from the Adzooma platform.

Adzooma also eliminates long, repetitive tasks with one-click automation. This allows you to set up custom rules and receive immediate alerts for when changes are made to your account.

In addition, Adzooma also provides reports that can be used in seconds. Enter the necessary details and set up relationships with your logo, ready to impress your managers and customers.

Finance And Accounting

Xero

Xero is becoming increasingly popular as the software is cloud-based, a more efficient structure helping users remain organized while conducting standard bookkeeping and accounting operations. Financing comes with a swirl of hiccups and setbacks. With Xero, everything is streamlined and intuitive.

As a business, Xero is a platform that highlights how important small businesses are to our global economy. Because of this, Xero curates all services for this reason alone: to invest in the potential of startups.

Expensify

Expensify is a handy tool that automates receipt tracking and expense management. It streamlines the entire pre-accounting process and seamlessly syncs with Xero (if you use that). Expensify will save you countless hours of time-consuming manual entry with a single click of expense reports in real-time.

Expensify is known for helping small and medium-sized businesses revolutionize the way they manage their expenses and accounting reports.

Stripe

Paypal is the usual go-to for many businesses when it comes to making payments. However, Stripe is a more streamlined and cost-effective alternative to Paypal. Stripe does not take you offsite when you make a payment as Paypal does. You never have to worry about complicated gateways to process payments.

Stripe has a secure interaction with its servers to keep customer information safe— nothing is stored on a third-party server like Paypal. Protecting customer data is a massive deal to Stripe.

Stripe doesn't have any monthly fees, no setup fees, and no minimum charges. Stripe is a godsend for startup businesses (and pretty much any business) looking to save costs!

Baremetrics

Baremetrics cuts through the messiness of finance and accounting and reveals many insights you would need for profitable decisions that will propel the startup forward.

With Baremetrics, you can see what is happening today, plan for tomorrow and the next day, and strategize for further growth months and years into the future. You will always be in the know about where your business financially stands.

You start collecting valuable feedback in a matter of minutes, which includes learning how much revenue you lose and the reason for it. Then you can automatically send personalized emails to bring that revenue back.

Web Development

WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for building professional and dynamic blogs and websites. It is among the most globally loved website creation tools. Want to know how much? WordPress makes 40% of the websites you find on the web.

WordPress involves a vast community that contributes to its foundation and strength as a platform. It is used by almost everybody— from individuals to big business entities. Even one with little information on website development can quickly learn and modify WordPress websites.

The platform includes many themes and plugins, making the building process more fun and interactive and allowing users to restructure the look and feel of websites quickly. Users may add additional features like image galleries, mailing links, and many more.

Elementor

A powerful website builder, Elementor empowers just about anyone to create a comprehensive, converting WordPress website, code-free. Boasting an intuitive, dynamic drag-and-drop editor, Elementor completely revolutionizes the WordPress web creation process. You can choose from hundreds of templates and leverage more than 90 widgets to create a website that fits your unique brand and style. If you have an aggressive GTM approach, and would like to launch websites on the fly, you might want to check out Elementor’s Full Site Kits. Designer-made and ready to go, Kits are complete websites that you can lightly customize and launch, immediately. There are more than a hundred Kits, and you’re bound to find one that fits your needs.

Weebly

Weebly is a great website builder that is ideally suited for small businesses. The platform offers the opportunity to quickly put up an online store, which then helps you market. Additionally, Weebly has a structured process for SEO optimization, making every website you create on it is search-friendly.

Weebly is among the best website builders on the market for startups because it offers unparalleled ease of use and innovative features through an understandable user interface. So if you're looking for something a little less overwhelming and basic compared to WordPress, this is a good stepping stool!

Customer Relationships

Zendesk

Zendesk is a cloud-based customer support service that offers various features that ease and smoothen customer service for many companies. Over 40,000 small to medium businesses use Zendesk, including large brands like Zappos and Groupon.

The Zendesk help desk has space for 5 to 500 support agents, and they can manage thousands of tickets on an hourly basis. The software helps businesses improve customer satisfaction and reduces costs. Zendesk is your one-stop shop that has all you need for customer support and management.

LiveChat

If you are building a startup, you must know that most interactions are best received in real-time. When it comes to customer support, this is especially true as users seek solutions to their problems right away. When you offer a direct support channel, you show customers that their concerns are important to you.

LiveChat is an integral platform that lets you communicate with customers in real-time to connect and solve their concerns quickly. This is a feature that you do not want to go without. Live chatting generates a satisfaction level of 73%, compared to email and phone support, which stand at 61% and 44%, respectively.

Having LiveChat adds reliability and credibility to your website. Every visitor will instantly see that your business has real people on the other side that care to help them at any moment. And this is a foundation of trust that builds over time and can do wonders for your business.

Which Startup Tool Will You Pick?

Startups must move and act quickly to thrive. And that right there is the biggest challenge. You have to instill a reliable brand presence with minimal resources (especially time and money) without much experience or guidance.

However, you are not in this alone, nor are you the first to embark on such a complicated journey. The tools above were once created for beginner entrepreneurs and business owners who need better prospects for sustainable growth. If you use them wisely, nothing can stop you from a flourishing business.

Finding the right startup tools can make your job simpler, faster, and more cost-friendly. And we at LOGO.com care about your startup journey. One of the most fundamental aspects of a startup business is building a brand presence, and to do that, you will need a logo and a domain.

Check out our logo maker, which is AI-powered and incredibly easy to use. If you get a logo from us, you also get a free domain, a website builder, a social media kit, and a lot more! The entire process takes up to 30 minutes, and it won't hurt your wallet one bit. The closer you are to building that recognizability, the better.