Running a startup and accelerating its growth needs a lot of hard work, commitment, passion with detailed planning and a great amount of effort with time management. Building your startup, fighting with a tight budget is challenging. There are several situations from unavoidable decisions, budget management, co-workers management to buying domain, getting server, business name registration, legal advice, marketing policy and the list goes on
This twentieth-century is a tech-driven world and technology gives you many tools that can increase your efficiency and save time.
10 Essential Free Tools for Startups
Yes, there is a huge number of accessible tools; one might be confused to figure out which ones are the best for their startups. But there are a few tools that can be helpful for Project Management, Automation, Marketing, Communication, Payroll, Digital marketing, Social Media Management and in many other sections. They can save your time as well as using these budget-friendly tools can give your startup a boost and save your energy. So, picking the required tools from the beginning Can take you many steps ahead.
1.Asana for Project Management
Asana can be a great tool for your startup as it can help you in project management by coordinating and managing workflow. Simply what Asana does is it ensures that everyone knows what the team plan is, the procedure of the project and who is doing what by when.
This tool can help you to allow the project team to assign tasks to members as per their role, add new team members as needed and get updated on every second of task activity, work progress and work track. World’s successful teams like Uber, Google, PayPal, Facebook also use this tool to keep their work on track and increase productivity.
Features one can get:
a.Timeline
b.Automation
c.Portfolios
d.Workload
Pricing: The premium plan starts from $10.99/month to $24.99/month for the business plan.
And of course with basic features, the free version is also available for individuals/teams who are just getting started with the tool.
2.Hootsuite for Social Media Management
Today, social media is a platform that can have a large impact on marketing your business. We can say social media now has become the most influential platform for marketing your product and services. Otherhand, one can use social media as a research tool to understand what the users think about their products. So, managing your social media for marketing and other purposes; Hootsuite can be the best tool for your startups.
Hootsuite will help you manage all your social media accounts/pages/profiles from just one dashboard. You can schedule your future post in advance on several different social media platforms and that can actually save a lot of time. Moreover, it is a great tool to track your content reach across platforms, engage with followers and manage your social media team.
Features One Can Get:
a.Key performance metrics
b.Automated post scheduling
c.Flexible approval workflows
d.5 social media certifications
e.Team message assignments
f.Exportable reports
g.Custom analytics
Pricing: There is a 30 days free trial available to use this tool and the professional plan for one user starts from $17.56/mo to $627.04/mo for the business plan for up to 5 users.
3.Slack Your Communication Manager
Slack is one of the fastest-growing business applications. Millions of people/Companies/teams around the world use Slack to connect their teams on one platform. Using Slack you can create multiple channels to discuss different projects/maintain a professional relation with members or you can have a private conversation through one-one chat. Slack also allows you to integrate with other applications such as Gmail, drive, share files, trello and many others to find messages/notifications. A large number of startups and companies use Slack to simplify their communications.
Features One Can Get:
a.Collaboration
b.Organised conversations
c.Searchable history
d.Face-to-face and face-to-screen
e.Integrated file sharing
Pricing: The free version is available for small teams for an unlimited period of time though the standard plan starts from $3.20/mo to $6/mo.
4.MailChimp for Marketing Automation
When one has launched a new product/business/service they need to run a successful email marketing campaign and MailChimp can be your savior. MailChimp, an efficient email marketing tool needs no introduction when it comes to email marketing and newsletter service. MailChimp comes with a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers; surely the best among others available in the market. MailChimp provides the best email servers that can help you to collect the overview response, open rates and clicks for your email marketing campaigns.
Features One Can Date:
a.Email
b.Social Media
c.Landing Pages
d.Digital Ads
e.Postcards
f.Automation
g.Reports & Analytics
Pricing: It starts from $9.99/mo to $299/mo for the premium plan.
5.Semrush for SEO & Digital Marketing
Almost every startup has its own website and to monitor your website perfectly SEMrush is one of the most essential tools. This SEO tool which can help you with organic research for your website like keyword research, backlink analysis, backlink audit, tag words, Competitors keyword, traffic analytic, PPC almost accurately. This tool can help you to analyze your website on almost every side.
Features:
a.Analytics Reports
b.Advertising Research
c.Backlinks
d.Keyword Research
e.Product Listing Ads
f.Traffic Analytics
Pricing: Only 7-days of a free trial will be available and their pro plan starts from $99.95/mo for freelancers and $399.95 for businesses.
- Prospect.io for Sales Automation
Email prospecting helps us to reach our potential clients that are looking for your services and this service is actually helping businesses to grow over the past few years. Now, sending emails and follow-ups manually has been outdated and it takes much time. Prospect.io, is a sales automation tool that can help your sales team to reach out to potential clients and send them some cold emails.
Features one can get:
a.Email Finder
b.Email Verification
c.Drip Campaigns
d.Emailing
e.Templates & Variables
f.Analyze
g.Mailbox Automation
h.Campaign Stats
i.Tracking
j.CRM Integrations
k.Reporting
l.Syncing
Pricing: Essential plan starts from $ 79/mo to $129/mo for businesses. Unfortunately, there is no free version/trial not available for Prospect.io.
7.Canva for Designing
Canva with its drag-and-drop features can create amazing graphics/animation that can full fill your graphic design needs for your startup. The strong part of Canva is it’s very easy to use and on their website, one can find around a million fonts, photos, icons, templates, etc. Creating eye-catchy graphics is important for your social media appearance. Once you are familiar with Canva, you can fulfill your graphical needs very easily.
Features one can avail:
a.Graphs
b.Photo editing
c.Print
Pricing: The free version of Canva is almost enough for making graphics posts, animation with a lot of free templates and their pro plan starts with $9.95/mo with 4M+ photos & elements.
8.Calendly to Schedule Your Meetings
Calendly is simple to use. It is a perfect scheduling software that can save time, accelerate sales and improve service quality. It will help you to use email and phone tags for scheduling your appointments, calls, interviews, and more. It ensures team members don’t miss phone and email tags.
Features One Can Get:
a.Meeting Schedule
b.Streamlined and productive workflow
c.Calendar integrations
d.Integrate directly with GoToMeeting and Salesforce, plus connect other apps through Zapier
e.Allow customers to schedule directly from your website
f.Collect payments using credit card or PayPal
g.Integrations with your existing services
Pricing: Though Calendly’s basic plan is free only for a single user and the pro plan starts from $6/mo for 6 users.
9.Google Analytics to Maintain Website
Google Analytics is a gift tool for you that can help you to track the traffic coming on to your website. It allows you to identify your traffic’s country/language/average session/bounce rate/operating system and many more. Using google analytics can help you to identify why you are losing customers and can help to fix it to enhance your customer engagement, user experience and bring more traffic.
Moreover, it will assist you with digital marketing campaigns and collect various data through it for monitoring online marketing growth.
Pricing: Google Analytics is free unless you exceed 5 million impressions/traffic per month.
- Crunchbase for Research
Crunchbase can be your research assistant. They have built an empire with data that lets you access any startup, investors, founders, business updates, business partners, accelerators through their web interface. Crunchbase will offer you features like advanced searching, customized lists, their previous history, their founders, a list of partners, personalized alerts, and CSV (Comma-Separated Values) exports. If you are a newbie in the startup ecosystem; you should study first. Study about other successful ventures, your competitors, or about investors.
Pricing: For basic research Crunchbase is free. Though if you want more data you have to pay.
To make any startup successful can be hard and challenging, and using various tools as per your need can save your time and money. These tools with basic features that come free or low cost can be your best resource in the initial days; can save your time, energy, money after launching your startup.
These amazing 10 Essential Free Tools for Startups can give a boost to your job. These tools can make things easier for you to manage your startup.