15 Essential Tools to Start Your Tech Startup in 2019
An amazing startup idea is great, but let’s face it, moving from an idea phase into a product takes a very long time. Luckily, in 2019 it is easier than ever to get your idea boosted into reality with a myriad of tools to help you get started and running.
As a solo tech entrepreneur who launched a business in 2018, I learned what works and what is essential.
The business I have built is completely bootstrapped and relies on lots of tools to automate every piece of the way, free-ing my time up for all the other roles I needed to take.
Without further ado, here is the essentials list.
Stripe — Payment
Stripe is a complete payments platform that developers love. Using Stripe, you will be able to receive payments from your customers in no time using pre-defined widgets. Stripe also provides Atlas: a tool that handles everything to launch an internet business.
FreshChat — Customer Engagement
Businesses do not want tools anymore, they want services that can help them grow along the way. FreshChat brings a modern chatting system for your customers on your website so they can reach out to you for help. You can also setup in-app and triggered campaigns based on what your customers did or have seen.
MailChimp — Marketing E-mails
You need to keep interacting with your users. MailChimp makes it dead simple to send out marketing campaigns to your user base with their visual e-mail builder. You could also setup timed campaigns such as on-boarding campaigns. Their reports are very detailed, giving you all the measuring you need to understand your campaigns effectiveness.
Asana — Product Management
Asana helps you organise and manage your teams tasks. Track the tasks in swim lanes and assign them to your teammates. Contribute all together, attach files, comment, tag and prioritise.
Hootsuite — Social Media Management
You have to have visibility online. Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social media accounts in one dashboard. Schedule your updates, achievements, campaigns in one place, and have them delivered to all your social media accounts at once.
DeveloperHub.io — Documentation
Your customers need to know how to use your product, and their developers need to understand how to use its APIs. DeveloperHub.io hosts beautiful documentation for your product and APIs, providing a powerful editor for everyone in your team to collaborate on writing. DeveloperHub.io also hosts API References for software integrations documentation.
Metabase — Analytics
Measure, measure, measure!
Metabase allows you to connect your data sources and to answer questions about the data in a graphical tool. Create dashboards of these questions and have the answers be sent to you on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to keep tracking your experiments and successes.
Mailgun — Transactional E-mail
Most probably you will need to send out lots of e-mails to your users. Activation e-mails, reminder e-mails, user activity e-mails, congratulation e-mails… Any e-mail that needs to be sent by your software can be handled by Mailgun through a few lines of code. You can track the deliverability and opens through their dashboard.
Google Analytics — Analytics
The first tool that you must install on every page of your websites. Google Analytics helps you understand how your users are using your website, where is the traffic coming from, how long are they spending, which pages need enhancements… It’s a very powerful tool and a necessity.
For more transparency and granularity about the events happening in your website, you can use: Mixpanel or Amplitude.
G Suite — E-mail, Storage and Productivity Tools
We all know Google Mail, Calendar and Docs, but why G Suite specifically? Simply because it integrates with everything else. If you go for a free e-mail hosting service, then you will probably need to have separate e-mail and calendar apps. Using G Suite makes your life much simpler going forward, and it’s just £3.30/user/month.
Hunter — Find E-mail Addresses
There are two ways: Either go to LinkedIn and start looking for someone who works at the position you’re looking for in that company, reach out and wait for a connection, or… click on Hunter chrome extension button when you’re on that website and find the e-mail directly.
This tool saves so much time when you’re trying to reach out to your target customers.
HubSpot — Inbound Marketing and Sales
HubSpot monitors the entire customer’s journey. It integrates with your Gmail (again why you should use Gmail) and provides you with up-to-date information about your sales pipeline. You can create e-mail templates to send out to target and prospect customers right from Gmail. It’s a complete platform for inbound marketing and sales.
hotjar — Understanding Customers
hotjar is a magical tool that records your users’ visits and collects insights about how they click, scroll and move around on your website. It provides reports in heatmap views allowing you to visualise your users interactions. Use hotjar to find which content needs to be enhanced, create conversion funnels and track conversions.
GitLab — GIT-Hosting
GitLab is a superior service for hosting your code GIT repositories. Its interface is super easy to use and fast while also being powerful. They also provide wiki, issue-tracking and CI/CD pipeline features.
Sentry — Error Tracking
Let’s face it, errors will happen. Make sure to capture these errors in real-time with Sentry to make sure your customers are always happy. The integration is very easy, just a few lines, and it is supported by many frameworks. You can add user identifiers to errors to notify them of error resolution status.
Have you got anything else on mind? Let us know in the comments section!
