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 you 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.
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.
Cashflow Management
Its important to be on top of your books in every stage of business, 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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
Hotjar
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.
Are there other types of tools you’d like recommendations for? Let us know in the comments below! ✌️
