Launching a startup is rewarding, terrifying, and exhausting all at once.
Trust me, I get it.
Startups need to move quickly to survive. And, do so with very limited resources—especially money and time—while wearing many different hats, without much training or experience.
It’s critical for founders to arm themselves with a toolset to navigate the turbulent path and remain as lean and efficient as possible.
These tools and resources below can help smooth out processes that can go awry, such as marketing, accounting, and team management.
Once you’ve worked out these core processes, you’ll be free to concentrate on growing your company — just remember us when you’re a millionaire!
Domains
Squadhelp.com
You can’t have a startup without a domain name.
Find the Perfect Name for a Company, by Squadhelp.com
These folks are disrupting the traditional agency model by allowing companies to engage with hundreds of naming experts.
Their platform combines crowdsourcing, AI, and gamification to help companies come up with high quality name ideas instantly.
In addition to comprehensive validation, they offer audience testing to ensure that names resonate with your target audience. There is also a curated collection of premium domains to purchase instantly.
Squadhelp has over 18,000 customers and 75,000 creatives, and was recently recognized by Inc Magazine as one of the six most innovative companies in the 2018 Inc 500 list.
Link: Squadhelp.com
Other similar tools:
Website Builders
Squarespace
Build yourself a beautiful online presence
Professional websites for online presence by Squarespace
Squarespace is ideal for creating professional websites.
It has the best quality designs and features on the market, and while it can take a little getting used to, the final results are worth your patience.
Stunning templates, beautiful customization, and quality features are all at your fingertips.
Link: squarespace.com
Other similar links:
Build Audience
BetaList
Start building your audience before you start building your product
Build Your Audience Before Launching With BetaList
BetaList is the place to list your startup before you publically launch it, or before you even start building it.
Submit for free and wait two months to be listed, or pull the trigger and spend $99 to get listed in just a couple of days.
If your service resonates with their (mostly) startup focused audience, you can get a ton of people on your potential customers list very quickly.
BetaList is the place for early adopters to discover upcoming and recently launched internet startups, and for startup founders to share their startup with the world and get early user feedback.
Link: betalist.com
Other similar tools:
Research
Want to stay up-to-date in the startup innovation game?
Take our short survey to find out what type of intellectual property is right for your startup!
BuzzSumo
Research what people want
Research and Know Your Audience with BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a great resource to find influencers within your niche or industry — you know, people who can really help give your project a social boost by talking about it to their large followings
Find them, flatter them, and do whatever it takes to put your startup in front of their audience.
It’s also a great content research tool built on top of a huge database of backlinks, shares, and popular posts. You can find the hottest articles in your industry niche, identify who liked and shared the content, and then use the insights to build successful content strategies.
Link: buzzsumo.com
Other similar tools:
Social Media
Talk to Your Facebook Audience with MobileMonkey
MobileMonkey is one of the best Facebook Messenger marketing chatbot platforms out there.
It allows marketers to create powerful chatbots, interact with their customers, segment their audience, grow their contact list, and drive conversions.
The possibilities are endless, and the potential is enormous.
It unlocks an entirely new marketing channel — one with sky-high conversion rates, insane engagement metrics, and massive payoff.
Plus, it’s free — so it’s a must-have tool for any entrepreneur or marketer.
Link: mobilemonkey.com
Buffer
Make your social media life better
Manage Your Social Media Presence with Buffer
If you’re posting articles or images to social media or simply want to schedule posts for later, Buffer is a great tool.
It’s a fantastic tool if you want to get more advanced and plug it into other tools to schedule events to your social media. For example, you can connect it to your Pocket via IFTTT so that you can publish relevant articles to your feeds super easily.
They also make it easy to set up and manage several social media profiles from within one account, allowing you to publish at the same time across multiple accounts.
Definitely worth the twelve bucks a month.
Link: buffer.com
Other similar tools:
Content Curation
Quuu
Put content curation on autopilot
Take Your Content Curation To A New Level with Quuu
Content curation makes you stand out from the masses on social media. It’s a way of providing value and consistency to your followers. However, doing it properly is a time consuming process, so automating your content creation by using Quu gives you more precious time to work on your business.
Quuu is a sensational tool that hand-curates content in over 500 interest categories, meaning you’ll always have relevant posts to share with your audience on social media.
Even better — Quuu integrates with your favorite scheduling tools, like Buffer!
Link: quuu.com
Other similar tools:
Stock Photos
Unplash
Images that won’t get you a cease and desist letter
Get Images That’ll Make a Lasting Impression with Unsplash
10 new stock photos every 10 days, big and gorgeous ones, that you can do whatever you want with — all thanks to a generous community of photographers.
If you want a good example of a site that has beautiful stock photos, check out Pixelarity and scroll down to their templates. Unsplash is a wildly popular template site for a reason.
With a huge library of photos and thousands more added each day, chances are they’ve got a photo for you.
Link: unsplash.com
Other similar tools:
Graphic Tools
CANVA
Easily create more visually appealing designs
Become Your Own Graphic Designer with Canva
Canva is a very a user-friendly design tool that makes it possible for businesses, marketers, bloggers, and other professionals to create eye-catching images without any graphic design experience.
This online design solution offers a wide array of features, including drag-and-drop design creation, quality photographs and illustrations, layouts, and fonts.
With this tool, users can take their ideas and turn them into a design that can then be printed, downloaded, or shared on social media.
It’s absolutely fantastic and worth a shot!
Link: canva.com
Other similar tools:
Content Capture
Find something, put it in your pocket
Save Your Favorite Content Pieces for Later with Pocket
Ever come across an article that you want to read, but not right now?
The Pocket plugin for your browser lets you easily save it to read later — on your iPad, or phone, or whatever. Plus, you can save information from any publisher — the latest news, magazine articles, stories, videos, recipes, web pages, how-to information… anything.
They’ve also done a really nice job creating a clean layout and customizable display for a relaxing reading experience that clears out the visual clutter, gives your eyes a rest, and lets your mind focus on the information at hand.
More interestingly, you can link your Pocket account via Zapier to your Buffer feed so that you can share all the articles you read with your audience.
Link: getpocket.com
Other similar tools:
Automation Tools
Zapier
Harness the power of automation to save yourself time and make processes happen on their own
Automate Your Processes and Save Time with Zapier
Born out of a Startup Weekend, Zapier connects a ton of APIs together, enabling you to connect all sorts of tools.
For example, make a new entry from Typeform, automatically turn into a Trello card in your sales funnel, or get notified in Slack when a customer unsubscribes so that your team knows to do an exit interview.
The possibilities are endless.
Link: zapier.com
Other similar tools:
Communication
Slack
Put collaboration at your fingertips
Make Remote Communication A Breeze with Slack
Slack is a meeting space, water-cooler, bulletin board, and phone-tree for your whole team!
It’s an app created as a way for organizations to communicate both as a group and in personal one-on-one discussions. You can communicate as a group through channels or privately via direct messaging.
It’s an awesome tool to help your team stay organized — especially when working remotely, like us here at KISSPatent!
Slack makes communicating easy and fun.
Link: slack.com
Other similar tools:
Video and Conference Calls
Zoom
A great video conferencing app.
Upgrade Your Video Conferences with Zoom
Zoom is designed for hosting webinars, teaching online courses, conducting online training, video demonstrations, virtual meetings, and video conferences.
It presents an easy to use online video conferencing and meeting software — helpful for small to medium businesses, enterprises, educational institutions, and healthcare organizations.
Offering high-quality video, audio, and screen-sharing capabilities and experiences, Zoom improves collaboration among teams, remote employees, and participants — they can start and join a meeting instantly with just one-touch of their mobile devices or browsers.
Link: zoom.us
Other similar tools:
SEO
Ahrefs
Search Engine Optimization is a powerful way to get traffic
Better Your Organic Traffic with AHrefs
When you’re focused on getting to the top of the first page for a certain search phrase, you know you’re trying to outrank competitors.
With Ahrefs, you can reverse engineer what they’ve done to get to the top of the results, then either duplicate it or do what they did but better, so that you can knock them down a notch and take over.
Ahrefs is a great all-inclusive tool for keyword research, backlink analysis, site audits, competitor research, and much more! Take advantage of their 7-day trial for $7 — it’s totally worth it.
Link: ahrefs.com
Other similar tools:
Hiring
AngelList
Need a hand? Hire someone on a short-term or long-term basis
Hire the Best Team with AngelList
AngelList is a platform that every startup needs to know. Not only does it help startups connect with potential investors, but it also helps them find experienced professionals who would be interested in working for them.
Unlike other job portals, on AngelList, professionals and startups require no middleman to connect with each other.
Created in 2010, the platform is on a mission to democratize the investment process and to help startups with their challenges in fundraising and finding talent.
Link: angel.co
Other similar tools:
Leads
Import.io
If you actively do sales, you always need more leads
Improve Your Sales Leads with Import.IO
Import.io is a scraping tool with a function called “magic,” which is an appropriate name because it operates like magic.
Show it a website, point to a bit of data, tell Import.io what you want to call that data, point to other data, and Import.io learns how to intelligently scrape and place all of that data into a CSV for you.
It can do it in batches too — huge batches. It will work better than your offshore virtual assistant. It’s impressive!
If you want to pull information off web pages in order to gather leads, this is the tool for you.
Link: import.io
Other similar tools:
CRMs
Hubspot CRM
CRM rules everything around — get the money!
Take Advantage of Hubspot’s FREE CRM
Why pay for a CRM when Hubspot is everything you need, and it’s free?
We absolutely love it! It has everything you need to organize, track, and nurture your leads and customers.
Hubspot makes staying organized effortless — you can manage your pipeline with total visibility, log every customer activity, see all the contact information in one place, and chat with prospects and customers in real time.
It’s a no-brainer.
Link: hubspot.com
Other similar tools:
Newslettering
Mailchimp
Your mailing list is your best friend
Keep Your Audience Up-To-Date with Mailchimp
To run a successful email marketing campaign and keep your audience updated about your company’s news and offers, you need an efficient newsletter service. This is where Mailchimp comes into the picture.
It probably needs no introduction in the tech world. The good news is: Mailchimp offers a free startup package with all of the basic features.
Moreover, Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform helping you build your brand, create integrated campaigns, and turn data into useful insights.
Link: mailchimp.com
Other similar tools:
Productivity
Trello
Work more collaboratively and get more done.
Upgrade Productivity with Trello
Most people know about Trello, a hugely popular organization tool based on the Japanese KANBAN model, in which you move a card from column to column.
You can use it to organize and record all the tools for your site, or keep track of all your development tasks and marketing ideas.
It also makes a great funnel for fundraising or sales — as you move a person from one column to the next as they go from cold lead to interested to closed, and so on.
Trello is a super flexible and useful tool and has ons of API integrations too.
Link: trello.com
ProofHUB
A fantastic project management tool
Perfect Your Project Management Skills with ProofHub
ProofHub is a cloud based project management and collaboration software built to simplify the way teams run, communicate on, track and report upon projects.
Their aim is to help teams to plan, collaborate, organize, and deliver their projects on time, and within budget.
Main features include workflow management, time-tracking, chat, project calendars, integrations, notifications, and more, to assist with project management.
Link: proofhub.com
Other similar tools:
Forms
Typeform
Capture and use valuable data from your site visitors
Create Professional, Beautifully Designed Surveys with TypeForm
Even if you’ve never set one up personally, you’ve probably used a survey to give feedback.
They’re gorgeous. Typeform simply creates elegant, dynamic forms that can change depending on what responses are given during the process of filling out the form.
And it works with Zapier, so you can take that data and send it to Slack or Mailchimp or wherever your heart desires.
Link: typeform.com
Other similar tools:
Writing
Hemingway App
To help you write more good and stuff
Write to New Heights with Hemingway’s Readability App
The Hemingway app works hard to make your writing easy to read.
It will highlight in yellow any sentence that is hard to read, and highlight in red any sentence that is so hard to read it should be reworked.
It will also tell you when you’re using passive voice, when there are suggestions for alternatives to the words you’re choosing, and what grade level you’re writing at.
By the way, this text is at a 7th-grade level.
Link: hemingwayapp.com
Other similar tools:
Draft
Password Management
LastPass
Auto-pilot for all your passwords
Protect and Organize Your Passwords with LastPass
Passwords can get really annoying.
LastPass stores and manages all your passwords. You can also give someone else access to an account temporarily by doing it via LastPass.
You can simplify online shopping, generate strong passwords, store digital records, and share effortlessly.
It’s free and you can take it anywhere! Save a password once and it’s instantly on all your devices.
Link: lastpass.com
Other similar tools:
Payment Solutions
Stripe Billing
Getting paid is crucial. Stripe makes it easy for that to happen.
Get Paid Easily with Stripe
Stripe’s new service, Stripe Billing, is a new take on recurring business models. They can manage invoicing the same way they manage online payments — in a smart, customer-friendly way.
Whether it’s a wire payment or ACH, Stripe can still identify the payment (and set up a virtual bank account for you to receive the payment). This allows businesses to bill customers according to the business and customer preference.
Plus, the pricing is great — free for the first million dollars, then 0.4% on top of their payment processing fee.
Focus on your product and customer experience and rely on Stripe to optimize and automate order flows, billing, invoicing, payments, and more.
Definitely worth taking a look at.
Link: stripe.com/billing
Other similar tools:
Wrapping up
We have curated this list after thorough research, and each name on the list has been selected after much care and consideration.
All of these tools and resources are beneficial for startups and small businesses alike. They can keep your operations seamless, easy and more efficient.
Your startup’s business success depends on using the right tools at the right time. It’s our hope that this list will help you in your efforts to build a successful business and bring you the success that you’re seeking.
Consider us your partner on your startup journey, and let us be your go-to resource for all things startups and innovation — no strings attached!
Browse through our Learning Hub for tons of useful articles, FAQs, and free ebooks!
There’s a wealth of information on there — like the Ultimate Guide to Launching your Startup or How to Make Money With Your Ideas as a Startup.
If you need anything or have any questions, please know you can always reach out to us. After all, that’s what we’re here for — to help you.
Wondering if your idea is patentable? Have a question about this article? We can answer all of your questions — just hit "contact us" down below!
