Any startup is not magic although it is the most popular word these days. Startup is a collaboration of a lot of smart hard work in a tight time frame towards a common goal. It may be by a person or a group of people. Either way, it requires a set of online solutions to make it professional, fail-proof, and at par with competitors. Even though the success of a startup cannot be guaranteed but an attempt can be made to do it the right way with the help of the right tools, avoiding time-wasters, and keeping the data safe in all prospects. Below are some of the best tools for startups to achieve success in their endeavor at different stages.
Team Hiring – Zoho Recruit
For any startup, the most important thing is “the idea” and the second is a “reliable team”. Hiring a good team is the building block of any business. Today, amongst various recruiting solutions available in the market, Zoho Recruit is an all-in-one recruiting software tool. Zoho recruit comes loaded with various other features like resume management, workflow management, advanced analytics, candidate sourcing, and easy integration with other related platforms. Once, your business picks up the pace, you can always upgrade it to a better ZOHO plan with added features. You can post multiple job options on various social media. The new AI feature of ZOHO recruit allows you to select perfect candidates by carrying out the mapping of their capabilities, knowledge and qualities. It’s highly recommended for startups to use the ZOHO recruit for a great start.
Communication – Slack
Slack is one of the leading app for team communication and collaboration with multiple features like instant messaging, file sharing, audio/video calls, powerful search, and the largest number of integrations amongst its competitors. It has a great design and user interface. Loaded with multiple features and customizable workspace Slack has become the choice for startups. Its ability to work both on android and iOs has increased the number of users.
Design Solution – Crello
When it comes to designing and creating, many startups face problems as “Geeks” may not always be creative. Designing is important from the presentation and marketing point of view. You have a great idea and solution but if you are not able to click with the users or impress them with interface n all, no use. Crello is an incredible app designed to meet your design needs. You can create images and media accompanying social media posts, blog posts, etc. It includes thousands of templates for social media posts, flyers, and even business cards. You can easily create videos for social media stories or posts with great video templates. The new Advanced subscription also gives you 5 paid stock photos (from DepositPhotos) per month, which for startups is worth the price. Overall, a great choice for startups to meet all their design related requirements.
Payment Solution – Paypal
Today PayPal is one of the most used payment solutions across businesses and that makes its integration with the lion’s share of the online solutions especially startups as the first choice. It offers a very basic and easy to use online payment or money transfer options with quick updates. It is highly secure with new technologies for encrypting data and offers barcode scanning, credit card reader, and express checkout. Its one-touch feature eliminates redundancy to accelerate sales and it works in all devices and operating system.
Marketing Solution – Hootsuit
The next step after developing a product or service is to market it and make its existence known to the target audience. Marketing solution basically covers two major types of marketing i.e email marketing and social media marketing. There are many such tools available in the market but so far Hootsuite is the best and also the most popular one. Hootsuite comes with excellent features to assist communicating with users and target audience over a wide range of social media platforms. It offers a secure, reliable dashboard for managing the social media calendar of your product/solution. Works on android and iOS and is easily manageable.
Finance management – Invoicetra
One of the biggest problems that startups face is mismanagement of finances. They either don’t streamline the payment process or ignore the whole thing giving it the least priority. As a result, this becomes one of the main reasons for failure. Invoicetra is one of the best tools for startups and is indeed an all in one invoicing and taxation solution which simplifies the whole payment process and that too for free. It is loaded with excellent features with respect to invoicing, expense management, GST/ TDS, and powerful reporting. It saves you a lot of time handling all your payment related issues thus enabling you to focus on revenue building. It has an incredible dashboard and user interface with a single click registration and login facility. Highly recommended for startups and freelancers.
Project Management – Monday.com
The majority of the startups have a team with well-defined roles. Startups generally struggle with lack of funds and even workplace hence, they ought to work remotely. This, inevitably raises a need for a powerful project management tool. Monday.com is a stable, cloud-based software that helps you manage your team and projects in one place. It has a color-coded board that is well organized and transparent thus enabling the team to easily track the progress of the project at various stages. It facilitates you to invite your clients as guests to check the project progress themselves. Multiple projects spanning over multiple days and multiple workloads can all be tracked at the same time with its timeline feature.
Productivity tool – G Suite
“Productivity tools” are the software that assists users in creating and designing documents, presentations, databases, graphs, and charts. For most of the web-based startups and freelancers, this tool is inevitable. And believe it or not, if your team does not use a common/compatible productivity tool for all the above-mentioned needs then you might end up wasting a lot of time in the formatting of the final documents. To avoid situations wherein your presentation stops just before the meeting or the document loaded from hard drive turns out to be in wrong format, you need to use a platform that is stable, secure, tested, and compatible with all devices. G-Suite comes with all these tools like doc, slide, sheets, and is one of the most popular tools in the market. It reduces the pain of learning one more software when you already have so much to do for a startup. It is easy, sharable, and dynamic with all basic features of its desktop counterpart.
Website Hosting – Bluehost
With the world going digital, there is hardly any business today without a website. Now, to extend the access to your website to everyone on the web, you need to host your website on the webserver. Bluehost is one of the best tools for startups for web hosting. It is not only fast and secure but also very easy to use. Because of the excellent features and comfortable pricing plans, it is today the top choice of freelancers and startups. It comes with integrated cloudflare support and various inbuilt security features like IPs, SSL, & SiteLock protection. The basic plan comes with 50GB storage space which meets most of the startup’s requirements and this can be easily upgraded to a higher version on a need basis.
Website CMS – WordPress
WordPress is a content management system which, being open-source, is free. In other words, it’s a simple platform for designing websites. Almost 40% of the total websites on the internet have been designed on WordPress. WordPress is very basic, flexible, offers user management, media management, and comes loaded with publishing tools which makes customizing professional websites very easy. It is bundled with various inbuilt themes and there are plugins for almost every type of website design need, be it a complex e-commerce website or a simple blog. There paid plugins as well to offer you even better design choices. It is easy to install, upgrade, and is available in over 70 languages.
Conclusion
Today, the internet is flooded with multiple solutions in various categories and it all depends on the mission and vision of a startup, which tools it wants to use as a starting platform. Above mentioned online solutions are some of the best tools for startups to start with, considering low funds and limited team members in the beginning. As and when they grow, they can always upgrade/switch to better plans available in these online solutions.