Every year many aspiring entrepreneurs decide to take the plunge and start a business. However, starting a business is not easy, especially if it’s a startup.
Out of the thousands of startups, only the creme de la creme manage to create a niche and become wildly successful. A lot of hustle, networking, resilience, and grit goes into making the startup a success.
You’ve got to learn how to multitask while keeping your costs low. Along with this, a startup demands things like fundraisers, marketers, web designers, and much more. As 62% of businesses in America do not have more than 5 employees, this means the founder ends up wearing multiple hats.
Thankfully, there is a large number of tools and software that can turn you into nothing less than a marketing pro or a financial wizard. Here’s our list of tools to get your startup off the ground in 2018:
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
If you’re working on a startup, you probably have your plate full with n number of tasks. Fortunately, there are plenty of project management software available, each with its own problem-solving features.
ProofHub
It’s much easier to keep your projects on track when your team is collaborating on ProofHub. You can create tasks, assign them to multiple team members, and manage deadlines with absolute ease. It offers a neat and easy-to-use interface that enables you to see at a glance who’s working on what and the status of the assigned tasks. And, the super-handy mobile app lets you carry all your work in your pocket.
FUNDRAISING & CAPITAL
Do you know that 67.2% of entrepreneurs use their personal savings to fund their startups? Luckily, there are some ‘angel’ tools out there that can help you crowdsource and get some angel investors for your startup.
Foundersuite
Foundersuite is a great tool to search and find investors from a giant pool of 50k investors. Time and again, it has proven to be really effective for entrepreneurs as it offers a wide range of features to get instant feedback on their idea and track their fundraising efforts. Looking at the figures, Foundersuite has helped more than 10,000 startups to raise money and make it big.
AngelList
A place where the world meets startups – that’s how AngelList likes to describe itself. To sum it up, it is a website for startups, angel investors and job-seekers looking to work for a startup. According to TechCrunch reports, “AngelList, the online platform that has made itself indispensable to early-stage startups for fundraising and recruiting, said it closed out last year having raised $163 million online on behalf of 441 companies.” Well, the numbers speak for themselves.
KNOW-HOW TOOLS
With so much to do in a day’s job, it can be quite a challenge to keep everything happening in the startup scene. No need to worry, as there are many services that can be of help.
Google Primer
It’s a free app that offers interactive business, digital marketing, and entrepreneurial lessons whenever you have five minutes of free time. They cover the most relevant topics such as Tips for building a successful website, How to create a high-ranking search ad and more that can help you learn the latest business and marketing skills and get an edge over others.
Startup Launch List
Startup Launch List is an online service that provides you a list of mandatory articles you must read before launching a startup. The best part is that you get to read these topics written by accomplished individuals who are popular founders, designers, investors, and thought leaders in the world of startups. And, who doesn’t mind a free advice, if it’s coming straight from the best in the industry?
WEBSITE AND DESIGN
One of the best ways to allure customers and potential investors is by having a visually compelling website to your name. Below are two tools that can come to your aid.
Contentlook
Contentlook is a perfect tool that helps you market your content better by optimizing your website so that you can drive more traffic and increase user engagement. It offers a plenty of filters to choose from: Social Media shares, Optimization Score (SEO), User Engagement metrics etc.
With the power to optimize your content and drive more traffic, it can turn your website into a lead-generation machine.
Canva
There’s a multitude of web-designing tools out there in the market, however, Canva seems to be most intuitive and easy-and-to-use. It has an enormous library of featured images, infographics, and visuals that can elevate the impact of your website’s content. All in all, it’s quite useful to create reports, business cards, and other professional documents – for free!
Every day, we see so many tools debuting, this list is just the tip of the iceberg. But I’m sure, these tools will definitely help you to manage your work or find your angel investor.
Till then keep hustling and take your startup to new heights this year with these amazing tools.
