The success of your startup largely depends upon your ability to make use of the available resources in the most effective manner. With advancement in the technology, we have witnessed an enormous growth in the amount of tools and widgets that are designed specifically to assist entrepreneurs to expand their businesses.
While you can find a lot of tools – free and paid, to build your expertise in a particular domain, picking up the most effective ones can be quite tricky.
Earlier this month, we covered a list of top project management tools that can help modern PMs in timely and effective project deliveries. Today, I’m bringing in some promising business tools that can help in team management, productivity enhancement, idea testing, and marketing communication management.
Here’s a list of 7 business apps that can help you manage and grow your startup business in different domains.
1. MailChimp
MailChimp needs no introduction – it offers one of the cheapest ways to market your product or service. We know the importance of engaging our audience at different touch-points (from lead generation perspective), and nothing can do it better than email. However, you cannot manage emails from a simple email solution like email services by Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
In this regards, dedicated email marketing solutions like MailChimp are a great source of help. They allow you to design a custom template, build up email lists, send email drips and analyze the campaign’s performance against set metrics.
The best news is that MailChimp starts out free and you’re required to pay only when you’ve reached a particular scale. So you can get started for free.
2. GoCo
Startups are short of funds to hire specialists for each domain – human resource management is no exception. If you’re facing a similar HR and process management GoCo is the perfect remedy for you.
It is a free all-in-one HR platform that streamlines all of your important business operations in one place. From onboarding services to HR compliance and benefit programs, GoCo system has got every touch points covered.
Think of any operations system, like GoCo, as the foundation for growth for your business. You need a base that can support you as you aim for rapid expansion. With a strong foundation, you will be able to support all of your employee’s internal and external needs from one place.
It will make growing your company just about growing your company, no longer about dealing with paperwork and little employee problems.
3. QuickMVP
As a startup business, you come across a wide range of ideas – but not every idea is practical or feasible. With QuickMVP, you can test any business idea within minutes. Using this, you can build landing pages (even when you don’t know how to code) and manage Google Ads.
The ultimate objective is to seek real-customers’ response to your product idea before you actually work on it – and invest time/money into it. QuickMVP is a paid tool and will cost you $29.99/month
4. Slack
Dubbed as the most reliable team communication platform, Slack is an essential part of the modern enterprise communication. The app allows teams to have text, voice and video communications. In addition to the standard messaging features, it offers integration with other tools like Google Drive, Trello and others. You can manage your projects from within the app, ask the relevant resource to work on a particular document or task.
Using Slack, you can create channels (for projects/tasks) and add team members to it, who can communicate in it. This way, all project related communication comes under one umbrella and all relevant stakeholders are informed on-time. You can dub Slack as an improved version of Skype that offers a rich set of experiences – and above all, it’s free to use.
5. MOZ
Rand Fishkin needs no introduction – he is truly the SEO wizard and one of the leading authorities on digital marketing. He founded MOZ – a platform that helps modern marketers in building and managing a wide range of inbound marketing campaigns. You get deep analytics of your website and campaigns’ performances – and as a result, make informed business decisions.
MOZ also facilitates your market research and intelligence drives. It enables you to spy on the competitors’ latest campaigns so that you could get ready in advance before any negative fallouts on your business.
Just remember, it’s a paid tool but you get a free trial as well.
6. Product Hunt
One of the hardest parts about growing your business is reaching an audience to support your product. The internet is extremely competitive, which makes it hard to stand out. One thing you can do to help get some exposure is “hunt,” also known as submit, your product or business to Product Hunt.
Basically, it’s a site that curates the best new parts of technology every single day. It is a community-driven system that attracts tons of visitors to check out new products. You can leverage their audience by launching on their site. If you are able to communicate your business effectively, you’ll be able to gain loads of new customers and users — all in just 24 hours.
7. Hello Bars
It is one thing to get customers to your site, but it’s often a whole different challenge to keep them. The best solution I’ve found for conversion is to use a lead capture service like Hello Bar. Hello Bars shows the right message at just the right time for your website visitors.
You can completely customize the program to help you get more email addresses with exit intent pop-ups or use it to A/B test website designs. It is a great tool to help you start growing your following and spread your services.
There are a variety of free and paid tools that can help small businesses in enhancing their productivity and achieving business goals fast. Hopefully, the listed apps can help you manage your business challenges in an effective manner.
IQVIS Startup Offer:
If you are a startup and facing some product engineering or growth challenge, get in touch with Startup consultants. We offer an on-demand, FREE and non-obligatory consultancy session, where you meet with our team of engineers and strategists to discuss your engineering or business problems.
