Running a business is never easy. Starting a business from scratch is even more difficult (although quite rewarding). While running a startup you’ve got so many things on your plate at once that it’s easy to become exhausted, and get off track. One of the ways to avoid getting off track is by using the right tools; no one ever won a battle with bare hands. If you want to be a success, and get a second look from users and investors, then consider enlisting the help of some of these tools for entrepreneurs.
The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today. – Elbert Hubbard
1. Unroll.me: This free digital service presents you with a list of all the newsletters you’re signed up for, and then allows you to either delete a subscription forever or “rollup” (daily list of subscription emails). Why fight subscriptions, if someone is willing to help?
2. Boomerang: Schedule emails to send later, get email reminders and track their status. The more you know about your emails, the more success you’ll have sending and getting results in the future.
3. Rapportive: Know who you’re emailing – and put a face to it. With this Chrome add-on, you get LinkedIn profiles for correspondents inside of your gmail. Start personalizing emails today.
4. Inky: Wouldn’t it be fantastic to have one interface for all of your email accounts, organized by categories? That thought has now become a reality. Features: Instant search by keyword, contact, or even tags via the # lets you find what you need fast! Do more in less time on email.
5. Bluemail: Too many messages in your inbox? The Gmail app lookalike, has sweet feature for the swipers among us. Swipe left on any message and you’ll get two options: Done and Delete. The latter is self-explanatory, while the former puts a check-mark on the mail, so you know that you have addressed whatever needs to be addressed. Why not turn your inbox into a to-do list? Organization is the mother of productivity.
6. Sidekick by Hubspot: This is quite the tool for anyone that likes Rapportive and Yesware. With this tool you can see a contact’s title, company, social profiles, and more: professional history, where they live, mutual contacts, and email history.
7. Yesware: Email tracking and analytics – Check the status of each tracked message, schedule emails, know who opens and clicks on your emails, set reminders, and know if an email has been opened on a desktop or mobile device.
Newsletters
8. MailChimp: The leader when it comes to sending newsletters, and stands out from the crowd with its unified subscriber profiles, so you know who the special people behind all the clicks are. Combine that with the intelligence of their analytics and “best time to send” information, Mailchimp becomes one tool you’ve got to consider to email the masses.
9. GetResponse: If analytics are important to you (as they should be) then this is another great option. You can calculate email open rate, click rates, unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, set campaign goals and understand a handful of other information about your community and emailing results. Unlike other options for email, you can use a “drag and drop” editor for creating beautiful looking emails.
10. Campaign Monitor: Simple, beautiful, fast, and social. Is it possible that this is the best kept secret in email marketing?
Sales
11. LoyalBlocks: Automatic punch cards in an app. Every business can create their own loyalty club, and creates a new way to stay in touch with customers and keep them coming back. Automatic check in? Yes, please. LoyalBlocks is the ultimate loyalty-marketing tool for brick and mortar businesses. Available worldwide, it’s the first ever fully automatic check-in experience specifically tailored for their customers. (Mentioned in: 10 Israeli Startups to Watch in 2015)
12. Salesforce: The undisputed champ of sales’ CRM has a plethora of products to boost sales and business altogether: access to data.com, desk.com, a marketing cloud, Pardot for marketing automation, and more features make it a step above the rest.
13. ToutApp: This is an email-sales tool. First and foremost, know that there is Salesforce integration. They have created a complete tool for management and analytics to help Sales and Business Development professionals manage, track and gain insights from their day to day emails. Create sales emails and email campaigns – ToutApp lets you create and execute single or mass email campaigns from within the dashboard. The ToutApp integrates with your email client and tracks exactly when an email was opened, the clicks, the attachments and even when a presentation was opened and for how long.
14. Outreach: Think of this as your CRM for emailing and closing deals. With it you can schedule emails, detect out of the office replies and pause until the person is back in office, detect replies from email a colleague, who replies after being forwarded your message from the original prospect, and more.
Social Media
15. Facebook Page Manager: Even with all the algorithm changes and the decrease in organic reach, being on top of your Facebook page is a must.
16. Buffer: We for one, prefer manually conducting our social media updates and interacting with the community. However, there is no doubt that if you are going to automate on various social media networks then there is no substitute for this easy to use tool that’ll save you loads of time while keeping you in your community’s eyes. (*check out their awesome blog*)
17. Hootsuite: Even with Buffer available, this is our preferred tool for Twitter automation updates.
18. Meshfire: We all know that Twitter can be difficult to manage with the information overload we get in real time. With Meshfire, you’ll be spending less time on Twitter, and only deal with tweets that actually matter to you and your team. Meshfire’s Ember is the tool that will deliver relevant content and give you info. regarding your own tweets.
Meshfire Infographic
19. Sniply: Want to increase social media ROI? When you’re sharing content, use Sniply to add a call-to-action to the page itself. Here are some common CTAs: visit website, download app, buy now, signup for newsletter, register for event, etc. Obviously in the age of data, you’ve got a great dashboard to check out clicks and conversions.
20. Famebit: The number 2 search engine is YouTube, so start maximizing it’s core – the YouTube movie stars that get more views than all of us. Fambit lets you collaborate with the authorities of Youtube and let the masses do the work for you.
21. Followerwonk: This nifty dashboard is your Salesforce for Twitter growth with greater analytics on what your Twitter community is comprised of by showing you who the followers are, where they are from, when they tweet, and in addition you can compare your social graphs with those of others. Keep your enemies close.
22. Newswhip.com: By using data from social shares, comments, and more, they’re able to track and then bring to you the content that is going to engage your community right now. Via Spike (the content discovery platform) marketing managers can instantly know which articles, videos, and other content are trending now – real time (claimed to be capable of predicting what will matter in the future too).
23. TalkWalker: If you’re expanding globally then this is the dashboard that you need to track and understand your social presence – it displays a world map of stats and info for each country/area, and is focused on sentiment. Then you get real-time results for your keyword, and understand everything in their simple and incredible dashboard displaying 4 crucial elements: potential reach,buzz, engagement, and sentiment.
24. SocialRank: Is Twitter your Achilles heel? ROI on Twitter not high enough? SocialRank is a simple tool that makes it easy to organize and manage followers. With the release of their new toy, “SocialRank Index”, that will aid companies in discovering what is or isn’t working on Twitter, through analysis of different data (not followers and engagements on tweets) that they think measure how a company stacks up against the competition, and all the rest.
Productivity (THROUGH THE ROOF)
25. Zapier: If there is a tool for entrepreneurs that is a “must have”, this may be it. Your apps allow you to be successful – but what about having them work together? Zappier’s “Zap” allows you to integrate apps to work together without having to code. The apps do even more work for you now – they talk to each other.
Timing
26. RescueTime: Feel like you get off of pace at work too often? RescueTime helps you understand your daily habits so you can be more productive. The software runs in the background of your computer, tracks the amount of time you spend on X and Y, and reports to you. To top if off, once you’ve seen results (or before) you can block the sites that damage your productivity.
27. Toggl: Write your task down and then track how long you take to complete the task. How long do you do email? How long do you spend interacting on social media? Know what type of activities take up your time by adding the tags you want and thankfully works when you are on and offline.
Focus
28. Focus@will: It’s all about the right music. You may think the music you are listening to is helping you, but you are more than likely incorrect and wasting time skipping to a different song every few minutes. This is music optimized to boost your concentration and focus.
29. Focusbooster: This is an alternative to focus@will that helps you do more in less time by analyzing the amount of time each task takes, only with this tool it is just you – without headphones.
30. Stayfocused: Tired of friends and family bothering you at work? Can’t turn off your phone because you are waiting for a specific call? This is your app. Stayfocused lets you turn off whatever app you want whenever you want, block calls, but make exception, set blocks by days of the week or choose to block for a set timed period
31. Anti-social: As the name suggest, this add-on is for those of us that spend 15 minutes on Facebook instead of 5. Block it out and all the other distractions.
Notes
32. Evernote: What makes it so special? It’s not just for taking notes rather a full-on workspace that enables you to write – not just notes – collect all of your favorite or most important links, images, and other collections in one place, and present your work at the next meeting w/out creating slides. No need for dozens of different apps – everything at once with Evernote.
33. SoundNote: The app tracks what you type and draw while recording audio, so you’ll never worry about missing an important detail.
To-Do
34. Wunderlist: The “to-do list, that keeps everyone connected”. The app for those that make more and more and more lists – and now it’s with you always and keep in touch with everyone that has something to do with the list.
35. Todoist: From personal experience, the reason to use it to control and complete your tasks are two-fold: one, reminders in my toolbar so I always know what needs to be done, and two, daily reminder at the time I want to know what needs to be done.
36. Any.do: For those that want more than just the old-fashioned “list” app, this is for you, and this is the CRM for your priorities. If you need something for a team to communicate tasks this is one app to try.
37. Carrot: Want to have fund and turn your to-do’s into a game? Finally someone stepped up so you can feel rewarded (if that was missing before) for finishing up your chores and projects. This is a great choice for personal use, and it’ll be on my phone when it hits Android.
38. HabitRPG: Now, success and failures have rewards/repercussions, and aside from moving up and down levels and earning points, now to-do lists are social so even your community knows if you were lazy today.
39. Teuxdeux: Create your “to-dos” on your computer, and then take them on the road. With this tool, you can create tasks that need to be carried out on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis without having to write it down each time, and thankfully you can bold & add links to your tasks.
Teamwork
40. Slack: Teamwork at its best, by actually (really) changing the way teams communicate. Forget emails. Forget Whatsapp groups. Slack let’s you do all the communicating in once place – with different channels, drop and drag document sharing, integration with DropBox, Asana, Papertrail, Soundcloud, BuildBox, and it does not matter if you’re on the go on your phone or on the computer.
41. Trello: This is the flashcard tool for team communication and to-dos. With Trello you can see all the conversations in one place in an organized manner so you never lose track of an important conversation. The power: post comments for instant feedback, upload files from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive, and add checklists, labels, due dates, and more.
42. Yammer: Yes Facebook just released “Facebook for Work”, but Yammer is still the go-to tool for enterprise social media. With Yammer, you’re always connected to coworkers, information and conversations. Tap into your network to find exactly what you need and discover things you didn’t know to quickly make decisions, get work done and keep moving.
43. Producteev: Now turn discussions into action the minute a decision’s made and then quickly create team projects, assign/schedule tasks, and track progress so nothing falls through the cracks. This is where your most important meetings take place, so everyone can keep doing what needs to be done without having to stop and meet every second.
44. Asana: Do we really need to explain?
45. Sandglaz: Got a small team? Need something simple? See what has been done, what needs to be done (in what order), assign tasks with @, and categorize with the good-old #. Obviously you can attach files, work off-line, and on the go with the mobile.
46. Wrike: Named a 2014 “Cool Vendor” in Social Software and Collaboration by Gartner, it is your company’s “virtual workspace”, and with it you can instantly: assign tasks, remind and update team members what’s going on, and communicate with your team on where things stand. AND, it integrates with Gmail, Apple Mail, GitHub, DropBox, Box, SalesForce, Zapier, Evernote, Slack, Zendesk, HubSpot, and so much more.
Marketing
47. Hubspot: As part of their awesome marketing platform, you’ll have a great analytics dashboard to always increase the ROI on all of your marketing tactics: blogging with more leads, unlimited CTAs, landing pages and the rest of the marketing gang.
48. MOZ: Is google annoying you? Moz, or otherwise known as SEO Moz, offers a few handy features that are sure to make your site and online presence more attractive to Google with their state of the art SEO tools. The addition of Followerwonk is an added bonus for using Moz and creating a better Twitter ROI.
49. Raventools: A bit of a mix of a few of the features from Hubspot and Moz, this is a much simpler, yet quite efficient full-house marketing solution tool for smaller companies. The Raventools solution offers you benefits that should improve content marketing, social media presence, SEO, and PPC efforts (that can be quite exasperating).
50. Wishpond: Create landing pages with just drag & drop, retarget everyone that leaves you without converting a CTA, and manage all leads and current users without needing to open new accounts. Everything is integratable with the top newsletter provdiers, from MailChimp, GetResponse, SalesForce, AWeber, and more!
51. Vuture: Easily create and send video messages for anything. No matter the occasion, you can easily create your own video on the go, and then have it delivered at the exact time and date. This is automation messaging for videos.
52. Unbounce: Not getting the right results from your landing pages. Meet the product that changes your lead chasing work: build mobile responsive landing pages – that convert – in hours. With growth hacking at the forefront of startup growth, creating a unique and successful landing page is a must.
Analytics
53. Kissmetrics: If data is important to you, and need to know exactly who is visiting your site, then with this metrics tool you can With real data on real people, you’ll have better insights on how to optimize your marketing machine. Better insights give you better decisions and more optimization. KISS looks at the data that actually impacts your revenues – how customers interact with the site.
54. Google Analytics: What, you don’t know what this is? Where are you living?
55. Clicky: Noticed the lags with Google Analytics? Getclicky is the real realtime analytics tool to enable you – the people – the capability to know what is going on in your domain at any given time with the most up-to-date data. It is 2015, is there really a reason to lag?
56. Mixpanel: Take a different view on analytics – actions. Instead of using a tool that shows “visitation statistics”, this one focuses on “actions”, as in what are people doing on your site. The focus is on dividing your visitors into groups and analyzing what actions were taken within each group. Visits are great if you are a blogger. Actions are what’s needed when you’ve got a product.
Presentations/Pitches
57. Haickudeck: If your focus is on your images, then this could be your “Instagram for presentations” for engaging presentations (that may carry less information). All in all, in an age in which our attention span keeps shrinking and we love images, this is a great tool to use from time to time.
58. Emaze: A relatively new comer to the game, their presentation software offers tons of different templates that don’t look like something from the 90s, rather they actually look good and engage your viewers without you having to code-in extras. From what we’ve seen, they’ve got some slick looking templates.
Take a peek.
59. Powtoons: Animated videos getting your attention? Then this is the tool for you. Anyone with a bit of an imagination can create an attention grabbing, and high quality animated video in an hour or two.
60. Prezi: Storytelling and presentations come together with Prezi to make your viewers fell part of the process as they get “sucked” into the process. If you want something different, and plan on using less than 8 slides then keep Prezi in mind.
61. Slideshare: Social media for presentations has got to be a must. Create your presentations, download them (if you used one of the other tools), and then upload all your presentations to your online profile at Slideshare (connectable to LinkedIn).
62. Pitchenvy: If you need to make a pitch, and need a few ideas during the brainstorming phase, then this is the spot for you with its collection of startup pitches. Unfortunately it has not been updated in a while…
Images
63. Canva: Don’t know how to use Photoshop? Tired of the same stock photos? If so, then Canva was created just for you. The best part is that you don’t need to size the images down for social media. With Canva, pick where you plan on sharing, and only after start creating.
64. PicMonkey: This is a tool that is often used to edit/touch-up your images, although you can do more. Why just share a stock photo, if you can play around with it before hand by adding borders and text?
65. Flickr: Obviously
66. 500px: Tired of finding the same stock photos that don’t really inspire? 500px is a photo community for discovering, sharing, buying and selling inspiring photography powered by creative people worldwide.
67. Wordswag: Creating text based graphics just got so simple!
Events
68. Meetup: The biggest database of events on the web, with Meetup you can join colleagues and friends in an event, journey, or conference. Got an interest? Want to meet different types of users of your product? Go interact in a natural atmosphere.
69. Eventbrite: Similar to Meetup, this is a great place to find more formal events and conferences that are not weekly events from your close community.
PR
70. HARO: Don’t have money to pay a certain news outlet to create some initial traction? Don’t fret, with Help A Reporter Out, you may not land on one of the more popular sites (although possible), but if you’ve got a good story someone will tell it.
71. JustReachOut: Need more love from the press? Help the press help you by using their tool. If Mashable were to reach out to you, wouldn’t you be happy? It can happen when you work with this stuff. Reaching out to a reporter/journalist just become efficient.
Business Plan
72. Canvanizer: This tool serves as the visual representation for analysis and further development of Business Models at all stages of the business model life cycle. Here’s a full list of features.
73. Live Plan: By using their service, creating a business plan isn’t a head ache any more. Not sure what you need in your business plan? No problem. LivePlan is packed with easy-to-follow instructions, helpful advice, and over 500 sample business plans to help you along the way. LivePlan ensures that your plan follows the format that banks and investors expect. The feature that we fell in love with (because it goes beyond expectations): quickly and easily build a one-page infographic that visually represents your business opportunity.
Legal
74. Adobe Echo Sign: A bit different from the above, with Adobe’s tool you send the documents, get them signed (in the browser of your choice), track, and then archive the doc. for later on.
75. SignNow: One of the unique features it offers is “Kiosk mode”, which basically allows customers to physically sign the document, without being able to actually open anything else on your device. Added bonuses to using this to replace sending off hard copies, is the integration to SalesForce, Office 365, Google Apps, and their API.
76. Docracy: Docracy is an online, opensource hub for quality legal documents like contracts, NDAs, wills, trusts and more that enables startups/individuals to take their legal documents and compare them against trusted and used documents on Docracy. See what’s the same and what’s missing from your docum
77. HelloSign: With their embedded signing option, users can sign legal documents in a secure iframe while staying on your site. The best part is that only you need to sign up at HelloSign – users don’t need accounts.
File Sharing
78. Dropbox: Share your files with everyone, whenever and wherever you are.
79. WeTransfer: Need to send big files? Problem solved.
80. Google Drive: Why use Microsoft Office for work you are going to share in any case? Work on the cloud, hassle free, and be just as productive as the old and weak Mic. Office.
81. Onehub: Other than being able to upload, organize, access, and share files, with this platform you can also edit, preview, and communicate while working, as it integrates with other tools (such as Google Docs). One of the more genius features added is that you can manage who is able to edit what in your docs, so each one does what is expected of him, and communication is added to finish-off the project.
82. Dropcanvas: A simple drag-and-drop interface to upload your files and generate a short-link for collaboration (no registration required), with share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. It’s the minimalist tool for file sharing.
83. Box:
Everything Else
84. 1Password: Now you can have the security you need in today’s online world without slowing you down. With their tool, you don’t have to constantly open docs and apps to find passwords. Be more productive while simultaneously increasing your security with strong, unique passwords for all your accounts (that they help create) and keeps all of your important information encrypted.
85. Intercom.io: Intercom is a straightforward platform that saves you precious time when it comes to interacting and knowing who your customers are. The cool thing is that you can see what users are doing inside your apps, so you can help them when they have the issue – and not after when you’ve gotten a bad rep (and you don’t have to sit and look at the screen to see when a message needs to be sent…it’s all about automation).
86. & 87. CamScanner and Scannable (Evernote): Stopping taking pictures of documents with your phone, and start scanning them like you would with an actual scanner.
88. Fundbox: Business owners now have a simple way to fix their cash flow. Fundbox advances payments for outstanding invoices, and then the recipient has up to 12 weeks to return the funds. Is it a loan? They say no. If it is, it’s one with no-hassle (see: 10 Israeli Startups to Watch in 2015).
Prototyping and Mock-ups
89. Balsamiq: Balsamiq Mockups is a rapid wireframing tool that helps you work faster and smarter. It reproduces the experience of sketching on a whiteboard, but using a computer, so no need to scan and email to the team. The project management tool for creating mock-ups. Their UI Library is filled with tons of UI elements, so all you’ve got to do is drag and drop.
90. Lucidchart: Making it easy to sketch and share professional diagrams is their game. Do everything from brainstorming to project management with the entire team together at the same time, from any device. As they say, “diagrams done right”.
91. Quick MVP: Got a minimum viable product, or in other words something you can present to potential users (maybe a prototype, very early beta version)? With the platform you can get invaluable feedback with a very quick landing page – that still catches the visitors ‘attention. Once you’ve got something to show, a Google Adwords campaign is set up in a jiffy, and then get validation – to know if or how to launch your product.
Did you enjoy our list of tools for entrepreneurs? We did not cover them all, and we are sure you’ve got a tool we missed, so share it with us all.
