Starting a business is challenging; startups are constantly faced with financial, developmental and management challenges.
Luckily, there is an abundance of online tools designed to make life easier for startup founders by saving time, reducing costs, helping in marketing new products and guarding against legal or cybersecurity problems.
Many of these apps even offer a free basic version and scalable pay-as-you-go pricing plans that can grow with your company.
It is impossible to test every single startup app out there, but we have put together a list with some of the apps that rise to the very top in the must-have category.
1. Trello
Trello is a project management and collaboration tool based on the Kanban method.
The app allows you to organize and prioritize your projects with the help of boards, lists, and cards. To these you can add comments, attachments or due dates. It is very user-friendly and has straightforward, easy-to-understand features and functionality.
Trello stays in sync across all of your devices, so you can collaborate with your team no matter where you are. The app also offers a free version and integrates with many of the apps you already use.
2. eversign
eversign allows you to prepare, sign and manage contracts online from any device, without having to print or scan them.
eversign meets the most stringent eSignature security and authentication requirements, making your documents legally binding and enforceable in court.
You can choose to store completed documents on eversign's encrypted cloud infrastructure, schedule them to auto-expire, export them to a private location or permanently delete them from the eversign systems.
With eversign’s document audit trail you can keep track of every past and present transaction.
3. LastPass
LastPass helps your team save time by not having to interrupt their workflow to retrieve passwords from Excel sheets every time they need to log into an app.
LastPass lets you add all your passwords for various apps and websites to their vault and stores them in an encrypted system. You only need to log into LastPass and it will log you into everything else. The built-in password generator creates long, randomized passwords that protect against hacking.
With LastPass you can conveniently and safely share passwords with anyone. You can add and remove users, instantly block access and turn on basic security policies to control who has access to what.
The password app allows you to centrally manage authentication across the organization with visibility into every login. Thanks to the automatic sync, your team members will always have access to their passwords, no matter where they are working from or which device they are using.
4. invoicely
invoicely is an easy to use online invoicing tool that helps you create professional-looking invoices in less than a minute. You can easily add sales tax, shipping costs, and discounts to any invoice.
invoicely has multi-currency support and accepts online payments. The app also offers a free plan including unlimited invoices and clients, as well as many invoicing features and automations, such as automatic payment reminders, recurring invoices, automatic receipts and custom notifications. The paid plans offer advanced features like time, expenses and mileage tracking.
Using invoicely, you can stay on track with your finances with dynamically generated reports, monthly and yearly statements, income and expenditure summaries and accounts receivable and payable.
5. Template.net
Template.net offers a collection of over 100.000 beautifully designed, instantly downloadable templates for flyers, posters, certificates, postcards, invitations, banners, labels and many other.
You can easily edit these ready-made templates and save, share or print them according to your needs.
The templates are available in all file formats - Microsoft Word, Excel, Publisher, Apple Pages, Apple Numbers, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Google Docs & Sheets - and are 100% customisable.
6. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing platform that enables you to run email marketing campaigns and keep your audience updated about your offers.
The tool is easy to use, has free newsletter templates and customisable signup forms and allows you to track your performance with built-in reports.
Mailchimp offers a number of integrations, for example with platforms such as Salesforce, Magento, WordPress and Shopify.
MailChimp has a free startup package with all the basic features, which allows users to send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers monthly.
7. Evernote
Evernote is a sleek, easy to use task manager, word processor, design board and collaborative messenger.
The app allows you to create notes, which can be text, drawings, photographs, or saved web content. These notes are stored in notebooks and you can tag, annotate, edit, search and export them.
With Evernote you can stay in sync with your team members, no matter where they are and create and share notes and files in real time, so they always have the latest updates.
Evernote is free to use with monthly usage limits, and offers paid plans for expanded or lifted limits and extra features.
8. Hemingway editor
The Hemingway editor helps you write easy-to-read marketing texts and blogs, without stylistic errors.
You just need to copy your text into the editor and it will highlight all problematic areas, such as phrases that have simpler alternatives, too many uses of the passive voice or sentences that are too long and hard to read.
The Hemingway editor also shows the readability level of your text, the approximate reading time and the number of characters, sentences, paragraphs and words.
9. SEMRush
SEMRush is a Marketing SEO tool that allows you to see your website’s rankings and traffic insights. The app gives you a quick overview of what’s working on your website and where to optimize.
One of its most popular features is the domain versus domain analysis, with which you can easily compare your website to your competitors’.
The app’s analytics reports help you better understand your website’s search data and traffic. The SEO checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings as well as find recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance.
10. Brand24
Brand24 is a brand monitoring tool that helps you track the position of your brand across the web, find out what people think about your brand and be prompted to react in real-time.
The app notifies you each time someone mentions your brand. This way, if you get negative mentions on the web, you can immediately tune in and turn matters around.
With Brand24 you can analyze the number of mentions, likes, shares, and comments your brand is getting on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and various forums.
It also allows you to generate reports based on these results, export data, and create infographics.
The life of a startup founder can be very exciting, but also very challenging, so it’s important to find the best tools to make your business successful. You need to find not only the right tools but the right tools for your budget and skill set, that can grow together with your business and cater for its continually changing needs.