Even if 77% of start-up founders accepted that they came across potential failure in 2020 due to pandemic, 4.4 million new companies started operating in the same year. It shows that the shattered global economy has not yet impacted the number of growth opportunities in the market.
But, can you deny the challenges the idea of start-up brings along with venture capital? Before you dive into a business, gear up yourself with top feature-packed tools that answers demanding situations and perfectly balances your budget at the same time.
Here are the best tools for early-stage startups:
1- Xtensio (For Presentation)
Xtensio, a cloud-based platform is highly recommended for start-ups due to the fairly shallow learning curve that it offers. Even a user with little or no experience can effortlessly design on-brand documents in no time. The pool of free templates with a customization option lets you create beautiful presentations and documents to impress your customers and clients in the first meeting.
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Another option is to create a document all from scratch and combine its design capabilities. Next comes the collaboration features to streamline your workflow and increase productivity. Excellent customer support by Xtensio is an added advantage for beginners in the business.
Features:
- Provides hundreds of professionally designed templates for instant use and also allows you to create your own breath-taking templates.
- Enables you to create pitches, sales sheets, reports, case studies, agendas, and more.
- You can customize almost everything, with options like drag and drop, resize, and change backgrounds or colors. Also, you can add videos, images, tables, task lists, charts, and graphs.
- You can send a live, responsive web link, display a full-screen slideshow, and export a PDF or PNG file from one location.
- You and your team can collaborate to unify to get everything in one place or work privately if you need. You can follow your team’s progress weekly through stats.
Pricing:
The plans go as follows with yearly pricing:
- Free: The free plan is valid for one folio and one user only. You can upload up to 1MB and have access to all Xtensio templates and examples.
- Basic: The first paid plan costs $10/month/user. For every additional user, you have to pay $7/user. It allows 3 folio, unlimited users, and up to 2MB/image. It is perfect for teams willing to create and export a few key business docs.
- Plus: This plan costs $20/month/user and includes all features of the Basic plan. Besides, it allows 30 folios, 4MB/image, sharing and downloading privacy, collaboration features, and organizing and analyzing features.
- Full: The plan costs $30/month/user. You get everything in Plus and get unlimited folios and users. Other than this you get all the features except advanced admin features.
- Enterprise: This is the topmost plan that includes all the features and can be customized as per individual requirements. Hence, you need to contact the vendor to know the price.
2- GrowthBar (For SEO and Digital Marketing)
In recent times, GrowthBar has emerged as one of the most effective SEO tools, available at an affordable price for start-ups, bloggers, and marketers. It eliminates extensively advanced features, instead, it focuses on absolute vital metrics, such as site inspector and rank tracker. Such metrics provide a ton of useful data to boost your search rankings and attract more traffic.
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The tool differentiates itself from the rest of the old players in the market by offering two ways of using it. First, you can use it as any other standalone web app, and second, you also use it as a Chrome extension. This flexibility gives start-ups the flexibility to use the tool even when they are on the move.
Features
- It allows you to track your own keywords and have access to billions of keyword suggestions, keyword difficulty scores, and related long-tail keywords.
- The tool can display the organic keywords of any website. Also, you can see their Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and backlinks.
- It is the only one to utilize OpenAI GPT-3, which produces content outlines for your blog or website with word counts, keywords, headers, links, images, etc.
- Google Chrome Extension is available for free with your account.
Pricing
With GrowthBar, you get a free trial for 5 days. Here are the three plans at yearly pricing:
- Standard: The starting plan costs $29/month. It offers unlimited keyword research, Google Ads, backlinks, and Facebook data. Plus, track up to 25 keywords, get unlimited competitor traffic insights, unlimited Chrome Extension use, all for 1 website.
- Pro: The next plan costs $79/month. It includes everything in Standard and allows tracking up to 75 keywords, 15 AI-created content outlines/month, all for 3 websites.
- Agency: This plan costs $129/month, offering everything in pro. Plus you can Track up to 150 keywords and 30 AI-created content outlines/month for 10 websites.
3- Omnisend (For Creating Email Campaigns)
Omnisend is recognized as one of the best eCommerce marketing automation tools available in the market today. It is an industry leader in offering omnichannel marketing, lead generation, and automation to everyone, including solopreneurs to multinational companies. Hence, you can see a free plan offered along with brow-raising features that perfectly fit the needs of start-up businesses. For example, you can get email campaigns, sign-up forms, sales and performance reports, list segmentation, and customer analytics, free of cost.
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Omnisend incorporates an array of different in-built templates that beginners in the business like you with limited time can use to create personalized emails. The option to automate email sending and list segmentation is an added advantage.
Features
- You can pre-built automate emails for cart abandonment, welcome series, transactional emails, and more.
- You can segment your customers on the basis of their shopping behavior to create well-targeted, personalized emails and texts.
- It allows you to provide a consistent and omnichannel customer experience by adding SMS and other channels to your emails on the same platform.
- The tools integrate seamlessly with your SMS marketing campaigns and Facebook Messenger.
Pricing
Here are the Omnisend plans for 500 contacts at a monthly price.
- Free: Without paying you can get 15000 email sends/month. Plus, there are email campaigns, signup forms, sales and performance reports, segmentation and customer analytics, etc. included in the plan. It is a perfect plan for beginners.
- Standard: This plan costs $16/month. It includes everything in Free, plus marketing automation, pre-built workflows, SMS (International), A/B testing, and more. The plan suits those who want to automate their emails and start SMS marketing.
- Pro: This is an advance plan that costs $99/month. It includes everything in Standard, plus free SMS credits, web push notifications, audience sync for Facebook, audience sync for Google, advanced reporting, and more. This is an appropriate plan for mid to large-scale businesses.
- Enterprise: The topmost plan as the name suggests, it is for large scale business that needs advanced features. The plan can be customized as per individual needs and therefore pricing is not disclosed. You can get the price on call.
4- SlickPie (For Accounting)
SlickPie is among the very few accounting software products to be popular in such a short span of time. Launched in 2015, SlickPie soon attracted market attention by offering decent features, a well-designed user interface, access to unlimited users, and most importantly a free pricing plan. It has all the fundamental yet vital features that you need to handle your accounts, such as online invoicing and billing, bank reconciliation, financial reporting, expense tracking, etc. Indeed it is designed, keeping small businesses in mind.
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Features
- SlikPie supports multi-currency, provides quotes and estimates, manages sales tax, and allows source document upload.
- It incorporates many time-saving automation features, such as recurring invoices and automatic payment reminders to get payments quickly.
- It offers MagicBot, a built-in automated receipt data entry tool.
- You can find contact management, accounts payable, expense tracking, automatic data entry, and more.
Pricing
SlickPie has two straightforward plans as follows:
- Starter Free: The free plan is available for 10 companies and you get unlimited MagicBot-automated receipt data entry, plus all features of a paid plan.
- Pro: The only paid plan costs $39.95/month, which allows 50 companies and includes all the features of the Free plan, plus additional phone support that is not offered in the free plan.
5- Invoicely (For Invoicing)
Invoicely is a cloud-based, modern invoicing platform built to target small businesses and freelancers. It has been highly praised for its modern UI, simple setup, and ease of use. Sending and accepting payment invoices, and managing expenses are like a piece of cake.
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Beyond simplicity, the software goes one step ahead to offer advanced features like the support for multicurrency, multilingual invoicing, and time-saving invoice automation. The best part is its free plan that supports multiple businesses at no extra cost. In current times, possibly there is nothing better solution than Invoicely if you are looking for a clean, simple, and affordable invoicing solution.
Features
- It incorporates a fully-featured suite of customizable business reports and summaries to keep you updated with your progress.
- There are multiple payment gateways, including credit cards, and allows clients to pay from your invoice from any device.
- You get an option to track hourly billed tasks, expenses, and trips with super ease.
- The tool can convert all the expenses into elegant invoices or estimates in a single step.
- You can create recurring invoices, and send automatic payment reminders to your customers.
- It enables you to fully customize the statements, logos, icons, control panel pages, and log-in screens to fit individual design and color preferences.
Pricing
Invoicely offers three paid plans with a free plan, they go as follows:
- Free: With the free plan, you can generate 5 invoices per month to 3 clients in any currency. However, you can accept payments through PayPal only.
- Basic: The first paid plan costs $9.99/month. You can send100 invoices/month to 25 clients, allow 2 users, and accept online payments.
- Professional: This is an advanced plan that costs $19.99/month. It includes everything in Basic, plus allows up to 10 users, 250 invoices/month to 100 clients.
- Enterprise: The topmost plan comes at $29.99/month. It includes everything in Professional, plus allows you to send unlimited invoices to unlimited clients. Up to 25 users can access the tool.
6- Crowdsignal (For Creating A Survey Form)
Crowdsignal is a simple poll and survey tool, yet surprisingly powerful. Beginners in the business can find it relatively faster in creating surveys and polls for their website, blog, and social network profiles. If you want to go one step further to make your initial surveys interesting, you can create quizzes as well. Moreover, customization features are quite flexible. The built-in templates are customizable to match your new brand, website social networking profile, or email campaign.
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If you wish and have time for it, you can create your own templates too. Additionally, you can collect, organize, and analyze data from various sources like social media and mobile.
At a reasonable price, Crowdsignal offers plenty of features to satisfy the needs of any small business. A free plan with an unlimited number of surveys is another reason behind its popularity among start-ups.
Features
- The drag and drop feature allows you to create a survey or poll in minutes.
- It lets you put your polls and surveys on any public platform, such as WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook.
- Interactive polls and surveys are shareable via emails.
- Exporting your poll and survey results is easy to export to apps like Google Sheets and Excel.
- It also has an in-depth reporting engine to aggregate and prints your results.
Pricing
All the Crowdsingnal plans come with a 30 days money-back guarantee. Below is the pricing structure for the plans when billed annually:
- Free: In the free plan, you can ask unlimited questions, surveys, polls, and ratings. You can also collect up to 2,500 signals, have limited data export, get Crowdsignal branding, and you can embed your polls. It doesn’t require a credit card.
- Premium: The first paid plan costs $15/month. It includes everything in Free, plus you can collect unlimited signals, connect to Google Sheets to sync your data, create surveys with branching/logic trees, and do a lot more.
- Business: This plan costs $45/month. It includes everything in Premium, plus there is no Crowdsignal branding, you get fully customizable CSS themes, you can use your own domain name, and redirect traffic after submit.
- Team: This plan is for a team of a minimum of 3 users as the cost is applicable per user. You have to pay $29/user/month and enjoy all the benefits and features of the Business plan. Besides, there are other features as well, like collaboration on editing surveys, quizzes, and other projects, shared themes, survey templates and assets library, Keep all company data in one place, etc.
Summary
The early stage of a start-up business is challenging and demanding. To create a successful business, you need to prepare from the initial days of launching your business which starts from choosing power and innovative tools. Your right selection will minimize your effort, simplify your work, and add value to your business, without impacting your finances. The tools listed here are recognized for helping businesses grow at a significant pace. Using them in a relevant and effective manner will surely make your start-up a leading player in the industry.
