The Best Tools and Resources For Startups in 2019
Launching a startup is rewarding, terrifying, and exhausting all at once.
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, says that starting a company is akin to jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.
Startups need to move quickly to survive. And, do so with very limited resources — especially money and time — while wearing many different hats, without much training or experience.
As a result, it’s critical for founders to arm themselves with a toolset to navigate the turbulent flight path, and remain as lean and efficient as possible.
These tools and resources can help by smoothing out processes that can go awry, such as marketing, accounting, and team management.
Once you’ve worked out these core processes, you’ll be free to concentrate on growing your company — just remember us when you’re a millionaire!
DOMAINS
You can’t have a startup without a domain name.
These folks are disrupting the traditional agency model by allowing companies to engage with hundreds of naming experts.
Their platform combines crowdsourcing, AI, and gamification to help companies come up with high-quality name ideas instantly.
In addition to comprehensive validation, they offer audience testing to ensure that names resonate with your target audience. There is also a curated collection of premium domains to purchase instantly.
Squadhelp has over 18,000 customers and 75,000 creatives and was recently recognized by Inc Magazine as one of the six most innovative companies in the 2018 Inc 500 list.
Link: Squadhelp.com
Other similar tools:
WEBSITE BUILDERS
Build yourself a beautiful online presence
Squarespace is ideal for creating professional websites.
It has the best quality designs and features on the market, and while it can take a little getting used to, the final results are worth your patience.
Stunning templates, beautiful customization, and quality features are all at your fingertips.
Link: squarespace.com
Other similar links:
BUILD AUDIENCE
Start building your audience before you start building your product
BetaList is the place to list your startup before you publically launch it, or before you even start building it.
Submit for free and wait two months to be listed, or pull the trigger and spend $99 to get listed in just a couple of days.
If your service resonates with their (mostly) startup focused audience, you can get a ton of people on your potential customers list very quickly.
BetaList is the place for early adopters to discover upcoming and recently launched internet startups, and for startup founders to share their startup with the world and get early user feedback.
Link: betalist.com
Other similar tools:
RESEARCH
Research what people want
BuzzSumo is a great resource to find influencers within your niche or industry — you know, people who can really help give your project a social boost by talking about it to their large followings
Find them, flatter them, and do whatever it takes to put your startup in front of their audience.
It’s also a great content research tool built on top of a huge database of backlinks, shares, and popular posts. You can find the hottest articles in your industry niche, identify who liked and shared the content, and then use the insights to build successful content strategies.
Link: buzzsumo.com
Other similar tools:
SOCIAL MEDIA
Make your social media life better
If you’re posting articles or images to social media or simply want to schedule posts for later, Buffer is a great tool.
It’s a fantastic tool if you want to get more advanced and plug it into other tools to schedule events to your social media. For example, you can connect it to your Pocket via IFTTT so that you can publish relevant articles to your feeds super easily.
They also make it easy to set up and manage several social media profiles from within one account, allowing you to publish at the same time across multiple accounts.
Definitely worth the twelve bucks a month.
Link: buffer.com
Other similar tools:
CONTENT CURATION
Put content curation on autopilot
Content curation makes you stand out from the masses on social media. It’s a way of providing value and consistency to your followers. However, doing it properly is a time-consuming process, so automating your content creation by using Quu gives you more precious time to work on your business.
Quuu is a sensational tool that hand-curates content in over 500 interest categories, meaning you’ll always have relevant posts to share with your audience on social media.
Even better — Quuu integrates with your favorite scheduling tools, like Buffer!
Link: quuu.com
Other similar tools:
STOCK PHOTOS
Images that won’t get you a cease and desist letter
10 new stock photos every 10 days, big and gorgeous ones, that you can do whatever you want with — all thanks to a generous community of photographers.
If you want a good example of a site that has beautiful stock photos, check out Pixelarity and scroll down to their templates. Unsplash is a wildly popular template site for a reason.
With a huge library of photos and thousands more added each day, chances are they’ve got a photo for you.
Link: unsplash.com
Other similar tools:
GRAPHIC TOOLS
Make your site visually more appealing
Canva is a quick and easy way to create a flyer, web image, or infographic by adding text to and modifying templates.
The website holds a library of around a million fonts, photos, and icons. Users can select a design template or opt to create one from scratch using drag-and-drop features.
Uploading, adding, and creating images is quite an easy task. The basic account is free and additional graphics and photos uploaded by freelance designers can be used for just $1 each.
Link: canva.com
Other similar tools:
CONTENT CAPTURE
Find something, put it in your pocket
Ever come across an article that you want to read, but not right now?
The Pocket plugin for your browser lets you easily save it to read later — on your iPad, or phone, or whatever. Plus, you can save information from any publisher — the latest news, magazine articles, stories, videos, recipes, web pages, how-to information… anything.
They’ve also done a really nice job creating a clean layout and customizable display for a relaxing reading experience that clears out the visual clutter, gives your eyes a rest, and lets your mind focus on the information at hand.
More interestingly, you can link your Pocket account via Zapier to your Buffer feed so that you can share all the articles you read with your audience.
Link: getpocket.com
Other similar tools:
AUTOMATION TOOLS
Harness the power of automation to save yourself time and make processes happen on their own
Born out of a Startup Weekend, Zapier connects a ton of APIs together, enabling you to connect all sorts of tools.
For example, make a new entry from Typeform, automatically turn into a Trello card in your sales funnel, or get notified in Slack when a customer unsubscribes so that your team knows to do an exit interview.
The possibilities are endless.
Link: zapier.com
Other similar tools:
COMMUNICATION
Put collaboration at your fingertips
Slack is a meeting space, water-cooler, bulletin board, and phone-tree for your whole team!
It’s an app created as a way for organizations to communicate both as a group and in personal one-on-one discussions. You can communicate as a group through channels or privately via direct messaging.
It’s an awesome tool to help your team stay organized — especially when working remotely, like us here at KISSPatent!
Slack makes communicating easy and fun.
Link: slack.com
Other similar tools:
VIDEO AND CONFERENCE CALLS
A great video conferencing app.
Zoom is designed for hosting webinars, teaching online courses, conducting online training, video demonstrations, virtual meetings, and video conferences.
It presents an easy to use online video conferencing and meeting software — helpful for small to medium businesses, enterprises, educational institutions, and healthcare organizations.
Offering high-quality video, audio, and screen-sharing capabilities and experiences, Zoom improves collaboration among teams, remote employees, and participants — they can start and join a meeting instantly with just one-touch of their mobile devices or browsers.
Link: zoom.us
Other similar tools:
Head over to our blog for the rest of the list — there are still tools for SEO, hiring, lead prospecting, CRMs, newsletters, productivity, and much much more!
We curated the list after thorough research, and each name on the list was selected after much care and consideration.
Your startup’s business success depends on using the right tools at the right time. It’s our hope that this list will help you in your efforts to build a successful business and bring you the success that you’re seeking.
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Originally published at https://kisspatent.com on June 7, 2019.
