Startups can benefit a lot from the modern technologies that society has available today. Using smart appliances that run on complex algorithms at the back-end and robust mobile applications that are rich in functionality, startups can drive costs down, improve workforce performance, increase the quality and quantity of output, and accelerate growth and progress of the company. The challenging part about the adoption of these new tools and solutions is that, with so many to choose from, it can be time-consuming and expensive to test them all in search of the right one. To help you get started, here are seven tools that every new startup can benefit from:
InVision
Product design is a huge cornerstone in building a startup. But without a modern touch, startups are left using the traditional, expensive, and slow design solutions that have been around for decades. With innovative digital product design platforms available today, such as InVision, you can create rich, dynamic prototypes in minutes. It lets you iterate and ship rapidly without having to sacrifice quality. Features, such as Freehand, allows you to explore your team’s best ideas without cluttering the digital whiteboard, collate beautifully crafted designs and present them, and virtually reduce time spent going from design to development.
GitHub
If you have software engineers and web developers in your team, GitHub is an essential tool you’ll want to train them to use proficiently. In a nutshell, GitHub is a development platform that hosts hundreds of thousands of codebases, ranging from open source to enterprise. With it, you can review code with your team, manage and collaborate on projects, and build software alongside other engineers. While there is reasonable concern regarding your codebase’s security and administration, GitHub has robust security protocols including protected branches, signed commits, and required status checks.
Evernote
New startup CEOs are still finding their rhythm on how to manage day-to-day operations. As such, they find themselves juggling too many things throughout the day. Left unattended, this can lead to an inability to focus on which ideas and tasks are most vital to your business and which are not worth pursuing. Evernote helps you organize the information in a single, centralized location. It claims to help you work smarter by improving your note-taking with links, file attachments, checklists, and tables. The information can be made accessible to your entire team, making collaboration seamless.
Profisee
With the increasing amount of data that businesses receive, use, and store these days, there is a rising need to improve the quality and consistency of key data assets, such as customer data and physical and intellectual assets data. Master data management platforms, like Profisee, help you get the answers to some very important questions, such as “who are your biggest customers?” or “which product/service offers the fattest margins?”. For more information, check it out here.
Desk
Desk, a product of Salesforce, is unarguably one of the must-have software-as-a-service tools for every modern startup and small business. As anyone business owner and manager can attest to, customer support/service is a hallmark of any successful commercial venture. Unfortunately, many startups still fail to grasp this rudimentary concept. As a result, they keep losing customers left and right, spending an unnecessary amount of money on customer acquisition and retention strategies. Desk helps make customer service fast and easy by giving you access to customer cases in an intuitive platform. Features, such as satisfaction scores and performance monitoring, make it even more intuitive for your relatively nascent company to quickly address the root of the problem before it develops into a major issue.
Gusto
Hiring your first set of employees is a daunting process. It’s hard to know what to expect. Nonetheless, since you’re allocating a huge portion of your budget into hiring, you’d want to get only the best talent in the industry. Gustohelps you manage the crucial yet exhausting HR tasks that come with starting a business by making tasks including payroll, employee benefits, and surveys a breeze. Using the platform, you can organize employee information and documents in one place.
Wave Apps
Wave Apps is a set of accounting tools designed specifically for the needs of startups. What’s great about it is it’s completely free. Using Wave Apps, you can track expenses, send invoices, send and receive payments, and balance your books. You can also automate recurring payments and scan receipts directly from your mobile device. If you need more from the platform, accounting-wise, there are several payment processing and payroll services with a pay-as-you-go structure.
Thanks to these seven tools, even a new startup can compete with the bigger and more established businesses in their respective industry. Adopting them into the workplace successfully, however, will take time, patience, and thorough planning to pull off. Fortunately, there are also tools to write detailed business plans.
Author Bio: Mark Alvarado is a digital nomad and freelance writer.
