5 Powerful Tools To Use If You Are A Start-Up

Let’s face it.

Building a startup is hard. From limited monetary resources to a constrained workforce, there are multi-level challenges and constraints.

But here is the thing.

While nothing supplements hard work and consistency in building a startup, there sure is a host of powerful tools that can boost your business. But the question of the hour is how to know which tools can drive growth?

Fret not. You have help.

In this post, we bring the 5 best performing tools that can help you launch a high-performance start-up in 2021. Let’s begin.

5 tools that every startup swears by in 2021

At the core, the tools that can boost your startup growth have three things in common. They are high performance, scalable and cost-efficient at the same time. But the problem is, getting hold of such tools is a little more tricky than you think.

This is exactly where we come in.

We have scoured the market and compiled a list of 5 powerful tools to use if you are a start-up to help you through your journey. Each one is designed to alleviate your problems with one core task of your business.

The list does not follow any particular order but is when used together provides comprehensive support to all your business operations.

1. Analytics software

Source

Data and analytics reside at the heart of modern businesses. Without knowing what your customers want, how big of a market your solution has, building a product for virality is next to impossible. This is exactly where analytics software comes in.

Attest is a great tool when it comes to market analysis. Its powerful market and competitor research capabilities ensure you have a scenario understanding of your market. It lets you create custom reports on the basis of your chosen metrics for lean development and fast growth. What’s more? To make this easier, you have the handy Attest’s market analysis template. In the long run, this template usage can be very useful to understand how your market is shifting and create a more accurate forecast for better business decisions.

Pros:  

• Less time is required for the creation
• Enables flexible and creative work
• Can be used in the different phases of the product life cycle

Cons: 

• Competition is not considered
• No consideration of trends as such
• Missing environmental analysis

Price: Using this tool is as simple as downloading and using it for free.

2. Employee engagement

Source

One of the most critical assets of a high-performance startup is its team. Having a highly motivated and engaged team at work is critical for your overall success. But the thing is keeping employees engaged and in their best performance needs a little more than a pep talk.

Employee engagement software like Perkbox is one such tool that can be used to keep your team motivated. It helps to create easy engagement and helps to get acquainted with other employees around. No matter what your goal is, a new onboarding or existing employee retention this tool has a solution for all.

Championing the principle of employee rewarding, the platform curates a collection of unique perks and offerings for your team members. Discounts, free offers, e-vouchers are some of the ways in which the platform instills these perks in your team engagement programs.

Yet again, it doesn’t only work on rewards but focuses on recognition. This makes posting in the internal network of the company possible for every employee.

Pros:

• One-to-one employee recognition
• Automate work like birthdays and anniversaries

Cons:

• Freedom to post anything can violate a company’s work culture
• Turns out to be quite expensive if you have a massive number of employees

Price: There are types of plans such as core, pro, custom. Perkbox charges approx USD 2.70 per user and per month for the basic plan. If you bill annually and you go for monthly billing then USD 3 per user/per month.

3. CRM software

Source

Every business runs on customers. This means if you fail to create an unforgettable experience for your customers, chances are you would fail in your journey sooner than you think. This makes customer relations such an integral operation of your business. A CRM (customer relationship management) software like Hubspot can bring in the sense of order in this chaos of customer relationship management.

One of the pioneers of the CRM industry, Hubspot helps you to track, manage, and report on every traffic aspect of your website to create personalized brand-customer interactions for your target audience. There are multiple metrics that this software can track. From the number of conversions, engagement elements, email metrics, and more, you can optimize each communication channel on the basis of the targeted metrics.

It is the most widely used tool, so you can get a lot of information from it. Its main features are Logins, lead generation, meeting scheduling, customer feedback, analytics, Traffic Sources, conversion, and referral.

You can easily track and monitor how users are engaging with your content and how they are using your website.

Thanks to HubSpot you will get to know you user, their insights, how they are using your products and service, marketing automation, etc. Track all user interactions to enhance your business approach.

Pros:

• No need for programming knowledge.
• Enables you to keep a close eye on it and provides you valuable insights to help you improve it
• UI is user-friendly for a non-technical person

Cons: 

• The learning curve is pretty steep

Price: There is a standard free version for small and medium-scale businesses. As you go for plans it will cost USD 150,000 annually.

4. Marketing tool

If you have to scale your business, you need more customers. Marketing thus becomes an integral part of a business trying to scale. After all, without letting your target audience know that you are operating, it is impossible to convert them into paying customers.

But, marketing as it is integral is by far one of the most dynamic and challenging processes of your business. This gives advanced marketing tools an irreplaceable place in your business process.

Google is a great tool to start with. Giving you a unique opportunity to be in front of your target audience this tool helps you to rank for keywords that your target audience is already searching for. The best part?

Google ads’ intuitive dashboard lets you, monitor, optimize, and edit your campaign copy and creative assets for better results.

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Low maintenance
• Comprehensive report to understand how your site is performing
• Reports on new traffic and how it is converting
• Using ads will allow you to reach a large number of potential customers

Cons: 

• You need to understand how a website works
• Results can be inconsistent
• Requires an update to target the desired audience
• Does not provide you with advanced features

 Price: Google charges are based on your ads type, content, visibility, and per click.

5. Automation tools

Source

One of the biggest challenges in business is that a lot of valuable time is spent on unproductive tasks. This is exactly where process automation tools come in. By decluttering your workspace, you spend your valuable time on work that matters. One such automation tool is Buffer.

Buffer is a social media automation tool that schedules and posts content on multiple social platforms simultaneously. All you have to do is create the schedule date and time to put your social media engagement content publications all by themselves. But that is not all.

As a business seeker, you can use the platform to get access to people who may have the skills or expertise you are seeking. If you are a local business that wants to grow its network, the buffer is a great way to create your engaging social profile. It helps you to promote your business and grow your network at the same time.

Pros:

• Has a freemium model
• Is user-friendly
• Has a preview feature to see your final content in real life
• Easy to schedule and post content on different social media sites

Cons:

Is capable of sending traffic to limited social sites

Price: This software supports your needs at each stage as you grow. Buffer comes with different plans and features. The basic plan is free, while the pro costs around USD 15 per month.

Bonus tool

To create any world-class product, you need to have a well-defined knowledge base for your customers and employees. Good software documentation is critical for the success of any product. The most common types of software documentation include tutorials, reference docs, how-to guides, etc. Document 360 can help you create a robust knowledge base and software documentation for your product.

Final thoughts

If you have to get away with one takeaway from this post, just know this.

Building a startup is hard and will always be.

No matter how many tools you are using in your operations, there will always be inherent challenges to the ecosystem. No tool can alleviate those problems. More importantly, business tools are not meant to do that.

The only thing the tools do is create padding for your operations. It gives your operations a boost. Sure, the above tools will bring ease and speed to your startup landscape. It declutters your workspace to create a more creative room to solve your core business problems.

This means the core task still depends upon you. The better you can use these tools to simplify your path to make finer business decisions, the better your chances of success are.

So now when you know how to build a high-performance toolkit for your startup, when are you integrating the same?

Author bio

Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as an Instructional Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted and compelling content. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband and parents. She loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends in her free time. You can reach her on Linkedin or write to her at atreyee.c@gmail.com for any content writing/marketing requirements.

Main image source