Every business has its share of challenges when it comes to figuring out the right path to success, especially startups. Considering that they have extremely tight budgets, limited resources, and unpredictable outcomes with each step they take, startups need to seriously look into practical solutions to facilitate and speed up their processes. And who says there aren’t any shortcuts on the way to success?
The internet currently boasts with tools that help startups easily automate their activities, manage their teams, and solve problems in a fast and more efficient manner. For that reason, we curated a list of the best 20 tools that are going to be big in 2021.
Read on to discover the tools that’ll make all the difference for your business’ growth.
uPress
Where and how your website is hosted can make all the difference, so choosing a reliable host can help your startup grow faster than expected. If you’re using WordPress like countless other sites you need a good reliable host.
That’s where uPress managed WordPress hosting comes in. Their hosting delivers incredible performance, and with some amazing loading speeds and uptimes as well. They also own their own server centers, guaranteeing maximum protection for all of your data.
What truly sets them apart are their Geek and non-Geek packages: offering assistance to WordPress newbies, and professional users.
MindMeister
One of the core mechanisms for a prosperous workflow is mind mapping. Visualizing every idea into structured information will not only help you analyze all of the elements you work with, but it will also help you define all of your projects’ scopes.
MindMeister does an incredible job at mind mapping. It’s a cloud-based platform for project planning where each of your team members can share their ideas and collaborate in real-time. They can vote on ideas and chat and comment on the topics that arise – all accompanied by a gorgeous graphic representation of the projects’ hierarchies.
Gusto
The HR personnel is among the resources startups can rarely afford to hire. But don’t despair – Gusto can cover all of your HR necessities. The service makes it so easy to onboard, insure, pay, and support your hardworking team.
Gusto offers certified HR experts to help you take care of all of your employees’ payrolls and set up benefits plans for them. They even have features for your employees to manage their savings and 401(k)s. All in all, it’s a great app to help you maintain a healthy and secure financial future.
Shopify
Whether you’re just starting in eCommerce or you’re already selling a product or a course, implementing Shopify can be one of the best decisions you can make for your online platform.
The service offers one of the most reliable website builders on the market, with amazing templates that are fully customizable and responsive. Shopify also features amazing point of sale elements that you can use to start, run, and grow your business. You can rest knowing you’re in good hands because Shopify supports store owners in every crucial aspect of the sales process.
AWeber
A great way to promote your business is through email marketing. Using a platform to widely share your content is great for improving SEO and building brand awareness. One tool that excels in this area is AWeber.
AWeber is a powerful email marketing tool that features an AI-powered design assistant to help you create charming landing pages, newsletters, and branded emails in seconds. And it comes packed with all the great marketing features such as a list builder, campaign automation, and insightful data reporting for thorough analytics.
Mozart Data
Modern digital marketing is essentially data-based. The more data you are able to gather about your customers, the better your chances of converting them.
Mozart Data allows you to connect all of your data sources in less than an hour, saving you a lot of time and hassle that usually comes with data analysis. You can connect over 120 data sources and also add custom ones as well. Then you can sort and search through them easily from a single dashboard.
There is of course also the option of creating reports (whether for clients or yourself), and exporting your data. Analyzing and understanding what all those figures are telling you has never been as simple.
Penji
One of the first things you need to do for your startup is to present it visually. Whether you’re launching your website or app or need help with your pitch book, social media ads, or business cards, hiring a graphic design team should be a priority. And since that can be costly, we’d like you to take a look into Penji.Penji offers readily available graphic designers whenever you need them. For one flat monthly fee, you can request as many designs as you want, and you’ll receive them in 24 to 48 hours. If you’re not satisfied with something, you are offered unlimited revisions until you are. The end product is solely your ownership.
You can even invite your team members to mutually collaborate with Penji’s pool of vetted designers. Their support team is amazing and if you ever feel like you’re assigned designer isn’t compatible with your brand, they’ll immediately swap it with another one to better match your taste.
Botsify
In order to provide your customers the best possible user experience, you need to ensure they can contact you whenever they have a question. A chatbot can be a very useful tool as it’s available 24/7.
Botsify offers website chatbots which will ensure your main point of contact provides around the clock answers to all of your leads and customers. They also provide Facebook chatbots, which you can leverage through Messenger to further engage your audience and get them to convert.
With Botsify, you can literally eliminate the need for human contact, yet ensure your customer service is helpful and available at all times.
MockPlus
Having a prototype of a product can be of great service to a company, as it allows it to test the sample before it’s physically produced. This can save startups immense amounts of time and money.
MockPlus is the most robust all-in-one product design platform for prototyping, design systems, and collaboration that allows your team to cooperate and build your designs together. Its drag-and-drop editor features fast interaction of all the components and icons to help you build prototypes with rich animations and transitions, available for preview across all types of devices.
Mailbird
Managing multiple inboxes is challenging, especially if emails are just a starting point for your further workflows. For example, a customer service agent replies to queries shared through email, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Subsequently, they set up tasks in Asana or schedule video calls in Google Hangouts. That’s a handful.
With an email client such as Mailbird, you can optimize the whole process: reply to all customer queries coming from different channels in a unified inbox and organize further workflows without switching to other apps and tabs.
Mailbird works seamlessly with Windows 11, 10, 8, and 7. It’s also one of the best email clients for Mac.
Hootsuite
Social media are the cornerstone of today’s marketing. With the help of Hootsuite, you can put an end to the chaotic struggle of keeping track of all of your ads that you run on different social networks.
Hootsuite lets you discover all the possibilities that come to light when you unite your social campaigns in one platform. With it you can publish and schedule content to the right network at the right time, track performance in real time, recognize trends, and improve response quality.
Salesforce
With the pace Salesforce has been going at for the past few years, we can certainly predict that it will easily own 2021 as the world’s number one CRM tool. Like many of the tools featured on this list, Salesforce is on the cloud as well.
It’s the best service for observing your customers from every point of view. With features such as sales streamlining, fast customer support, AI-powered customer interactions, learning resources, and much more, you’ll notice spikes in growth in no time.
Heroku
Heroku is an amazing PaaS platform that offers startup developers various solutions to build, deploy, and operate applications. It’s a cloud-based solution, meaning it takes care of servers and infrastructure, so your development team can focus on creating the best app.
As you grow, Heroku offers seamless scalability to support your success with advanced features. We love how flexible this platform is – developers have the freedom to work with their favorite programming languages, services, and databases that best fit the needs of the apps they build.
Growth Hacker TV
Receive the best actionable advice from entrepreneurs who’ve made a name of themselves in the startup world. GrowthHacker.tv features over 100 episodes where renowned experts reveal their secrets.
On this platform, you can watch videos of interviews playing on a loop, where successful growth hackers talk about their past experiences and how they left their own imprint in the digital world. It’s always worthwhile to have an educational resource that you can often go back to, hear a story or two that you can relate to, and then return to your work motivated and with a fresh perspective.
Brandpa
If your startup is still in the cradle and you haven’t decided on a domain name that will best reflect your brand, Brandpa is the tool you should turn to. They’ll help you create a recognizable brand identity online by visualizing your chosen name with a logo.
You can refine your search by style and industry and Brandpa’s team will ensure to present you with a careful selection of short, compelling, and brandable names. You’ll even get a free logo with your domain name purchase.
Amazon Web Services
Whether you’re looking for a cloud computing platform to build your web apps or a service to host your already developed websites or apps, you’ll find no match to what Amazon Web Services offers. AWS is probably the most dependable service in the web hosting space, and in our opinion, they never disappoint.
It’s the most reliable, scalable, and flexible solution for developing sophisticated applications, powered with a plethora of features that enable app integration, machine learning, content delivery networking, security and firewalls, and tons of other valuable utilities.
Unsplash
The reason why we chose Unsplash among the many stock photography platforms on the market, is because it’s completely free and the quality it delivers is of a premium standard. They offer 2 million high-resolution images which you can explore within popular categories.
Talented photographers from around the world contribute their works to Unsplash, but not all of their photographs get featured – they all go through a selection process and Unsplash handpicks only the best.
Optimizely
Optimizely is the all-in-one service meant to primarily deliver the conversion rate you want to reach for your startup, but also helps with product development and risk elimination.
With Optimizely, you can perform superior A/B testing for your platform and products, validate the impact of new features, backend changes, or performance improvements before rolling out to your audience.
The service is also great for optimizing the UE across any platform, including mobile and conversational apps, in order to ship your products with ultimate confidence.
AngelList
Every startup owner dreams of a community where they can showcase their expertise, access skilled candidates to hire from, and discover other startups to invest in. Enter AngelList – the most amazing platform where you can become a venture investor yourself.
Here you can join well-established managers that will help you become a top investor in the next big thing in tech. AngelList also provides a complete hiring toolkit to manage your talent pipeline and helps you discover the most suitable candidates for your business.
Canva
Not everyone has the time to become Photoshop savvy or afford to hire someone who is in order to create stunning designs and documents. With Canva, you can satisfy all of your creative needs to produce the most effective marketing materials and high-impact social media graphics.
Canva’s incredibly intuitive tool is highly customizable, uses an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, and features multi-channel campaign management to help you reach a global audience. Their premium stock image library is just another quality that makes this solution one of the best of its kind.
Hemingway
Ranking higher on Google is crucial for your startup to attract a bigger audience, and Hemingway works very well to help you boost your SEO. Hemingway is a word editor that you can use to analyze your content for readability.
The tool boasts many features designed to improve the readability of your content. It will highlight every piece of text where you should perform certain changes based on Hemingway’s suggestions. It’s also skilled to let you know what grade level your content is written at. For example, this short review is a grade 9 according to Hemingway.
Slack
A team performs the best when all of its members always work together. And there’s a great chance that as a startup you probably have contractors working remotely for you. Enter Slack – your startup’s cloud-based headquarters.
With its signature channels, Slack enables your whole team to share ideas, make decisions, and move projects forward with a common purpose at the same place. It provides all the work tools your team might need and it lets you even keep clients in the loop by assigning them a dedicated channel to completely remove the need of draining email threads.
TermsFeed
If you’re serious about your startup’s success, you must never dismiss becoming legally protected on all fronts. TermsFeed will back up all of your assets and operations with legal support, so you can rest assured there won’t be any unexpected lawsuits in your mailbox.
The service offers fully-compliant privacy and terms & conditions policies for all of your web platforms, but also they cover disclaimers, cookies policies, EULAs, and return & refund agreements. All of this for just a fraction of what law firms charge.
SwagUp
Whether you’d like to surprise your employees with an unexpected gift or show your top clients you care and appreciate your cooperation, branded swag always works. SwagUp is a great platform that integrates the creation, automation, and distribution of high-quality swag to any place you wish to deliver.
The service takes care of everything from the idea to the shipping, and it’s great to build brand awareness and loyalty. Their items are just to die for – they offer everything, from charming coffee mugs and t-shirts to gorgeous notebooks and backpacks.
Go Auditor
Adding an SEO audit tool to your arsenal will help you uncover any underlying errors, improve the performance of your website and plan your future marketing wins.
Go Auditor offers API access, on-page and keyword metrics, and lets you download a fully customizable report you can brand with your own logo and even send out to clients. It can help you lay some solid foundations and prepare your website for an increase in traffic.
Clipchamp
If you’ve never made a video for your startup business before, Clipchamp’s free online video editor is a great place to start. In just a few clicks, you can amaze your audience with videos that suit any industry, with no downloads required.
Whether you’re demonstrating a new product or service, announcing a sale, or sharing customer testimonials, the video marketing opportunities are endless for a startup. Users can edit their business videos with exclusive features like screen recorder, speed control, AI voiceovers, trimming, animated text, green screen, and even high quality webcam recorder.
Pressed for time or have a small budget? Create videos easily using a ready-made video template. All you have to do is add your brand’s color scheme, add text, and add groovy transitions to a professional video template.
The stock video, image, and background music library can spark your imagination if you’re lacking inspiration. There are over 1M+ choices, from breathtaking landscapes and real people to holiday specials and sci-fi.
Save your videos to your computer or share them directly to your business social media accounts like Facebook, YouTube and TikTok once video editing is complete in Clipchamp.
StartupResources
Discover the best tools and resources to build your startup from a comprehensive collection that carefully curates over 400 services. StartupResources is the go-to platform for whenever you encounter an issue with your startup that requests an asap fix.
There are over 60 categories to choose from at StartupResources, where you can discover solutions for almost every situation. We’re pretty confident that the tool you’re looking for lurks somewhere at StartupResources, so go ahead and give it a go.
Conclusion
Thank you for going through our list of the top 20 startup tools for 2021. Each of the tools included here were given much thought and consideration, so we hope we did a good job presenting you with resources that will be of great value for your startup.