Top Apps and Tools That Startups Swear By

Trying to get a start-up business right off the ground can be mind-bending turmoil. You need the right people to fulfil your vision. However, getting and keeping clientele will take all your time and effort. Besides, your company size makes every hit against your coffers a potentially devastating blow to your start-up.

Watching their start-up become something large, lucrative, and a venture they could be proud of is every entrepreneur’s dream. In the quest to achieve this dream, some tools abound the interwebs that are there to improve your organization’s processes and operations. Tools like these help you stay on track with your customer relations, data security, and, at the same time, flawless access to your team.
Maybe you are still getting your ideas in order, or you want to monitor your business flow? Perhaps you need a took to keep everyone is on the same page? Whatever the case – there is a tool out there that matches your specific needs.
We have compiled a list of tools with a high reputation as start-up boosters.

Start-up Tools for an immediate project take-off

If you pool your ideas and try to make a working business plan out of them, we selected three tools that might be right up your alley.

Lean Stack

Lean Stack offers various products that will guide beginner entrepreneurs in conceptualizing and building their start-up with the so-much needed learning materials, business templates, coaching, boot camps, and masterclasses. These are indispensable items for pretty much any new project. They have business playbooks and something called the Continuous Innovation Framework.
This tool will help you learn as you go and put it all into practice. You can easily avoid the pitfalls that frequently plague the uninformed and unarmed. Being an inexperienced business builder is always challenging. However, knowing your start-up tools is a huge step forward, allowing you to convert every piece of experience into a usable knowledge base. With Lean Stack, every improvement can become a pivot point for further advances.

MindMeister

MindMeister is a mind mapping tool that helps you capture, brainstorm, collaborate, and share your ideas with experts in real-time.
This tool runs a project management app (MeisterTask). After using MindMeister for brainstorming and planning, you can drag and drop your notes into the PM app and set goals and deadlines for your team. The free version covers three mind maps, along with any data about real-time collaboration.

Germ.io

If you have trouble turning your basic ideas into bulletproof concepts, Germ.io might be the right tool for you. It helps you develop your ideas into realistic goals.
They have best practices, tips for growth, and, most important of all, templates suitable for start-up ideation. Many young entrepreneurs are quick to wrap-up their business ideas and put them to act immediately. However, they might be making a capital mistake and take a long road that eventually leads to a dead-end. Ideation, one of the most underestimated phases of project building, is so critical that it should be taught in school. It is the phase where all the possible crossroads and forks in the road are critically examined and evaluated. With the rich template base of Germ.IO, it’s easy to practically test ideas and see what they will look like before committing to putting the necessary time and resources to make them a reality. You have the right toolset for true beginners determined to avoid rookie mistakes and risk getting lost in the woods.
You can use Germ to collab with your team members from within the app. Your ideas and notes, tasks, and scheduled procedures are all wrapped conveniently inside the application.  Germ.IO is an excellent tool for monitoring your progress, all at zero cost. A precious advantage in startups where every penny counts.

Start-up Tools for Operations

Once you’ve reached your start-up’s operations stage, you will need tools to help you run your day-to-day business. These tools will primarily focus on recurring tasks and knowledge management.
Operations Management is an overarching term for a never-ending list of time-sensitive tasks and recurring protocols. Do you need MailChimp for your email campaigns? Will Evernote suffice for your self-management needs, or maybe your team shows a personal preference to Pipefy? Choosing the right startup tools would be nothing but high-risk gambling without a steady overview of core operations.
The big problem with any startup lies precisely in the beginning stages, where there’s a lot of uncertainty. The unpredictable nature of business growth further complicates the optimal choice for an adequate startup toolset. A rookie mistake during a start-up is to have a non-realistic evaluation of the market, specifically: How ready is your business to accept change once growth opportunities arrive?
It is one thing to set the bar too low and avoid significant failures and financial loss if things go south. However, skipping incoming opportunities by not being ready to take on them is an entirely different matter. We don’t want to know the story about the fisherman who was afraid to pull a bigger boat.

Slab

Your start-up’s success relies heavily on how you present, store, and disseminate company knowledge. Slab’s comprehensive templates can support even the most peculiar aspects of your business, with possibilities to company values, even company culture. Slab is designed to serve both tech-savvy and tech-inept. It has an excellent integration capability, and your existing system can welcome its workflows in an optimal instructionless process.
Internal app features such as Slab Topics create the best environment for teams. Information is well organized. Unified Search is another precious function for accurate searches within the system. Slab centralizes knowledge within your start-up, and it does it from the moment you start putting pieces together.
Slab is a powerful management tool ideal for business jumpstarts.  Your daily operations will be smooth-sail, and with the help of Slab’s Library, with top companies’ templates, you will be ready to become one of the best.

Slack

Pandemic or not, you and your team might be separated between the office and anywhere else in the world. Communication-based apps make it possible for professionals to connect despite the limitations presented by physical distance. Remote team management reveals new possibilities in business and also showcases a developing trend worldwide. Remote communication is now part of optimal methods for collaboration. Most innovative companies use a mix of an in-house team and remote members, effectively broadening their services’ reach considerably.
Whether your people are near you or not, Slack can help you establish a universal connection, with options to customize it to your specific team needs. All team communication and collaboration details go through internal channels, where the correct data reach their proper destination.
Slack supports standard tools for online communication like messaging, voice, and video calls. Remote teams benefit immensely from a centralized communication tool like this one.
The app keeps everything secure and can be accessed across devices, whether you have a Mac or a PC, Android or iOS.

Customer Relationship Management

At the heart of every business always stands the customer. Regardless of the company’s size and nature, customers keep your business afloat and add meaning to it. Thus, customer relations should remain an essential part of your strategic approach to business growth.
Customer Relationship Management is a complicated but essential component in business relations. Due to the specific problems that CRMs tackle, they certainly deserve special attention, usually a special team dedicated to their maintenance.
Team communication and data management are part of the daily work that’s part of normal business operations. However, applications dedicated to customer relations carry even higher importance. Without a healthy relationship with customers, even seemingly thriving businesses eventually catch the downward spiral of failure.
The best apps in this business come directly from talented engineers but are closely supervised by the customers’ honest feedback.
Customer relationship is a continuous process, and its maintenance recurs on a daily. Let us examine some of the CRMs — the tools designed to link providers with customers —hold the creative spark needed by promising start-ups. These are tools we tested ourselves, and their credibility is backed by years of research and improvements.
In our mind, all the top CRMs out there have something in common; They equally value the convenience they provide for the end-user (the customer) and the vendor. When vendors are facilitated within the app’s core intent, it’s easier for them to shape the best possible experience for their target group and connect with them better.

Hotjar

Hotjar can help you understand customer behaviour with unique visual tools providing rich analytical data. This behaviour monitoring tool allows you to observe your webpage visitors in finer detail.
This tool converts visitor metrics into a heat map. The map highlights the areas of your web page where users physically moved their mouse. These ‘hot spots’ are indicated on your website layout and show visitors’ exact path to reach their final destination. It is a very clever way to turning repeating patterns into meaningful analytical data bits, later used to improve shopper’s journey even further. The improvement cycle depends on all previous data about the progress that led to the present state and when used correctly, is a never-ending process.
With Google Analytics data, you manage and reveal your most popular pages and see metrics like the average time people spend on each individual page. However, were they reading the text or staring blankly at the wall while the page was loaded? We could have used an eye tracker there. Unfortunately, users don’t provide that kind of information. But we can still see how they used their mouse and keyboard to navigate to their destination. Several peculiar mouse movements or keyboard shortcuts somewhat reveal the thought process behind them. Heatmaps can tell you if users even scrolled down a particular part of your web page. There will be a vertical bar, visually dividing your visitors into two groups – those who scrolled past it and those who didn’t. Clever metrics like these sometimes reveal the difference between a pure purchasing intent and mere curiosity.
Customers’ wholesome journey looks clearer with tools like Hotjar’s heatmaps, and lots of improvements derive from its analytical data. Maybe your most common route needs a bit of an adjustment. Heat map data reveals precisely why potentially interesting pages may suffer from a popularity drop.
With Hotjar, you can have a glimpse at your website through the eyes of your visitors. Every click and mouse movement of every visitor is encoded into a map. Visitors’ unique activities and choices, all captured visually. Customers navigate a website just like you would. If customers experience a glitch or inconvenience anywhere along the line of their shopping journey, the heatmaps will highlight it as a potential problem. These indicators allow you to see any usability issues and address them efficiently and quickly, ensuring satisfaction and preventing complaints.
Hotjar allows you to segment your heatmap data intelligently. For example, you can target a specific page and schedule a recording of user activity. The recording can be set to complete after the task reaches a certain visitor quota or after a particular time frame. By selectively choosing the condition more for information gathering, you can target specific patterns and act upon them with maximum accuracy and urgency.
For websites with bigger audiences, the incoming visual data need a whole team to analyse it. Fortunately, Hotjar thought about that and integrated team accounts within their platform.

HubSpot CRM

With the help of HubSpot, you can manage your leads, sales, and customer behaviour. It organizes your contacts, automatically logging customer interaction data. Then, the data is further analysed to highlight behaviour that suggests the emergence of a potential customer.
Hubspot CRM also provides training materials aimed to help entrepreneurs launch their start-ups. HubSpot integrates with over 500 other platforms, which enables you to extend your capabilities and run your operations smoothly. You do not worry about compatibility issues, and you’re the basic version is free and supports unlimited users.
If you need more than their essential services, you can pay for HubSpot add-ons. However, the need for the entire scope plan is a sign that you are ready to grow your business and a tool to reflect on that positive change.

Conclusion

Starting your own company may be daunting, but exploring the tools mentioned above can ease a lot of your burden. From masterclasses to CRMs that fit your budget, you have all you need to make a success out of your start-up.
The operational cost of paid services like Hotjar and HubSpot absolutely justifies the investment. With clear advantages in areas like inbound marketing, all-around CRMs can be a massive win.
The opportunities to attract and convert visitors with inbound marketing are endless. Since your targeted customers are naturally attracted to your merchandise, your job is to make their way to the product more manageable and enjoyable. Successful providers never try to make customers by convincing them about their genuine intent or the consistency of their products’ quality.
Some of our customer-centric projects demonstrate the power of this pure approach to conversion and retention. And with the helping hand of tools like an accurate buyer persona, some start-up ideas will impact.