What Are The Best Tools for Entrepreneurs

A master list of the best startup resources for entrepreneurs

There are numerous startup resources for entrepreneurs that can help in saving the valuable time of a savvy businessman, as well as help in reducing startup costs.

Let’s discover some of the best tools for entrepreneurs:

Education

When you’re ready to launch a startup, you need to take advantage of available resources to succeed in business. There’s a lot to deliberate, from locking in funding to marketing your new business.

• Skillshare – Provide online classes on a range of business, technology, design and artistic subjects. And many of these videos are completely free!
• General Assembly – Its contributions range from short-form, one-off workshops to full-time, career-transition courses. They provide both in-person and online classes, most common ones being data, coding and design classes.
• Paul Graham’s Essays – Paul has assisted many entrepreneurs to think more openly about how to build a startup, how to make something people want, and overall widen their range of thinking.
• StartUp Podcast – This podcast touches on the preliminary questions about the risks and rewards of building your own business, finding a co-founder, business naming, and getting funded.

Legals

Beginning something on your own is always a thrilling concept. But with great startup concepts, come great risks. Understanding and satisfying the legal responsibilities like registrations, trademarks, privacy policy, legal agreements, idea protection, patents, copyrights, terms of service, etc, should be among the highest priorities of any entrepreneur.

• Gilbert & Tobin – They handle some of the most intricate dealings in Australia, guiding acquirers, targets, and financiers.
• Sprintlaw – This law firm is on a mission to make excellent legal services quicker, easier, and more affordable for small business owners and entrepreneurs.
• Allens Accelerate – A legal practice devoted to supporting the Australian startup network and offering expert legal advice to investors, startups, and corporate and government agencies reacting to disorder and investing in innovation.
• Lawpath – This online legal platform offers technology-powered legal services at a portion of the time, cost, and complexity of the traditional system.
• LegalVision – This commercial law firm brings together lawyers and technologists to provide effective and lucrative legal solutions for startups and corporates across Australia and New Zealand.

Domains

Your chances of success on the Web start with your domain name. From your LinkedIn company page to your business card and more, your domain name is a form of marketing for your brand, not just for integrity and ownership.

• Instant Domain Search – Checks domain availability by doing a DNS query to get domain name search results as quickly as possible.
• Lean Domain Search – A great, easy-to-use domain name generator that allows you to find hundreds of domain name ideas with one easy click.
• Namecheap – Also provides cheap domain names with a very consistent service.

Website Builders

It’s never been more vital, or easier, to create an online space for your business as the world becomes more and more digitally focused.

• Shopify – covers everything you need to start an e-commerce business, from the storefront to the backend. You can effortlessly build a great-looking website with Shopify, with pre-built e-commerce features like a shopping cart, track analytics, manage customers and order fulfillment, boost social presence and SEO, etc.
• Squarespace – A do-it-yourself website builder, blogging platform, and hosting service, and lets businesses of all kinds create specialized websites with the service’s accessible drag-and-drop interface.

Investors

When you’re inclining toward the private investment market, choosing the right investors can make or break your business.

• Arowana – Create, invest in and grow new initiatives. They search for businesses with the ability to change markets, leveraging their resources, knowledge and experience to grow people, initiatives and value.
• Tidal – A prominent product-centric Seed investor in the Australian venture capital segment with offices in Sydney and New York.
• Federation Asset Management – Asia-Pacific’s leading investor in renewable energy, real estate, health and education, and private businesses with strong growth potential.
• Rampersand – A Seed and Series A stage Venture Capital firm in Australian tech.
• Blackbird Ventures – United by the largest of ambitions, they invest in every kind of technology.
• Brandon Capital – Invests in the most encouraging biomedical prospects that have the potential to improve the lives of patients.
• OneVentures – They work with businesses to take them to that vital next phase, by enthusiastically molding their future.
• AirTree – A venture capital fund with a mission to support the most determined Australian and Kiwi technology entrepreneurs who are defining the route of our civilization.
• Black Sheep Capital – This firm invests in early-stage technology startups across Australia. Black Sheep is concentrated on recognizing excellent founders leading high-growth, scalable tech businesses.
• Square Peg – Inspiring brilliant founders in Australia, Southeast Asia, and Israel with a focus on Series A and Series B.

Crowdfunding

There are sites where people can invest in your concept, project or business.

• SeedInvest – A prominent equity crowdfunding platform that offers individual investors with access to prevetted startup investment prospects.
• Patreon – An American membership platform that offers startup tools for content creators to run a subscription service. It helps creators and artists earn a monthly income by offering rewards and incentives to their subscribers.
• Pozible – An Australian-based crowdfunding platform and community-building tool for creative projects and concepts.
• Indiegogo – A crowdfunding platform that has supported over 800,000 creative projects and claims over 9 million active backers from over 235 countries.
• StartSomeGood – This crowdfunding platform helps changemakers raise the funds they need to create noticeable social good around the world.

Admin Assistance

The best admin assistance services make it easier and simpler for you to manage routine tasks throughout the day.

• Anytime Offices – Anytime Offices offers virtual services with a professional team who can take care of copywriting, administration, marketing tasks, and more.
• HelloSign – With HelloSign you can fill out, sign, and share legally binding forms and documents. As an entrepreneur, this can be your go-to for signing advisor agreements, NDA’s, freelancer work contracts, and everything else your lawyer may throw at you.
• Vesper – Accessible, outsourced office management and administrative support – everything from scheduling and calendar management to light bookkeeping, event planning, and HR support.

People & Hiring

Freelance platforms assist businesses in finding and hiring independent professionals for provisional job roles or special projects. These platforms provide a marketplace for companies to glance at profiles of freelancer candidates based on skills, location, experience or other measures.

• 99designs – Can assist in website design, promotional materials, logos, and business cards. Without having to pay the salary of a full-time graphic designer, it provides the value and the artistic creativity of a pro. It works with your budget and you can either choose a designer with whom to work on a longer-term basis, or you can run a competition and pick your favorite multiple submissions from different designers.
• Clarity.fm– Assists you in linking with industry leaders from all across the world. These Clarity specialists can help you overcome any challenge that you might be confronting at any phase of your entrepreneurial voyage. These tools for entrepreneurs have got you covered with the best business advice, whether it’s raising funds, improving your skills, scaling your business or researching market trends.
• Fiverr – Another platform that connects you with digital freelancers, Fiverr can assist you in finding a professional who’s extremely experienced in user testing, game development, data analytics, web design and so much more.
• Upwork – A global freelancing platform where startups and business owners can find professional freelancers, from customer support reps and writers to developers and designers.
• Dribbble – A social networking and self-promotion platform for digital creatives and designers. It operates as a design portfolio platform, and jobs and recruiting website.
• AngelList – People who are interested in startup work will express interest in your job, and you can involve them from there. AngelList also comes with a Trello-like board so you can track the standing of your applicants.
• Vettery – Directly connects top talent and inspirational businesses, matched to condition, using machine learning and real-time data to obtain and recruit talent.
• Greenhouse – Applicant tracking system and recruiting software which is intended to help make businesses great at hiring and hire for what’s next.
• Scripted – A marketplace for writers. You can communicate directly with a writer to implement your idea. When you find a writer you love working with, you can add them to your favorites to start creating a ‘bullpen’.

Team Collaboration

Smooth collaboration is important for startups and small businesses. Today’s digital world demands every member of a team to be aware of online collaboration startup tools, particularly if they work remotely.

• Zoho Workdrive – An online file storage, sync, and collaboration platform for current teams, small businesses and large companies. It presents Team Folders, which allows teams of any size to work together securely like they’re right beside you.
• Trello – Provide the simplest and most collaborative way to arrange, envisage, assign and monitor tasks as a team. It follows the Kanban list structure by letting you organize projects and tasks into boards (themes), which are made of lists (task-lists), which in turn are made of cards (tasks). It also works for agenda planning, brainstorming, and any other list-based actions. The free tier offers all the functionalities a small team would need.
• Microsoft Teams – This is an obvious choice if you’re using the Microsoft Suite when it comes to video conferencing. It’s free and super simple to set up.

Networking

Communities allow like-minded entrepreneurs to bond, share experiences, guidance and resources to succeed in business.

• Anytime Offices – Anytime Offices provide virtual offices, meeting rooms, serviced offices, and co-working in three locations in Sydney with the additional value of a network of over 250 businesses.
• StartUp Grind – The world’s biggest community of founders, creators, startups, and innovators. They bring like-minded yet varied individuals together to learn, assist, belong, connect, teach and create.
• Eventbrite – This service lets users to create, browse and endorse local events.
• Meetup – A service used to arrange online groups that host in-person and virtual events for people with alike interests.
• Entrepreneur’s Organisation – A high-quality support network of 14,000+ like-minded leaders across 61 countries. Their member network is dedicated to learning and helping each other succeed.

Payments

Thanks to the continuing advancement in the payments industry, there are more payment tools for startups to choose from to assist in finding the perfect option for your business based on the kind of business you have, how many payments you collect, and your budget.

• Square (AU) – Businesses can accept credit card payments with Square. Most common with physical stores, Square sends you a free card reader and merely charges you 2.75% of every transaction, with no hidden fees. It also integrates with some e-commerce platforms to allow online transactions.
• Stripe (AU) – An online payment-processing platform for web-based businesses. Without having to register a merchant account, its collection of payment APIs allows businesses of all scopes to integrate payment processing into their websites.
• Invoice2Go – Allows you to set up everything in-app so you can invoice instantly once the job is done.

Scheduling & Calendars

Shared calendar apps have risen to make it easier to collaborate with co-workers, schedule consultations, and even organize tedious tasks.

• Calendly – Allows you to share your calendar link with whomever you choose and allows those people to book time directly in your calendar. It syncs with all your emails and, on top of avoiding conflicts, you can set up rules for what times people can book. It sends out an automatic invite to both people’s calendars when a meeting is booked.
• X.ai – With x.ai, your personal assistant Amy Ingram will take care of all your meeting scheduling. Amy sounds human and understands the context in email so she will pick up the conversation and ask the right questions to the other person in order to set up the meeting specifics.

CRM Tools for Startups

As soon as you’ve got your first few faithful customers, it is the perfect time for you to invest in the best CRM resources for entrepreneurs. A CRM can prove to be huge help for your startup as it frees up so much time which you can spend effectively on converting new leads. Some of the best startup tools in regard to CRM are:

• Zoho CRM – Acts as a single source to bring your marketing, sales and customer support activities together, and simplify your policy, process and people in one platform.
• CRM by Hubspot for Startups – Hubspot CRM is a great pick for startup owners. It unifies your contact list, and assists you by automatically recording customer interactions, and extracting the data from the web to create information about your possible customers.

Print-On-Demand

Print on demand websites allows you to assemble and ship products with your own custom designs. These services don’t need you to order in bulk, or order stock at all, unlike traditional printing establishments. In fact, most handle order fulfillment and shipping for you.

• Vistaprint – Assists small business owners in making skillfully designed, up-to-date custom marketing – the variety of products they need to look and feel professional, equipped, and plugged in.

Design & Development

Entrepreneurs will find huge help in DIY graphic design tools for startups that are readily accessible at little or no cost yet come with outstanding features that everyone can find valuable.

• Unsplash – One of those startup tools that provide high-resolution stock images so that you can create visually pleasing promotions and campaigns for your startup. You can use their search feature to download exactly what you’re looking for, or you can find stimulation from the new images they hand-pick each day.
• Pexels – Another place to find editorial quality stock photos for free to use in marketing, social media etc.
• Canva – An online graphic designing tool. It is broadly used by many individuals and startups to design blog graphics, Facebook ads, social media posts, Twitter headers, Instagram posts and much more. You can come up with a range of visually pleasing content with a library of more than a million fonts, icons and images. Its user interface is quite simple to use. You can choose a template, or you can build your own from scratch by using their drag-and-drop features.

Social Media

Suitable application of a marketing strategy needs startup tools to monitor, examine, and assess any marketing campaign. In order to guarantee the efficient application of processes, the following marketing tools for entrepreneurs are a must-have.

• Zoho Social – Let’s set agendas for the content you want to post on social media, and then queue it up so it posts automatically at your stated time. It works with Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram.
• Hootsuite – One of the most common social media management platforms for handling and tracking campaigns, scheduling content across networks (including Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, LinkedIn, amongst others), and calculating the efficiency of messages across platforms, all from one dashboard.
• Buzzsumo – A cloud-based platform that assists you in determining the best engagement, content, and outreach opportunities across social and search.

General Marketing

We have collected the best marketing tools for startups to endorse and drive brand awareness with marketing automation, SEO, social media, and content creation in mind.

• Mailchimp – This email marketing tool for startups allows digital marketers to use a dependable emailing service to distribute emails straight to any user’s inbox.
• Zoho Marketing Hub – An all-in-one marketing automation software that helps you effectively manage your marketing actions across numerous channels.

Phones

While almost all types of businesses engage in email marketing, there are comparatively fewer businesses, mostly local businesses, that take SMS marketing seriously. The lack of awareness concerning the types of software tools for startups available to automate your SMS marketing requirements is one of the key causes.

• Twilio – Provides developers a great API for phone services to make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more effortlessly integrate numerous communication approaches into their software and programs.
• TextIt – A digital platform that allows organizations to distribute and receive messages from targeted recipients through SMS. The tool can be used for monitoring, research, key messaging and campaigns, improving the effectiveness of data collection and communication – particularly in areas that are not easily accessible.

Analytics

Essential to decision-making in the 21^st century are data collection and data analysis. Whether you provide a small product or run a website, you need to appreciate what persuades your customers to buy your product, what your marketing channel is, and how you can make it better.

• Google Keyword Planner – Assists you in researching keywords for your marketing campaigns. You can use this free tool to discover new keywords associated with your business and see approximations of the searches they receive and the cost to target them.
• Google Analytics – Helps you to track the traffic coming on to your website. Furthermore, it helps you to create much better digital marketing campaigns and eventually, increase your conversion rate.
• Facebook Ads – Facebook ads are targeted to users based on their demographic, location and profile information. Many of these selections are only available on Facebook.

Presentation

Presentation software is at the core of business sales, management, and development. The necessity to share ideas, workflows, concepts, and working practices, can be a vital part of a department, and the ability to present these in an easy and understandable way is crucial.

• Keynote – Apple’s version of PowerPoint. It has many good accessible themes and supports multimedia and animations very well.
• Canva – On top of all the functionalities outlined earlier, you can also create great-looking presentations on this platform.

Co-working spaces

Co-working spaces are great choices for teams and startups, but also for individuals looking for motivating places to work from.

Anytime Offices – Anytime Offices provide flexible workspaces designed with the thought of and inspired by you. They are the new way to network that allows you to improve your business in an engaging, stimulating, and motivating setting surrounded by like-minded individuals. An alternative for an up-and-coming startup is signing up for a virtual office, the fastest and most cost-effective way to establish a business presence.

News

The best business minds know that staying on top of the news is vital, and they know that weekly and monthly publications often offer the best channel for doing so.

• Anthill – One of Australia’s major online communities for business builders, entrepreneurs, and innovators.
• Startup Daily – A reliable media source covering the Australian and New Zealand startup and tech environments.
• Startup Digest – A media business that distributes curated email newsletters on startup events and educational content in more than 300 cities.
• SmartCompany – Australia’s leading publication for growth businesses and entrepreneurs looking for advice, ideas, information and news to help them succeed.
• Entrepreneur – An American magazine and website that carries news stories about entrepreneurship, small business management, and business.

After comprehensive research and deliberation, here is the list of the best startup tools. Each of the startup resources in this list is helpful for entrepreneurs in keeping their business operations convenient, speedy and effective. They hold the power to boost your potential and increase your ROI.

Anytime Offices helps entrepreneurs change the world. Get the support you need to start, grow, and lead your business today. Contact us now.