If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to tell you how hard it is managing a startup life.

Investors, visions, training, setbacks and the digital world can be tricky situations to handle. But there is good news. There are hundreds of online tools that will help you and your employees get through any rough patch and boost your productivity.

Instead of you having to search the web for all the relevant tools I have made your life easier.

I’ve created this list of 22 awesome tools that you should know about, and use to help your startup get a head start. Whether you are just starting or even already a developed startup, these tools can be implemented at any stage of your initial development.

Organize Your Startup Life

When you are starting out with your business, it’s important to lay down the foundations first. That’s where project management tools help a lot. Not only does it help you manage your daily task list, it also reflects in your communication with your clients, which is crucial in making a successful business.

SunRise Calendar – I personally love SunRise as it synchronizes all of my calendars to one place. It also has a great app which keeps me update while I’m on the go. If you have a close team, you can combine your calendars so that everyone knows where the team is at one time.

Trello – A free and simple task management tool, organized through the use of boards and cards. It’s a no frills ticket system, that you can move, comment on and close tasks within an online group environment.

Evernote – This is an awesome tool that no start up should be without. The free version gives you a base to collect, make notes and develop ideas on all devices. Get your creativity going, but take time to learn about all the features – there are a lot!

CRMs for the Cash Strapped Startup

As a startup up you will see that even a small sales team can use a Customer Relationship Management system. And you don’t have to fork out too much to be using one. If you start early, you will see processes become much more streamlined and sales come in quicker.

Pipedrive – This CRM is multilingual and enables you to see the overview of the communications between your sales team and your clients. Perfect for small startups without much experience in these systems. Its basic package is only $12 per user per month.

Nimble –  The perfect CRM for the social media guru. You can use Nimble to import all of your contacts from all of your platforms (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter) and also track their social media presence. This helps you understand your clients better and personalize your sales pitch to fit their needs. And its only $15 per month.

Insightly – For anyone that likes to see the bigger picture in their sales process this is the CRM for you. It is designed specifically for small startups and even offers you a great business card scanner app for only $12 per month.

Learn from the Best

One of the best (and free) tools you can find on the internet is the advice of others. There are countless numbers of people out there that write about startup life, marketing, SEO and much more. But not all of them do it as good as these guys.

Neil Patel – This excellent content writer and speaker focuses his advice on developing content that will bring traffic to your site. He is regarded as one of the world’s top influencers and has great actionable advice.

Matthew Woodward – The no nonsense SEO guru has a fantastic blog with thousands of readers. He uses data and analytics to really get down to the core of his message, and can often write extremely long (but very informational) blog posts that you find reading without thinking about it.

Rand Fishkin – One of my favorites. Rand Fishkin gives advice that ranges from SEO to making great presentations. You don’t want to miss his whiteboard Fridays, the highlight of the week for any entrepreneur.

Knowing Your Customer

You are supposed to know your customer at every stage of your startup. They might change along the way, but it’s your job to learn more about them to help your business develop.

KwikSurveys – This is the most cost effective way of getting to know your customer. Kwiksurvey gives you unlimited questions and a way to export all of the answers at the end.

SiteFeedBack – As you probably know, getting feedback from users is much harder than people think. This feedback tool enables you to give your customers a direct option to giving your insightful information that will help you improve your site.

Social Mention – A fantastic tool to make an analysis of a subject or even to do competitor analysis. When you know what is trending in your industry at the moment you will have an easier job of reaching your customer.

Analytical Tools

Open Site Explorer – This tool is must have for anyone that believes in the value of SEO. It enables you to make comparisons of link metrics and make a quick competitor analysis of internal and external links. Download the data and start making impressive reports.

SEMRush – A more in depth website analysis tool that gives you insights into backlinks, paid and organic traffic, as well as a keyword overview. Perfect for those who are working with Google Adword. Campaigns.

CrazyEgg – I love CrazyEgg because it really takes your users journey and visually shows you what they are looking at on your site, or what is making them leave. From heatmaps to scrollmaps you will be able to place the right call to actions in the right place.

Shareable Content

Are you planning on gaining traction through social media? Whether you want to engage a new audience or share your milestones and hard work with your followers, here are some tools to help you do that.

Co- schedule – I can’t highlight this service more, but this is essential to any startup looking to increase engagement on social media. In addition to being a great content scheduling platform, they also created a fantastic free ‘Click to Tweet’ tool that you can use in any blog post to help make your content more shareable.

Scoop.it – Many startups struggle in getting their content out there. But don’t worry! Use Scoop.it to share interesting content to their community which can be share to other networks. You’ll see your traffic grow quickly if you diversify the places you share your content.

Oktopost – Very similar to Coschedule, with an additional visual feature of analyzing your content engagement. Oktopost also makes it easy for you to share content from various profiles.

Visual Content

If you in a startup that believes in content being a driver of the message and brand, you will need to be using visual content to get it seen.

Easl.y – Infographics is one of the web’s most exciting visual additions. Even if you’re already an established startup but have yet to make an infographic, you should start ASAP. And try out this tool first.

Recite – Want to get more engagement on your images? Love quotes? Recite is the perfect quote maker for any occasion.

PliXS – If you’re looking for something other than Pixabay or Flickr, PlixS has thousands of images to choose from. No membership is needed and download as many as you want.

Great! You got to the end of the list! But if you noticed there were only 21 tools, so as promised here is the 22^nd:

Connections (no hyperlink needed)-The most important tool in your toolkit. Making, building and keeping connections is crucial for your startup business to succeed. You can learn from people as well as teach them what you know. The more you invest in people from your industry (and from other industries) the more you will receive in return. It might not be today, or tomorrow, or even next month. But at one point that connection is going to give you a value you cannot find online.

I don’t expect you to be using all of these tools simultaneously (except the last one), but choose the ones that will be the most important for your startups current development stage.

Do you use a tool that I haven’t mentioned? Would love to hear from you in the comments below!

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