15 unique startup tools that no one is talking about

“The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.”- Reid Hoffman 

Launching a startup is tough. And handling finances at the beginning is even tougher. 

Whenever an entrepreneur starts a business, the first concern that comes into his mind is how he/she can reduce costs to a minimum. A business cannot be just launched by creating a website and taking it online, be it an online or an offline one. There are many other steps that need to be taken before you can launch your startup in the market, and it costs you money. 

There are several unavoidable costs that a startup has to bear, however, these costs can be reduced manyfold with the help of the best tools for startups. 

These tools not only minimize your costs, but also help you save your precious time by helping you accomplish mundane manual tasks with minimal effort. 

The only thing that keeps you from attaining heights is your unawareness of these handy yet amazing tools that can change the way you take your startup forward. 

We have listed 15 such tools for startups and divided them into 5 categories. Each of these tools have a strong impact on the growth of your startup and enhance the overall performance of your business. 

Here are the categories: 

1. Ideation tools 

2. Launch tools

3. CRM tools

4. Marketing tools 

5. Design and development tools 

This categorization covers almost every aspect of a startup, and you can choose out of these tools based on your requirement and budget. 

Let’s dive into the list of tools that can efficiently strengthen your business and help you achieve your goals. 

#1 Ideation Tools for your startup 

“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.”- Guy Kawasaki 

First step is always the hardest. The phase where your intangible ideas are taking shape into a concrete business is the most crucial part where you need to understand the industry you are working in, the kind of product or service that you are selling, and who your target audience is. But once you do that, the path becomes clearer to walk on, and the following tools can help you do just that in no time!  

1. Press Kite 

The power of persuasion is what makes an entrepreneur successful. And to back it up, you got to have a story that tells the world of your struggle. Press Kite is just that- A story for your startup. 

As the name suggests (told you, names matter a lot!), this unique tool creates a press kit for your startup, so that you never have to worry about creating one when a journalist asks for it. 

Press Kite exposes your startup to press coverage and helps you reach the masses. 

Indeed, a tool worth checking out! 

Price: Free 

Premium- $9 

Custom- $79 

2. Mindmeister 

A mind-mapping tool that helps you collaborate and brainstorm with experts in real-time. Along with project planning and ideation, this tool can also come in handy to make presentations. With Mindmeister, you can turn your ideas into dynamic slide-shows. 

Also, to turn your ideas into actionable tasks, Mindmeister integrates with MeisterTask, a task management tool. 

Price: Basic plan- Free 

Personal- $4.99 

Pro- $8.25 

Business- $12.49 

3. Javelin 

This one is for the innovators. Javelin helps you identify customer needs and validates your product or service accordingly. It’s a one-stop solution for startups when it comes to customer development. 

With the help of their pre-designed survey, you can analyze the market fit of your product. Also, it allows you to save more time as the speed of the workflows increases. 

Price: Free to Signup 

4. Squad Help 

No business has ever begun without a name. And no matter how you think, names do matter a lot! 

Squad Help assists you in finding the right name for your business, and it does not stop just there. It also helps you find names for your app, book, products and services. 

You can hold naming competitions on Squad Help and engage thousands of experts to find the perfect name for your business while you are guided through their agency-level naming process. 

They offer hand-picked compilation of premium names to choose from with the option of immediate purchase. 

Price: As low as $199 per contest 

#2 Launch Tools for your Startup 

“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”- Scott Belsky 

Launching a startup is never easy. From ideation to execution, there are several factors playing major roles that determine the successful launch of a startup. You only have to keep in mind that bothering about failure is worthless, you just have to be right once! And the following tools will assist you in hitting that one masterstroke that will establish your startup as a successful business. 

5. Beta List 

Having been helped more than 3,000 startup owners in establishing their business, Beta List is a pre-launch platform that helps your startup gain the traction it needs in order to launch successfully.  

You gain an advantage using this platform, since it puts your startup idea in front of an exceptional community of business enthusiasts, who can provide you with their valuable feedback on your idea. 

Beta List helps you understand your customer base with the help of their qualitative and quantitative research so that you create the right product for the right audience. 

Price: Hobby Free 

Startup- $129 

Funded- $299 

6. Product Hunt 

The ideal platform for product-loving enthusiasts, Product Hunt is a brilliant go-to launch platform for startups, which showcases amazing new products every day. They share, discuss and geek over about new products, mobile apps, websites, and other tech creations. 

Product Hunt is a convenient platform to launch your product, and more importantly, your startup, especially when they offer a pre-existing community of testers who are always excited about trying new products. 

Their website operates on a system for user comments as well as voting system, similar to Reddit. 

Price: Signup for Free 

#3 CRM Tools for your Startup 

Every business thrives on the relationships they build with their customers. But how do you build long-lasting relationships with your customers when you are juggling between multiple tasks every day? 

Customer Relationship Management software are especially designed to overcome this issue that every business faces every single day. Your sales reps can rely on CRM for many things- be it automation, or centralization of important information, saving minute details over conversations or getting rid of manual labor to get more time to sell. 

“CRM isn’t rocket science, but it can make you a competitive superstar.” 

8. Salesmate.io 

The right sales CRM for your startup can be the most important investment that you’d make. Salesmate is a one-stop solution to- 

• Generate more leads and build a sales pipeline 
• Eliminate guesswork and get clarity over details
• Manage and engage customers at every stage of the pipeline 
• Save time from manual tasks with the help of automation 

Salesmate is easy to use and provides value for your money. It also provides useful integrations in order to track team’s performance and improve productivity. Using only one platform, your team can access every important information on their clients, without having to struggle between multiple apps and platforms. 

Salesmate also provides complete sales automation that will help your sales team get rid of mundane tasks such as follow-up emails and texts, data updating, task assignments, sales reports, and much more. 

The best part of Salesmate CRM for startups is that it’s highly reliable and secure, and provides personalized support at any given time, so that you never have to keep your work on hold when you hit a bottleneck. 

With a CRM like Salesmate, your startup can become unstoppable and your sales team will always thank you for easing their workload! 

Price: Basic – $23

Pro – $39

Business – $63

Enterprise – Custom 

#4 Marketing Tools for your Start-up 

“Businesses have only two functions- Marketing and innovation.”- Milan Kundera 

Reaching your target audience is never an easy task. To do so, it’s necessary to implement the right marketing strategies at the right time so you can reach the right people. And this implementation requires proper tools that can monitor, analyze, and evaluate any marketing campaign that you run. Here are some of the quality tools to implement your marketing strategies. 

9. Hootsuite

Social media marketing is the core of every marketing campaign these days. Hootsuit, because of its easy user interface and affordable pricing, is one of the best social media marketing tool used by well-known startups across the world. 

With Hootsuit, you can schedule posts across any social media platform, measure the ROI (Return on Investment) on your social media campaigns, and know what impact is being created by your campaigns- everything under the same roof. You can also link it with different startup tools with like Mail Chimp, YouTube, Dropbox, etc. 

Price: Individual (1 user 3 social media profiles) Free 

Professional- (1 user 10 social media profiles) $19 per month 

Team- (3 users 20 social media profiles) $99 per month 

Business- (5-10 users 35 social media profiles) $599 per month 

10. Mail Chimp 

Email marketing is a tried and tested strategy that works wonders for every business. As per Statista, roughly 306.4 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2020, and the figure is expected to increase to over 376.4 billion daily mails by 2025. 

That’s a lot of emails! 

With such a vast usage of emails, you require an email marketing tool that allows you to utilize reliable emailing services to deliver emails directly in the user’s inbox. 

Mail Chimp is exactly the tool that you are looking for! It’s a highly recommended tool for startups. 

Price: Free Plan 

Essentials- $9.99 per month 

Standard- $14.99 per month 

Premium- $299 per month 

11. Google Analytics 

Want to know how much traffic is coming on your website every day? 

Google Analytics is the tool for you! 

It helps you analyze what’s working for you and what’s not, so that you can fix what is not working to enhance customer engagement and user experience. It helps you create more engaging marketing campaigns and increase your conversation rate. 

With Google Analytics, you can always achieve greater results for your startup by continuously evaluating the data and monitoring online marketing strategies. 

Price: Free till you exceed 5 million impressions per month.

As we know Google analytics is getting deprecated and we all need to move towards GA4. Here is a GA4 migration checklist that you can use.

#5 Design & Development Tools for your Startup 

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”- Steve Jobs 

For a budding startup, design and development can give a difficult time. Even one wrong step at the beginning can lead to complications in the future that might be tough to turn back from. To save yourself from this hustle, you can invest in some design tools that can enhance the image of your startup. 

12. Logo Design 

Logo is the identity of your startup. However, creating one can be a major task. Logo Design is an online logo maker that can give your startup a unique visual identity. It offers an extensive range of logo templates for every industry to choose from. The designs are appealing and customizable, and you don’t need a graphic designer to do so! 

In addition to the company name, you can also add tagline in the logo. And you know the best part? All their logo templates are created by a team of expert graphic designers and you can directly get in touch with them to get your custom logo made. 

Price: Varies as per the requirements. You can get discounts on the website as well. 

13. Canva 

Canva is an online designing tool that is widely used by individuals and startups across the globe to design their social media posts, twitter headers, Facebook ads, blog graphics, Instagram posts, and more. It comes with more than a million fonts, images and icons to give you the most appealing designs. 

The user interface is easy to use, and the templates can be customized with the drag-and-drop feature. Images made by global designers are also available for a small amount of fee. 

Price: Basic Free 

Pro- $12.95 per month 

14. Visme 

Visme is a powerful startup tool for designing amazing presentations, infographics, and other visual content to get the maximum eyes on your business. 

Price: Basic- Free 

Standard- $19 per month 

Single/Complete- $39 per month 

Team- $117 per month 

15. WordPress 

One of the most popular CMS that runs on PHP and MySQL, Wordpress is a free, open-source contact management system. The basic features of Wordpress include plugin architecture and a template system to create attractive websites. You can pair Procreate design brushes with WordPress to create interesting banners, cartoon characters, visuals, and rich charts.

WordPress offers responsive designing, multiple page styles, social sharing, auto upgrades and support, a wide range of plugins and widgets, theme customization, SEO, and much more. It’s an ideal platform for new startups to create their websites and generate online traffic easily. 

Price: Basic- Free 

Personal- $5 per month 

Premium- $8 per month 

Business- $25 per month 

Ecommerce- $45 per month 

To sum it up… 

We came up with this list of unique tools for startups considering all the necessities and complications that a startup can face during the early stages of commencement. So now you have it! 

Get the ones that suit your business the best and make the most out of them. If used wisely, these tools can flourish your business with prospects and sustainably grow your startup in the years to come.