10 Tools For Your Startup To Be Productive And Grow Faster

With many open source projects and tools available for start-ups today, it’s becoming easy to be productive and grow fast.

But when you are starting something new it’s difficult to choose right tools for your startup. With amazing idea and enthusiastic team, every startup like to launch their product soon and build early users.

The same happened with me, when I started GrowthHub, India's first community-based crowdfunding platform. But the tools we have chosen helped us to grow faster our expectations.

If you are a budding entrepreneur, here is the quick list to run the show efficiently.

1. Trello – Team based project management

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Trello helps you collaborate on projects from beginning to end. It makes your team stay organized. With column-based layout on a centralized board you can assign tasks, prioritize to-dos, label cards and add due dates. It helped us to track all our tasks and manage everything at one place.

2. Slack – No to emails. Communicate easily!

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Things get messed up when people communicate with you through various platforms. Slack makes things easier, it helped our team to be more productive and communicate at one place. With concerned channels for different departments or projects, it helped us to manage things remotely. Slack offers you to call each other, drop documents and kick-start things faster.

Thanks to slack for many integrations, you will start loving every productive discussion your team will do on slack.

3. Canva – Design anything!

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Canva is something that I often suggest people in my network, when they look out for designers. At our startup, we never hired a designer. All our social media posts, Website design, brochure, Presentations and Flyers everything is designed on Canva.

Canva makes design simple for everyone. You don’t need to procrastinate your plan for a designer, everyone in your team can make amazing designs through Canva.

4. PowToon – Amazing animated videos

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Next time you launch a new product don’t wait for a professional video maker. Make it yourself. With amazing templates, Powtoon helps you to make best animated explainer videos or presentations. Write a script. Add Visuals. Add Music and its done. You can even record voice-overs and make professional looking videos.

Canva and Powtoon showcase creativity in your team and boost your motivation.

5. GMass – Build your Mass through e-mails

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Gmail tabs turned the game of e-mail promotion industry. We all receive lot of emails every day landing in our promotions & update tabs. These e-mails get unnoticed with open rate of 8 - 12%.

If you are an early stage startup, GMass would help you land your e-mail in primary inbox. You will start noticing an e-mail open rate of 80-90%. You can personalize emails and tune your users about updates, offers and new launches.

6. Hootsuite – Your Social Dashboard

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Hootsuite is pretty much a staple for start-ups. You can enhance your social media management with Hootsuite, It puts all your different social handles in one place – help you manage faster, smarter and safer.

7. Hunter.io – Contact Anyone

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As Truecaller is for Contact Numbers, Hunter.io is for E-mails. Many stumble upon finding contacts to reach out business clients. Hunter.io can help you find your client e-mails and unlock opportunities. Their google chrome extension is even integrated with linkedin, making it easier to know client e-mail address to connect.

8. Surveymonkey – Know your customers

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Every startup like to know what their customers think of their product. Surveymonkey can help you with that. It is an easy-to-use tool that helps you design, create, collect and analyse surveys.

For general surveys, you can choose one from their plenty of templates. Typeform also help you build beautifully designed forms to conduct surveys.

9. Wave – For all your Accounting

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Wave is a fantastic accounting app for all startups. It is simple to use and helps you manage all your invoices, Payrolls and finances. Wave creates and sends out unlimited number of invoices, manages your cashflows.

Most startups find it amazing, as it provides all details about how your business is moving in just a few clicks.

10. RescueTime – Be Productive!

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With lot of things to execute at your startup, being productive is important. Rescue Time helps you to track your time, eliminate distractions, and optimize your daily productivity.

It is so amazing that, it runs on the background of your laptop and mobile and tells your daily stats. It will help you to figure out what is distracting and how to make things productive.

For teams, you can use Toggl, to track time and optimize productivity.

Are you using a tool that helped your business but didn’t see on this list? Would like to update with credits, connect with me at www.manikanth.com