Starting your own business is a daunting prospect for anyone. For young people, it can seem especially challenging as they dream of running a business that will get its foot in the door and grow and jostle for position amongst older, more established companies. Whether alone as a sole proprietorship or with others forming an LLC, a successful business needs to be put together with the best tools for the job.
There are many tools out there to help either sole proprietors or general partnerships. Here below are 4 of the essential ones for every young entrepreneur building their first business entity.
1. Trello
September the 13th of 2021 marked Trello’s tenth birthday. It has become one of the most popular business management tools on the market for a variety of reasons. Priced well, including a free version (get to that soon), it is incredibly easy to use even for first-time entrepreneurs making their maiden foray into the world of business ownership.
Trello uses kanban boards. These provide excellent birds-eye views of how various tasks and projects are progressing. For new entrepreneurs and anyone else new to project management, Trello’s kanban boards provide a superb way of getting to grips overseeing multiple business tasks. This can be a valuable early education: many much more advanced project management and business platforms use kanban boards as their base. Therefore, with Trello, you have a win-win: a simple-to-use, beneficial tool right out of the box, which can also teach you the ropes for more heavyweight software in the future.
Trello acts as a type of online whiteboard with lists and cards. Individual cards can be used for notes, tasks, project details, clients, and so on. You will have full visibility of all cards and lists, enabling you to manage and prioritize your projects more efficiently. These cards can be included in lists, which makes it easy – for example – to see who is assigned to and responsible for particular tasks and keep track of their status. Extremely versatile, Trello can be used not just for specific project organizing but for a variety of other tasks including course creation and the writing of ebooks.
You will also be interested to know that there is a free version of Trello – and for many, the free version alone is adequate for their management requirements.To learn about other leading project management tools on the market, check out this post on the top Trello alternatives.
Pricing:
- Free version;
- Standard: $5 per month, per user;
- Premium: $10 per month, per user;
- Enterprise: $17.50 per month, per user.
2. Canva
Australia’s Canva came onto the scene back in 2012 and is a beginner-friendly online graphic design platform. Simple to learn and to use, Canva is an exceptionally good tool for new businesses wanting to increase awareness of their brand. Company visibility can be enhanced through numerous physical mediums, including flyers, posters, t-shirts, and business cards. These finished products can look highly professional thanks to the provision of high-resolution graphics. These graphics can be downloaded as vector files to then be applied to whatever you wish.
Canva has over a quarter of a million free templates available in its library. These can be put to use in almost any way you see fit – including the all-important social media marketing. It’s simple and intuitive to use, and with so many options at your disposal, it makes it seem more like fun than work as you experiment with your company logo design and promo image ideas. Canva is armed with more than enough fonts and backgrounds for any new business to come up with a unique, eye-catching style.
Extremely advantageous is the fact that Canva is such intuitive, easy-to-use software that simultaneously enables solid artistic possibilities from anyone with zero art or design experience. It’s easy for all, fun to use – and delivers very professional end results.
Canva is an essential tool for any new, young entrepreneur wanting to make a splash with their brand name.
Pricing:
- Free version available for non-profits;
- Canva free trial available;
- Canva Pro subscriptions start at $12.99 per month (+$6.99 per month for every additional user).
3. Hootsuite
Now in its 14th year, built as a platform for the multi-management of social media accounts, needless to say, Hootsuite is doing well – and it can do well for your business too. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and every other platform you can expect to be named can all be handled from Hootsuite’s easy-to-use dashboard. Social media platforms are an infinite arena for marketing potential – and Hootsuite’s features and functions are designed to optimize every angle of it.
Pricing:
- Free version – (only for 1 user and 2 social media accounts);
- Professional: $49 per month;
- Team: $129 per month;
- Business: $599 per month;
- Enterprise: Pricing to be discussed.
4. Mailchimp
Every business needs core email software to keep its customers updated and for marketing campaigns. Mailchimp fits the bill for businesses of all sizes, ages, and types – but they can be especially convenient for new entrepreneurs. This is largely in part due to their excellent free version. Mailchimp is absolutely free if you have less than 2,000 subscribers on your contacts list. For a new business, this is excellent and generous assistance.
Mailchimp will provide you with every feature you could possibly need for your email strategies while remaining simple to use and easy to learn. Scheduling, customization, and the ability to be integrated with other platforms, Mailchimp will supply your essential one-stop email service. Entrepreneurs like Deepak Shukla used tools like Mailchimp to generate leads and attract new customers to his business. Deepak states, “the power of email marketing cannot be understated. It’s a vital strategy that can help you win your first clients and it helped me in the early stages of building Pearl Lemon Group.”
5. Fyle
The success of a business depends on how its finances are handled. As a busy entrepreneur, it is easier to ignore small financial discrepancies than record everything meticulously – this could prove detrimental to your business and invite unpleasant audits from tax authorities. Fyle is a business spend management software that helps you track and control your business spend in real-time.
Fyle gives business owners real-time and in-depth analytics on all business related spend so they can optimize spending, cash on any opportunities, and stay compliant with tax regulations right from the start. Further, its practically plug-n-play and sits inside everyday apps like Slack, G-Suite, and Office 365 so employees can track spend as it happens and with a click.
Pricing:
- $0.00 per month (while below 2,000 subscribers);
- $30.99 per month;
- $78.99 per month;
- $135.00 per month.
6. Pics.io
Pics.io is the digital asset management (DAM) solution to easily manage your media. Photos, videos, infographics – visual media plays a crucial part in any marketing campaign. However, what many don’t understand is how much time one spends looking for needed visuals each day. Given that marketing always runs on a tight schedule, these hiccups add up fast and contribute to slow content delivery. With Pics.io, you can search for assets fast using metadata (e.g. keywords), quickly check and retrieve needed revision of an asset and improve collaborative effort by keeping assets & commentary on them in one place.
- 7-day trial
- Saves each user 10 hours/mo that they would have spent looking for assets
- 270% search results improvement
- Plans start with $150/mo per 10 users
7. Weje
One of the most simplified tools for online whiteboarding, team collaboration and knowledge management. Weje got all essential tools to organize and sort your ideas, build different schemas and work with various formats.
It helps to build processes small business owners, educators, influencers and anyone who found of keeping information and data clean.
Pricing:
It’s absolutely free now, which is great if you’re a beginning blogger trying to grow your income. Soon they will charge depending the number of users you want to have as co-editors on boards.
8. InEvent
InEvent is an event management solution designed to help businesses in the financial, pharmaceutical, automotive and other industries streamline processes related to online registrations, self-service check-in, attendees and more. Its white-labeling capabilities allow administrators to create customizable landing pages or mobile applications by adding brand logos, colors and images.
All-in-one virtual event platform, InEvent powers experiences that transform attendees into customers, driving sales, profits, efficiency and cost benefits for virtual and hybrid events. The end to end management software is designed to transform corporate events, trade shows, exhibitions, meetings and training sessions all in one dashboard.
InEvent´s platform is geared towards promoting and encouraging networking connections. With a private chat and 1:1 videoconferencing, attendees can instantly message each other individually whilst enjoying the event or schedule a business meeting within the platform.
Pricing:
- Starting at $2990 per year, but you can check the plans here.
9. Snov.io
A startup can’t move forward without practical lead generation tools. At Snov.io, you’ll find a best-in-class toolset to get leads fast and convert them into customers, and much more.
Founded in 2017, Snov.io has been designed as a comprehensive sales automation platform combining lead generation, email verification, and email sending tools to streamline outreach. Over the course of just a few years, the company boasts more than one million users of its products.
The platform offers individual and bulk prospect search on any website or social media with its advanced Email Finder tool and a separate LI Prospect Finder tool to scrape emails directly from LinkedIn. After verifying your email list, you can boost your conversion rate by creating scheduled email sequences with triggers, personalization, and open, click, and reply detection.
The company’s use cases also cover funding search, meaning you’ll find it easier to secure funding for your startup, which might be crucial at the early stages. There will be no problem for you to contact investors and VCs directly, automate sending investor pitches and follow-ups to stay top-of-mind, and schedule meetings with personalized Drip Campaigns.
Snov.io’s CRM also ensures high-level assistance in gathering, organizing, and managing all information about your customers. You can trace the buyer’s journey for each prospect you deal with, improve their customer experience, and stay focused on the deals that matter the most.
The pleasant thing is that you can get free access to the CRM functionality by simply signing up. But if you want to use its extended features, consider the plans:
S plan – $39/a month
M plan – $99/a month
L plan – $189/a month
XL plan – $369/a month
XXL plan – $738/a month
10. Drag
Switching between internal and external communication is a burdensome task. You receive emails from clients and suppliers that result in tasks all the time. So how about using those emails as task cards in a Kanban board inside your email client instead of copy-pasting the messages to a task manager? That’s what Drag does. It adds task management features to Gmail making it easy to collaborate. Share Gmail inboxes, create Kanban boards, assign tasks, automate boring processes and much more.
Pricing starts at $8 per user / month and you can try it for free.
Conclusion
If you are a young entrepreneur, the business tools listed above will provide you with superb building and management assistance as you develop your enterprise. With their use, you will be able to improve your overall efficiency, as well as your professionalism – and be well on your way to building up your business empire.
Interesting Related Article: “Business Formation Guide: Choose a Business Structure“