9 Software Tools for Startups

Establishing a startup company can be an exciting and stressful venture. You’re probably concerned with mounting expenses, marketing challenges, and employee worries. Finding the right set of software for your startup can be a great way to mitigate some of those challenges in an affordable and easy manner.

Today’s technologies are more powerful and less expensive than ever. Many are scalable to the size of your organization and based on a per-user subscription basis. In addition, they can help automate many of the time-consuming, mundane tasks that can easily bog down a new startup organization. Here are the top 9 software picks for startups.

1. Duo Delivers IT System Security

With cybercrime and security breaches on the increase, startups must place security high on their list of priorities. Losing critical data or compromising customer-sensitive data can easily destroy a fledgling organization.

Duo Security from Cisco protects your workforce with simple, yet powerful, access security from anywhere and to any environment. Designed to safeguard all users, devices, and applications, Duo allows a startup to stay focused on top business priorities instead of worrying about these backend security issues.

You’ll obtain complete device visibility so you can respond faster to threats with an easy‑to‑deploy, scalable SaaS solution that natively protects each of your applications. The solution protects all your applications from compromised credentials and devices, meeting any compliance requirements that your business may have easily.

2. Google Meet Makes Virtual Communication Easier

In today’s world of remote work, it’s likely that your startup is spread out geographically or will need to consult or use remote professionals. Be sure you have a reliable meeting application to make ongoing communication effective and simple.

Google Meet is free, operates in a simple web app, and integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar. Meet provides a fast, easy, and reliable online meeting solution that’s designed to foster workforce productivity. This solution can help your startup build better relationships and drive business success through face-to-face interactions, effective sharing of visual materials, and brainstorming with any number of colleagues from around the world.

3. TechnologyAdvice Helps Get Your CRM Right

This is more of a tool-for-choosing-a-tool, but it’s an incredibly useful one. Choosing the right CRM is one of the most important choices you can make as you’re launching your startup. Salesforce might be the most well-known option, but Hubspot, Zoho, Insightly, and Less Annoying CRM (to name just a few) all offer compelling alternatives. With all the choices available to you, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and just go with whichever company has the most persuasive sales rep.

TechnologyAdvice has a great tool for helping you compare and contrast the different CRM options available to you. The information they provide will help you explore options you may not have been aware of and narrow down your choices to the few CRMs that make the most sense for your business.

4. SurveyLegend Helps You Stay in Touch With Stakeholders

SurveyLegend helps startups create mobile-friendly surveys, forms, polls, and questionnaires that are customized to your brand with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop tool. It also allows you to display collected data with eye-catching and insightful graphics.

Although market research is critical to startup organizations, you now no longer need to make a large investment in a third-party organization to conduct your own studies. Understand customer demand, measure customer satisfaction, or gauge how your employees are doing with SurveyLegend -- all on a continuous and ongoing basis so you can continue to improve while you grow.

5. Paystand Makes Collecting Payments Fast and Easy

Ensuring that you get paid in a timely manner is critical for any business, but especially for start-up organizations. You rely on that income stream to keep your company going and having that cash available means you can expand and capitalize on new opportunities more quickly.

Paystand is a B2B Payment Automation that can be easily integrated into your accounts receivable system. By offering a “pay now” button that can be seamlessly included in your electronic invoices or email reminders, you can make collecting on bills as easy as possible. In addition, the organization offers a no-fee bank-to-bank payment option that eliminates high credit card transaction fees or the time-consuming manual processing of paper checks. Processing and reconciling accounts is easier than ever with this payment solution.

6. ScaleGrid Automates Time-Consuming Database Administration

As a fully managed Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) platform, ScaleGrid allows startups to automate time-consuming database administration tasks whether they are in the cloud or on your premises. ScaleGrid allows you to easily provision, monitor, backup, and scale any open source database. It offers high availability, advanced security, full superuser and SSH access, query analysis, and troubleshooting support to all subscribing companies.

ScaleGrid supports both public and private clouds, handling all your database operations at any scale so you can focus on your application performance and core business priorities.

7. Asana Puts Organization Into Your Project Management Efforts

Keeping your team organized can sometimes be a challenge in a startup as things tend to move rapidly. Asana is a leading project management tool that helps your team members stay in sync, meet deadlines, and accomplish goals, and for good reason.

Asana helps you see the big picture so it’s easy for management to see which teams and individuals are assigned to which tasks, why it matters, and how to get things done. Startups can use visual boards, timeline tools, integrations, calendar features, and dashboards to stay organized. Asana helps pull together team goals, plans, tasks, and files into a shared space. Each team member can customize his or her own dashboard to see what’s relevant to a workday.

Organizations can manage dependent, overlapping, and unscheduled tasks to build plans so that every member of your startup is pulling in the same direction.

8. Hootsuite Unites Social Media Campaigns

Social media may be one of the most important aspects of today’s startup’s marketing program. Understanding how to manage campaigns on various social media channels as well as handle positive and negative feedback and respond in a timely manner to questions and complaints can be nearly a full-time job.

Hootsuite allows you to easily manage all your social media and get results. Startups can schedule and publish content to the right channels at the right time, track the effectiveness of campaigns in real-time, and increase the volume of your top-performing content. Hootsuite allows you to view and manage all your social content in a single collaborative calendar.

You can empower all members of your startup organization to create visually appealing and engaging posts for their favorite social media outlets. Hootsuite can help fill out your social presence around the clock by automatically scheduling posts during the slower times.

Hootsuite is an excellent tool that helps startups build their brands, resulting in better customer experiences, more engaged conversations, and loyal, long-term customers.

9. Canva Provides In-House Design Support Affordably

We are living in an increasingly visual world where images and videos are critical to attracting and holding the attention of customers, prospects, and stakeholders. The problem for startups is that professional design services can be expensive, eating away at the valuable capital necessary to keep a new business afloat.

Canva is a low-cost, easy-to-use design tool that offers a myriad of professional layouts and designs. It allows you to customize those layouts and designs for your organization, brand, and image until you’re ready to hire a graphic designer.

If you have a creative team member or want to add a one-of-a-kind image, simply upload it to Canva for easy editing and filtering. Icons, shapes, fonts, and elements can be added to create all those details you see from the professionals.