In the digital world, we live in today, having a stellar startup concept alone just isn’t enough to facilitate success. Nowadays, startups need to manage, deliver, and analyze their concepts with innovative tools in order to stay competitive.
“Every entrepreneur is under the impression that he or she has the best idea for a business — nobody has ever come up with something so clever, so appealing, so needed,” Serenity Gibbons explained in a Forbes article. “But there’s a big gap between coming up with a great idea and executing on it successfully.”
From business planning to daily ops, having a tool in place that maximizes the process for efficiency and productivity is essential. Here are X essential management tools every startup needs in 2023.
1. Project Management Tool
Project management is absolutely essential for the success of any startup. Those early stages of launching products and/or services, creating client value, remote team collaboration, and more can be pretty chaotic and stressful. But having an innovative project management tool in place can ease the beginning of startup tensions and challenges. Project management must-haves include:
- Real-time project planning
- Resource/workload management
- Ability to collaborate easily
- Document management
- Visual timelines
- Review and approval management
- Ease of integration into other tools and software
There are certainly the traditional project management tools, like Asana and Trello. But new innovative project management tools are being launched annually, and 2023 will surely have some new tools worth trying out.
2. Financial Management Tool
The number two reason why startups fail is running out of money, behind lack of market. This makes having a financial management tool in place critical to the success of your startup in 2023 and beyond. This actually may require a few different tools rolled into a toolset for absolute financial efficiency and productivity.
The first financial management asset to consider is finance tracking. Using business financial platforms is a good start and some are pretty streamlined. You will also need a way to get paid for your products and/or services. Implementing business invoice software can be a startup lifesaver with customer ease of use, automated workflow, and more.
3. Design Management Tool
If your startup is designing anything, like in the case of a digital marketing or website design agency, you will need a stellar design management tool. Design tools can streamline projects, allow for real-time collaboration and feedback, and bring clients into the conversations about their projects with ease. If you have yet to implement a design management tool, 2023 is the time to make it happen.
A notable design management tool is InVision. It is a lightweight tool that is easy to use. It is especially great for web design, since team members, developers, clients, and content strategists can mark up sites and share ideas and comment on what needs to be accomplished on a single web page during staging and prior to launch.
4. Document Management Tool
Your startup will compile documents pretty fast, and being able to manage them all without anything important getting lost is essential. This is even more important in 2023, since regulations on-site security and the personal information and data of customers are a top security protocol priority. Document management tools like Dropbox or even the old standby, Google Drive, can be great for your startup to organize, share, collaborate on, and secure documents. The best part is you can easily scale these tools as well.
5. Communication Management Tool
The ability for a startup to communicate effectively is absolutely essential, and a tool every startup needs in 2023. You can not only create internal team groups but also communicate better with clients, wherever they may be in the world.
“Conventional methods of communication such as phone calls and emails are somewhat slow and can experience challenges leading to delays in the channel,” according to The Startup Magazine. “However, with the modern smart communication tools, vendors and clients can be invited onboard to interact directly with your team. This ensures instant approvals, decision making, and feedback, making the process faster.”
Communication management tools like Slack or Skype can ensure your team and clients are always up to date, offering feedback and insight, and keeping workflow productivity maximized.
In Conclusion
Having essential management tools in place is vital to the growth and success of your startup. This goes without saying in the digital era we live in today. The chances of your competitors using management tools are pretty high, so if you want to stay competitive, ensure you have your own strategy for leveraging these tools ready for 2023.
