Starting and growing a business can be hard work. To set things on the right track from the beginning requires harvesting the field and picking the right apps.
Some will of course be of more benefit than others but it doesn’t all have to be tiring work. Some must-have apps are actually fun and can be exciting to use as you attempt to grow your startup.
So let’s have a quick look at 3 exciting tools for startups in 2022.
1. Slack
Entering its 9th year now, Slack is a team messaging tool designed to improve internal communication and file sharing.
A cursory glance could have you dismiss it as not much more than a dressed-up SMS app, but there is a lot more here than immediately meets the eye: this is a rapidly growing business application that doesn’t have over three-quarters of a million businesses using it for nothing.
Slack is a powerful tool and a very efficient one. It’s also a lot of fun to use. Slack’s interface is as intuitive as you could wish any form of software application to be.
Providing the ability to create multiple channels, you can observe and participate in discussions relating to more than one project at one time.
It can also be integrated with other platforms such as Trello and Google Drive.
These integrations combined with Slack’s own multi-channel communications will give you the following benefits:
- Better management of conversations;
- More efficient communication between teams;
- Better collaborative opportunities;
- Voice and/or video calls;
- File sharing.
On reading the above, those features may not seem like anything particularly new. Where Slack wins with them, however, is with its speed.
There are bigger, more well-known, names out there providing the same things, but they are sometimes sluggish and even at times seem to be burdened by their own weight. Slack is ethereal in comparison. Don’t let that fool you.
It may seem like a balloon when sat next to the Zeppelin of big brand Peer Software, but there is a lot of power and potential tucked away, waiting for you to tap into it.
Further to its speedy nature, it is incredibly quick to create an account and become an administrator with your own domain.
Within minutes, you can add members to your team and begin collaborating immediately.
For those wanting a heavier app with a weightier feature set, Slack may not be for you. But for those wanting to be more efficient and be faster and not slowed down by dozens of bells and whistles dragging behind them, Slack is the perfect internal communication tool. And it keeps communication fun.
2. Canva
A hugely popular tool and a whole lot of fun to use, Canva is aimed at designing images and graphics to boost brand awareness.
You can use it to push eye-catching marketing across all the social media channels of the digital world, as well as use it to bring your brand tangibly into the real world.
Canva has been built to help you make your brand shout out from the crowd, grab attention, and generate interest in you and your business. Regardless of your business, you can gain great value from Canva.
Tarquin Brown, from Mercator Group states, “We use Canva daily,” and it has helped him and the rest of the Mercator team manage projects remotely.
It includes several features to assist in the scaling of your business:
- Time-saving custom design blueprints to build upon;
- Collaboration tools will improve the efficiency of teamwork;
- Fast image creations for social media, like Instagram stories and Instagram stories
- Intuitive, easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.
Canva opens the doors to creative infinity. The possibilities are endless for anyone, and you don’t need to be artistically inclined to be able to get to grips with it and use it.
Whether you have a keen eye for design and graphics or not, with the help of Canva, you can generate professional and expert-looking content quickly.
With that said, you may find the only thing that slows your progress down, and that is the fun you have experimenting with it.
Once you get going and further into what it has to offer, you may find you have fallen down a deep rabbit hole. This is a work tool that makes work fun and enjoyable no matter what your skill level.
For any startup wanting to boost brand awareness, Canva is an excellent platform to shout from.
You can design images to create a brand logo that can then be printed to anything you can think of: stickers, mugs, business cards, flyers, clothing, phone cases – you name it.
With more than 250,000 free templates on hand, there is more than enough to inspire you no matter what industry your business is in, be it popular or niche.
There are no limits to how to use them other than the far reaches of your own imagination.
Feature-rich, Canva is a must and the perfect tool to create the stamp for your brand.
3. Mailchimp
All businesses will need an email marketing service, and that is especially the case for new businesses wanting and needing to grow.
Easily recognizable with its cheeky monkey logo, the cloud-based Mailchimp is a market leader and considerate of new businesses: it has the best free version you can find, which is a real aid for new companies on fragile budgets.
The free plan is limited to contact lists numbering under 2000, but for fledgling companies, this is more than enough.
Mailchimp comes wielding a massive array of email blueprints from which you can easily create your own branded, professional-looking mail via its drag/drop interface.
To check the subject titles whether they follow the best practices, there is a subject line helper available in Mailchimp or you can use an online title generator tool to create powerful subject lines for a better open rate.
Built-in analytics means that you can track open rates, unsubscribe and subscription rates and a whole spectrum of other data to give you valuable insights into how your emails and business are being received and interacted with.
Honed and efficient, this is a superb tool that is as easy to use for first-timers as it is for seasoned professionals. Using it in combination with multilingual email translations will allow you to overcome language barriers and give your campaigns a truly global reach.
With the entry-level free version being as good as it is, there is no reason at all not to give the trusted monkey a try.
4. TimeCamp
Modern startups require modern solutions to bill their employees accurately. That’s why they choose TimeCamp – an automatic time tracking software that also offers an overtime calculator that helps both employees and managers find out how much their employees should be paid for working extra hours.
Key features:
- Automatic time and activity tracking,
- Daily and weekly timesheets,
- Wide range of built-in and custom reports,
- Billable/non-billable hours,
- Attendance tracking,
- Invoicing,
- 30+ direct integrations,
- Custom management roles and Guest features,
- High availability: web timer, desktop app, mobile app, a browser extension for Chrome and Edge
TimeCamp offers businesses a fast and intuitive work hours logging that streamlines various business processes. A wide range of reports (both built-in and custom ones) allows checking projects and teams’ performance and staying on top of resource consumption for a particular task or project.
The tool registers clock-in and clock-out data and a time logged for a chosen project, which is especially helpful for managing the attendance and creating an accurate payroll list.
Users can also generate invoices based on time entries and send them straight to their customers.
With TimeCamp you can add as many projects as you wish, as well as tasks and subtasks.
What’s more, you can also add the tags for better categorization and notes in case you don’t want to forget something important about the entry.
It creates transparent, multilevel project transparency, which is crucial for effective time and resource management.
Besides its own features, TimeCamp also integrates directly with 30+ plus various tools, like Trello, Asana, Clickup, Jira, Salesforce, Azure DevOps, and many more.
It also offers a Calendar integration, that adds all your events as new time entries to your timesheet.
TimeCamp offers a free plan for unlimited users. Paid plans start at $6.30 user/mo, but if your startup needs have more specific needs, contact their Sales team to discuss the details.
Conclusion
For all the tedium that can come with business applications, it’s good to know that there are some that are actually enjoyable to use.
Apps such as Canva can really bring your brand and ideas to life and rejuvenate the excitement you felt before the hard work began to build your company.
The apps above are easy and fun to use and all add to the excitement of nurturing and growing your startup.
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