Thursday, 14 October 2021
It is not unusual in many startup businesses that the owner should find themselves wearing multiple hats. I’m not talking about Jeanette’s most recent dashing beret, or the time that Derek had a fedora phase. I’m talking about multitasking roles like Social Media Manager, Business Analyst and People and Development Executive. All of which are full-time jobs, and it can feel overwhelming to undertake all that responsibility.
Starting a startup is a courageous feat, and at the beginning, it can feel like the only option is to cut costs by absorbing roles like these into your title of ‘the boss’, but what if it could be simpler?
Often the answer is right under your nose, and in this case, it is. Startups can help startups!
Here are our top 5 Free Apps that your Startup NEEDS... so you can take off a beanie or two.
1. Buffer
First let’s knock off that Social Media Manager title. Social Media is often a key marketing tool for startup businesses, but it can be a hugely time-consuming and demanding task. Look no further!
With Buffer, you can schedule your posts in advance and has a function which allows you to edit your posts according to the social media platform. Their free plan allows you to manage up to three social media channels and schedule up to 10x posts in advance.
Available on iOS, Android and desktop.
Try it out: https://buffer.com
2. Senditure
Let’s stay focused on the marketing team for now. Senditure equips you with everything you need for elegantly run email marketing campaigns, from intuitive design templates to email insights and reports so that you can create attractive and engaging emails, and see results.
Whether you are just starting out in e-Commerce or whether you are looking to boost revenue by automating your email service. Senditure have you covered.
3. Typeform
Perhaps an oldie but a goldie.
As we well know, surveys, questionnaires and forms all contribute towards user engagement, but they also serve to provide the key data we need to understand the strengths and failures of our businesses or products. Without intimately understanding our successes we cannot continue to grow, and if we ignore our failures we can never correct them.
Typeform gets rid of the hassle when collecting this sort of data. Not only does Typeform offer templates for basically any form known to man, it also offers valuable integrations without platforms that your small business or startup may already use, like Slack, Google Sheets and MailChimp.
4. Notion
There are a few good apps out there for time-management but unlike the others, Notion offers templates for different aspects of your business. For example, most time management or task management apps will have a Company Dashboard template, and then each team ‘Marketing’ ‘Sales’ etc. With Notion, there are templates to track other sides to your business like the Value Proposition Canvas, design so you are ticking all the boxes in terms of Value Proposition or Pitch Deck Creator where you can create and share pitch decks with your team in real-time.
Notion is completely customizable and ideal for members of your team who might be neurodivergent.
5. LastPass
This one is a true life-saver! Never forget a password again with LastPass.
LastPass keeps your passwords organize, synced across your devices and most importantly locked away. You essentially have a vault of passwords and one ‘master’ password to log into it with.
You can share passwords with other accounts, so if your team are forgetful.. no worries! You can simply share the password with them from your vault.
LastPass is also available as a web extension for a smoother browsing experience.