Top “truly” Free Tools To Boost Your Startup

For a lot of startups, there is a need to minimize costs and maximize productivity.

A very easy way to minimize cost is to make use of tools that are freely available.

These tools can sometimes match the functionality of some proprietary tools. We have curated different tools that can be useful to startups irrespective of industry.

These are the free tools for startups that provide services from bookkeeping to employee management to customer relations to advertisement to managing online presence to increasing visibility for your startup.

Getting Started

Apart from registering your startup and acquiring the necessary operational licences one of the important things to startups is an online presence usually by apps and websites

Building an app can be quite technical, if you do niot have the technial skill you might need to hire a professional which will cost a lot. since this post is about free solutions to boost your startup. the website is one free solution you can take advantage of. even though you will still ave to pay for domain name and hosting these expenses are very cheap compared to the cost of seting up websites

Website building

1. WordPress
   Word press is a content management system built on ph a way of building websites that is totally non-technical.
   
   The WordPress platform was created in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little and has grown to a platform that powers 30% of the internet.
   
   It has grown to become a very versatile platform that’s open source. the wide range of users and the GPL license has led to an array of free tools to help build fully functional websites. A lot of startups and websites have been built on WordPress e,g tech crunch, and Nairametrics
   Download WordPress here. Having an online presence in 2020 is particularly important for startups and businesses.

Domain and Name selection

Before you can start using WordPress you definitely need a domain name. A domain name serves as your online identity. It is what is used to recognize you on the internet. This is the address that uses of your customers can type into their web browsers and can get the website to get a domain name you would have to register a name you like which could be the name of the work of your service or your startup with a domain registrar.

A common thing given the widespread use of the internet is that if your if the name of your startup is not so unique the domain name might actually belong to someone else and as far I can regulations only one person can register a domain name therefore you have to find other domain names to use. This kind of century be problematic. A way to get around this is to use the main research tools one of such is to use domain research tools.

1. Lean Domain Search
   One such tool is leandomainsearch.com this website was created by the same guys behind wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Therefore it is also totally free to use and does not require anything this tool allows you to build new domain names it automatically scans for available domain names and its beauty domain names for you which countries from to use other tools also exist and substitute one such is owned by namecheap.com description below
2. Domain Name Checker
   Apart from using this form in research tools which help you build domain names from what keywords that you intend to use, you can also check for the availability of domains without using a domain name system instead domain recently the other way to check the domain availability without using the messages mentioned above include the use involved the use of domain checkers and all domain registrars have to win checkers example of popular domain registrars include 123-reg.co.uk namecheap.com and many other hosting companies which also offer domain name registration.

Image editing

In the fast-paced internet world first impressions actually, matter a lot of things fighting for the time of your user and as such, it is very very important to make good visual impressions. Research has shown that people tend to store more things that are represented visually that are written as plain text. Hence, the need to add visual elements to your website or whatever means of communication with your users of customer base exist.

1. Canva
   These visual elements can be created using a lot a number of tools but in this post will only be talking about the total the free tools you can use for start your startup one of such tools for image editing and creating designs for your startup is canva.com cover is an online tool which is totally built for beginners and non-technical in that it offers a drag-and-drop interface with a lot of pre-designed templates which makes it totally easy to use therefore even non-technical business owners can create visually appealing designs to properly market their Brand and make lasting impressions in the Minds of their uses.

Marketing

Email Marketing

Apart from creating online business and actually producing a product the other thing a startup needs to do is actually put their product in front of consumers and reach them to make them aware and possibly generate leads for their business is a very popular way to do this is through email Marketing the very first steps in email Marketing involves creating an email list and then sending emails to this address is to generate leads there a lot of tools which are available to startups and business owners for free which can be used to create an email list to send emails and then to access the statistics involved in conversion rates and reception and responses to totally provide data for analysis

1. Mailchimp
   They’re actually number of tools that can be used to do the aforementioned since one of such is MailChimp. Mailchimp is a SaaS business and allows you to send up to 10,000 emails to 2,000 contacts per month, with a daily send limit of 2,000 The trade-off with MailChimp is that your emails are branded with the iconic funny headed monkey.
   
   If you decided to create your website on WordPress and decide to create an email list from your WordPress website then there are a number of free tools by 12 plugins that can be used to collect emails make the form list and then save emails to this list to generate leads for a website a lot of this plugins exist but I’ll be mentioning just two which are mailpoet and the MailChimp plugin for WordPress

Social

Social media no doubt as huge traffic Facebook alone record about 1.2 billion monthly users active monthly users this represents a vast amount of possible uses which startup can reach by using this platform. Other social media platforms include trailer YouTube LinkedIn and Snapchat

Some of these platforms actually pay you for the content you create and can serveas revenue source for your startup if proper attention is paid to it

1. Facebook
   For Facebook, you can create a page for a startup, and then from the page, you can interact with users and customers on the platform.
2. Youtube
   YouTube as a social platform is particularly spectacular in that apart from using YouTube as a means of reaching out to your customers a startup or business can actually make money by producing YouTube content or do the things you need to reach a certain level setting in certain requirements before you can monetize your YouTube videos but essentially serve as a source of revenue for a business ultimate source of happiness
3. Linkedin
   LinkedIn is majorly a business-oriented social platform this platform can be used by startups and small businesses to connect with other businesses and even users and experts in their field it’s great just like any other two apart from their means of interacting with other users and customers

Surveys

After making your products getting consumer feedback is one of the key things that can make Homer a business consumer feedback is such a crucial part of any business that it should never be ignored so we have decided to include free tools to be able to collect consumer feedback on a product.

1. SurveyMonkey
   A very popular way of getting feedback is through the use of surveys and polls and as a startup you can use survey monkey to get feedback from your consumers you can also use Google forms to get feedback from your consumers on product quality and products and consumer satisfaction and ways to improve upon your products just like free consultation with your customers

Content editing

1. Grammarly
   Grammarly is an editing software that helps you edit your content and prevent silly edits

Search Engine Optimization

Just like having a website you could have decided to carry out content marketing to boost your startup I’m going to be losing some tools which can I use to to develop a proper content marketing strategy and to also evaluate importance and your performance.

1. Google trends
   Google Trends Google Trends is a past form which can you use to assess how popular is I think the world is is the data is pulled from Google searches and then you can use it so visually evaluate and analyze the popularity and the search traffic for a certain keyword over a specific period of time search
2. Google keyword planner
   Google keyword planner is google’s own inhouse solution to give you comprehensive insights on keywords.
3. Page Speed Insights
   Google is the most popular search engine in the world currently end the search engine uses in quite a number of factors and ranking websites a particular keyword one of such criteria for ranking website speed of the websites this tool also provided by Google can be used to assess the load times of your website web pages and to see if there are any improvement optimizations can be done as regards peach pit optimization this tool is called page speed insights that give me free tools and free business owners and tally non-technical very easy to use and

Related: Starting a Business in Nigeria

Data Collection/tracking

Given that you already established a website you would like to be able to get data which you can analyse to make changes to your website to better optimise the performance user performance and get the most out of your website two free tools I’m going to be mentioning next can we use for Justice we are also part of the Google webmaster two kids and a first-year free to use his tools are Google Analytics and search console

Website/Apps

1. Google analytics
   Google Analytics essentially tracks users on a website the time we spent website their mode of acquisition will be there from search is organic traffic or they’re from social websites or is better traffic-wise directs traffic to actively protect their web address into a browser and then came directly to websites are going for this type of data if you’d like to enable is the demographic and a whole lot of data which you can analyze and better optimize the performance of a website to your target consumer markets you can actually analyze where the bulk of a truck traffic is coming from and then better tell your content or product to match the pattern demographic another
2. Search console
   Search console is basically an interface that allows you to monitor what pages are in the drawing traffic to your website and all pics are getting it on your website
   With the search console, you can no keyboards that you’re getting it for and then your current ranking in serps and basically up your gaming does as such that you can come better and more traffic

Business Data visualization

1. Power BI
   Apart from pulling together your website data which was released so she made online your website visitor tracking and not her that there are also those that exist that I can use to visualise and analyse the data collected from other sources in his tools in this is the input is not from a website or a web address the input is actually what you put into it and then you can analyse the computer data and then get strategies out of business
2. Tableau
   Tableau is another solution similar to Power BI. it also free and preference will be according to the user.

Collaboration

Collaboration is a means of boosting the productivity of your startup that check out the post harnessing the power of startups. different-colored free collaboration platforms exist for you to boost your startup for the more technical oriented start-ups the platform or the most popular platforms to use is the top

1. Github
   Github is basically a person that allows developers to share code and then compensation management system and solid or liquid package for technical guys mostly web developers before I could answer stuff to get
2. Slack
   Another collaboration help I can very very useful for startups is slack so although as a news way before the outbreak of COVID-19 since lockdown started and overnight in well in Fuji it has soared in popularity because it allowed teams to collaborate remotely and was adopted by a lot of startups businesses and other organizations we needed to meet and work together and free for 1000 messages per user the first best of an enterprise punch to use rice
3. Google Drive, Docs, Excel
   These google solutions are free to use and can really help your startup productivity.

Payment Solution

1. Stripe
   If you are in the US, you must have in one way or the other heard about stripe. It is one ‘free-to-an-extent’ solution to help your startup in accepting and processing payments.
2. Paystack
   As a Nigerian, I am obliged to mention a solution that is open to startups in Nigeria. Paystack is a payment sl

Legal

1. Termly.io
   Termly a web-based solution enabling businesses to be compliant with privacy laws. Termly’s compliance suite can help you stay up to date and compliant with privacy laws like the GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy Regulation, and more

Insights

1. Crunchbase
   Crunchbase is the leading destination for company insights from early-stage startups to the Fortune 1000. Get insights into your competition. 
2. TechCrunch
   TechCrunch is a way to keep up with reporting on the business of technology, startups, venture capital funding, and Silicon Valley.
3. Techpoint
   TechPoint can be regarded as the African version of TechCrunch and they are doing a good job in curating startup news in Africa.

Book Keeping

Keeping track of expenses payable receivable etc may be quite a lot for a business owner who does not even have enough money to hire a full-time accountant so the use of these tools I’m feeling makes it easier and lessen the burden on the business manager another for some well-known proprietary actually offers a cheaper alternative which also works

1. QuickBooks Online.

Accounting and bookkeeping tools to use for your startup
If free true that you can use for managing the accounts of your new business or startup is QuickBooks and online tools made by into it which you can use to manage visually and very very easily your money

Let us know if you have other tools that can be helpful for startups