108 Must-Have Best Tools For Business Growth In 2023
For any startup or business to acquire customers, grow, scale and automate your marketing and operating processes
Having several failed startups and one thriving business, I’ve leveraged tons of tools that helped me with productivity and survive the harsh and lonely world of entrepreneurship.
With tools like these, you don’t have to travel to different countries to meet the best people you wish to work with, and you can repeat the same tasks as many times as you want with just a few clicks.
These tools are not only helpful, but they are also either free or affordable for any startup and business looking to grow. Hope they help you too!
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MobileMonkey — The best chatbot platform for marketing, sales, and customer support.
If you can’t be the one to bring in the leads and sales all the time, leave it to MobileMonkey. Customers can now get their answers in real-time straight from your website. This is the best chatbot platform by far to support your customer and sales process.
SendPulse — Multichannel marketing automation platform.
SendPulse
The company grew from an email marketing startup into a multichannel platform with tools and features to automate bulk promotional emails, SMS, and browser push notifications. SendPulse, has also, made its way into messenger marketing with their Facebook Messenger chatbot builder. The service has many tools that come in handy for every marketer be it a drag and drop email template editor, custom subscription form builder, or a SendPulse chrome extension that helps marketers save email templates straight from their inbox.
MatchCasts — Brand marketing campaigns on audio
As more people are tuning into podcasts and audio content these days, it’s hard for businesses not to use audio to reach out to their audiences. That said, there are so many podcasts, searching for the right one is like looking for a needle in a haystack. With MatchCasts, you save time using their platform to find the right podcast partner in minutes. You can do deeper research with any podcast analytics and automatically insert your audio ads into any podcasts in their network. That’s many genius moves in one!
Vainu — All-in-one powerful sales intelligence platform
If you are growing a business or have been doing so, sales prospecting is not new to you. Every business needs sales to survive. How you do that is key to winning the right customers. With Vainu, you will be spot on with who you are selling too. No more “spraying and praying” to win a sale. Vainu uses real-time company data to personalize customer interactions and improve your conversion rates. One platform to power your sales.
GetProspect — Search for your prospect’s email and profile
You can’t get more automatic than using Get Prospect to run through any list of LinkedIn profiles and extract email addresses from there. Besides clicking one time, you don’t have to do anything else. This is the best email extractor and storage I’ve ever seen so far. Better yet, you get 50 free contacts to try it out.
Hunter — Find the right email to build more connections
Most business emails are scattered across the web. Type the domain name of the business and Hunter will hunt down anyone’s email with that domain name from public sources on the internet.
HubSpot CRM — Sales pipeline tracking platform
When I first started out, sorting out leads and recording when I’ve contacted them worked well using Google Sheets. After a while, keeping track became a pain because every time I emailed someone, I had to manually update on Sheets. HubSpot CRM is free to use. It integrates seamlessly with your email account, making it easier for you to know who to followup with next and when to do so.
MailShake — A simple solution for cold emails
Made for sending out cold emails in a personable way, MailShake includes features to help you schedule your emails so you won’t miss out on who to respond to and followup with. It automates your lead generating activities.
Lead Cookie — Done-for-you Linkedin lead generation service
You may have +500 connections in Linkedin and yes it’s a powerful B2B machine. But what do you exactly say to them to break the ice? Lead Cookie has a team at your back helping to start warm conversations with your LinkedIn prospects and connections to generate the right leads to your door. You also receive training lessons on converting your leads, monthly coaching calls with the founder Jake Jorgovan, assigned to a dedicated manager, a CRM to keep your leads in place and monthly reports.
Social Champ — Easily manage your social media with this tool
When it comes to posting regularly on social media, it’s easy to lose track and sometimes miss out on the right time to do it. Social Champ is a social media scheduling and automation tool where you can bulk upload your content and set future dates and times to publish your posts. At times when you aren’t sure what content works for your audience, you can use its content curation tool to schedule existing content from the web-based on your suggestions.
Welcomely — Free home page builder to grow your email list
Growing your email list should be a simple process. Welcomely not only helps you create beautiful home pages, but it also allows you to design your landing page and collect email addresses for free. Many platforms charge for that.
ProductHunt Ship — A toolkit for makers to ship awesome products
This is the simplest set of growth tool I’ve ever seen, yet it’s powerful enough to help you launch and create demand before making anything. Its aim is for you to ship your product as soon as you can. Hence, there aren’t many design templates or customising options for you to spend unnecessary time on. Created by the team from Product Hunt, you are given just the right features you need to create a landing page, build an audience, test your ideas and grow your audience.
Leadpages — Landing pages that turn clicks into customers
Leadpages started off as a high converting landing page builder. It has evolved to become more than just providing high-quality design landing page templates. Now it’s more like a marketing tool helping you generate more leads with integrated Facebook Ad builder, email marketing platforms and performance tracking systems.
Canva — A platform to Design anything
You can almost design anything you want with Canva on your own without a designer. From print media, social media graphics, to presentations, the template library is huge and updated regularly. You can also leave notes and comments on the designs to work with your team right within Canva.
RelayThat — Automated design for your brand
RelayThat helps you create visual graphics that fit your brand in the fastest time possible. You don’t have to be a designer, nor do you need to do the real design work as you do in Canva. Just one click and you can generate thousands of designs. Resizing them for different social media platforms? Consider it done. You get free icons and photos in one place. If you need to update all your graphics, just do that one time and everything is done instantly.
BannerSnack — Banner maker tool
If you are running a design business or you may have a design team to help churn out regular graphics for marketing purposes, BannerSnack can help your team churn out banner graphics quicker than before. You can generate your designs, animate them and collaborate with your team. This tool is simple and intuitive, pick it up in minutes and you are ready to use it on a daily basis.
Interfacer — Free high quality design resources
If you are looking for design resources like illustrations, fonts, mockups, web templates, UI Kits and icons, Interfacer has all of them. I would call this an aggregator of all aggregators of design goodies. Best of all, they are free and you can use them in commercial projects.
Penji — The better way to outsource your graphic work
Design work can drive anyone crazy, even designers themselves. One way to save your time and sanity is to try out Penji. You can request for designs for unlimited projects and get the top 2% designers to work on your requests. Using their platform, you can add as many projects as you wish, ask for unlimited revisions and download your designs and source files from the platform instantly.
ManyPixels — Get a personal graphic design in a few clicks
You may not be a designer, or DIY or “Do-It-Yourself” kind of business owner and if outsourcing is your thing, you may go for unlimited graphic design services like ManyPixels. They operate with one goal in mind, that is to become your go-to solution for ordering design services online.
Deer Designer — Get your personal graphic designer for a flat monthly fee
Another great flat fee design service you may wish to try is Deer Designer. They pride themselves as designers who care about your success, not just another “unlimited graphic design” company after your money. I’ve heard their designs are of great quality and customers love their work. Definitely worth a try!
Unsplash — Freely usable images
Unsplash has a huge variety of high-quality and less stock-like images that are unique as compared with other free photo libraries. They are free to use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Pick any photo from a variety of categories to help your business stand out, from nature, architecture, business & work, film, animals to travel and more.
MixKit — Extraordinary HD videos and art for free
MixKit has put together a library of free high-quality videos and animation for business and tech, city, lifestyle, travel, nature and more. Expect to see 10 free new videos each week. These videos are great for website banner backgrounds, or you may wish to put them together in one explainer video.
Biteable— Make better videos than your competitors
Having trouble finding appropriate videos for your business? If you are good to do-it-yourself, Biteable has a variety of high-quality real-life as well as graphic animation videos to serve this purpose. You don’t have to worry if you are not a video expert. Biteable has in-built tools to help you create studio-quality videos in minutes. All you need to do is, pick a style from their templates, add your content and pick an audio track. That’s it!
Wave video— Online video maker with built-in stock footage library
If you need to combine video clips and images into one video, but you don’t have the resources to film them on your own, look no further. Wave has 300 million stock video and images for you to choose from. There is a “forever free” version of up to 15 secs long video, hence you may try it out first before purchasing other plans to make longer videos.
ThriveCart — The number 1 cart platform for marketers
I spent three years searching for the best payment system for my business. One criterion is something flexible that does not charge a percentage of my sales. Another is a highly-responsive customer service team to support my business whenever possible. ThriveCart is one such platform. It has in-built one-click up-sell, down-sell features, affiliate centre and allows recurring billing and more. It also includes high-converting checkout page templates that you can customise within the platform.
BigCommerce — eCommerce platform for enterprise brands
If you want to grow your online store, BigCommerce is a platform you may wish to consider. It does not charge transaction fees and has integrated anything you need to run and streamline your eCommerce business. Use their tools to design your store to match your brand, options for shipping and fulfilment, coupons, gift cards, shipping label discounts and more.
Live Chat Ninjas — Startup customer support
As your business grows, so does the volume of visitors checking out your website. Without training the right support staff to the station as live chat customer service personnel, you will have to be the one to standby. Otherwise, your visitors may slip off quietly without questions answered promptly. Live Chat Ninjas help you by doing the legwork, setting up the frontline to your business. You’ll have a sales team converting your website visitors into the sales for you.
Drift — Live chat to get more leads without forms
More than just a live chat tool on your website, Drift is a powerful marketing platform that integrates knowledge base, bots and responds to customer email, for free.
MailTrack — Know when your emails are opened
Only works on Gmail now, MailTrack lets you know if your email recipients have opened your email, how many times and when they opened it. You can turn on notifications to let you know of the activities in real-time to allow you to respond or followup with your recipient at the right time.
DripScripts — Write high-converting email sequences in record time
You may be converting your visitors into leads. The next challenge comes with warming them up with regular emails to eventually turn them into customers. It can be a pain figuring out what you should write. DripScripts gives you a set of proven email sequences and you customize from there.
Loom — Video recording, simplified.
Loom has a Chrome extension and a desktop app where you can record your screen with one click, grab a shareable link and send it to anyone. You can also trim your videos to remove unwanted scenes. In the Pro version, you can speak, record and draw on your screen to literally illustrate your point better than just pointing with your cursor.
HippoVideos — One-stop solution for all things video
After recording your video, you wouldn’t want to stop there. You can use it to generate more leads, close sales or use them as onboarding guides for your team. HippoVideos help you do that by hosting your videos, turning them to video email campaigns and adding call-to-actions in your videos.
Slack — Efficient collaboration with your team
Slack is better than many other chat tools like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp because of it’s easy way to store and retrieve information. You can easily organize files and messages so it’s easy to search for them. Use it to communicate and collaborate with your team members as well as your clients.
Zoom — Host meetings
The split screens and live chat functions are incredibly helpful in Zoom. You can use it via its downloadable app or your browser. You can record your videos both in a video (MP4) and audio (M4A) versions. So far, I’ve not encountered any tech issues unlike most, hence I highly recommend Zoom above anything else.
Otter — AI-powered assistant
After I record my meetings with Zoom, I open up my Otter account to have a quick glance over the text version of the conversation. It is an AI-powered, real-time and live-transcription app. There are times you need to check back on a part of your meeting session for some information. Instead of having to rummage through the video of over an hour, you can easily do a text search via Otter.
GetSiteControl — Custom web forms and popups to generate leads
GetSiteControl is an all-in-one solution for you to collect email address, receive feedback, chat with visitors, display announcements and more. You can use it to create consistent popups, floating buttons and add feedback survey forms to your website from one place. With one click you can choose to switch each of them on or off.
Content Allies — Done-for-you content marketing for thought leaders
Content Allies takes all that’s in your head and turn it into high-quality articles to be promoted via social media. The team ghostwrites, podcast production, Linkedin content and email newsletters, all done-for-you. All you have to do is to answer their interview questions and leave the content marketing work to them.
With Content — Done-for-you content marketing for tech companies
Creating content to draw people to your online platform comes with good research, well-thought, high-quality content for your audience and clear writing that can be easily found on Google. This is a lot of work and With Content does all these for you. Plus you can complement the content with well-designed and engaging visual content such as beautiful infographics, ebooks and checklists.
ContentWonk— Content promotion services for B2B SaaS firms and digital agencies
We all know “content is king” is not new. Hence we take the time to crank out great content and lots of it. But most of them don’t really get seen unless you put them out there and promote them. That’s another full-time job. If you are a B2B Saas firm or digital agency, trust ContentWonk to do that. They help to submit your content to places like GrowthHackers, Quuu Promote, Zest.is, OpenZap, your social media, plus email outreach and more.
Ravenry — Your virtual research analyst on a monthly flat fee
Doing research in multiple industries takes up a lot of your time. If you are like me, doing a bit of digging can lead you down a deep rabbit hole, finding it hard to refocus on what’s the job on hand. Ravenry provides you with a team who will take your requirements, gather the experts to do the research for you. Expect to receive your report in 48 hours.
Zapier — Connect your apps and automate workflows
If you are serious in growing your business, one way is to let go of doing repeatable tasks by using Zapier to connect your apps. For example, in my graphic design business, once a customer pays us, we use Zapier to help us create a Google folder in our Google Drive and simultaneously ping me in Slack about the new customer and folder created. While all these are going on, I can be spending my time connecting with real people to grow my business.
1Password — Password memory bank
It’s hard to remember all the passwords you use for different tools, especially when you have to use different ones to keep them secure. 1Password solves this to allow you to only use, well, one password. With one master password, you have access to a vault where all your other private login details are stored. Remember only one password to login to all other apps you have signed up to.
Asia Law Network — Your go-to place to resolve all your legal needs
Back in 2005 when I first started my freelance business, I was far from getting legal help. It had to take me at least $500 to engage a lawyer before he or she can give me the advice customised to my business. Fast forward to today, Asia Law Network saves the day with an affordable rate from $49 to help us with advice for Startup,, incorporation, employment contracts, IP, patents and more.
iUBenda — Legal documents generator
The time when my business only has less than five customers a month, I told myself I would invest some money to engage a lawyer to help me with the legal side of things. If you are in a similar position, just use iUBenda. It’s preloaded with anything legal that’s compliant with multiple countries. Just follow the instructions in their generator and you get the fine prints you need for your devices. You can use a free version before going for their premium ones.
Hotjar — Understand your users on your website
Since you have a website, you might as well use it to understand your visitors better. Hotjar tracks how your visitors navigate your site by detecting where they lead their cursor or mouse over your content. By tracking their behaviour, you can improve your website user experience to increase probability of visitors converting into customers.
SweetProcess — Document your standard operating procedures
SweetProcess makes documenting standard operating procedures (SOPs) easy and efficient. It helps you and your team members keep track of the ongoing tasks that have to be done. As you grow your business, you have to come up with a system that leads your team to know what are the next steps without you having to repeat them over again to every member. SweetProcess helps you with this to remove you as the bottleneck and saves you time to work on more important parts of your business.
Slite — One combined workspace. All your team documentation.
At MeetAnders, our team has always been using Google docs to put down any information, processes, notes, ideas, content, links and more. That was easy, but we experience the pain when it comes to searching for those things because we have tons of documents created in Google Drive. In Slite, the way things are arranged and organised helps you to have a overview to track progress and what you have to do next. You can also tag your team members, which allows better communication and daily workflow.
Notion—All-in-one workspace
I bet you are using many tools at one go: Evernote, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, Dropbox and more. Use Notion and you can literally combine all of those tools in one, without having to open multiple windows on your desktop.
Trainual — Every process, policy, and playbook, organized in one place.
You don’t always have to be giving live trainings or saving training manuals and videos in multiple platforms. Trainual focuses on all of that at one place. Use it to document your processes, set up training programs and tests for your team members, connect with other apps and add your branding to make it your own.
Competitor’s App — Know your competition’s marketing changes
Wonder what your competitors are doing to acquire their customers? Competitor’s App helps monitor and analyse your competitions’ every move. You get to know what emails and newsletter your competitors are sending, what and when they post on their blog and social media, what they change on their website and what keywords and ads they are using with SEO.
Gusto — Manage payroll and benefits
Gusto is a platform where you can manage your team’s payroll, benefits, time tracking all in one place. You can also use this to calculate and file your taxes, provide benefits and insurance to your team members and get compliance help.
PersistIQ — Simplest and cleanest sales engagement tool
A cold email shouldn’t be literally cold if you want more responses. PersistIQ marries sales automation and human touch to each of your emails. Yet you don’t have to manually send each email one at a time because, in this platform, you can personalize each of them at one shot. You can also create campaigns to automatically send out followup emails if your prospects don’t respond.
Clearbit— Convert your prospects with just an email address
Trying to grow my business for the past four years taught me to target the right people who are ready to buy my service product in the shortest time possible. Clearbit does that by helping you turn an email address, or anonymous web traffic into full company profiles. With the right data, you will know who to target and who is visiting your website in order to create campaigns that are personable.
ThunderDrive — Securely store, share and access your files from anywhere
I remember scouring every point on the web for cloud storage that works seamlessly with my team and clients. I’ve tried almost everything I know. They are either too expensive for us to sustain each month, or the search for files is too tedious. If you face a similar situation, ThunderDrive promises a safe and secure platform for you to save your photos, videos and files. They have an option to pay for lifetime usage too.
MakeTracks — Social media on autopilot
Posting on social media never seems to be enough and you need more time to grow your business. MakeTracks helps relief your time by doing the legwork of finding and engaging real, active people in your niche to drive leads to your site.
LaunchPass — Charge for access to Slack teams and channels
Do you have a paid membership program that runs via Slack or Discord and find it challenging to charge them for access? LaunchPass helps you charge your members for access into your membership group whether it’s subscription-based or not.
Xero — Online accounting software for small businesses
When you can’t engage an accountant, you start with a cloud-based online accounting software. With Xero, you get to create recurring invoices, track sales and purchases, manage bills and expenses and get financial performance reports to manage your business budget like a pro. The best part is, you can accomplish all these on the go via your phone.
Mr Biller — Generate tons of invoices in the shortest time possible
Unlike many invoicing platforms that offer a limited number of invoices. Mr Biller allows you to generate any number of invoices, set up unlimited customers and unlimited items. You can allow customers to pay via the invoice as well. You can also quickly convert quotes to invoices in no time.
Outreach Artist — Done-for-you influencer marketing and outreach
Most influencers receive tons of requests to promote brands. That makes it hard for anyone to gain their attention, build trust and work with them. Outreach Artist will do all the heavy lifting for you by reaching out to the influencer of the best fit for your brand and run and monitor your ad campaigns. They will also use these campaign results to improve the future ones.
Mavenful — Platform that matches influencers to brands.
Mavenful helps to recruit a pool of data-driven selections of influencers and match you with the right ones, engage and build the relationship for you. Your matched influencers provide authentic content on Instagram that you can use to refresh on other channels.
Bean Ninjas — Easy business bookkeeping and finances
Keeping up with bookkeeping can be overwhelming. As a designer by profession, I just can’t bring myself to look at numbers. If you feel the same, you may engage Bean Ninjas to do the accounting legwork for you.
Snov.io— Cold outreach automation platform
Snov.io does many things. It’s like an email marketing engine, email automation tool plus cold email machine in one. With Snov.io, you can get business prospects and email addresses, verify emails individually and in bulk, send emails for free, design drip campaigns visually, identify technologies on websites. All without switching platforms to grow your business.
Copper — CRM for G Suite
Gone are the days when you have to manually do data entry to save your prospects’ and customers’ information. Copper helps you do all that while you spend your time building relationships with your customers. Best of all, you can do all that right,track leads, work deals, add tasks, and collaborate together — all from your Gmail inbox.
Collect Chat — Fresh and interactive way of collecting data
Most of us now may have a contact form or opt-in form sitting on various pages on our websites to collect visitor’s information and payment. With Collect.Chat, you can forget about adding forms to those pages. Just one powerful chatbot to help youqualify and convert your visitors into customers by engaging them in a conversation.
ShotCrew — Platform of talented photographers and models
You may need high-quality photos of models using your product and Googling may not offer you the best fit. ShotCrew does all the heavy lifting for you by doing the search, filtering and matching the right profile for your needs. This platform includes a large list of curated talent you can count on for your next round of photoshoots.
MissingLettr — Turns blog posts to social media campaigns
Your blog doesn’t promote by itself. After many hours of writing, you also have to set time to create content to post on various social media. MissingLettr helps to do this automatically, allowing to drip your blog posts to your social channels. It helps to automatically re-publish your blog posts from your main site to Medium without negatively affecting SEO as well.
Repurpose — Create once. Publish everywhere.
If you’ve been creating podcasts, live streams and videos, Repurpose.io helps you automatically publish anywhere such as social media, Dropbox, Google Drive and more. You can also use it to convert an audio content to video and create captioned memes to better engage your audience with your content.
Anchor — The easiest way to make a podcast
One of the ways to grow your business is to start a podcast. With Anchor, you can record your podcast from mobile, publish it everywhere, get matched to relevant sponsorships, find someone to co-host with you and build and store unlimited episodes all for free, on one platform.
Mighty Networks — Build online communities
If you wish to connect with your community, create online courses, plan events and invite people all in one place, Mighty Networks can help. You can use it to charge memberships and receive payments as well. I would say it’s Facebook Groups plus Slack and Kajabi all in one. There’s a “free forever” plan too.
Thinkific — Create, market and sell online courses
With Thinkific, you can build and design your whole website with it, sell your online courses and host them in one place. It provides features such as different tiers of memberships for your courses, certificates, quizzes, course pricing options, drip scheduled content and more. This allows you to quickly grow and scale your business without having to change platform or wait to hire a developer to work on add-on functions.
Headliner App — Repurpose audio to video
I’ve been seeing this image a lot these days: a headshot with waves dancing around it. It’s a video and it’s been created with audio content. If you’re curious on how it’s done, use Headliner app, simply add your audio, add captions, animations and more, then export your video to share.
Stream Yard — Create professional live streams
Story-telling is a great way to grow your community and live streaming is one of the best media to spread your message. But haggling with tech can be stressful and time-consuming. With StreamYard, all you have to do is show up via this app. It allows up to 6 participants in the stream, add your brand logo, chooses your colours and simply types out a call to action for it to work. You can do it once and appear on Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin and Restream.
ClickUp — One app to create tasks for anything
There are so many project management tools these days where simple ones become messy. They end up making you less productive. If you are like me and don’t wish to use more than one app to track your tasks, time and team, ClickUp has the best solution so far. Its layout and design allow you to know what everyone is working on, what you should do next based on priority, and you can choose to see all the tasks together. Best of all, there’s a forever free option for you to play around with it.
Scribly.io — Content delivered within 48 hours by the best writers in the world
Since growing my business, writing has taken up most of my time that it may just become a full-time job. If you are in the same situation, Scribly.io works with you to reach your growth goals. Their team is made up of writers who have published work in leading publications like Bloomberg, the Guardian and the FT. Leave your content to them and maximise your results.
Proofreading Pros — Expert copyediting and proofreading for your writing
These days churning out great content is a must. The least you can do is to keep your content professional with as little language errors as much as you can. Digital apps may do the trick, but most times you need good editors to do more complex rephrasing of your sentences. That’s where ProofreadingPros.io comes in to keep your content error-free and relevant for your audience to read.
SocialPrim — Get done-for-you daily social media content and posting at one fixed price a month
You may have done it all to grow your business: research, write and post. These take so much time, by the time you are done with one piece of content, the day is almost over. SocialPrim sets up your social media posting for you by creating the post content, from the text to design, and finally to posting them up. You don’t have to overthink on what image to use, where to place the text, and how to create a high converting post.
ExcelRescue — No more excel headaches
Excel was a compulsory module at my University, but I get all sorts of errors trying to accomplish bigger tasks. Before leaving it to waste, I realised I can make better use of it with the help of ExcelRescue. What they do is take what you left off and turn it to a fully-featured application to take your business to the next level. That’s a whole lot faster than what you can achieve by doing it yourself.
PixerMatch — Get connect with a photographer wherever you are
This is a marketplace where travellers get matched to photographers and vis versa. You may be travelling around for business and instead of taking your own selfies, you may connect with a professional photographer to get great profile shots for you and your team in any location. As a photographer, you get to grow your business as well by getting matched to travellers who happened to be in your area.
Demio — Personal conversations at scale
We all know we can’t automate or scale relationships. Demio gets you closer to that. You can use it to do live or recorded presentations and you don’t have to download anything. It provides beautiful templates for your webinar registration and thank you pages. Best of all, you can customize automatic email notifications with your branding to remind your registrants of upcoming sessions.
Gradexi — Unlimited video editing service
I know it can be addictive and fun to play around with effects on videos. But when you realised it’s eating your time away from your family, business growth and lifestyle, you need to let it go. Gradexi helps edit engaging videos and create video content for your marketing or business needs. The best thing is they do these for you as many times as you wish at one price per month.
SlidesGo — Free Google Slides and PowerPoint templates
There are times I see myself spending hours on a slide deck, not on the content but on the look. That’s not the best way to spend time when growing a business. SlidesGo makes it faster for you to churn it out. Best of all, it’s entirely free to use for both personal and commercial purposes.
Beautiful — Create beautiful presentations in minutes
If you are struggling with slide decks, most of the time it’s the user experience of shifting lines, boxes and getting text to align nicely so that your content is readable. If you use Beautiful.ai, you don’t have to do that because it does all that for you by adapting to the content you place on it.
O-Dan — High-quality free stock photos search
If you’re looking for free images, these days there are plenty of platforms to choose from, Unsplash.com, Pexels.com and Pixabay.com are a few that come to mind. But going to each platform one at a time to look for the images can be a drag. O-Dan is an aggregator of all aggregators to help you search for your images from as many websites as they can search from.
Link-Assistant — One platform. All of SEO.
I was looking for something similar to Ahrefs and Semrush at a lower price. Link-Assistant came along with a keyword research tool, website SEO auditor, backlink research tool and link-building tool, all in one! It’s one-stop SEO software to power your next SEO campaign.
Really Good Emails — Web’s best curated emails
I am never satisfied with my emails. Content is king, but as someone with a design background, I always want my emails to be well-designed to keep my readers glued to my emails as much as possible. Really Good Emails is one place I always turn to for inspiration so that I can save time on figuring out email designs through trial and error.
Milled — Search engine for email newsletters
I used to sign up to loads of email newsletters of various companies not because I am interested to receive their updates. It’s because I want to keep up with their offers as a form of research to get ideas on what I can offer my customers. If you have been doing that too, Milled has done the legwork for you. All you have to do is browse the website to know what others are doing for their newsletters.
SendView — Track and learn from any company’s email marketing strategy
Want to have a spyglass to look into your competitors’ email marketing strategy? SendView does that for you by helping you track your competitor’s emails without having to sign up with your own email address. SendView will generate a special email address for you and anything sent by your competitors will go to SendView inbox, not yours. Study competitors’ emails via analytics and reports on your dashboard.
Animoto — Do-it-yourself drag-and-drop video maker
Gone are the days where you need video-editing experience. Animoto allows you to create and edit your own videos with easy drag-and-drop functions. You can add text, music, filters and still photos to create an engaging video for your audience.
Heap — Automatically captures web and mobile app behavioural data
Growing your product is tough if you don’t know what your audience is looking for. What you need is deep data to offer the right product at the right time. That’s where Heap comes in to help you analyse your audience behaviour on your website or app. It does this by monitoring how your visitor navigates your product, identify the features that provide the most value to them and identify the behaviors that drive long-term user retention.
ScopeLeads — Automate your lead generation and cold emails
I’ve been spending a lot of time personalizing my cold emails by researching on each prospect one at a time. If you’ve also been doing that, you may save more time using ScopeLeads. It has in-built filters so that you can select the audience you are looking for and send them what they need in seconds.
Optimizely — A/B test sample size calculator
A/B testing is a great way to know which copy, colour, layout or design to use over other options. But you need to know your sample size before testing. Optimizely sample size calculator helps you quickly churn out that number by just filling in the blanks on the information you have.
RemoteHQ — Collaboration workspaces for distributed teams
I have a remote team to work with the best people wherever they are, not bound by our locations. It’s great to use many tools that help remote teams. But the challenge is when you need to do many things in realtime during virtual meetings. RemoteHQ solves this all in one browser tab. You can co-browse and co-edit any web app, share files, take notes, whiteboard, screen share, video chat, and more while the meeting is going on.
Ninja Outreach — The smartest influencer marketing & analysis platform
Scouring the web to find business profiles and social media influencers in your niche and location can be time-consuming. With NinjaOutreach, you simply type your keywords to access millions of profiles and their email addresses in their massive influencer database.
Printful — Print-on-demand drop shipping and fulfilment warehouse services
Setting up an online store may be simply selling your products online. The hassle comes when it’s time to deliver the goods. Most times you need your products printed with the best labels, packaging and shipped with the most efficient courier service. Printful does it all under your brand.
Aha! — Product roadmap software
Aha is for product and marketing teams whether you are working independently or collaborating with each other. You can use it to set strategy, build program plans, and manage campaigns. It’s also great to help you define goals, create plans and manage programs.
Gather Content — Content operations platform
Creating content for my business is a daily task. The main challenge isn’t the content but the processes to churn out loads of content on time. That’s what Gather Content is helpful for. It helps you gather and organize content in one place. It has templates to ensure content is in the right structure. You can collaborate with your team in real-time, ensuring everyone knows what to do. And easily migrate approved content.
TryPigeon — CRM and automation suite inside Gmail
I’ve been using Gmail since 2005, so far nothing is taking me away except for CRM function that’s missing. TryPigeon helps you with that in Gmail. You can automate your followups so that you don’t forget getting ahead of those you’ve touched base with. It also helps you keep tabs with your projects within Gmail. You can also save your replies as templates to reuse with keyboard shortcuts.
Streak — CRM in Gmail to keep your pipeline moving
Sending one email is simple, but sending at least 20 different emails a day can be tough to track. Streak has this under control by converting your Gmail to a searchable, filterable and sortable view customized to your needs. You can group tasks and categories and share with your team. You can take notes and set upcoming tasks across your pipelines so you never forget to follow up.
Votemojo — Community voting board that you can embed on your website in seconds
Sending an email or message to your customer for feedback is great. But half the time they can’t remember what was the pain point they were experiencing before. Votemojo is a voting and commenting board where you can embed on your website. You can use it to ask visitors to vote for additional features to improve your product. Just one line of code is all it takes to start understanding what your visitors are looking for.
Transistor — Professional podcast hosting and analytics
If you wish to grow your podcast audience, you need more than just audio recording. Transistor helps you with unlimited hosting of your audio files, allowing team members to collaborate, podcast analytics, smart podcast player to embed on your website, distribution of your show on various media like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and more. Transistor also generates a website for your podcast and updates it automatically once you add a new episode.
Ahrefs — Research your competitors to grow your search traffic
Wondering how your competitors are getting organic signups so much more than you. Use Ahrefs to help you learn why your competitors rank so high and what you need to do to outrank them. Ahrefs include features like competitive analysis, keyword research, backlink research, content research, rank tracking and web monitoring to get the data you need.
Semrush — All-in-one marketing toolkit for digital marketing professionals
As I figure out how to improve my website’s SEO, Semrush comes to my rescue. This platform includes the complete SEO workflow where you can do SEO audit, get ideas to gain more organic traffic, help improve your PPC results, build your most effective social media strategy, improves your content marketing performance, and provides market insights and competitors’ strategies overview.
ManyChat — Messenger for marketing, e-commerce and support
In the early days of my startup, my purse was tight to engage help to respond to live chats on our website and Facebook. With ManyChat, you can build your own bot to add your own string of response to your customer’s questions and feedback. Rather than sending them to a page of static information to find answers, ManyChat creates a conversational and engaging way to understand the customer and provide solutions. Rather than chasing prospects away, using ManyChat you can drive more sales and grow your business faster.
HubStaff — Time tracking for more productive work
One of the most challenging aspects of running a business is making sure that work is being done. HubStaff is designed to streamline this process, so you don’t have to waste time asking your team for progress updates. With HubStaff, you’ll be able to see who’s working on what and exactly how much time each team member is spending on different tasks and projects. HubStaff can track the apps they use and the websites they visit while they are tracking time, giving you a clearer picture of how they’re working so you can help them be as productive as possible. It also lets you set project budgets and hourly limits, allowing you to stay on top of your expenses with ease.
ProofHub— A powerful, all-in-one work management and team collaboration platform
If you’re looking for a powerful, yet easy-to use and intuitive tool to have ultimate control over your projects and widely distributed teams then ProofHub is the right solution for you. This SaaS-based tool allows you to bring all your team members, clients, and stakeholders on a shared platform and easily plan, organize, collaborate, and execute projects in the most efficient manner possible. A comprehensive suite of features under one virtual roof means you can manage various aspects of your work without having to switch between various applications.
And that’s a wrap with 108 tools to help you kickstart 2022, wishing you all the best in growing your business and reaching your goals!
Special thanks to Anfernee Chansamooth, Productized Startups Facebook Group and Demand Curve Slack Group for their contribution to this list.
Featured image from: Online illustrations by Storyset