5 Free Tools that every Startup Needs in 2020
It’s the startup era, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry is either doing a startup or part of a startup. I didn’t mean it in a bad way, we might succeed or fail but it’s a part of a long journey, and kudos to all the startup folks out there, keep hustling!
So first, before I talk about the tools let me give you a brief about a startup and the life-cycle in my point of view!
Pitching the Idea
First comes the idea, overnight you get this amazing idea, and off the top of your head, you dream how you could be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs.
Building the Team
Then you talk to your best buddies — commonly known as co-founders (most of them don’t stick around until the end) and you explain to them your great idea and after a 2-hour call, you are a startup now!
Planning and Execution
This is the phase where things get crazy, and some of the common hiccups you are going to face are,
1. Where is the plan? You have a great idea but you have no clue how to execute it.
2. Did you do your research? If I’m not wrong 90% of your ideas are already there! either one of the tech giants or a Harward dropout is working on it!
3. Do you have the right resources for the job? Yeah, you got the Co-founders but most of them will do the talk but are they ready to walk the talk?
4.What’s the cost? To launch 99% of the startups you only need a computer and an internet connection, the other resources are freely available if you know where to find them!
Well once you overcome all these issues plus a thousand and one other issues you are going to come to a stage where project planning, tracking, accounting, communicating, file storing, and collaborating is going to look like a mess with so many Excel sheets, WhatsApp groups and Google drive links with no storage left! when you reach that point the below tools are going to come in handy, it’s better to adapt early than regret later on.
1 . ClickUp
ClickUp is an amazing tool no matter what kind of startup you do, from planning, tracking to reporting it got you covered at zero cost for Unlimited users! How amazing is that! obviously, they limit the features of the free tier but believe me when I say the features allowed in the free tier are more than sufficient for any medium scale startup.
Clickup is the fastest growing productivity platform that was founded in 2017 and it has come a long way since. UI/UX wise this is one of the best applications out there and the folks at ClickUp do feature releases very often, stacking up a huge number of features.
2 . Wave apps
Excel is a great tool for accounting, even major companies use excel for accounting, but if you have limited knowledge of accounting and you don’t do it full time you can easily lose track of everything and end up wondering where did that 100 bucks go! Wave apps makes your life so much easier, with a straightforward UX. This allows you to easily track your income, expenses and create estimates, invoices, and track them with automated reminders and generate necessary reports. Wave apps accounting is a totally free application there are no paid tiers and you will be given access to all the features, this is one of the best free applications you can find out there!
3 . Discord
Communication is a key component of any startup especially with the current trend of virtual work, Having a proper medium for conferencing, screen sharing, and creating groups are essential, although still we use WhatsApp for creating groups, the main problem which each team will face is getting distracted easily with your personal conversations, so having your work-related communication in a different platform would increase the productivity and help maintain a work-life balance.
There are multiple tools in this category which are more advanced and free, the main reason for selecting Discord is the straightforward minimalistic user experience which doesn't over complicate things.
4 . WeTranfer
If you are a startup related to content creation you often tend to share a lot of files with your team and clients. Most of these files are just for one-time purpose and is not required to store them in the cloud.
WeTranfer allows you to share files less than 2GB with absolutely no login required. But the files will be deleted upon a mentioned time period. So what if you want to share a file which is larger than 2 GB, well you could simply compress and split the file, just google it!
5 . Figma
Figma is the Holy Grail when it comes to designing, it’s basically a tool built for UI designers, but I’ve been using it for UI designing, poster designing to even designing logos. Basically, it can cover all your designing needs if you know how to use it properly.
The best part is it’s a web application and can be accessed by any computer. You can easily design, prototype, collaborate with a team, and share it with users.
These are the 5 key tools I use on a daily basis to drive my startup, there are hundreds of free tools out there which would suit your need, you just need to keep searching and if you don’t find it,Voila..you got a new product idea.
and like Steve said,
It Isn’t the Consumers Job To Know What They Want !
Thanks for reading and keep hustling!
