As a start-up business, you will need the necessary tools to help you get started. Whether it’s a graphic design tool that will allow you to make banners for social media posts or just a project management app that can keep track of your team’s to-dos, we listed the best online tools that you can check out for your business.
The tools listed below are chosen based on these criteria:
- Cheap/fair price
- Efficiency
- Easy-to-use
- Business-friendly
Read more: Maximize Team Collaboration With the Help of These Powerful Tools
Table of Contents:
Online collaboration tools
Design tools
Forms and online documents tools
UX, social media, and content marketing tools
Video tools
Online collaboration tools
Whether big or small, team collaboration is essential to keep the company going. With the help of these tools, it will be easy for teams to collaborate, share ideas, and manage tasks no matter where they are.
PlatoForms
No matter which business or industry you are in, you will need PDFs. Thankfully, you don’t have to go through the complexity of Adobe acrobat to use one. PlatoForms is a PDF online form builder and converter that can help you make fillable PDFs online, turn your PDFs to web forms, and allow your clients to complete PDF forms online for a seamless process. With its workflow feature, your team can quickly build and complete PDF forms online once, allowing you not to re-print the same forms. This is useful especially for start-ups that need to save costs from printing materials while making things easier. Invite your team members for online collaboration and make fillable PDFs online in seconds!
Pro tip: Aside from making fillable PDFs online, you can also build online PDF forms that your team members can access. For every PDF, you can manage team member permissions. Choose the form editor, form submitter, or form submission viewer.
Try now: Complete PDF forms online with PlatoForms Workflow
Invision
Invision takes the traditional whiteboard note-taking to the next level. With its colorful and interactive features, you surely won’t come back to whiteboards and pens again. This app allows teams to make digital collaboration easy by offering freehand, design studio, animation, and more. Invision also provides modernized templates for team brainstorming, including Xbox, customer journey map, and card sorting template, just to mention a few.
Markup.io
Leaving feedback on digital content is now easier than ever, thanks to this tool. Web designers and content marketers can collaborate quickly with the tool’s interactive feedback features. This is useful for teams who need real-time collaboration on websites, PDF, and image feedback. Visual feedback can help teams to visualize work efficiently, without the need to do ordinary drafts.
Airtable
Airtable surely builds a better way to work through its various templates for teams. From content calendar to project tracker, teams can now customize their workflow easily with the help of Airtable. Its interactive interface allows you to mention teammates, tailor data calendars, and integrate it with common apps.
Pro tip: You can upload your spreadsheets in Microsoft and Google docs to Airtable for a smoother workflow.
Trello
Have a more organized workflow in your team with Trello, one of the most common apps for project management. Teams rely on Trello because it provides complete details of everyone’s tasks, from to-dos to done tasks. Trello also offers different workspaces for teams in specific industries, including marketing, human resources, CRM, or education.
Ruttl
The fastest website feedback tool that allows you to leave comments on a live website and make real-time edits so you can give precise change values to the developers. You can also review mobile apps and have live chat with your website visitors.
Design tools
The design has a significant impact on business; that’s why it’s essential to know different online design tools that can help you build your brand. Aside from Canva, here are some other design tools that you can check out:
The Noun Project
The Noun Project offers a wide array of minimalist art-quality images for your social media posts, from various icons to photos. You can choose beautiful images from its gallery of tech, flat lays, hiking, and more. The Noun Project also provides a vast collection of icons that you can use for brochures and marketing projects.
Pro tip: The Noun Project offers Icon API, a collection of unique icons for visual stories, infographics, games, and 3D printed products.
Creative market
Creative market is more than its Instagram templates. It also provides:
- Vector graphics
- Shopify themes for Shopify users
- Various display fonts that you can use
The best thing about Creative market is it provides art sets for different occasions, such as Christmas and other holidays. Aside from its wide collection of art and graphic designs, artists can also earn in Creative Market by opening their art shop.
Projector
Projector is an all-around creative tool that offers various designs for live presentations, social posts, and email templates. The tool also provides GIFs and videos for your business! Whether you’re making product highlights or custom designs, Projector is worth checking out.
Pro tip: Team collaboration is also possible for Projector! Just share the design link with your team for more accessible visual communication.
Forms and online documents tools
Forms are essential in business–it allows you to create order forms, survey forms, or even feedback forms that can improve your business. Below are the easiest tools that you can use for your start-up business.
PlatoForms
Whether you’re making online order forms or reservation forms, PlatoForms is the tool you can lean on. Offering an easy interface, you can make fillable PDFs online in minutes. The best thing? You can also convert PDFs to online forms with PlatoForms–now, your customers don’t have to deal with complex PDF forms that can be only be edited using Adobe Acrobat. Aside from allowing your clients to complete PDF forms online, you can also do so much for your business with this tool, including collecting payments via stripe with your online forms, integrating them with restful API, or collecting e-signatures with signature certificates.
Pro tip: Make fillable PDFs online with PlatoForms pre-fill invitation forms. With this feature, you can easily make pre-populated forms for your clients. Besides completing PDF forms online, you can customize your online forms and imprint your domain on them for a more professional look.
Google Forms
Google forms provide the most basic features, especially for start-up businesses who don’t want to customize their forms. Despite the simplicity, Google Forms offers basic templates that can be used in different ways.
WeTransfer
WeTransfer is focused on making transferring of files more convenient. Sharing documents to your teammates is possible in a blink, from allowing you to upload files of up to 200 GB. You can also track downloads, manage your transfers, and send them to anyone with a link. WeTransfer also provides a presentation tool for branding and marketing purposes.
UX, social media, and content marketing tools
Carrd
Carrd is an aesthetic, beautiful, and interactive one-page site for businesses and portfolios. If you’re a simple person who doesn’t really like managing tons of website pages, this is the tool perfect for you. The good thing about Carrd is it’s a no-brainer tool—you don’t need coding skills to build a site. With its free ready-to-use templates, you can make your own one-page site within minutes.
Since it’s only a one-page site, you can maximize the page by inputting the link of your social media channels, autobiography, and a gallery that showcases your works.
Publer
Publer is a social media calendar management tool for your social media marketing needs. It lets you collaborate with your team, schedule posts, and analyze their statistics. Publer covers pretty much all aspects of social media, including Google My Business, Youtube, and Wordpress.
Some social media tools might require you to upload media manually—but with Publer, you can integrate your media library from Canva and VistaCreate for faster scheduling. The good thing about Publer is it’s cheap, too—compared to most social media tools in the market.
Planable
Planable offers an aesthetic, modern, and sleek social media calendar for businesses and content creators. You can freely add workspaces in different businesses and add various social media pages. Unlike other tools, Planable includes TikTok, Youtube, and Google My Business. This is helpful especially for start-ups who want to save money on tools—Planable offers it all in one tool.
Its bulk scheduling and Instagram story creator and editor also come in handy—saving time and effort.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is truly a must-have for start-up businesses. The tool offers a wide selection of landing pages, email sign-up forms, and integrations that can help businesses grow their audience. You can make easy-to-build pages that can help you gather your client data, as well as implement strong email marketing strategies.
ConvertKit’s icing on the cake is its commerce feature—where you can sell your digital products within minutes and post them on your website!
Video tools
Today, videos matter more than ever in digital marketing. In fact, over 81% of businesses include video as a vital part of their digital marketing strategy. To add, 97% of marketers also said that videos allowed their customers to understand their products more.
Creating a video to advertise your business might sound daunting, but the truth is, you don’t really need an extravagant video with fancy effects to do the job. Thanks to a lot of beginner-friendly video makers in the market today, you don’t really need to be an ultimate video expert to pull off your first business video. Consider checking out these tools for your video creation:
Invideo
Invideo provides a wide range of video templates that you can choose from. Invideo offers amazing features for businesses such as unlimited team members where you can add as many members as you want, multilingual videos where you can create videos in different languages.
Animoto
An official partner of most marketing tools including Facebook business, Youtube, LinkedIn marketing, Twitter, and HubSpot, Animoto is probably one of the most common video-making apps today. From product intro advertisements to graphic story promos, you can customize each template in accordance with your branding.
FlexClip
FlexClip is more than just a video maker—this awesome tool offers video editor features, movie maker features, slideshow maker, and screen recorder. With FlexClip, you don’t really have to go through a lot of instructions to get started with your video creation—you can easily make one in three steps: Add media, customize, and export.
Choosing the right tool for your business
Of course, choosing a digital tool is not easy. With all the choices available, it can be overwhelming to go through different tools that will suit your unique needs. Consider answering these questions to help you choose which tool you should for your business:
Is it budget-friendly? Consider the monthly subscription of your chosen tool. Think of how much this cost can affect your long-term financial goals, and if it’s worth the price.
Does it have the features I need? You don’t want to pay for a tool that lacks the essential features for your business. All features offer a free trial—consider trying every single tool and assess whether it can do the job based on your preferences.
Remember to have options. If your chosen tool can’t make ends meet, feel free to explore. Be updated with the latest software that can be beneficial for your business, as this can also help you innovate.
PlatoForms for start-up businesses
We know how difficult it is for start-ups to manage their businesses —limited resources, small capital, consistent competition, it doesn’t end there. The challenges are endless, but with perseverance and excellent strategy, the rewards can be fruitful.
Here at PlatoForms, we are focused to help start-up businesses organize their workflow. With our features, you don’t have to worry about spending business costs on paper, printing materials, and additional storage supplies. The best thing about using online forms is it’s cheap, readily available, and easy to build. We offer features that can allow you to make fillable PDFs online for your clients, convert your PDFs to online forms for convenience, or even turn your complex PDFs to web forms. This way, you can provide an excellent form-filling process to your customers while maintaining efficiency.
Start completing PDF forms online today with PlatoForms—it only takes a minute to sign up!
