10 Free Tools To Help You Kickstart Your Start-Up
Starting a new business is a daunting task, especially when it comes to managing finances and resources. Fortunately, there are plenty of free tools available that can make your life that bit easier. Whether it’s for project management, site hosting or designing, these tools can help you kickstart your startup.
Website Hosting: Cloudflare Pages
Cloudflare Pages is an excellent option for those looking to quickly set up hosting for their website. Cloudflare Pages runs on the JAMstack architecture to provide lightning-fast page speeds with unbeatable uptime. On top of this, Cloudflare’s systems are incredibly secure and provide image optimisation as default, helping to improve your page speed, and ultimately your SEO.
Setting up the hosting is also incredibly simple as your website’s code is automatically deployed from your GitHub or GitLab repositories after each change. Furthermore, if you’re using Cloudflare as your DNS, setting up the domain name for your site can be done in a few clicks!
Blogging: Ghost
Blogging is an essential tool for startups as it helps to build brand awareness, establish expertise, and attract customers. By creating valuable and informative content, a startup can establish itself as an industry leader and attract potential customers. Additionally, a blog can improve search engine optimization, increasing traffic to the website of your start-up.
Ghost is an essential blogging tool for startup founders. The open-source blogging platform allows you to set up a beautiful-looking blog in minutes, with both free and premium templates to get you going. It also features newsletter subscriber functionality (after connecting your blog to a MailGun account) so that you can keep all of your audience informed of new posts. Ghost offers SEO and social sharing settings as core features as well, making it even easier to improve the search rankings of your start-up.
While Ghost offers blog hosting in-house, you can also host your Ghost blog for free using Fly.io.
Analytics: Umami
Page analytics are an essential tool for startups as they provide important insights into the performance of the website and inform critical business decisions. For a startup, understanding the behaviour of your target audience is crucial in order to make the right investments and allocate resources effectively.
Page analytics can help startups identify the most popular pages on a site, which can inform the development of future content and features. This information can also help startups better understand the needs and interests of their target audience, allowing them to tailor their offerings and marketing messages more effectively. In addition, page analytics can provide insight into the sources of traffic to their site, allowing startups to focus their efforts on the most effective marketing channels. By using page analytics, startups can make data-driven decisions about the development of their website, optimize the user experience, and ultimately drive more conversions and revenue.
Umami is an incredibly powerful, open-source and privacy-focused site analytics tool. Umami doesn’t collect any personal information while still collecting all of the important data about the user, meaning that there’s no need for any updates to your cookies policy. What’s more, because it’s open-source, you can host it on a server of your choice.
Uptime Monitoring + Status Page: Status Hive
Uptime monitoring tools and status pages are critical for any SaaS startup as they help to ensure the reliability and availability of a company’s online services. With uptime monitoring, startups can detect and be notified of any performance issues or downtime with their website or service in real-time and take proactive steps to resolve the problem. This helps to minimize downtime, which can have a significant impact on customer experience and satisfaction.
A status page provides a clear overview of the current and previous status of the service and any ongoing issues. This helps to build trust and credibility with customers through clear downtime communication and management. By using these tools, startups can proactively manage potential issues and maintain their online presence, which is essential for their success in the competitive business landscape.
Status Hive is a powerful uptime monitoring and status page solution that offers 3 monitors and a status page as part of its free package. With their status pages being hosted using the JAMstack architecture, you can be sure that your status page is incredibly quick to load and reliable, improving your user’s satisfaction.
Testimonials: Senja
User testimonials are an effective tool for startups because they provide valuable social proof, credibility, customer insights, and cost-effective marketing. User testimonials act as an endorsement of a startup’s product or service, providing potential customers with real-life examples of its value and quality. Testimonials can also provide insights into customer pain points and preferences, which can help a startup improve its offerings and better meet the needs of its users.
Senja allows you to collect video or text testimonials in a simplistic editor and embed these onto your website without any code. What’s more, Senja’s testimonial displays are fully customisable and don’t slow your page down at all. With a free plan allowing for up to 15 text and video testimonials to be collected, you’ll be able to use Senja to kickstart your business.
Application Logging: Log Snag
Log Snag is a tool that allows you to monitor events in real-time from your start-up, including new payments, user signups and warnings or errors from your code base. What’s more is that Log Snag provides a large variety of SDKs, allowing for easy integration into your existing tools or codebase. With a mobile and desktop app, Log Snag allows you to get notified in real time whenever an event occurs and see powerful analytics about the frequency of the events.
Log Snag’s generous free plan allows you to record up to 200 events per month over 5 channels and unlocks all of the analytics functionality, meaning that you’ll be notified about all of the events happening on your start-up immediately.
Trello
Trello is a powerful task management utility, which is vital for ensuring that all of the jobs get done when creating a start-up. With Trello, users create cards to represent different tasks, which can be assigned to team members, given due dates, and tagged with labels for easy categorization and organization. Trello also provides a visual and intuitive interface, making it easy for team members to quickly understand what work needs to be done and to track progress. This helps to streamline project management, minimize confusion and miscommunication, and keep everyone on the same page.
In addition to its project management capabilities, Trello also offers a range of collaboration and communication features that make it an ideal tool for startups. Teams can easily share boards, comment on tasks, and receive notifications when changes are made. This helps to foster collaboration and communication among team members, ensuring that everyone is working towards a common goal. With an incredibly generous plan allowing the creation of unlimited cards and power-ups on boards, Trello is one of the most beneficial tools to use when creating your start-up.
Notion
Notion is a powerful productivity tool that can be used for a wide variety of tasks in a start-up, including note-taking, task management, and project management. This product allows startups to streamline their workflows by keeping all their information in one place, reducing the need for multiple tools and systems. With Notion’s powerful text editor, startups can also create other tools such as databases, calendars, and other custom structures within the same app.
Notion’s accessible and intuitive toolset allows people with varying levels of technical expertise to massively increase their note-taking productivity. Its visual and flexible interface allows teams to easily customize their workspaces and create templates that can be reused for different projects. With its versatility, collaboration features, and ease of use, Notion is a great tool for startups looking to streamline their workflows, improve communication, and increase productivity.
Canva
Images play a crucial role in the success of a startup as they help to reinforce the brand identity, visually communicate its values, and capture the attention of potential customers. Images are used throughout a business including on the product website, marketing materials, and social media channels. Images help to establish a visual connection with potential customers and create a memorable brand experience f the brand.
With images playing such an important role in the success of a business, an easy-to-use image editor is a crucial tool for your start-up. Canva is a beautiful and collaborative online editing software. With ready-made design templates, graphics for any medium can be effortlessly created with this great free tool.
Zoho Mail
Having an email address using your custom domain is vital for your start-up as it establishes credibility and professionalism. An email address on a custom domain, such as info@yourstartup.com, shows that the company is established and committed to its brand, and helps to build trust with potential customers and partners.
Zoho Mail is an excellent email service that provides secure and fast email hosting. With an incredibly generous free plan, Zoho Mail provides an easy setup experience, with a tonne of settings behind the scenes to play with. What’s more, a free mobile app allows you to monitor your mail on the go and respond to client requests.
Overview
Now that you’ve seen the essential tools that you need for your startup, why not take a look at the 5 Core Elements of a Successful Startup to start creating your successful start-up.
