30Sep
Tips for CLIC Startup Competition applicants: 10 tools to make your life easier and focus on your business
When you are an entrepreneur, it is sometimes difficult to know where to start. There is so much to put in place for your business to be successful that it’s easy to get lost in the sheer amount of data, information, and tasks at hand.
Thanks to the technologies that surround us, many companies have developed applications to help us in the complicated task of entrepreneurship by facilitating processes such as communication, payments, email automations, delegation of tasks, team management, etc.
There are so many tools on the market that as an entrepreneur it can be difficult to know where to start. What tools should you choose to get started and facilitate, even automate, your processes and turn your project into success?
In this article, we list the 10 tools that will make your life easier when setting up your project. They are not all free, but are always worth the price invested.
We’ve tried to sift through the hundreds of different tools to bring you the ones that will be critical to your success in different areas.
Hoping that these will be useful to you during the development of your next project!
Technology mixed with AI that allows you to find a name for your startup quickly. The technology used is quite impressive and even if it does not allow you to find the exact name, it allows you to bounce off another name.
Xmind is a mind map creation software with the possibility of saving them in a cloud. This allows you to open them on your different devices and work collaboratively on them. Very easy to use, the mind map is a really useful tool, both for your presentations and for your brainstorming.
This is surely the best solution for creating your startup’s blog, but not only! You can use your WordPress site to bring your store online with the free Woocommerce plugin. You can also create your landing page or your showcase site.
For the realization of your questionnaires, market or satisfaction studies for example, I recommend the SurveyPlanet solution.
SurveyPlanet is really clear, easy to set up and comprehensive. It also has a slight advantage and it’s free.
Inspired by the Kanban method, Trello is a project manager you should definitely try if you aren’t using it yet!
It allows you to create cards on lists and move them from one list to another. For example, to change a task from the “to do” column to “in progress”, then “done”. This will allow you to work with an agile method, and much more than that! Indeed, Trello allows tons of possibilities, organizations, ways of working, impossible to summarize here. I invite you to try, if you are not yet using, this great free tool in its basic version.
No more passwords wandering around or getting lost! Dashlane allows you to save them safely and share them with your employees: each one has their registered access to the different tools in the box. Dashlane offers extensions for every web browser, as well as versions for mobiles and tablets. It also allows you to manage your bank cards and secure notes. The added strength of this password manager is that it does not save your master password on its servers. Without it, your data cannot be accessed and it is transferred to your devices only in isolation, from one machine to another. Be careful, however, not to lose this master password: you will not be able to recover it.
Slack allows better dissemination of information within your team. It improves communication and keeps an archive of all events, grouped into channels, in order to optimize collaborative work. In addition, it is possible to attach different applications and attachments to the interface. The use of the tool is therefore integrated and fluid.
Mailchimp is constantly evolving and allows advanced features with automatic responses, audience segmentation according to behavior, different email paths if the prospect has become a customer, has not been to your site for a while, has purchased for such amount, etc.
A beautiful infographic is sometimes better than a long speech. But creating this one takes a lot of time and skill. Well, that was before. Piktochart lets you make infographics, presentations, and even printables just like you would assemble Lego.
Creating a business plan has never been easier than with Bizplan. This application allows you to create your business plans section by section easily on site with a drag-and-drop system. Simpler and prettier than doing it with classic software like Word.
You can add text, images, graphics, reports… Everything to illustrate the problems you want to solve in your market and the solutions you will bring.
The platform also has a financial tool to calculate your projections. You can observe the evolution of your finances over time and thus keep a constant eye on the evolution of your business. Your investors will be informed of the progress and your project and of changes to your projections in real time.
