Newly founded businesses are known for always being on the lookout for low-cost and easy-to-use enterprise-grade technologies to enable growth. Afterall, when you are bootstrapped, every penny counts.
It's likely that you too are on the hunt for the right tool at the right budget (or free!) for your startup.
Luckily, here are a bunch of affordable apps that make your business workflows, relating to invoicing, marketing, and signing, so much more seamless and efficient.
7 affordable apps to tech up your start-up
When you are just starting off your business, you are likely to be short on time, money, and resources. That’s why you need to strategically adopt a bunch of intuitive and cost-effective small business apps that can meet each business need.
Here is our team’s pick of free mobile apps to get your startup off the ground and running:
1. Finance
Invoicing operations are often mundane and repetitive and require a high degree of accuracy. Getting your already stretched team to manually manage these tasks is not only inefficient but also error-prone. Using invoicing software, you can automate many of the workflows (such as billing and tracking missed payments) so that you get paid quickly.
Click here for a complete list of 10 free invoicing software solutions for small businesses.
2. eSignature
In today’s touch-free business reality, it isn't advisable to physically sign, share and access contracts. This is why more and more startups are choosing eSignature solutions, such as Signeasy, to securely sign documents on the go using a mobile app.Â
By moving the entire signing workflow online, we ensure that you don’t even have to step out of your homes, or even touch a printer, scanner, paper, or pen.
Our eSignature solution is super-easy to use (no learning curve), completely legal and leaves a digital audit trail for compliance purposes. What’s more, it automates the tracking and reminder workflows so your staff can focus efforts on more high-value work.
Sign-up for the 14-day free trial (no credit card required) and see how it amps up your staff productivity.Â
3. Networking
Want to hire the best candidates for a role or connect with prospective clients for your startup? LinkedIn can deliver on both counts. Especially at a time when face-to-face networking events are not preferred, the free social networking app is a real blessing.Â
Its powerful job board, contact list, and ability to connect with other members (with or without referrals) helps you source the right manpower for your business.Â
At the same time, it can help you build your brand, with its brand pages, and reach out to the right clients via its messaging functionality.
4. Collaboration
You need to find ways to connect and collaborate with staff who are working from home or remotely situated. Email and messenger apps are great to have but result in communication silos. The business communication platform, Slack, gets your internal and external team to work together on one platform.Â
It enables everything from secure file sharing, video and voice calls, and one-on-one chats to separate channels to have group team discussions.Â
5. Wellbeing
Working in a startup is quite exciting. In equal measures, it is also stressful. Your employees will perform better and stick with your company if you can boost their overall well-being.Â
With the free Calm app, you can get employees to participate in medication and breathing exercises, listen to sleep stores and relaxing music, and even light exercises. These features will help your staff improve sleep, reduce stress and anxiety, and develop more mindfulness so that they can be refreshed and centered to take on challenges at work.Â
6. Website analytics
More and more, websites are becoming one of the first points of contact between your brand and customers or clients. So, you want to make sure that your page is easy to find and use. Also, you want to better understand your customers, and use those insights to take action.
Google analytics enables small businesses to track the website visitors so that their details can be used to retarget ads, improve website user experience.Â
You just need to sign into this freemium platform and use it to track and report visitor source and website activity such as session duration, pages per session, conversions, and bounce rate. It can also help you monitor advertising ROI.
7. Graphic design
From brochures, flyers, and banners to presentations, logos, zoom backgrounds, and letterheads, there are so many business and marketing assets that need to be designed for B2C and B2B startups alike. Â
You can save the costs of hiring a designer, for such ad hoc requirements thanks to the Canva app.Â
You don't need to have any design experience to start using this platform. It is highly intuitive and even offers access to a bunch of free templates and stock photos for every need.
And it's not just images, Canva also empowers you to create stunning marketing videos.
Want to create an ecosystem of the best small business apps to get things done faster, better, and more efficiently? Start by clicking here to check out the top 10 free invoicing apps for your startup.Â
