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5 Essential Free Tools For Startups You Must Have!

If you feel you have what it takes to become an entrepreneur, believe it or not, there is no better time to jump on the bandwagon of startups.

Recently India’s prime minister visited United Stated and met with Fortune 500 company CEO’s, wooing them to invest in Indian startup companies rather than inviting them to start their own company unit in India.

With the positive response he has received and With the millions promised in investment by international biggies like Google, Facebook & Microsoft, there is undoubtedly a huge opportunity for our youngsters to start taking risks, and build their own startups in this high time.

And if you are planning to go ahead with your innovative ideas, or you have already started working with your small team of geeks, the following are some of the free tools that will help you build, optimize your business operations by building better communication in your growing startup.

5 Essential Free Tools/Apps For Startups

Wrike

Wrike is a detailed project management tool which lets you create a project and assign different parts of projects or goals to respective employees. By using such application, you can also keep a track on the progress of any ongoing project, or the ones that are coming up in near future.

This tool will eliminate the dependencies in taking work updates, and will connect the project manager directly to every employee and his work status will be always available, without asking any questions.  We have covered every feature in detail, in our in-depth review of Wrike, you can check that out.

Collaboration tool for startup

Slack

Are you still doing chat on Google Hangouts, FB or sending mails for small communications? Remember how frustrating it is to dig through all those messages later to find the passwords, and project IDs, or even sometimes important documents attached to these messages?

Well, sign out of all these crappy things, and bring your team communication all at one place with Slack. It’s basically a team messaging app that apart from being a great team chat tool, helps you share all the important documents and other things related to a project with your team. And there are hashtags for creating different communication channels or topics, and even mentions like twitter, just for your team.

Messaging App for Startups

Create private groups, talk one to one, or create an open group on a particular topic, all best things about organized communication for your start-up are already available in slack. Most importantly you can search through all the communication very easily using the advanced indexing provided with the tool. The comprehensive search is most important feature, that will make you dump all the existing channels you use to communicate right now.

Want even more? – It connects automatically with most popular online platforms with APIs like Dropbox, Github, Trello, Evernote and at least 50 other most used apps for teams. It gives you instant update for any changes or updates made through these services or platforms, which improves communication efficiency for your small team.

Slack is free to use for the team of 5, and you can dig through last 10,000 messages. For unlimited users and data access you can upgrade to Slack Premium for 8$/use/month.

Github

It is a more of niche Project Management tool that helps you do collaborative coding for building software. If you have ever coded a tool or a game or anything else, you might have met that disastrous moment, of not backing up right file, or crashing of some random page of code. And your whole project is in trouble.

Well, not anymore with Github. This will sync the developer’s new codes and share it to the online code archives. You can also keep track of how much of the work is done and what remains to be done in what time. The meticulous task of version management of the code is well-handled with GitHub, and you can go back in time, to find that old version of code using Github.

It simplifies the distribution of work and also becomes a repository of all the important code written by your team of developers. Adding new members is also simple and transparency in development becomes quite easy with this tool.

The free version keeps data open to the public, and mostly used in all open-source and freeware software developments. You can choose to purchase the premium version for private projects starting $7/month. Know more about GitHub pricing here – https://github.com/pricing

Evernote

As the name suggests, this is an app that lets you make your notes and to-do lists. It does more than that, it can also turn your notes into a presentation. You can access your notes offline, share them with your colleagues and can discuss about the issue. There are many interesting services like scanning and digitising your business cards and adding passcode lock on mobile apps. You can search in Office documents and attachments and can also see content related to your notes. There is also an option to store your PDF files and emails to Evernote. I bet you never thought you could do so much with a simple note.

evernote

Trello

This is like a virtual vision board stacked with cards called the Trello Board. Instead of using actual sticky notes on a physical board and deal with the mess of re-sticking, you Trello boards much more effectively. Each employee can access this board and can see their work listed on it on their desk. So they don’t have to go anywhere to know about the work they have to do. Other than cards, you can upload file attachments, create checklists, add labels and due dates, and more. You can create and comment on a card via Email. Trello displays all in a nice

You can create and comment on a card via Email. Trello displays all in a nice calendar view so you can also know the due date for a specific task. You can also have your team members to vote for a particular task. All of your data is safe and stored on a cloud for you to access from anywhere and at anytime.

Tools for Startups
So if you are optimizing your Startups workflow, or planning to get started with your spanking new small business, these essential tool makes it easier to efficiently manage your team, their workflow and be transparent about the performance and deadlines. Most of these tools are free for first 5 users, so you can try in-depth what suits your workflow better!

Have some great tool to share? Feel free to comment below for suggestions or any questions you might have about these web based tools for startups.

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One Response

  1. Great list of tools Akshay. Proofhub is another very useful tool that startups must use to manage their projects. Has amazing UI and loaded with awesome features.