As you start on your entrepreneurial journey, you'll need some tools to keep you going. Having these software tools is like owing your very own lawn mower, you will need them occasional to complete technical tasks, designs, communication, accounting or clean up shop. I know you've been waiting for this list, so let me cut this short.
This list contents more than 200+ software solutions to your problems and can help you accomplish the hardest tasks ahead for your business and personal life.
Here are some well researched and elected tools you can use to fulfill your startup goals. Don't be the one to stop your own dreams!
Free Website Builders & Templates
WordPress.org : Create your new website for free with a platform that is used by most blogs and businesses websites on the web.
Squarespace: Build high resolution websites with pictures, can be used by small businesses and e-eCommerce businesses.
Bootswatch: Free designs and themes for Bootstrap.
HTML5 UP: Responsive HTML5 and CSS3 site templates to help you apply colors and structure to your website.
Templated: Find a collection of 845+ free CSS & HTML5 site templates.
Blogging Websites & Writing Tools
Medium: A place to read, write, and interact with the stories that matter most. You can create your own blog and start posting content almost immediately.
Grammarly: Use this tool to find & correct mistakes of your writing.
Story Wars: A place to write stories together.
Refind: Discover, save, and read what's really worth your attention. Best links on the web.
Headline Analyzer: Emotional marketing value headline analyzer, to make sure you are connected.
Free/Freemium Email Marketing Tools: Collect & Send Emails
Sumome Scroll Box: You can capture more email addresses from your website visitor without intruding.
Great Email Copy: Well-crafted emails from around the web to help you create unique emails.
Mailchimp: You can send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free. Need more space, update to paid plan.
Send Pulse – Create and send newsletters to multiple recipients without coding.
Sumome List Builder: Collect email addresses with light box popover when visitor is about leave your site.
Sendgrid: Reliable platform that delivers marketing emails to potential customers on schedule.
Campaign Monitor: Campaign monitor is an email marketing service with great email templates, and pay-as-you-go plans.
Senderscore – Find out your email reputation score to see if you are blacklisted.
Mad Mimi: Mad Mimi allows you to create custom emails based on their well-designed themes, which gives you a good place to start campaigns.
HTML Mail Designs – Design amazing emails that catch the eye of your recipient without losing your target purpose.
Full Lessons & Knowledge Base Courses
Khan Academy: Learn anything and educate yourself with a world-class education anywhere.
Codecademy: You will find data science and software programming courses for various age groups.
Udemy: Paid video tutorials in a wide range of general topics including personal development, design, marketing, lifestyle, photography, software, health, music, language, and more.
Stack Exchange: StackExchange is one of several dozen Q+A sites covering multiple topics, including Stack Overflow, which is related to computer technology
Cousera: Offering courses (free for audit) from over 100 partners — top universities from over 20 countries, as well as non-university partners — with verified certificates as a paid option, plus specializations, which group related courses together in a recommended sequence.
Useful Tools For Estimates: Figure Out Some Numbers
How Much To Make An App vs. Website: Thinking of building something should you build an app or website? Use this tool.
Foundrs: Co-founder equity calculator to see what you can offer your partner.
Collaboration On Projects & Save For Later/Share Content
List.ly: Discover and create great lists with other people who find your content interesting.
Trello: Don't fall behind, this tool keeps track of everything.
Feedly – Use Feedly to organize the online content that suits you and share your others.
Pocket: This is a bookmarking tool, to help you view saved content.
Asana: Created by one of the co-founders of Facebook. This tool is a Web and mobile application designed to help teams track their work with out using any other tools. It can also integrate with other applications of your choice through an API.
Flipboard: Catch up with the online news you care about from most news sites.
Evernote: A suite of software and services, designed for taking notes and archiving content from your computer docs and the web.
Digital Nomads & Tech Job Apps
WorkTipper: Digital marketing and technology jobs from startups around you and remotely.
We Work Remotely: This job board is a catch-all of remote jobs from customer service to web design to programming. Sponsored by Remote, the book by famed 37Signals founders.
Working Nomads: Working Nomads delivers a curated list of remote jobs right to your inbox. Choose daily or weekly emails to make the remote job search come to you.
Authentic Jobs: A job board for web professionals. Easy to use, as you’d expect from a job board for creatives and developers!
Github Jobs: GitHub has a section to list remote jobs on their website.
Free Icon Samples: Use These Sites For Inspiration
Flat Icon: A search engine for 16000+ glyph vector icons.
Font Awesome: The iconic font and CSS toolkit.
Perfect Icons: A social icon creation tool.
Glyphsearch: Search for icons from other icon databases.
Fontello: Icon fonts generator.
Free Stock Images: Videos & Hi-Res Photos
Pixabay: Free high quality images.
Unsplash: Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.
Pexels: Best free photos in one place.
Startup Stock Photos: Go. Make something.
Life of Pix: Free high-resolution photos.
Function: Free photo packs.
Foodie’s Feed: Free food pictures in hi-res.
Color Pickers: Color Coordination or Combinations
Adobe Color CC: Color combinations from the Kuler community.
Flat UI Colors: Beautiful flat colors.
Skala Color: An extraordinary color picker for designers and developers.
Couleurs: Simple app for grabbing & tweaking colors you see on screen.
Colllor: Color palette generator.
Social Media Tools: Automation & Community Management
Addthis: Get more shares, follows and conversions.
Buffer Free Plan: Schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+.
Latergram: Easily plan & schedule your Instagram posts.
Bitly: Create, share, and track shortened links.
Triberr: A community of talented Bloggers and Influencers come together to read and share great content.
SocialRank: Identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter.
Hootsuite: World-famous tool that allows you to manage all your social media accounts. Monitor comments and mentions.
Social Crawlytics: Find out what the most shared content is in your industry.
Storify: Create stories using social media.
Forms: Contact, Polling & Survey Tools
Typeform: Free beautiful online survey & form builder.
Polldaddy: This is another popular polling service that allows users to create free polls and surveys containing up to ten questions.
Tally: Create polls in no time.
Cognito Forms – Powerful online form builder that helps your business create contact or registration forms.
Formstack: Online form builder that can help streamline processes, increase conversions & more. No coding, highly secure & flexible for all industries.
SurveyMonkey: Super tool for on-the-spot feedback.
JotForm: Online forms for generating leads, distributing surveys, collecting payments and more, JotForm is for you. Learn more about how we can help.
Doodle – Doodle radically simplifies the process of scheduling events, meetings, appointments, etc. Herding cats gets 2x faster with Doodle.
Poll Maker: Poll Maker Survey Maker Quiz Maker.
Ritetag: Instant hashtag analysis.
Easypolls: Free online polls using the intuitive and easy-to-use EasyPolls.net from ObjectPlanet.
PollSnack: Easy to use online poll & survey software that allows you to create and publish market questionnaires and then view the answers in real time.
Wufoo: HTML form builder helps you create online web forms. Use our web form creator to power your contact forms, online surveys, and event registrations.
Formdesk: Doing more with your database
Free Image Editing: Optimize & Configure Image
Pixlr: Pixlr Editor is a robust browser photo editor.
Aviary: Explore a curated collection of beautiful images made with Aviary
Canva: Amazingly simple graphic design for bloggers.
Placeit: Free product mock-ups & templates.
Meme Generator: The first online meme generator.
ImageOptim: Makes images take up less disk space & load faster.
Compressor.io: Optimize and compress your images online.
ImageOptimizer: Resize, compress and optimize your image files.
Easel.ly: Empowers anyone to create & share powerful visuals.
Recite: Turn a quote into a visual masterpiece.
Kraken: Optimize your images & accelerate your websites.
Skitch: Get your point across with fewer words.
Video Creation: Hosting & Animation Tools
Wistia: Professional video hosting with analytics data.
Moovly: Online video animation software.
Rotor: Online music video maker. Create your own music video, intelligently edited to match your song.
Animaker: DIY animation maker.
Vimeo: Free online video creation website.
Fixpress: Simple videos online in minutes. Make high-quality video for your business, YouTube, special occasion, or fun.
Wevideo: Make and share videos using WeVideo's cloud-based online video editing
Youtube: The world’s biggest video platform. YouTube allows you to post videos for free and even make money from them.
Animoto: Video creator allows you to make beautiful videos within minutes. Simply pick a design, upload photos and add music.
Biteable: Make free videos and animations.
Stupeflix: Create beautiful videos, online, easily! How to make travel movies, wedding videos, promo ads, property virtual tours
Trending Tools: Online Content & New Ideas
Buzzsumo: Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.
Quora: Find answers to questions in your niche. Turn the best ones into killer content.
Portent: Content idea generator.
Plagium: Check to see whether anyone is plagiarizing your content.
Hubspot Blog Topic Generator: Custom blog ideas.
Google Trends: A new way of displaying trending searches.
Buzzfeed Trending: If you’re trying to find some of the most recent and interesting trending content making the Internet rounds.
Sumo Me Headline Generator: This is a neat headline generator that can provide you with ideas about your next post headline.
Hacker News: Targeted towards those whose beat is in technology or startups.
Slideshare: Present images, content and infographics in the form of a slideshow. One of the world’s largest content platforms.
NewsWhip: NewsWhip is seriously fantastic. The platform tracks millions of stories, pictures, and videos every day from more than 100,000 different source.
Disqus: Add on tool for websites to allow users to comment on your content.
Web Analyzers: Understand Your Site/Keywords
Mautic: Free open source marketing automation software.
Nibbler: Test any website.
Google Search Console – A must-have for any website. Check all your website metrics and how your site looks on Google.
SEO Site Checkup: Check your website’s SEO problems for free.
Pingdom Website Speed Test: Test & the load time of a site.
Browseo: How search engines see your website.
KW Finder – Find hundreds of hidden keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Website Grader: Tool that grades your website based on marketing performance.
Notify: Find out whenever someone mentions your business on any social media platform.
Small SEO Tools – Helpful SEO tools that are 100% free.
Quick Sprout: Complete analysis of your website.
XML Sitemaps: Sitemap generator that creates XML & HTML variants.
Google: Tools to interact with Google and your website. Analytics Keyword Planner Webmaster Tools Trends
Hubspot Marketing Grader: Grade your marketing.
Screaming Frog: SEO spider that crawls your website page by page and allows you to see vital SEO metrics.
Ahrefs: Site explorer & backlink checker.
Open Web Analytics: Use OWA to track how visitors are using your website.
Keywordtool.io: Free alternative to the Google keyword planner. Find short and long tail keywords with this free tool.
Hotjar: Great tool that allows you to see how visitors are using your website.
WooRank: Freemium tool that provides an instant website review.
Alexa Ranking: One of the most used analytical insights to any site’s rank.
Sitemap Generator: Sitemap generator to create XML and HTML variants, you can use to submit to search engines like Google. Free for 500 pages or buy a script for unlimited use.
Clicky: Analyze and monitor your blog’s visitors in real time with one line of code.
Keywordtool.io: Simple keyword research tool as an alternative to Google Keyword Planner.
Majestic SEO: Link intelligence tool for SEO, that provides a view of sites linking to yours.
Facebook Insights: Statistics on how people interact with your Facebook page.
Twitter Analytics: See how your Twitter account performs daily.
YouTube Analytics: YouTube video statistics to see how your videos are performing.
SimilarWeb: Analyze website statistics for any domain integrated with Google analytics.
Google PageSpeed Insights: Analyse your website’s speed in seconds.
CRM, Invoicing & Time Tracking Tools
Fresh Desk: SaaS support software to help you stay in touch with your pipeline of customers.
Apptivo: Grow your business with Apptivo’s free online CRM, project management, invoicing & timesheets software.
vTiger: Open source CRM for small businesses.
HubSpot CRM – Excellent inbound CRM system that allows you to organize, track and sell to customers.
Insightly: Small business and entrepreneur CRM system.
Drift – Allows businesses to talk with website visitors in real time and can build a smooth customer service.
PR & Distribution
Backlinkfy: Press Release service provider for publicists - Marketing & Advertising agencies, including Entrepreneurs and small businesses who want to get the word out about different developments and projects.
JustReachOut: Think of getting the news out through media, you can pitch journalists on a daily basis without having to use expensive press release services.
HARO: Journalist can find a database of trending stories and gives your business a way to source announcements to news media.
Free Resources: Design & Coding
Dribbble: Powerful design inspirations from professionals around the world.
Freepik: Graphic design resources for everyone to stay creative.
Easel.ly: Simple web tool to create and share powerful visuals from the cloud.
Dbf: Best designs provided by Dribbble and Behance.
MarvelApp – You can easily turn sketches, mock-ups and designs into web, iPhone, iOS, Android and Apple Watch app prototypes.
Freebbble: High-quality design freebies provided from Dribbble, where designers showcase their creatives.
Adobe Experience Design: Use this tool to design and prototype websites/mobile apps with Adobe Experience Design.
Free Section of Pixeden: Free design resources from other designers who love to share.
Fotor : Photo editor for photography and image creation with inspirations. You can add filters, frames, text, stickers and much more.
Marvel: Free resources from creative designers around the world .
Motivation & Inspirational Designs
Awwwards: You will find awards for design, creativity and innovation.
Behance: You can signup, showcase and discover creative work from other designers around the world.
UI Cloud: One of the largest user interface design databases in the world.
MaterialUp: Daily material design inspiration to create graphics.
If I'm missing any great tool that can help entrepreneurs drastically improve their work day, please do share with me!
Divine Tumenta is an entrepreneur and professional digital marketing expert based in Los Angeles. He has worked in digital marketing for more than 8 years. He is currently founder and CEO of backlinkfy.com and a go to consultant for startups and small businesses in the USA.
