17 Must-Have Tools To Grow Your Startup in 2022
As a startup, your speed of impact depends on how you can empower your team members (or maybe just yourself) to grow your company with limited resources. We’ve carefully selected 17 tools that will help you and your team thrive.
Launching and growing a startup is difficult in a way only founders will truly understand. The wheels in your mind are constantly turning as you try to meet the increasing demands across your business.
So many crucial, and difficult, questions.
Noa Ganot, an experienced product executive, identifies four types of speed that are important for startups: insight, decision, delivery, and impact.
The most important type from the list is speed of impact. As Ganot states, “speed of impact can be seen in how long your sales cycle is, how big and healthy your funnel is, and how fast your business grows its bottom line.”
A lot of your business decisions relate to speed of impact.
As a startup, your speed of impact depends on how you can empower your team members (or maybe just yourself) to grow your company with limited resources.
You’re in the proverbial battlefield where you’re trying to triumph over your competitors.
So, your team must be adequately equipped with the right armor. That armor consists of tools that are cost-effective yet fully equipped to meet your company’s growing needs. Your company’s impact will be felt by both your customers and your competitors.
We’ve carefully selected 17 tools that will help you and your team thrive. Many of these tools may be new to you, (in fact, we intentionally steered away from most well-known tools you’ll find on other lists), but our bet is some of them will soon become your secret weapons. Also note that we’re an investor (and user!) in many of these tools ourselves.
Each of these tools is powerful in its own way and can help you take your startup to the next level while allowing you to remain focused on your product and company growth.
Make sure to bookmark this post for later, grab a coffee, and dive in.
Business Process Tools
1. SavvyCal
There are several players in the calendar scheduling space. Few make the scheduling process seamless for both the user and the recipient of the scheduling link.
Enter SavvyCal, a calendar scheduling tool that helps you create a personalized scheduling experience for your recipients.
SavvyCal allows your recipients to easily schedule meetings at times convenient to both of you by allowing your recipients to overlay their calendars. They don’t have to switch back and forth between their calendars and your suggested times anymore.
Team scheduling is another interesting SavvyCal feature. It’s the easiest way to sync everyone’s calendars so that there are no meeting overlaps. You’re also able to show combined availability for you and your teammates so that recipients can book the best times to meet with the group.
Key Features
- Set preferred times you’d like to meet
- Embed directly on your website
- Allow recipients to overlay their calendars and find the best meeting times
Pricing
- Basic Plan: $12 per user per month / $120 per user per year
- Premium Plan: $20 per user per month / $200 per user per year
2. Reform
Forms are important for capturing the information you need to make key business decisions. Many form builders exist, but Reform is one of the few that offers a clean and simple design while also making forms accessible to all users.
Reform doesn’t limit you to only one question per page. Instead, you can choose whether you want single-page or multi-page forms. You have complete control over your form-building experience.
Key Features
- Create branded forms that are easy to complete
- Responses come directly to your inbox so you’re able to directly communicate with respondents
- Templates that cover a wide range of business needs
Pricing
- $19 per month or $119 per year
3. SignWell
SignWell is an electronic signature tool that cuts the turnaround time for document signing by at least 40%. The manual process of emailing the document to your clients for them to print, sign, and return to you often leads to frustrating delays. SignWell eliminates that process by providing a seamless document signing experience that’s done entirely online.
Also, you aren’t limited to two signatories. You can have as many people sign as you want and you can choose whether to set a signing order or not. The document signing process is more efficient and collaborative with SignWell.
Key Features
- Create your own templates so that you can quickly reuse and resend documents.
- Use the audit trail to track everything that has happened with your document from views to shares and notifications about document completion.
- Automatically detect blank lines in your document so it’s easier to align fillable fields.
Pricing
- Personal: $10 per month or $96 per year
- Business: $30 per month or $288 per year
4. Keeping
Keeping makes it easier to follow up on customer inquiries directly from your Gmail inbox. You can turn a support email into a trackable ticket and assign requests to team members. When an issue is resolved, you can close the request with the click of a button.
You also have access to your conversations forever. Keeping doesn’t lock your conversations into the platform. So, you won’t have to worry about losing important conversations if you stop using Keeping.
Key Features
- Faster responses to customer queries
- Invisible to customers; all they see is a friendly email
- Each customer request is handled by one team member thus preventing duplicate responses
Pricing
- Team: $10 per user per month or $96 per user per year
- Organization: $15 per user per month or $156 per user per year
5. Call Hippo
Call Hippo is a great tool for businesses that want to look more professional. You get a virtual phone number that you and your team can use anywhere in the world to communicate with customers and prospects. No SIM card required.
One of Call Hippo’s most impressive features is its Coach Speech AI. This feature provides important insights about customer calls such as customer objections, competitor comparisons, and team members who go off-script. These insights help provide your business with a competitive edge since you can adjust your operations and marketing based on these insights.
Users have consistently commended Call Hippo’s stellar customer service. Call Hippo’s customer support team provides quick responses and is willing to walk users through the best ways to use the platform.
Key Features
- Integrations with some of the most common technology used by businesses
- Personalized voicemail
- Call notifications directly in your inbox
Pricing
- Bronze: $20 per user per month or $192 per user per year
- Silver: $30 per user per month or $288 per user per year
- Platinum: $50 per user per month or $480 per user per year
Add-ons, such as call transcription, are available for an additional cost.
Marketing Tools
6. Intercom Early Stage
Intercom Early Stage is a conversational tool that helps companies build strong customer relationships. One of their most popular features offers conversational support in the form of a chatbot.
Before sending a message to your team, the chatbot allows customers to explore your support content to see if they can find answers to their questions. They can reach out to your support team if they don’t find what they’re looking for. This approach provides a better customer experience and reduces the time customer support teams spend on common queries.
Intercom Early Stage also allows you to provide a seamless product demo experience. Prospects can easily be introduced to your product without the pressure of having to schedule a personalized demo.
Key Features
- Access to Intercom’s Early Stage Academy
- Collect feedback from customers
- Give your customers the support they need where (and when) they need it
Pricing
- $804 per year per user
- $199 per month for product tours
- $9 per month for a seamless messaging experience with customers in WhatsApp
7. Userlist
Userlist is an email marketing tool specifically created for SaaS companies. You can use it to build relationships with your customers that lead to the best product experience. The software provides two choices for communicating with customers: in-app messages or emails. Companies can use both or choose either option.
Users have commended Userlist for its slick and simple design. Some have found other email marketing software tools too complicated. But Userlist’s user-friendly interface has all the features you need to create the best email marketing experience for your customers.
The platform also offers strong segmentation features. Companies can send specific emails based on customer events or lack of activity. Users have reported seeing drastic increases in customer engagement and retention after using Userlist.
Key Features
- Send targeted onboarding campaigns to new customers
- Communicate with your customers within your SaaS product by sending targeted in-app messages
- Create and automate behavior-based email campaigns
Pricing
- Pricing depends on the number of users you have for your SaaS product. The pricing options can be viewed on Userlist’s pricing page.
8. SegMetrics
Marketers often have challenges attributing a monetary value to their marketing activities. SegMetrics takes data from all the marketing tools you use and provides attribution insights for all aspects of a customer’s journey. You’ll clearly see the source of your leads, their behavior, and the true value of your marketing efforts.
The SegMetrics platform makes it easy to find the data you need. You’re able to clearly see the relationships among all the marketing channels you use and accurately attribute marketing activities to named people. Segmetrics tracks anonymous events but is also able to provide details about who is included in the reports.
Key Features
- Understand the lifetime revenue value for each traffic source and lead
- Get detailed insights about each marketing touchpoint
- Direct connection to your payment platforms so each purchase is only counted once
Pricing
- SegMetrics’ pricing is based on the number of contacts you have. View their pricing page for more details.
9. Postaga
A strong backlink strategy is an important part of increasing search engine rankings. Backlinks, also known as external links, are one of the top factors used by Google to rank websites.
Here’s the truth. It’s very difficult to build backlinks, especially if you have a website with low domain authority. So, it’s not surprising that “66.31% of pages have no backlinks.” Postaga creates solutions for some of the common challenges people face with backlink building.
At its core, Postaga helps you build a backlink outreach campaign from start to finish. You can find your ideal contacts, set up campaigns, send outreach emails, set up drip email campaigns to follow-up with prospects, and monitor the results. The campaign manager is a breeze to set up.
One of the features Postaga’s users love is the Outreach Assistant. A big part of backlink building is sending emails people actually want to open and read. The Outreach Assistant provides suggestions for improving your outreach emails. These suggestions can mean the difference between someone agreeing to add your links to their content or completely ignoring your email.
Key Features
- Multiple campaign types to cover a wide range of backlink opportunities, including guest posting, head-to-head review articles, and podcast appearances
- Keyword search options so that you can find the best backlink opportunities based on your selected campaign
- Access to information you can use to personalize your email messages and increase the chances of someone wanting to include your backlink
Pricing
- Pro Plan: $99 per month
- Agency Plan: $299 per month
10. Churnkey
You probably pay keen attention to your customer acquisition and onboarding processes as a business owner. But what about your customer offboarding process? Research shows that B2B companies have an average churn rate of 5%. More specifically, the average churn rate in the SaaS industry is 4.79%.
Churnkey helps busy entrepreneurs like you retain more customers and minimize churn. The platform creates a complete customer offboarding experience that includes cancellation surveys and win-back offers.
You can also set up offboarding experiences that relate to specific customer segments. Each customer segment should be treated differently. Churnkey allows you to easily create an offboarding segmentation experience your customers will love.
Key Features
- A wide range of incentives to encourage customers to stay
- Real-time session recordings to actively track which incentives do and don’t work
- Deep insights about why customers want to abandon your product
Pricing
- Churnkey’s pricing is based on your monthly revenue. You can find out more about their pricing options by visiting their pricing page.
11. Keywords Everywhere
Research from Google shows that 39% of search engine users make purchase decisions based on relevant searches. Effective keyword research helps your brand get in front of these search engine users so they can make the best purchase decisions. There are several keyword research tools, but Keywords Everywhere is one of the most cost-effective tools that helps you experience keywords in the same way your customers do.
It’s a browser add-on that shows you real-time data on search volume, CPC, and competitive keywords for any website you visit. The tool also makes it easier to find the best long-tail keyword phrases you can use in your SEO strategy.
Most keyword research tools only focus on Google search results. Keywords Everywhere provides search results for both Google and Bing. Of course, Google dominates the search engine market with 92.7% market share, but Bing holds 7% of the global search market. So, it shouldn’t be completely ruled out of an SEO strategy.
Key Features
- View and download monthly historical search volume data at the weekly, daily, and hourly levels.
- Get a list of the top 5,000 keywords a website ranks for within the top 20 positions of Google search.
- Download the keyword list in Excel, CSV, or PDF formats.
Pricing
- There are three pricing options: $10, $50, and $100.
- Prices are based on credits. Each keyword gives you access to data for one keyword.
12. Unsplash
Images do more than improve the visual appeal of a blog post. They also provide opportunities for image SEO. Unsplash has an extensive database of images that are easy to use in blog posts. Just type in relevant keywords and explore the options available.
Be careful with images, though. You’ll need to either install an image compressor plugin if you have a WordPress website or use Compress JPEG to compress the images you download from Unsplash. Otherwise, the image sizes will be large and ultimately increase the page load time.
Key Features
- Easily cite the image source by copying the information that pops up when you download an image
- High-quality images that cover content across a variety of niches
- Images can also be found based on collections
Pricing
- Unsplash is free to use but also collaborates with iStock to provide royalty-based images. The prices for these royalty-based images vary.
Sales Tools
13. Harbor Plan
Harbor Plan is a lead generation platform that makes it easier for B2B brands to follow up with prospects. Research conducted by the RAIN Group reveals that “82% of buyers accept meetings with sellers who proactively reach out.” Harbor Plan makes it easier for sellers to keep reaching out after the first attempt.
Harbor Plan keeps the connection alive with your prospects. One of the platform’s most noteworthy features is its personalized automated responses to potential leads. It sounds paradoxical that an automated response in this context could also be personalized. But it’s possible with Harbor Plan.
You can also use one of Harbor Plan’s lead magnet templates to create a relevant lead magnet for your website that will attract leads. You’ll worry less about creating the best possible lead-generating content.
Key Features
- Follow-up sequences that keep your brand top-of-mind
- Messages are sent within a reasonable time frame so that prospects aren’t overwhelmed
- Follow-up with prospects who attend your events
Pricing
- Nuture: $165 per month per user
- Growth: $225 per month per user
14. Lasso
Lasso is great for Wordpress businesses that either work with affiliates or participate in affiliate marketing. It’s a powerful tool that helps you organize your links and display them in ways that entice website visitors to engage with your CTA.
One of the best features of Lasso is that it combines the work of multiple affiliate plugins into one easy-to-use plugin. Most affiliates would either have to use multiple plugins or custom code to get all the features Lasso provides. Lasso helps set affiliate marketers up for success.
This may seem obvious, but the Lasso team listens to what users want. They really listen. The founder, Andrew, understands what users need because he’s also a user and experienced affiliate marketer. He and his team are quick to take suggestions from users and use them to create new features. They’re always adding new features to give users what they need.
Key Features
- Sync with Google Analytics to discover which links are getting the most clicks
- Get notified when you have a broken affiliate link or a product you’ve recommended is no longer in stock on Amazon
- Identify affiliate opportunities on your website by turning unmonetized links into affiliate links
Pricing
- There’s a 14-day free trial.
- $29 per month
- $289 per year
15. Hunter.io
Hunter.io is an email aggregation tool that makes it easy for sales teams to reach out to business professionals. Gone are the days when you had to do manual prospecting by either struggling to find the right email addresses on a website or buying an email list. Using Hunter.io and LinkedIn simultaneously can help you pinpoint the contact details for the right decision-maker in minutes.
The platform also has campaigns that you can use to send cold emails to your newly identified prospects. These campaigns are directly linked to your Gmail account so you don’t have to manage multiple email accounts. You can also schedule follow-up messages to nurture prospects.
Key Features
- Verify whether an email address is active
- Use the Chrome extension to easily find email addresses on websites you’re browsing
- Upload data you already have to find email addresses
Pricing
- The free account has a lot of great features.
- Starter: $49 per month or $408 per year
- Growth: $99 per month or $828 per year
- Pro: $199 per month or $1,668 per year
- Enterprise: $399 per month or $3,348 per year
Other Tools
16. MockPlus (Product Design)
Mockplus provides an easy-to-use platform that your website design and development teams can use to collaborate. Over 200,000 teams trust Mockplus to provide them with the design tools they need to build amazing website prototypes.
There are a range of plugins that can be used with Mockplus so your teams won’t have to worry about adjusting to a completely new design experience. The software tools they love integrate well with the platform.
Key Features
- No complicated code
- Create a product development process that’s easy to repeat within the company
- Quickly test prototypes across devices
Pricing
- The free account has a lot of great features.
- MockPlus Cloud Pro: $7.95 per user per month or $71.40 per user per year
- MockPlus Cloud Ultimate: $17.95 per user per month or $155.40 per user per year
- There are additional pricing options for MockPlus Classic.
17. Summit (Financial Planning)
Summit is a financial planning tool that allows you to better predict the financial outlook for your business. You can easily create best-case, worst-case, and break-even scenarios for forward-planning.
No more spreadsheets! Summit provides a life-changing experience by simplifying your financial planning processes. It’s a whiteboard that does the math for you.
Key Features
- Accurate financial modeling based on real-world conditions
- Visual interface that’s easy to follow
- Automatically updates each month
Pricing
- Summit is in its beta-testing phase. You can get early access by visiting their website.
Final Thoughts
There you have it, folks! TinySeed’s roundup of some of the best startup tools to help you grow your business in 2022.
Each of the tools in this list can help you streamline business operations, close more deals, increase your ROI, and help maximize your startup’s growth.
If you adopt and use these tools correctly, you can reduce a lot of the stress and hard work that comes with being a startup founder (sounds nice, doesn’t it?).
If you’ve come across any tools that changed the game for your startup, we would love it if you would share this post on Twitter, tag us, and mention the tool you have in mind. We will use your responses to make this post more useful for other startup founders.
Originally published at https://tinyseed.com on January 13, 2022.
