Selina Ife is living her dream working for a tech company in Melbourne, Australia. In recent years, she has focused on optimizing communication within teams spanning multiple timezones. She loves meeting and talking with interesting people, and is happily in a career where that can be put to good use. She also loves to travel, explore Melbourne, and take on overly ambitious craft projects. Dislikes inefficiency, particularly in cafes.
This coming year, make starting a business one New Year’s resolution you can keep.
Top-notch advice and high quality assets are important for any business, but employing specialists, designers, and developers can be costly. Fortunately, more apps, tools, and resources are being built specifically to help budding entrepreneurs overcome roadblocks. These are higher quality than ever and cover a wide variety of businesses.
Here are 12 fantastic tools and resources that could be what you need to make your latest great business idea a reality.
Freelance designers and developers
Envato Studio, Freelancer, and Elance-oDesk comprise various communities of talented freelancers who provide a host of services. Working with a freelancer online can pose communication challenges but will ultimately deliver quality goods at a fraction of the cost of hiring a designer directly.
DIY graphic design
Canva is an Australia-based start-up that aims to put design into the hands of everyday people. It’s easy to use and affordable. However, those without an eye for aesthetics might have better results going with a hired professional.
Marketing and social media
Social Media Examiner offers tips and explanations for business owners and marketers looking to get the most out of social media. Not all of the advice will be relevant for all businesses, but it’s a good resource for those looking to keep up to date on trends.
Social media management
Apps like Buffer allow users to schedule social media posts around the clock, which is particularly useful if your business has customers or community members across time zones. This is great to maintain visibility, but unless your social media team works 24/7, some of your responses may be delayed until you wake up.
Email marketing
For flexible and customizable email marketing MailChimp provides easy to use tools as well as analytics and reporting. Those lacking design skills may want to use a pre-made newsletter template.
Business apps
Google Business Apps are a one-stop-shop for email, calendar and video calls, with the added functionality of Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides and Sites, all stored in the cloud-based Google Drive. Google makes collaboration on shared documents easy, but you may miss some of the more complex functionality of the traditional Microsoft suite.
Team communication
For a team spread across geographic locations, Slack is designed to make communication easy with private and public groups as well as one-to-one chat. While no communication tool will truly beat face-to-face, customizable notification settings and a slick mobile app make it a great way to keep your team talking.
Legal advice
Lawyer Ryan Roberts represents a number of start-ups and entrepreneurs. His blog, Start-up Lawyer, provides useful information and advice for others. While good for general legal knowledge, as his disclaimer points out, it is no substitute for tailored legal advice.
Accounting and Payroll software
Xero is cloud-based software that aims to make accounting and payroll easy. That way you can do all your billing and invoicing yourself and use the software to track hours, too. It’s not the same as hiring a tax accountant to do your books, but it’s a great lower budget option to keep track of your business expenses without extra headcount to worry about.
Customer Relationship Management
To improve sales productivity Base offers a desktop and mobile app designed to help your team improve sales processes and hit targets. Not suitable for all business types but something to consider for those who want to build a winning sales team.
Project management
With Trello your team can keep track of projects via cards, listed and organized as you please. Cards can be assigned to team members and can include lists, due dates, checklists, notes and comments. Provided the team keeps everything up to date, Trello makes it easy to see all your projects at a glance.
Upskilling
For those who wish to learn new skills like coding, design or general business skills, Tuts+ contains over 18,000 free tutorials and hundreds of video courses. You won’t get official certification in your chosen field of study, but with a monthly subscription starting from $15, this is an affordable and flexible way to learn.
This post 12 tools and resources that prove there’s never been a better time to start your own business appeared first on Tech in Asia.
12 tools and resources that prove there’s never been a better time to start your own business
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