As a startup, there is so much to do in order to keep your business growing. Finding time to go through hundreds of “helpful” apps and tools that may help you is often not even an option.
This month, we have taken the stress off your shoulders and found 10 tools that will help you, as a startup, creative and savvy user:
Milanote
Behind every great masterpiece of art or even work, is planning. Planning is often as messy as 7 scrunched up balls of paper, color pens spread across your kitchen counter, and notes that get stuck to everything, even your dog. Not all of us have creative walls that we can paint onto and make large mind maps.
Eventually, we try collaborating all our research and information into a structured piece.
Milanote takes the research and planning, that is often messy and spread across the room and digitizes it, making it a visual, flexible, and tactile product.
Your ideas, notes, and research lay side by side. A fast interface makes it easy to experiment and explore your creative possibilities and eventually evolves by adding structure and connective lines to your categories.
From personal experience, and as a visual person thinker, Milanote is a great tool to have when it comes to notes. It creates a visual collage, including color and images, which is scientifically proven to stimulate the brain. This way, your memory receives and remembers the information more than if you were reading plain text.
Milanote allows you to have a personal workspace or a shared space with your colleagues, which has become a great way of sharing ideas with my team members.
Really Good Emails
Really Good Emails (RGE for short) aims to be the best showcase of email design and resources on the web. It provides transparency into product email and customer email cycles.
They have “really good” examples for about every kind of email out there.
After receiving and viewing thousands of emails, RGE puts them into collections, organizes them, and critiques them.
They have created a great way of understanding what makes a really good email, and are happy to share it with us.
A few examples:
- The email connects visual design with a good simple hierarchy.
- The content serves the customer more than the company.
- There is consistency across branding, website and app experience.
- It is accessible across devices and screens.
In my experience with RGE, I have learned so much about the hook, line, and sinker when it comes to emails. It’s not as simple as it once was, writing a letter to your next-door neighbor and sending it via pigeon.
Now, there are layouts, patterns, fonts, text sizes, and spacing between the texts. Yikes!
Luckily, we have tools, like RGE, that help us understand these components.
Through their shared information, I have been able to create a new structure when setting up emails. Focusing on Pre-header text, email layout patterns, images, typography, whitespace, CTA design, personalization, voice & tone, and footer finish.
This makes a significant difference to my brand in the professional industry.
Mention
Mention is real-time media monitoring tool, giving you live updates about your brand from the web and social media. All on one platform, Mention monitors keywords for your brand, your industry, and competitors.
In the dashboard there is a competitive analysis tool that allows you to compare the performance between you and 2 or more competitors. It also identifies demographics that perform best in which region.
In my experience with Mention, I find it a quick and easy way of connecting with others in my industry. It is extremely useful to see my brand, along side its competitors, with a graph.
I can also find the most influential people in my industry who are using the same keywords as me, and I can follow and reply straight from my dashboard.
Mention has helped me create more brand awareness, and should definitely be part of your social media toolbox too.
Wise Stamp
If you are seeking to show off your latest tweets, social profile, and visual media to the potential clients you work with, or even just as an added bonus to those you are emailing, without putting it in their face or adding links, look no further.
Wise Stamp is an email signature that lets you add your latest tweets and social profiles to every email you send, from Facebook and Pinterest to Dribble Shots and blogs, you can create and customize it to your own personal liking.
Using Wise Stamp has had a huge impact on my social media platform. People online tend to avoid reading messages that share links to different pages.
To have my social media accounts in my email signature allows a quick and easy click for anyone I am in contact with to view my creative work. I love it!
Podcast Player
A podcast is an episodic series of digital audio or video files, which a user can download and listen to, anytime, anywhere. The Podcast Player is the easiest way to find, save and listen to all your favorite podcasts, though there are multiple different podcast apps. One chooses the app best suited to their device (Android, iPhone, mac, web etc).
Once the app is downloaded, you can explore new podcasts across a variety of topics, including marketing, news, education, comedy, finance, politics, religion, crime, and many more.
The Podcast Player is one of my top 5 must-haves. From being stuck in traffic to traveling long hours, my earphones are in and my favorite speakers are on. It’s a great way to listen to experts talk about the topics you care about. I am constantly learning, growing, and receiving valuable information from other movers and shakers out there, who share their own knowledge with the world.
The Player downloads your clips with ease and tracks the ones you’ve listened to already as well as where you last stopped listening
WiFi Map
From airports, small towns, villages, and even remote areas, to the world’s busiest cities, WiFi Map is connecting the world one network at a time It gives access to this basic right to anyone in the world.
In a world where nothing is really free, and with so many individuals focused more on themselves rather than humanity as a whole, the people running this app have created such a gem.
With over 100 million free WiFi access spots, this app is going global!
WiFi spots are added by members of the community with a single intent of helping others with free Internet connectivity.
Ultimately, it’s a crowdsourced tool and social network for finding all of the WiFi hotspots in your area as well as the passwords in certain security-protected networks.
Wait, free WiFi?
I had to check this out for myself. After downloading the app and sharing my location, I was amazed to see the results.
As a traveler, this is a great way to be able to stay online without constantly having to buy and use up all my data; it’s also really great for safety if you are ever in an emergency and out of data.
You can also add new WiFis and share the app with friends.
This app has set a trend that I love, a shared economy!
Streamline Icons
Streamline Icons is the world’s largest icon library.
The world has become digital. In order to keep up with the language of digital, we have to understand the use of powerful icons.
Look at Facebook and their blue ‘F’. We immediately know which social network it is. Look at Twitter and their bluebird image; again, if we see that icon, we know who and what it is.
It has become the go-to icon library for many freelancers, agencies, startups, and even companies like Amazon, Adobe, and Mercedes.
In 2013 Streamline Icons opened with 1,300 icons and by 2018 they reached over 30,000 icons, and are officially the world’s largest icon library.
Using streamline Icons has enabled me to find an image for just about anything for my business and personal blogs, and I’m never disappointed. They have such a wide variety of categories and themes, from film, travel, and business to e-commerce and coding, I always find what I am looking for.
I was so excited to see that I could even change the color of my icon as well as the thickness of the lines, allowing more control for personal taste.
Find My Font
Find My Font allows you to identify any Font, in any digital image.
Take a photo or load a gallery image and the app finds any free or commercial fonts in the picture. This app is ideal for graphic designers, web-designers, sign makers and all creative people.
Being a digital savvy person myself, I was always on the prowl for finding some good-looking fonts, and I would. The problem is that I would spend more time looking for the matching font than I spent finding the font in the first place. What I find really useful is that Find My Font also gave me a list of fonts that resembled my input image, giving me a more diverse set of choices.
Sizzy
Sizzy is a tool for developing responsive websites really quickly and allows you to preview multiple screens at once while you’re testing out your responsive web apps.
Often, when we are creating responsive web apps, we use multiple screens at once and at the same time we are using multiple devices. This can become rather frustrating when you are trying to work at a rapid pace.
Sizzy allows you to see all the changes you are making simultaneously which I found to be useful when spotting and fixing layout bugs, faster too.
Checkbot
Checkbot is a tool that boosts your websites SEO, speed, and security. Checkbot also crawls for broken links, duplicate titles, invalid HTML/CSS/JS, and redirect chains.
Using Checkbot and understanding the SEO Guide, I have witnessed my pages ranking higher in search results, which lead to more clicks on my links and more visitors on my page content.
Nowadays, time is money. Users are less likely to hang around your online page if it takes a long time to download, which is why Checkbot has become such a handy tool in this department. Learning how to create a high performance web page that downloads in less time has become a crucial factor in keeping visitors engaged on my site.
That’s it for this months top ten roundup. If any this months selection of tech tools for startups, creatives and savvy users have helped you, we would love to hear about it! Send us your feedback and let us know what you think.
