10 Innovative Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier
These are some of the most popular and innovative tools for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups— and how to use them.
Successful brands know you’re only as good as your tools! That’s why we’ve rounded up 10 innovative tools that will help you become more efficient, more effective, more organized, and poised for growth.
Let’s get started:
Innovative Tools For Organization
Notion – One workspace. Every team.
Notion is an all-in-one task organizer and advanced notetaker. Create a Workspace for each project in your pipeline, drop all the relevant docs into that Workspace, give the space a timeline, urgency level, and priority, then share the space with as many people as you want. Your projects stay organized, your team isn’t left chasing down Google Doc links, and you can see the status of every project at-a-glance.
Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, startups, project managers, creative teams
Phase: Any stage, from startup to an established brand
Price: Free to $10/month per user
Similar alternatives: Monday, Atlassian Confluence, Asana
Innovative Tools For Communication
Slack – is where the future works
To keep your entire team, contractors, and stakeholders in-the-know, try using Slack. Slack mainly works as an instant messaging tool available online and on mobile, but it does much more than just messaging. Users can jump on video calls, voice-only huddles, and share files, links, and code snippets. Slack is easy to navigate, search, and organize, keeping your whole group on the same page.
Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, startups, project managers, creative teams
Phase: Any stage, from startup to an established brand
Price: Free to $10/month per user
Similar alternatives: Google Chats, Zoom
Innovative Tools For Connection
Gather – A better way to meet online.
To encourage better communication and collaboration among your teams, both at work and at play, take a look at Gather. This fairly new tool allows users to video chat while collaborating in real-time on documents or a whiteboard, or while watching a video, listening to audio, or viewing files. When it’s time for a break, users can chat and play interactive games. This unique style of real-time interaction is ideal for conferences, events, workshops, classes, and work-from-home offices. Gather offers a more realistic interaction experience than traditional video chatting because users can enter and exit various themed virtual rooms, depending on which meeting, group, or team they want to be a part of.
Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, startups, project managers, creative teams
Phase: Any stage, from startup to an established brand
Price: Free to $10/month per user
Similar alternatives: Teamflow
Innovative Tools For Visuals
Figma – the collaborative interface design tool
For graphic design, user interface design, social media planning, and more, check out Figma. Figma is highly interactive, so multiple users can collaborate on one project. Using Figma’s workspaces and hundreds of templates, you can design from scratch, customize pre-made designs, mark up design drafts, leave comments for your team, develop prototypes, and more. And because Figma is a web-based tool, your team can accomplish all of this without downloading additional software.
Target Audience: Product teams, interface designers, web developers
Phase: Any stage, from startup to an established brand
Price: Free to $75/month per user
Similar alternatives: Adobe Creative Cloud, Miro
Innovative Tools For Email
Mailchimp – Marketing, Automation & Email Platform
Mailchimp helps businesses streamline their email marketing through automation, visually appealing templates, and customer data management. Not only does Mailchimp come with a host of automations to keep your segmented audience in the loop with just the right information, the tool provides helpful analytics and email tracking to show you which emails and audiences are performing best. Mailchimp uses a drag-and-drop email design tool, so no prior design, coding, or interface experience is necessary.
Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, startups, marketing teams
Phase: Small businesses in the early to growth stage
Price: Free to $1300/month, based on the number of email contacts and level of service needed
Similar alternatives: Marketo, Salesforce, Constant Contact
Innovative Tools For Feedback
UserTesting – Human Insight Platform | Customer Experience
UserTesting puts your product, website, or app in front of a targeted audience of real people. As those people interact with your asset, their responses and questions are recorded live, giving you completely authentic feedback from first-time users. You can watch the recorded interactions or even ask your own custom questions. If you’re launching something new, UserTesting is a great way to gather performance data and make sure you’re launching the right product before putting your valuable resources towards the big release.
Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, startups, marketing and branding teams
Phase: Businesses of any size at any stage
Price: Starting at $35 per test
Similar alternatives: Userbrain, Typeform, SurveyMonkey, Hotjar
Innovative Tools For Websites
Squarespace – Website Builder | Create a Website in Minutes
Squarespace offers customizable templated websites for retail and service-based businesses, creators, and anyone else in need of an online presence. Squarespace requires no coding, making it a great solution for users with little design or development experience. As an add-on, Squarespace also offers custom domains, email marketing, advanced analytics, sales tracking, live support, and more.
Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, startups, marketing and branding teams
Phase: Small to midsize businesses at any stage
Price: $14 to $45/month
Similar alternatives: Wordpress, Wix
Innovative Tools For Social Media
Sprout Social – Social Media Management Solutions
Sprout Social streamlines every aspect of social media marketing. This tool helps you understand your social media audience on a deeper level, giving you the insights you need to make better social media content from the start. When it comes to posting, use Sprout Social to design your content, run A/B tests, research keywords, schedule automatic posting at the best times of day, and track your progress with an in-depth analytics dashboard.
Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, startups, marketing teams
Phase: Any size business at any development stage
Price: $89 to $249/month
Similar alternatives: Hootsuite, Later
Innovative Tools For Branding
ZeBrand – Brand-Building Platform | Build Your Brand Guidelines
Build your brand from abstract concept to fully-developed brand guidelines with ZeBrand. ZeBrand helps startups and rebranding businesses tell their story through design and messaging with a powerful, easy-to-use brand builder tool. Their step-by-step brand-building frameworks guides you through each step of the process, then provides visually appealing, easily shareable brand guidelines that keeps your entire team aligned. It’s more than your brand's look and feel. It’s your entire brand story. Premium users even have the opportunity to work with a brand coach as they’re building their strategy.
Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, startups
Phase: Early to growth stage, rebranding
Price: $29 to $148/month
Innovative Tools For Support
Zendesk – Customer Service Software & Sales CRM
Zendesk provides high-quality customer service support that allows companies to focus on scaling and development while still caring for their customers. They offer support services like live chat, answering bots, helpdesk ticketing, a knowledge base, forum management, and more.
Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, startups, marketing teams
Phase: Small businesses in the early to growth stage
Price: $19 to $150/month
Make Your Life Easier
These innovative tools are designed to help your business grow better, faster
Whether you just add one new tool to your tech stack, or adopt all 10, any step your business takes to become more streamlined and focused is a great one. We hope you enjoyed this quick guide comparing the top tools on the market today. When you’re ready to launch your own successful brand (or refresh and rebrand!) Get started here.
