NaijaTalkTalk- 9 Essential Online Tools For Startups


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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Hugo Beniada from Fueled, an award winning London-based app development company that builds amazing Android and iPhone apps.
Startups are blessed by new technologies. In this era of smartphones and constant access, tons of online services now exist to manage businesses more easily, thanks to always more features.
In this article, we’ve carefully selected the most powerful services that will help you expand your business start-up.

1. MailChimp


MailChimp is a newsletter service that allows companies to easily manage their mailing lists and customers data. With just a few taps, you can edit your lists, add new subscribers, send campaigns, and view your reports. You can create a campaign on your desktop or tablet, and send it from your iPhone or Android once your team signs off.
Also, the service has multiple and useful features, including e-mailing segmentation and multi-users access. Up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails, the service remains free! Enough to cope for your beginnings.

2. Dropbox


Dropbox is a cloud service that stocks all your file, automatically sync on your computers, smartphones and even on Dropbox’s website. In a business organization, Dropbox makes file sharing very easy. It offers a 10$ service for professionals that includes many features to help your business in being more productive. For a $15/month subscription, you can even host up to 1T of files.

3. Buffer


Buffer shares your content at the best possible times throughout the day so that your followers and fans see your updates more often. It’s a social-media oriented service which makes pictures, videos and links sharing easy. Buffer lets you quickly share content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and App.net on your computer or mobile phone.
Using web brothers extensions or the dedicated app on both iPhone and Android, brands can share any page in seconds. The service gets free, detailed analytics on all posts to every social network. Including data such as how many likes, shares and retweets companies get.
Buffer can also be used way to schedule the contents to share. Big filling up Buffer at only on time in a day, it automatically posts them for you through the day. Simply keep that Buffer topped up to have a consistent social media presence all day round, all week long.
Still with a $50 per month subscription, Buffer is the most expensive service of our list.

4. Sunrise (iOS)


Now available for iPad, Sunrise is the best app calendar ever built so far. In addition to its sleek design, the app is extremely easy to use. You can create events without typing anything. The app offers a quick pull-down list of generic events — call, coffee, meeting, etc — which you can tap to add to the calendar. You can then add a map of the location, select other contacts attending the event and add additional notes. Finally, Sunrise has access to your Google, Apple, Facebook and my other calendars. Which makes it the perfect app to manage your working and free times.

5. Evernote (iOS 7 and Android)


You might already be familiar with Evernote but still, it’s a great tool. With Evernote, all of your notes, web clips, files and images are made available on every device and computer you use. You can easily save webpages, share your notes and collaborate on projects with colleagues, plan your next trip and plenty of other useful things.
As a cloud service, you can sync all your contents whenever you have access to internet and it will sync on every of your devices. The perfect application for on the go people who need to keep track of everything.

6. Basecamp (iOS and Android)


Described by some as a project management tool, and as a collaboration tool by others,Basecamp is all about projects. For each project, the members of the company involved can share dates, files, to-dos, discussions and notes. For example, it is a gateway to everyone’s activity and it also lists who worked on what for a specific day.
The app makes everything easy to find and makes Basecamp an excellent tool to keep in touch with your coworkers and to reduce the time spent on your projects. With being even more productive.
The service starts with a 20$/month subscription, that allows to manage up to 10 projects at once and includes 3 GB of file storage.

7. Zendesk


Key people for you company will forever be your customers. Zendesk, a danish company now based in San Francisco, is the perfect service to manage your customer data. The software enables any company to have an all time access to its customers. From customer information, to internal conversation, to customer’s satisfaction measurement, Zendesk covers absolutely everything.
There are so many features that we can’t even list them all. From 1$ per agent/per month and up to 3 agents, make sure to take a look at Zendesk’s plan for startups. The best customer driven service we’ve seen so far. As be there for your customers is now mandatory, Zendesk’s mobiles applications also offer real time notifications and access to your dashboard.

8. Skype (iOS and Android)


Calling and messaging has never been as easy. As the top of mind online calling plateform,Skype is certainly the best tool to reach people wherever you or they are, no matter the device. Skype is available on Windows, Android, Mac, smartphones applications, etc. Despite the rise of many other messaging services, Skype remains the number one solution. Its long list of users makes it a safe value to reach coworkers or clients.

9. Mint (iOS and Android)


Mint does all the work of organizing and categorizing your spending for you. See where every dime goes and make money decisions you feel good about. Mint has amazing features, and everything’s for free. It enables you to pull all your financial accounts into one place, set a budget, track your goals and more. You can see what’s happening with your all your checking, savings, investments and retirement accounts at any moment of the day.
It also has a great bill reminder that sends push notifications to your smartphone so you won’t have to pay fees for late payments. You can also see all your balances and transactions together, on the web or your phone. Mint automatically pulls all your financial information into one place, so you can finally get the entire picture.
Feel free to comment if you have any other recommendation.

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