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75+ Tools for Startups and the Future of Work

It’s no doubt that there has never been a better time to start your own business and build products within the digital sphere. There are a whole host of new tools and resources that you can leverage to productize your knowledge and build the foundations of a thriving business.

However, when starting out, it can be very overwhelming. How does one know what tools to be using and which ones are the best fit for what you are building? For this reason, I wanted to put together a comprehensive list of tools for startups and the future of work. Save yourself the hassle of scouring the internet and use this guide to handpick and match the tools that best suit your business needs.

Many of the tools included in this guide help to facilitate you in building a lean startup or working product. Many of them also help to facilitate working as part of distributed teams in a remote fashion.

It is broken down into 14 different categories. You can think about which categories are most relevant to what you want to create, and find the tools that will best serve you.

1. No-Code Tools

  • Webflow - Allows you to build better business websites without coding.
  • Glide - Turn spreadsheets into beautiful and easy to use apps.
  • Adalo - Create unique Apps and Web Apps without the need to code
  • Landen - Build unique landing pages for your startup without code
  • Zapier - Connect apps and automate your workflows
  • Airtable - Part spreadsheet, part database. Organize the way you work.
  • Carrd - Fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much everything.
  • Bubble - Build fully functional web applications without code.
  • Thunkable - The fastest way from idea to mobile app without coding
  • Integromat - The glue of the internet. An alternative to Zapier for creating integrations for automating your workflow.

2. Email Marketing

  • Mailchimp - Manage your email newsletter, grow your audience and create landing pages.
  • Hubspot - Marketing, sales, and service software that helps your business grow without compromise.
  • Substack - Start a newsletter. Build your community and make money from subscriptions.
  • MailerLite - Email Marketing automation for your business.
  • Convertkit - Email Marketing and audience building for creators.
  • Revue - An editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers.
  • Buttondown - A small elegant tool for creating newsletters.

3. Community Building Platforms

  • YEN - YEN helps founders launch a branded community platform in just a few clicks.
  • Discourse - Is an open source community discussion platform. Probably best suited to medium sized and fast growing communities.
  • Disciple - A fully-branded, independent and profitable community platform that works on Web, iOS and Android. Disciple is a media rich platform suited for small and growing communities.
  • Mighty Networks - A comprehensive community tool that also has online courses, and memberships together in one place.
  • Playgroup - Is a modern community platform that are mixing old style forums in a modern app to bring people together. A good option for those just starting out.
  • Tribe - Tribe is an integrated community platform that you can bolt on to your existing website. It allows you to create a stand-alone or integrated community website. Great option for those starting out.
  • Circle - "A modern community platform for creators". Circle gives small creators the ability to create their own integrated community platform.
  • Flarum Pro - Flarum Pro enables premium hosting for beautiful forums. Ideal for online brands, professional software and video games.
  • Hivebrite - Is an all-in-one community platform. Hivebrite is geared more towards enterprise clients and larger organizations.
  • Habitate - Habitate is a community platform that integrates with your existing website and gives customers a space to engage in discussions, polls, AMA's and much more.
  • Spectrum - Making it easy to grow safe, successful online communities that are built to last.
  • Honeycomb - A full-featured community software solution that allows you to create your own social network. Honeycomb caters more towards larger brands and organizations.

4. Calendars and Meetings

  • Calendly - Calendly helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails. Excellent for scheduling meetings across remote teams and locations. Integrate Calendy with Zoom and Google calendar for co-ordinating virtual meetings.
  • Google Calendar - Manage all your events, meetings and appointments in one place. Integrate Google calendar with Calendly to seamlessly manage meetings and appointments.

5. Project and Task Management

  • Monday - Collaborate and coordinate projects with your team.
  • Asana - Keep your team coordinated no matter where you are.
  • Hive - A productivity platform for your team.
  • Trello - Trello lets you work more collaboratively and get more done. Use boards, lists, and cards enable you to organize and prioritize your projects.
  • Notion - An All-in-one workspace to write, plan, collaborate, and get organized.

6. Design & Creativity

  • Canva - Design Anything. From social media graphics to flyers and cover art. Canva is a powerful tool for all types of designers and creators.
  • Figma - A collaborative interface design tool. Figma enables teams to create, test, and ship better designs from start to finish.
  • MindMeister - Create Mind Maps and brainstorm ideas in a collaborative way.
  • InVision - Design and build interactive prototypes of your product.
  • Frame - Work at the Speed of Creativity. Allows you to stay connected with all your team on videos, images, and more - from anywhere on the planet.

7. Video and Voice

  • Zoom - Video Conference with anyone, anywhere.
  • Whereby - Enjoy easy video meetings and work from anywhere.
  • Loom - Say it with Video. Capture screen recordings and share them with anyone, seamlessly.
  • Daily.co - One click video chat. A great alternative to Zoom for growing businesses.
  • Descript - Record, transcribe and edit podcasts with ease.
  • Google Hangouts - Video calls for individuals and groups.

8. Membership Tools

  • Memberspace - Turn any part of your website into members-only with just a few clicks.
  • Memberstack - Beautiful user login & payments for any website. Memberstack allows you to add secure user accounts, members-only content & Stripe payments to any website.
  • LaunchPass - Launch a subscription business in minutes. Charge for access to Slack Teams and channels.
  • Memberful - Sell memberships to your Audience. It can integrate with Stripe, WordPress, and Mailchimp.
  • Patreon - Monetize your fanbase. Give your fans access to exclusive content, community, and insight into your creative process.

9. Online Education and Learning

  • Teachable - Share what you know. Create and sell fully customized online courses.
  • Thinkific - Allows you to build online courses and integrate them with your existing website. You can sell courses and membership sites under your own brand.
  • Learndash - The most trusted learning management system for Wordpress. Add online courses to your wordpress website with ease.
  • Skillshare - A marketplace for creators and entrepreneurs to build courses and share their knowledge.
  • Podia - Sell online courses, webinars, downloads, and memberships without worrying about the tech.

10. Feedback, Surveys and Forms

  • Typeform - People friendly forms and surveys.
  • Survey Monkey - Get the customer feedback you need with surveys.
  • Reevoo - Get targeted feedback from the customers who matter most.
  • Google Forms - A fast, free and easy way to create forms and get feedback from users.

11. eCommerce

  • Shopify - Build your own ecommerce store, no matter what business you’re in.
  • Stripe - The new standard in online payments. Payment processing for your online business.
  • WooCommerce - An open-source ecommerce platform built for Wordpress.
  • Gumroad - Super simple ecommerce for creators.
  • Paypal - Payment processing for your online business.
  • Paddle - Payment processing and billing solutions for your SaaS business. Paddle is an all-in-one SaaS commerce platform.
  • Payship - Sell digital downloads and memberships for your online business.
  • PayHere - Everything you need to collect and process online payments.
  • Squarespace - Build your professional website, store or portfolio.

12. Chat and Messaging

  • Slack - An all in one communication and collaboration tool for teams.
  • Intercom - Get feedback from customers and give them a conversational experience they'll remember.
  • Discord - A chat server and forum to communicate over voice, video, and text with groups and communities.
  • Flock - A team messenger and online collaboration platform.

13. Remote Event Tools

  • vFairs - Move your events online and engage audiences remotely.
  • Hopin - The virtual venue for all your events. Hopin is an online events platform where you can create engaging virtual events that connect people around the globe.
  • Run the World - Powering online events that create meaningful relationships.
  • Hey Summit - Online summits, made simple. HeySummit is designed to take the heavy lifting out of creating, managing, running and analyzing your online summits.

14. Networking Tools

  • Lunchclub - Smart introductions to relevant people. Lunchclub provides curated 1:1 professional connections.
  • Cafe Cito - 30 minute virtual coffee and lunch breaks weekly with like-minded remote workers.
  • Cuppa - One-on-one virtual coffees with curious minds from Twitter

That’s the list. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to check out how you can put these tools into action and start building your business, you can check out what we have going on at Startup Sanctuary

If you are building any tools in any of these categories, drop it below for the rest of the IH community.

  1. 3

    a list... to end all lists!

  2. 3

    Great summary, Gordon. Thanks for sharing!

  3. 2

    Great list! I would add Clubhouse to the project and task management section.

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing this @himself

  4. 2

    This is bookmark-worthy for sure. Thanks for putting it up!
    You have covered few of my favourites .. might I add a few more if you haven't already tried them out?
    Task Management TickTick
    No Code DronaHQ
    Creative/Design/Video Kapwing

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing these @gayatri7. Glad you liked the list too!

    1. 1

      Thanks @anthonyKap. Glad you like it.

  5. 2

    Thanks for sharing this. Bookmarked!

  6. 1

    Thanks for the list. Lots of great tools there.

    =1 for Learndash in the LMS category (great plugin @MrJustinF). We use it alongside Optimizepress and are happy with the results.

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