What is a Smart Startup?

A smart startup is a well-executed business idea that focuses on cash-rich operations. It lets owners make money in the initial phase and build their market by performing well in markets. Small startups always focus on more revenue growth and futuristic probability of higher profitability. Smart startup founders always focus on orienting the digital product *or service) in a highly relatable manner for customers within the target market.

Where should you focus on building the smart focus?

A smart startup should focus on solving critical problems in the daily life of the millennial generation. They should focus on attributes like convenience, quality of service, cash-rich operations, and digitalization of business for futuristic, sustainable growth. The ultimate aim should be to create a brand offering products and services that have self-driven sales because of their quality and impact on the customer‘s life.

Best useful tools to make a startup smarter in 2020

Tech tools for startups in 2020

AWS

One of the significant offerings by Amazon is the leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform. It is one of the most used web hosting services with a lot of built-in packages, side functionalities, and ultimate compatibility for future scalability. It builds an easy road for expansion of the digital solution for your startup. It is one of the best choices that founders and CTOs are making in the present day. Be a CTO for your firm or Startup see here: How to be a CTO?

They are greatly benefited with additional analytics and automated monitoring capabilities as built-in APIs. It is a highly utilizable and much-trusted product that is hosting and maintaining A massive number of comprehensive digital solutions by numerous startups, mid-level companies, and giants like Netflix.

It is one of the best comprehensive technology tools that can single-handedly uplift the level of technological advancement in your startup. It will help your business idea be more profitable, scalable, and highly sustainable in the coming years. It will be critical when customers are looking up to your product for excellent customer experience. The market has acknowledged it with a total business valuation of over $19 billion in the present time.

Why AWS for startups?

Trust of Amazon
Cost-effective, micro-retail cloud service
Highly scalable
Fault tolerant
Easy to find, nominally remunerated developers

Docker

When you're building a complicated but highly potent business idea in the form of a digital solution, deployment and server handling becomes a significant issue. People often chose to go with third-party deployment services unlike AWS. Lightweight, highly scalable, and very dependable containerized development can be quickly done with Docker CE. It is an Alpine Linux-based container that helps you bind your functional code into working applications and deployed on your respective Cloud platform. It is highly convenient and easy to use command-line based container management platform. It lets you raise your apps on the server in seconds and also bring them down for repair and quick maintenance.

Why Docker CE for startups?

Super easy application management
Easy to learn for developers
Optimized to bobs and maintenance cost
Super lightweight
Scalable

Engagement analytics tools

We do not endorse any particular brand or an instrument, but you need to have a clear perspective while choosing customer engagement tools. It is quite evident that customer behavior is best tracked with data-driven insights. It should have a complete ecosystem of data points that are required to track user behavior logically. It is highly beneficial in digital products and minds their map for future activities. Various very similar engagement analytics tools differ in the first approach of analytics. The mechanism is different for prioritizing the core objective while performing analytics on the technology side, the business side, or the customer side of datasets. Your decision of choosing the right engagement tool should rely on factors like:

Level of descriptive and predictive analytics
Data visualization capabilities
Interoperability
Compatibility
Prerequisite knowledge requirement

Data is the most critical resource on earth. Developing a highly data-driven decision-making process for the business model is highly beneficial for startups in the long run from a future perspective. Many factors constitute the success (or failure) of a startup like a customer engagement capabilities of the overall product/service. Building great products is just half the battle won. Further, it should become a cash cow in a successful future.

Why engagement analytics tools for startups?

Data-driven approach
Critical customer engagement
Engagement insights
Opportunities in business intelligence
Multi-stakeholder operations

Google Keyword planner

Building a highly visible and engaging online presence for your startup is a must in today's time. Approximately 85% of users retrieve local business information from Google. Your startup must build a really impressive Google business profile that looks convincing with reviews. The main objective should be to use SEO and services in combination with the best possible results. You can use Google keyword planner for churning out highly relatable, engaging content with your customers.

They are most likely to browse great surfing through your digital product. It is one of the most effective ways of pleasant people with your brand. The times of distal transformation, our certainly involving startups Automated monitoring and very sustainable, effective at low-cost who are in infrastructure. You can keep a straightforward and targeted beneficial approach towards SEO with Google keyword planner.

Why Google keyword planner for startups?

Most effective SEO
Reliability of Google
Completely data-driven analysis of keywords
Search volume results
Free

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most widely used bulk mail services. Email marketing and engagement through emails are standard and highly effective if there are reliability and persistence. Startups can look to use this excellent email service for conveniently shooting emails and also maintaining a branded customer experience with newsletters and updated, feedback emails. Using this great tool can help you persist on using your mind for building a great brand by consistently reaching the top of their mailbox. It is hugely beneficial in the long term to create engaging content and publish it through emails for your customers and continuously target them for penetrating a particular selected customer base.

Why MailChimp for startups?

Highly scalable
Easily compatible
Easy to configure
Low-cost
Multiple curation capabilities

Why using tech tools is a must for startups?

Using productivity-oriented tech tools is a must for young startups. It helps them reduce the cost of overall digitalization of business with him and raised user experience for the customers. Building the right stack of tech tools is always beneficial in the long run. It helps employees be more productive. The startup offers better services and highly satisfied customers because of never dipping performance. The user experience imparted by a digital product plays a vital role in the success of any product or service-based startup. Using the right set of tech tools helps to ensure a great user experience lesser cost and reduced effort.

Business development & management tools

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is an automated chatbot curation, management, and deployment service for web and mobile apps. Startups need to create sufficient reasons for the most probable customers to engage with their brand; in one way or the other. The competition and scope of engaging customers start right from the moment they log in to your product, on the web or even the mobile app. It is a convenient service that provides automated checks for a new IP address which logs in to the app. It offers a complete welcome experience with various FAQs and query resolution through a computerized system.

Generally, startups find it difficult to build a customer support team and carry out finance-intensive operations. It is a fantastic, cost-effective, and result-driven tool that is helping businesses get mature. It makes it easy for companies to reach the most probable customers in highly effective and pleasing ways.

Why Freshdesk for startups?

Scope of automation
Easy engagement
Cost-effective
Highly effective
CX enhancer

AYTM

AYTM or ‘ask your target market’ is a versatile, highly utilizable platform for people having startup ideas and startups under incubation. The idea behind the platform is to help young entrepreneurs validate the feasibility and profitability of the business idea that a person looks to execute. It is a handy platform that imparts a very informative and insightful market research experience for young startups. It offers the premium version for helping you conduct surveys in your target market for validating your idea. It is a great way to know how people perceive your business idea and the possibilities of successful, effective brand building and the respective landscape.

It is equipped with research and data analytics services on the data collected from free service. It lets you define your market, design, and programming survey will be a very critical combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. It has over ten turnkey research tests for the statistical validation of your business idea. The platform is one of the best go-to places for young startups because of its user-friendly UX, excellent capabilities, and completely research-driven statistical functionalities.

Why AYTM for startups?

Research design approach
Easy to Define market
Statistical turnkey tests, analytics
Intriguing UI
User-friendly

Wave

It is an award-winning financial software designed for entrepreneurs. It is a very convenient, freemium one-stop solution for all your business accounting, invoicing, and receive generation requirements. It imparts a powerful experience for all entrepreneurs being a very efficient financial manager, accountant, and financial analyst. It is an excellent product because of its straightforward UI and exceptional ability to impact operations of any young startup. Startups or never having a straight road towards success, and it requires a lot of traffic on the test plan and mitigation before they are stabilized as a business. It is your right companion through all the times when cost-cutting, high-performance, and user-friendliness are significant from a founder’s perspective.

Why wave for young startups?

Freemium
Exceptional accounting capabilities
Clear invoicing management
Official receipt management
Sale button and growth manager

Google docs/sheets/slides/forms

Building forms, using co creation document, creating spreadsheets is a common tasks that every startup demands. There is a lot of hard work, planning, and cohesive team effort that becomes an ingredient of quality business value creation with sustainable growth. Google G Suite is an ultimate productivity hack that is powered by the reliability of Google Drive and various other Google Drive compatible apps. You can use them for creating slideshows, presentations, basic text documents with complete formatting and even rolling out forms for a survey and various Purposes of data collection.

All of it is easy, user-friendly, and free. You can make use of them for streamlining business with highly productive applications. They can be extensively useful when crafting business ideas in researching, collecting information, and building further plans. The best part of using such services is its open-ended access just with the help of Google account. In simple words, you can use all these co created resources and also seamlessly share them on other Google accounts. You can also easily access these resources saved on drive just by logging into the Google account from anywhere in the world. Specifying the access and admin-based user rights are some features that you can use for involving a team to build certain resources, documents slides, and specify the role.

Why Google forms/dog/8/slides for your startup?

Trust of Google
To creation capability
Easy to share
Easy to access
Free of cost

Hootsuite

HootSuite is a potential social media marketing and management platform for businesses belonging to all creeds and classes, financial status on market reach. An excellent digital tool with a neat user interface offers well coupled and highly integrated APIs for centralizing social media management. It provides unique features like scheduling posts, monitoring reach, easy content creation, analytics, security, and boasting over all major social media platforms. These platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest. It is an excellent tool for social media advertisement and publicity of young startups. It allows you to amplify your effort and create an everlasting impact on social media users. Entrepreneurs can also gauge their success in the form of quantified insights and easy to use mobile apps for content management.

Why HootSuite for startups?

All-in-one approach
Centralize content duration
Efficient reach monitoring
Engagement analytics
Easy boosting services

Why should startups use business development, automation tools?

One of the core reasons behind miserable failure stories in the startup world is the lack of research and unclear business idea, operation strategy, and critical thinking. Entrepreneurs should look to delay their final call on executing a business idea with all the patients. Ensuring the feasibility and a distinct picture is extremely important before you start operating with a dynamically scalable team.

These tools help you automate your general tasks and focus on the core research, product development, and ideation of your business. Automation is critical because according to burritos rule, percent of the result is achieved from the significant 20% effort. An entrepreneur should focus on that essential 20% involving business research, analysis, and market research. It will not only help you be successful but also kill future possibilities of scalability bottleneck and chances of failure.

Productivity tools

Grammarly

Grammarly is your best content companion while framing emails, making business documents, and creating engaging content for online presence. With complete analytical, contextual machine learning abilities, it performs over 250 grammatical, semantic-based, and contextual checks. It also provides suggestions to users to improve the quality of the written text. The best benefit of using this tool is that it is available on a freemium plan.

You can upgrade to the premium plan as and when required. The device offers excellent multiple account sharing capabilities on business plans. It is an excellent tool for analyzing your mistakes and naturally take a grip on come on the global language. It categorically divides your mistakes, and let you rectify them with the correct alternative all the suggestion that it has for you. It also gives you paid proofreading facilities from their professional proofreaders. Every Grammarly checked text allows you to generate a text performance. It is an overall score out of hundred with an in-depth analysis of how and what you have written. Factors like vocabulary, Flesch readability score sentence formation, and ease of reading are considered for it.

Why Grammarly for startups?

Perfect productivity power up
Value for money premium plan
Free to use the premium version
Unlimited access
Rigorous analysis

Slack

Slack is an ultimate collaboration platform where people and your teammates can log in to build profiles. It is meant for managing products, use the messenger chat, and avail the services of various content channels. It is an excellent service with an inbuilt app store where you can use highly utilizable and high-performance applications running on the native system of the Slack app. It is just like WhatsApp on steroids with paranormal abilities. It adds a high capability to work in collaboration with others just like sitting in office face-to-face, sharing files, reaching out to update altogether, and communicating in real-time.

It is a highly beneficial and utilize able app because of a reasonably intelligent and sensibly working chatbot to help you with searches and essential information across the Internet. It is not the best of chatbots that you can use with Internet resources but reasonably adds to the potential of a great app. It helps your teammates be more productive and manage a project in a much better way.

Why Slack for startups?

Great UX
Interesting chatbot feature
Inbuilt apps
High-end collaboration
Classic UI/UX

Trello

Trello is a great organization management tool with To-Do lists, deck-to-deck transfer of cards, and ultimate co-creation capabilities. It comes with features like commenting, adding multimedia resources and a lot more. You can open up multiple projects and can also divide the whole project into a discussion. Each board can have different issues, task, or discuss matters in terms of cards that are transferable from one state to another.

Annotation, labeling, and editing features are available all across the trend of boards and their highly beneficial because of teamwork centric operations capabilities. You can add all your team members and discuss various issues in a highly systematized manner. It is an excellent project tracking and management application. It helps teams be more clear on shared information and systematically stack their tasks, needs, and various other information management needs.

Why Trello for startups?

User-friendly
Multiple project information
Potential ideation tool
Best for thought organization
Co-creation abilities

Hemingway

Hemingway is the torchbearer of simplicity in the times when we are writing very complicated business-oriented language even for general use. Using the Hemingway test helps you analyze the overall readability of the content. It is good to use the tool for emails, brochures, free content, and even the content that is dedicatedly prepared for digital marketing purposes. It is an ultimate tool that allows you to remain very simplistic while writing any text. One can also set goals for a different audience. It reduces the chances that you might mislead the reader and cause productivity concern and mismanagement at work.

Why Hemingway app for startups?

Helps you be relatable
Use of language
Correct grammar
Right customer target
Free of cost

Canva

Canva is an excellent collection of ready to use, customizable and editable static visual content. It is a great initiative that is helping the world make the web a more sophisticated place. The major USP of Canva lies in the seamless, highly convenient, and easy to use editing features. There are various categories of static visual content that include posters, banners, social media posts, infographics, and even brochure covers. One can use, handpicked, and further tweak it to make it your own. The customized visual content is ready for use, and you can easily download it in a standard PNG format of images.

The premium version of Canva allows users with an added advantage and more features. It lets people remove watermarks and use the customized edited visuals in any format of choice. It is a great resource to have in your bag for ultimate productivity.

Why Canva for startups?

Huge collection of visuals
Easy editing features
Easy to download
Reduces creation cost
Bulk options

Why should startups use productivity-enhancing tools?

When young startups are under incubation, a lot of focus should be on reducing the cost. Generally, startups have a massive overhead of the human capital at work, and they would want a smaller team to be more productive for cost-effective operations. These tools help you enhance overall productivity and get an idea about the most critical features & services of your business. It helps in saving time with automation tools for repetitive tasks. It idea generally seems to work for almost all entrepreneurs and is worth a try.

Bottom-line

The year of 2018 has witnessed the existence of over 1200 startups, including eight highly successful message unicorns. There are over 7200 startups presently existing on record in the Indian startup ecosystem. But a significant fact to worry is that the collective seed-stage funding for Indian startups was $191 million in 2017. The motivational financial figure dropped to $ 151 billion in 2018. It is a sign of warning and indicates a lot to the new age founders and entrepreneurs. Startups should try to make the best possible use of technology, use power efficient tools in all areas, and manage their team led by minds with a clear vision and an end to end thinking process. The Indian startup ecosystem has a lot of potentials that can be unlocked in the upcoming years.

Best useful tools and resources to make a startup smarter in 2019