Tools that make your one-man start-up look like you are with an army of employees…

The internet offers so many great tools and most people are not properly leveraging them. Fom time to time I run into situations where people ask for a certain task, I open up a tool click three buttons show them the result and they believe I am a full-on pro in that area. There is a saying you do not need to know how it works just where the manual is and this can be applied here pretty much. So I would like to present some insights into tools I like to use to create the WOW effect and help you make your one-man start-up look like an army of professionals. For this, we will assume you already have a product so I will leave out tools that help you with that, if you are interested there is another blog by me about tools to help you start your first app…

Many of the tools you might have already heard of or have seen in advertisements on YouTube like Monday.com, but let’s jump into it sorted by some umbrella categories…

1. Project management

2. Product management

3. Design and social media

4. E-Mail management

5. Grammar & lingo

6. Legal Stuff

7. Automations

8. Hiring people

Project management

Let’s start with project management, in start-up, you tend to just write your ideas or thoughts on the closest item in reach, which leads to your ideas and thoughts being spread out over several different mediums and ultimately to lost potential. For this, it is important to establish a baseline to organize your thoughts and project as a whole.

My go-to tool to tackle this is Notion.com, I believe most of you are already aware of Notion so I will just give some highlights. Notion lets you pretty much design your own workspace and organize stuff in any way you desire, but what makes this tool so great is the community. Millions of Notion users are building templates so you just have to fill in your ideas and do not even have to think about organizing them.

One of the biggest of those stores is Notionery offering thousands of Notion templates ready to be purchased or downloaded for free by you and help you organize your mess. I am actually convinced that you could even organize a whole business on Notion if you just use the right mix of templates and plug-ins.

I recently also created my own free template for project management/ idea organization, so feel free to check it out and give some feedback.

Although Notion is the best tool in my own opinion there are many more tools out there which similarly cut the case, one of them is Trello which has maybe the same popularity and lets you create amazing project boards and offers a rich width of templates to organize your project.

Product management

Next up sounds quite similar, yet something different from project management. All tools used for project management can certainly also be used for product management, but there are some tools which I would love to introduce in this context as well.

The first tool is ProdCamp, which is a web app which pretty much can do anything. It allows you to:

• Create an internal product map so you know what things need to be done next
• Sync this with an external product map to show your customers what you are working on currently and what is next
• Create a changelog to show your customers what you have implemented latest
• Collect feedback from customers organized by categories and display this on a feedback board for other customers to upvote or add comments. So you always know what you should really focus on.
• And many more

As you can see by the list above ProdCamp is a one-stop spot allowing you to tackle many areas/problems with a single application and on top helps you sync the different efforts.

As always there are millions of alternatives to ProdCamp, offering advantages and disadvantages, one alternative I personally like a lot due to its nice UI is headway which is a tool allowing you to create changelogs to show your customers what has been implemented in the latest update and is definitely worth checking out.

Some more tools I would like to touch upon but not go into too much detail are Wix.com which allows you to create non-code websites which is pretty practically If you can not write one right line of Json or HTML like me. Some tips on Wix and non-code websites, can be found in this blog. Another great tool is usertesting.com allowing you to invite a target group to test your product and give feedback, this does not only save you a lot of time approaching people but also ensures you approach the right people. Last but not least is Lucidchart this is not specifically a product management tool but does come in quite handy to create graphs and flow charts to further elaborate on areas of your products or determine bottlenecks in a process.

Design and social media

Next the Mekka of helpful tools design and social media, I already wrote a blog on design tools to make you look like a pro even if you are not, but I will touch upon one tool that is the most essential and key… Canva.com.

Canva pretty much is the ultimate design tool offering millions of templates from pitch decks to wedding card designs, from logo creation to CVs, from Instagram posts to …. You get the gist. You can pretty much design anything and you do not need to have any design skills except selecting elements that seem to be harmonies with each other.

When it comes to social media to be quite frank I have never really used too many social media tools but the one I did use and which was quite helpful is Hootsuite which is pretty known, for helping you to create posting calendars and schedule posts. Another more unknown one is snazzy.ai whose purpose is to deliver you AI-generated content ideas for your business based on your selected keywords.

E-mail management

Like every business owner, you will be no exception to getting untrustworthy sales Mails from people trying to offer their services or newsletters. The problem is that in the mids there might be actual important Mails or customers reaching out to you, which drown. To make the problem more complex you might use different inboxes for different purposes, which need to be checked individually or just all land in one connected inbox. Creating that huge cluster of mails which need to be categorised and filtered trough…

BUT there is help coming in the form of a paper aeroplane called Spark, most of you might encountered this application already either in the app store or on the phone of your friends for a good reason.

Spark helps you connect multiple Mailboxes, collaborate on emails with others and has an algorithm categorising your Mails in different folders. Helping you to filter out the important ones. Since Spark is very good at explaining their features and has a beautiful webpage I would just refer you there for further information ->

Grammar and lingo

Being in the context of writing and content creation, let’s talk grammar tools, I am quite convinced over 50% of people already use some sort of a grammar checker to ease writing but there might still be improvements to up your game.

First, write like a pro with Grammarly or Languagetool, both of those are amazing applications to help you eloquently write your sentences and make you sound like the young Christopher Paolini. Especially helpful if you have a weakness in grammar and definitely helps in dodging spam filters and creating a trustworthy impression with your customers.

What really is the highlight here in my impression is that nearly all apps or tools provide integrations for those add-ons. For example, you can just add Grammarly to your browser and now everything you write in there is automatically spelling checked the same goes for Spark. 😉

Another tool that may come in quite handy is probably the most known on this list DeepL which is a deep learning translator helping you to translate any language to another, perfect for international customers and for multi-language websites when you do not want to translate word by word but meaning by meaning.

Legal Stuff aka boring stuff aka the headegg

One of the topics causing restless nights and a lot of headaches and presumably, a lot, a lot, you get the memo… money is imprints, data policies, cookie policies, terms & conditions, and they somehow keep getting more…

But before you despair, there is one simple tool allowing you to be on the semi-safe side when it comes to legal disclaimers and more. This beautiful website is called termsfeed.com and enables you to create nearly everything you need on a budget. Their business concept is quite simple you select what you need and it’s already price tagged. Let’s say you are creating terms & conditions for your website you will be able to click your way through some questions such as “does your website have a user log-in?”, if you select “yes”, the price will increase by 9$ if not it will stay the same, equaling the bigger and more complex your legal agreement gets the more you have to pay (going up to a maximum of 82$). A small tip on the side you don’t have to gaze into the future and think about what you might include later down the line since after creating your account and buying your legal agreement you can always go back and simply add the things when needed.

There are obviously various alternatives, but they are all pretty much priced the same and sometimes even have the same interface.

Automations

Last, I would like to talk about automation. Automations help you boost your business by saving you time, minimizing errors, and designing your work more effective. A great tool here is Zapier which allows you to create events which trigger automation, lets’s just jump into an example to display this more easily.

Imagine you collect leads through a form on your Website, with Zapier you can then create an automation which takes the information of those leads and:

• Saves them in e.g. a google sheet
• Sends a follow-up E-Mail such as thanks for signing up

The options with Zapier are endless and only limited by the tools Zapier supports so far. A tip from my side would be to set up a slack channel, even just with yourself, most programs offer some sort of service integrations which enable you to interconnect different tools, Slack is a very great spot to receive notifications if events are triggered so you do not have to check all channels manually.

Word in the end

If you encounter a case where even a tool won’t help you solve a problem and most of you have likely already leveraged this for some part of your business is freelance hiring online, services such as Fiver or Upwork can help you solve a task you can not execute and even cant cut with a tool to still be easily executed without hiring an employee.

If you are wondering where I get the tools from, I mostly encounter them when working on tasks and looking to improve a process and take a shortcut, furthermore, there are many great websites like Producthunt on Blackish where people present their newest tools.