As there are hundreds of free tools for entrepreneurs, which you can find through the different sections of the blog, I wanted to prepare a special with the selection of tools that I personally have used and considered as essential when it comes to entrepreneurship. I hope these tools will be very useful for your venture. If you know of any other interesting tool, do not hesitate to share it in the comments.
Essential Tools for Entrepreneurs to Start Business
Below are 12 essential tools for entrepreneurs, which may help them to start a new business. As an entrepreneur, you need to remember them all.
- Validation Board
It is a tool created by Lean Startup Machine that allows you to test your business ideas through the validation of the hypotheses that support it, and thus determine if they are viable. The Validation Board, also known as the lean startup validation dashboard, is developed under the foundations of Lean Startup and Customer Development methodologies.
Thanks to this tool you can test and validate your business idea by interacting with the market before investing all your capital to start up your business.
- Template in Excel to realize the Projections of your Enterprise
Thanks to this template, created by Miguel Angel Nunez, you can make different financial projections of your business plan.
The template is divided into different sections. By entering the data you will get different financial statements and projections about your business. Here are some of the projections generated by the tool:
- Projected Statement of Income for the first five years
- Projected Cash Flow with the detail of the first 12 months
- Fund Flow Projected to 5 Years
- Calculation of the balance point
- Calculation of NPV and IRR
- And more…
- Business Model Generation Canvas
It is a strategic innovation tool that allows you to structure and define the way in which your company works or will work.
The tool consists of 9 blocks. Each of these blocks represents a key element of the operation of a business. The idea is to have a strategic map of your company to focus and make your business model sustainable, repeatable, scalable and profitable.
- Elevator Pitch Builder
An elevator pitch is a short and forceful speech in which you explain the most important elements of your business idea or project. This is a great resource to convince potential partners or investors to be part of our venture. The Elevator Pitch Builder is a tool created by Harvard Business School to help you build an effective business speech.
It is very easy to use and in the end you will be able to know how many words your speech has, the approximate time it would take to say it and how many repeated words are in it. The idea is to structure your speech step by step and optimize it until you have a short, forceful and effective elevator pitch.
- WordPress
WordPress is a powerful CMS with which you can create from a corporate website to an online store for your business.
It is one of the most powerful and versatile content managers. Sure it will be of great help to take advantage of the Internet to your advantage. It has a large number of plugins, templates and tools to enhance its performance and functionality.
- Freelance Calculator
One of the great dilemmas of entrepreneurs and freelancers knowing how much to charge for their work, so they have created this useful online tool that will help you define the prices of your professional services.
To use it you just have to enter a series of data such as how much you would like to earn per month, what are your monthly fixed expenses, percentage of desired profit, etc? By adding this data, the calculator will automatically generate the price you should charge per hour and how much you need to bill per month to get the profitability you want.
- Free Software to Manage Your Business
In this blog we have shared dozens of business software options, but without doubt one of my favorites is Ega Futura for its simplicity and functionality. It is software with an intuitive interface, friendly, easy to use and completely in Spanish. It has a free lifetime version for small businesses.
- BiiA Lab
Thanks to BiiA Lab you can learn about marketing, innovation, leadership, administration, finance and many other topics of interest to entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and professionals.
You only need to register for free to immediately access a wide variety of video courses. If you wish, you can also acquire a membership to access certified programs. BiiA Lab, a great tool to train you and acquire knowledge that allows you to grow personally and as well as professionally.
- Canva
It is an online tool to create visual contents, such as presentations, info-graphics, images for social networks, postcards, banners, etc. In Canva you have at your disposal different templates that will allow you to easily create professional and high quality visual content. You can use the tool for free, but there are some premium templates that you must pay if you want to use them.
- Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing tool essential for your company. With it you can send personalized bulk emails to your customers, create a newsletter and keep track of your email marketing campaigns.
The free version allows you to manage email databases with up to 2 thousand subscribers and send a maximum of 12 thousand emails every month. If you have larger databases, you can review the payment plans and purchase the plan that you consider convenient.
- Hootsuite
It is a social network management platform that allows you to schedule publications, interact with your audience, follow up on published content, etc.
It is very easy to set up and use. Once you add your different social networks, you will save valuable time in managing your social media strategy.
- Kanban
It is a Japanese productivity tool that functions as an information system to manage and optimize workflows in an organization.
The system allows organizing the tasks and processes in a board where each member of the company can visually appreciate which are the pending tasks, which are in process and which were finished.
Hello everyone! This is Richard Daniels, a full-time passionate researcher & blogger. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics. He loves to write about economics, e-commerce, and business-related topics for students to assist them in their studies. That's the sole purpose of Business Study Notes.
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