As a founder of a startup in the early stages, having the right tech stack in place is crucial for growth and scalability. Make My Dhanda wanted to share some of the key tools and software that have been game-changers for me in building my startup’s operations across sales, marketing, product, support and more.
Sales Tools:
- Apollo.io for outbound sales automation to build my prospect list, identify key contacts, create email sequences and analyze campaign results. The all-in-one capability here is invaluable.
- Calendly for easy meeting scheduling to avoid back-and-forth emails.
- Sybill for automated note-taking during sales calls so I can focus on the conversation.
- Outreach.io – For automating outbound sales prospecting and email sequencing
- Salesforce – Popular CRM for managing sales pipeline and tracking deals
- Mailshake – Another tool for cold email outreach automation
Marketing & Content Tools:
- Hashnode for blog CMS due to its superior content discovery features compared to other platforms.
- Canva for creating marketing collateral with a professional, polished look.
- Excalidraw for quick and easy infographics, images and rough notes.
- ReadMe for simple, lightweight documentation.
- Webflow for building websites without needing a developer. Extremely intuitive.
- Loops for beautiful, automated newsletters.
- Intercom for website chat integration across our properties.
- Mailchimp – Leading email marketing platform for campaigns and newsletters
- Hotjar – For understanding user behavior on your website
- Hemingway App – Improves clarity and readability of written content
Productivity Tools:
- SuperHuman for lightning fast email management. Well worth the small monthly fee.
- Brain.fm for improved focus when working.
- Claude.ai for content reviews, rewrites and ideation. (For 🇮🇳 Indian users, you might need to use VPN 😎)
Internal Collaboration Tools:
- Notion and Slack for central knowledge base and team communication.
- Loom for quickly explaining issues or ideas on video.
- Discord – Chat for teams with robust features
- Figma – Collaborative design and prototyping
- Coda – Flexible doc creation for teams
Finance & HR Tools:
- Brex for business banking and expenses.
- QuickBooks for accounting.
- Gusto for easy, affordable payroll management.
Let us know if you have any other must-have tools for early stage startups. We always look to optimize our workflow. What’s worked for you?
