10 Best Free Tools for Startups - Octoparse (octoparse.com)

(from 10 Best Free Tools for Startups - Octoparse )

Starting a business is not easy, especially when you don’t have the right startup tools or resources. Startups are willing to do anything to get your businesses to succeed.

What entrepreneurs really needs are the best startups tools to help you build your startups and sell your products or services. But there are hundreds and thousands of tools out there and you probably recognize the importance of choosing the right tools. Plus free is way better, isn’t it?

This is my list of 10 best free tools for startup businesses, as there are tons of tools you might think they are the best for your business. They covers different uses and needs including data analysis, data collection, CRM and such. I hope you will find them useful for your business.

1. Google Analytics - Real-Time Data Analysis

     

Google Analytics is a freemium website analytics platform provided by Google. It is a great tool for startups to demographics, sales funnel and website traffic. GA presents you a whole customer picture across websites, tablets, mobile phones social media and such.

2. Google AdWords - Advertise Online

     

Google AdWords is a key Google product and it has a symbiotic relationship with Google Analytics. It’s Google’s advertising system where advertisers can bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. It is great tool for startups to advertise products or services online.

3. XMind - Visualize All Ideas    

    

XMind is a mind mapping software that can be used to visualize and mange any ideas and plans. It will be a great tool for brain storming and helps startups become more productive. The best feature is the ability to capture ideas on the fly and structure them logically. Awesome tool for visual organization.

  

4. Octoparse - Data Mining

      

Octoparse is a free web scraper for data collection. It turns unstructured data from any websites into visual formats like CSV, Excel, TXT. Startups that need large amount of data can create your own APIs. Here are some common usage scenarios.

a) Real estate agents: real estate listings gathering/gather already listed properties

b) Email address gathering: scrape leads from directories such as yelp/lead generation

c) Product information scraping: scrape products reviews/scrape products from retailer or manufacturer websites/price comparison/reputation comparison

d) Website creators: scrape search engine results for seo tracking/scrape news websites to apply custom analysis/scrape competitors websites

e) Social media/network scraping: scrape people profiles/monitor company pages to gather what people are saying

f) Research purposes

g) Travel sites/scrape health physicians from their clinic websites

5. Similar Web - Measure The Web

     

Similar Web is a new marketing research tool for websites analysis and competitive research. It has a free version and three different paid subscriptions. As a start-up you can use the free version to track a lot more data than its competitor Alexa.com.

Once you have your competitors’ websites, you can use it to track how much traffic they get, what the main traffic sources are, what traffic strategies they have, etc.

6. Dropbox - Save and Share Anything

     

Dropbox is a file hosting tool that allows you save and share any kind of file. It is very easy to use and a breeze to set up. Startups can use it to store files in the cloud and get them at any time from Dropbox’s website desktop for Mac, Windows and Linux or iOS, Android, Kindle Fire and BlackBerry mobile apps.

The tool automatically and quickly syncs your files so you can access everything everywhere. It is a great tool for simple storage and sharing.

7. SurveyMonkey - Talk to Your Customers

       

SurveyMonkey is great tool for startups to gather your customers’ feedback, thoughts and ideas. It helps you design, create, collect and analyze surveys. It would be a effective way to engage your customers in your business. Users can use it to build survey from scratch, or choose their templates.

8. Evernote - Remember Everything

       

Evernote is a note-taking tool to capture thoughts, to-do items and pictures. “Remember Everything” is what Evernote promises. Startups can use it for personal or commercial project management. It’s very easy to use and make you better organized. You can have all notes and ideas in one single place, well organized and synced across your different devices, which is a great help and very convenient.

9. Asana - Manage Your Team And Project

       

Asana is a handy tool for start-ups to manage your team and projects. It helps you to improve the efficiency by having all the plans, ideas and tasks in a platform that every team member can see and contribute to.

Startups can use the tool to create projects and assign tasks to your team members. It keeps everyone up-to-date with what stage of the task they are on.

You can use Asana on your mobile phone and it has a alert system that will remind you when a team member is pinging you.

10. JIRA - Mange All Your Projects

     

Jira is a product-racking tool that provides bug tracking, issue tracking and project management functions. It allows start-up teams to capture and organize issues, assign work and follow your team’s activity. Programmers usually use JIRA to manage projects and support tickets. The use of JIRA is company-wide but sporadically. JIRA is viewed as an "opt-in" tool in our organization and is mainly sought by the development groups.