It’s a known fact that over 50% of startups fail during their first year. Even if the founder has a great idea, many factors can affect the long-term health of his or her business. From disharmony to poor product quality, many factors can easily impede the growth and success of a company.
So what do successful digital entrepreneurs do differently to prevent failure? What things do they do to overcome challenges in their business? When it comes to running a digital business, the adoption of the right software and tools can make or break your business. In this article, we’ve rounded up the best software tools and solutions for digital entrepreneurs in 2023. Read on to learn which software is most suitable for your business.
Shopify
Best eCommerce platform
The go-to online shop builder for digital entrepreneurs, Shopify is preferred for its user-friendly and reliable platform. Shopify is also mobile-friendly and designed to be intuitive for all users.
If you’re an ecommerce store owner, Shopify makes managing online stores incredibly easy. You don’t need to hire someone with technical know-how to run your store for you because you can do it yourself. Their platform also supports print-on-demand dropshipping functionality, which allows you to launch an online store without an inventory. Shopify integrates with many print-on-demand companies, one of which is Printful—their number one partner. Shopify plans start at $9/month. There are also other advanced plans that you can get for a better upgrade and flexibility at a higher cost.
Pros: Clear interface, several theme options, mobile-friendly, easy-to-use
Cons: Limited functionalities, costly integrations, best for multi-product ecommerce business
Evernote
Best for note-taking and web-clipping
Evernote stands out as a cloud-based note-taking application for several reasons. First, its cross-platform capability allows you to access the application no matter where you open it. Aside from the notes and listing tool, Evernote allows users to capture and save photos or record audio.
If you’re a digital entrepreneur who has a creative team, Evernote’s team dashboard space can be an amazing place to brainstorm and store ideas. Evernote has a total of two paid plans: premium and business. It also has a pretty good basic plan that can offer you a 60MB monthly upload limit.
Pros: Amazing integrations, good basic plan, clean, modern design, efficient collaboration
Cons: capture feature has limited image editing features, an expensive premium plan
Best for building a professional network
As an entrepreneur, you need to be visible to your customers, talents, and other businesses to secure clients and build important business relationships. As much as you work on your services or products, it’s also important to spend time improving your brand. The best tool that can help you in this aspect is LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a social media platform designed for building your professional network. With LinkedIn, you can connect with old and new colleagues, clients, customers, leads, and more. As a digital entrepreneur, you can also use LinkedIn to increase your business exposure, improve your credibility, and find the best talent for your business. LinkedIn has several account types and plans. The most affordable paid plan is the LinkedIn Premium Career, which starts at $39.99 a month.
Pros: networking opportunities, talent acquisition, industry updates, improved marketing
Cons: spam connections, costly premium, identity theft risk, time-consuming
MarkUp Hero
Best for product management
With Markup Hero, product management is easier than ever. This screenshot and annotation tool makes it easy to share ideas, communicate with colleagues, and collaborate with people online.
Just like how excellent team collaboration software improves productivity, an annotation tool like Markup Hero can solve different efficiency issues in the workflow. It has impressive feedback features that allow users to type a long list of texts or tasks into a viewable image for sharing with individuals or groups. MarkUp Hero pricing starts at $4 per month. It also has a free version with limited features.
Pros: powerful markup tools, flexible API, annotation tools, link sharing, and image exporting
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Slack
Best for team communication
Collaborating with your team is now convenient and easy with Slack. Slack is the leading business communications tool that’s used by big and small businesses alike. Slack’s features make it the perfect tool for remote teams and entrepreneurs who run online businesses.
Slack has a total of three paid plans: Pro, Business +, and Enterprise Grid. It also has a free version that’s good for small teams and businesses.
Pros: easy to use, good app integrations, advanced security, good for remote teams
Cons: expensive paid plan, limited formatting on messages
GetResponse
Best for email marketing
GetResponse is an email marketing app that allows you to create mailing lists, send e-newsletters, and analyze your marketing campaigns in one dashboard. With GetResponse, digital entrepreneurs can automate their marketing campaigns, build landing pages for their websites, and install several integrations. GetResponse has a free plan and several different plans for features you need. Its email marketing plan starts at 15$ per month.
Pros: Good for small and large businesses, marketing automation, build better landing pages
Cons: No money back for annual plans, limited integrations, expensive plans
Canva
Best for graphic design
Canva is a graphic design application that can help you design various business materials on your own. You can create posters, slides, social media graphics, and more without hiring a graphic designer to do all the image designing for you.
As we all know, hiring a graphic agency or a graphic artist can be quite expensive. So if you’re a budding entrepreneur with little to no budget for graphic design, Canva is simply the perfect tool for you. Canva has two paid plans: Canva Pro starting at 43$ per year per person and Canva for Teams starting at $70 per year for the first five people.
Pros: Easy to use, excellent design tools, several app integrations, good mobile app
Cons: No co-editing, limited number of templates, no creation of unique elements enabled
Medium
Best writing platform
Medium is a place where anyone can write, read, and connect with other people. Similar to blogging sites such as Blogger and WordPress, Medium allows both new and experienced writers to share their writing with the world.
Since Medium is a free website, anyone can start writing and publishing without limitations. A lot of business owners use Medium today to improve their content marketing strategy and bring in more readers to their websites. Medium’s premium plan starts at $5 per month.
Pros: content marketing opportunities, an alternative to a website, improved brand reputation
Cons: lots of competition, no metadata control, no custom code, no recommendation control
Buffer
Best social media scheduling tool
As an entrepreneur, you should always be actively seeking out ways to reach your target audience. The best way to do this is through a social media scheduling tool like Buffer. Buffer helps busy entrepreneurs to save time by allowing them to manage different social channels on one platform.
Instead of logging out of the different social channels you have, you can use Buffer to open all of them at the same time. Aside from viewing your channels, you can also use them to schedule posts, review data analytics, reply to customers, and manage your team. Buffer has a total of three paid plans: Essentials for $5 per month per channel, Team for $10 per month per channel, and Agency for $100 per month per channel.
Pros: Great calendar scheduling, workflow management, content optimization, mobile access
Cons: glitches, costly compared to other tools, limited post scheduling on free account
Moz
Best for SEO
SEO remains a strong and effective digital marketing strategy for many businesses. Tools like Moz make it easy for you to run your SEO campaigns without the need to hire people to do certain tasks. With Moz, you can do audience analysis, easily see site rankings, fix errors on your site, and more. All of this makes Moz a wonderful option for optimizing your SEO on a limited budget. Moz has several paid plans starting at $99 per month.
Pros: good value for the price, metrics and reporting enabled, keyword explorer
Cons: could be overwhelming for beginners, limited features on the free account
easy.jobs
If you’re thinking about making your hiring process smoother and easier, easy.jobs here to help you out! easy.jobs is a popular and well-regarded remote hiring SaaS solution that has been used by over 9,000 companies around the world. It is available in 14+ languages and has facilitated over 30,000 successful recruitments. easy.jobs offers an advanced applicant tracking system with AI screening, allowing you to set up questions to test candidate skills, IQ, and other factors. You can also use easy.jobs' sorting and filtering options to easily find the best candidates, and measure their performance with insightful analytics.
easy.jobs has both free and pro versions. In the free version, users can post one active job for remote hiring. In the pro version, there’s a three-tier pricing plan: Startup, Growth, and Scale along with a customizable Enterprise plan that provides an exclusive White Label feature. Users can purchase the package on a monthly, annual, or lifetime basis.
Pros: Powerful AI screening, easy candidate pipeline set up, integration with WordPress & Elementor page builder, integration with Zoom, and Google Meet, creating branded company page and career page, and in-app messaging.
Cons: No Question Bank for assessments and quizzes, no option to Edit Job Posts in bulk (in the WordPress plugin)
Find the Best Software for Your Business Today
The internet is full of tools that are designed to help your business succeed. Your job is to use the tool that is suitable and benefits your business the most. If the tool helps you and those around you work efficiently, work tasks can be accomplished faster and easier. We hope you find the best software for your business in the above list. Good luck!
