Brad Smith — January 17, 2018 — January 17, 2018
50% of all new businesses fail within five years.
Fortunately, you haven’t failed… yet.
But that doesn’t mean you’re immune. In fact, the number one reason that new businesses fail isn’t because they can’t find customers or they have a terrible product, but because they scale too quickly.
In other words, they are doing well. And that success kills them.
Largely, because they can’t keep up with the growth.
And the start-up world is riddled with unexpected failures, mistakes, transitions, and changes.
Each one has the potential to kill your business.
In the words of Paul Graham, “Bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup.”
The good news is that you don’t have to be unprepared.
In fact, these seven tools can help you avoid failure by becoming more productive.
After all, when your big break hits, you don’t want to fail because you were unprepared, you want to flourish.
1. GMass
Sending cold emails is a drag on your startup.
Nothing is more boring than writing a message, and then copy and pasting it into hundreds of different emails.
Only to receive a markedly low response rate.
GMass makes the process a whole lot simpler.
And the best part is that it’s free to use.
With it, you can send individual emails natively from your Gmail account to up to 10,000 people at one time.
(Image Source: gmass.co)
Since GMass sends the emails individually, you don’t need to worry about someone responding to all of the email addresses by mistake. Each email will start a brand new conversation.
So yeah. GMass can save you a ton of time in your prospecting and sales process.
Especially for a startup like yours that has limited budget and bandwidth.
Additionally, you can use GMass to automatically send pre-written follow-up messages.
That’s a remarkable feature, especially when you consider that 80% of sales require five follow-ups.
You can even personalize each email with merge tags to include everyone’s first name, for instance.
Pretty cool, huh?
And since it’s free, you’ve got nothing to lose.
Because here’s the thing. Only 24% of sales emails get opened. And far less receive a response. Which means that you need to play the odds and send as many emails as you possibly can.
If 10,000 at a time is enough for you, then GMass is perfect.
2. Asana
Every business needs project management software.
For small businesses, Asana shines through.
Perhaps, where you’re currently at in your business, you don’t think you need project management software, though.
After all, if you have a small, close-knit team, then communication is easy and due dates are well-known.
But, if you’re planning to move out of the startup world and grow your business, then you’re going to have to hire more people.
As you do, the need for project management software becomes even more critical.
SmallBizTrends, offers this advice, for instance.
“Decide about expansion only after carefully reviewing, researching and analyzing what you will need regarding new employees, facilities and systems. While it may be feasible to do much of the work yourself early in the life of your business, that won’t be the case after you expand. Just keep in mind, slow and steady wins the race.”
Asana offers just the kind of organization you and the rest of your team need to become more productive.
With it, you can schedule project due dates, label each one with a status, and assign each task to a person.
You can also view the overall progress on each task to see if due dates are being met and how your team is performing together.
(Image Source: asana.com/product)
And on a higher-level view, you can see your project due dates in calendar form to get an idea for which projects take priority and which don’t need attention until later.
You can also allow your team members to reference this calendar when they want to understand where the business is heading.
(Image Source: asana.com/product)
The number one reason that businesses fail is because they are unprepared for expansion.
They grow too fast.
And the best antidote to that mistake is a project management system that organizes your tasks, making everyone less confused and more productive.
Meaning your business also has a better chance of weathering storms that comes its way.
3. Slack
If you’re like most entrepreneurs today, at least part of your startup team is remote.
Fortunately for your business, the digital world makes remote work easier than ever. Today, tools like Slack allow you to quickly and easily engage in critical discussions with team members and even create channels for those discussions.
With Slack, you can create a channel for “brainstorming” and “marketing” and any other necessary and talk-worthy topics.
Then, people included within that channel can start a discussion at any time, sort of like a private forum.
Slack is a communication tool that is wildly popular in the business world.
If you’re not using it, you’re missing out.
Not just on critical discussions, but on a more productive team. Consider that, today, 70% of U.S. employees aren’t engaged when they’re at work.
The risk is even higher for remote workers, where culture is difficult to develop.
Naturally, you don’t want your team to be un-engaged.
You want them to ask questions, think about what they’re doing, and even take on a certain amount of leadership.
The answer? Strong communication.
Productivity improves by 25% in organizations where the employees feel connected.
Slack might just provide that needed connection for your startup team to keep everyone more engaged and thus more productive.
4. Venngage
Content marketing is a hot topic recently.
And for good reason.
I don’t need to tell you about the oft-quoted statistics of content marketing’s claim to fame. Content marketing drives audiences, attention, traffic, leads, and even sales.
One of the more effective types of content, though, is the infographic, which is 30 times more likely to be read than a text article.
But, of course, you and your team don’t have the time to create infographics from scratch.
Or do you?
Enter Venngage.
This infographic maker allows you to make custom infographics with premade templates, photos, icons, and fonts.
With Venngage, you’re just a few steps away from making a beautiful, shareable infographic that drives traffic and social media attention.
They even have a free version of their tool, but to get the full effect, you’ll want to dish out some cash for one of their plans.
If you want to make a lot of infographics, though, then those monthly costs are fairly reasonable.
So yeah. You can make some pretty cool stuff with Venngage.
Content marketing doesn’t need to take tons of time, and infographics definitely don’t need to.
But, despite that saved time, they’ll still drive traffic for your business. It’s higher productivity with the same effect.
Win, win.
5. Hootsuite
Social media represents a wealth of potential for most businesses.
93% of Pinterest users, for instance, use the platform to plan purchases and 59% of social media using Americans believe the social media makes customer service faster and easier.
You can leverage that potential in your own startup. And the best part is that it doesn’t have to hog up your bandwidth.
A lot of times, finding content, writing a custom post, and then sharing that content on all your different social media channels is a real hassle.
You’re trying to grow a business, and you don’t have the time to post regularly on social media.
However, you also can’t afford to ignore social media’s potential for your business growth.
Take Twitter as another example. 66% of Twitter users have discovered a small or medium business on the platform and 94% plan to purchase from one of the businesses they follow, while 69% already have purchased because of a product they saw on the network.
Fortunately, Hootsuite streamlines your social media marketing process.
With it, you can schedule posts across multiple platforms.
And you can then view all of your scheduled posts on a high-level calendar.
Want to market your business organically on social media but don’t have the time?
That’s alright. No one has the time.
With Hootsuite, though, social media marketing becomes a pleasure rather than a hassle.
6. SurveyMonkey
Knowing about your target market is important for every business on the planet.
If you don’t know who your target market is, then you can’t create great content, plan advertisements correctly, or draw the right people to your products.
And that truth becomes even more important in the startup world.
You definitely can’t afford to lack understanding of your target market.
You need to know who you’re marketing to, what they want, why they want it, and what they’re struggling with.
You need to know them better than your kids and better than your spouse.
Okay. Maybe not that well. But you get the point.
How do learn about your target market, though?
One word: surveys.
Ask them questions and study the answers.
SurveyMonkey makes doing this remarkably simple.
With it, you can create surveys and easily send them to your audience to find out who’s listening to you and what defines those people.
You can ask questions like this, for instance.
(Image Source: surveymonkey.com)
Why is running surveys so important for your business?
Well, the better that you understand who your ideal customer is, the more productive you’ll be.
Sadly, the average business hears from only 4% of its dissatisfied customers.
In other words, businesses and customers are doing a bad job of communicating. If you communicate with them though, you’ll understand them better, which will naturally increase your advertising ROI and your overall business revenue.
This means you’ll survive the coming storms and your competition won’t.
7. HelloSign
Running a startup requires a lot of signatures.
You need signatures for contracts with partners, freelance team members, and various legal documents.
Often, all of those signatures end up taking a remarkable amount of time.
You have to find the right documents, run them by a legal professional, fax them to the right person, let them sign, wait to receive them back, and then file them away.
Except you don’t.
HelloSign streamlines the entire signing process for a reasonable monthly fee.
With it, you can upload documents and email them to the right person (or multiple people).
(Image Source: hellosign.com)
Then, receivers can easily sign documents with their smartphones.
In fact, HelloSign walks each person through how to sign the documents and even where to sign.
Which means you don’t have to spend loads of time answering questions about how and where to sign the document.
You upload it and HelloSign takes care of the rest.
(Image Source: hellosign.com)
You need various signatures since you’re a business owner. And there’s no reason to let that process take more time than it needs to take.
Streamline it with HelloSign, and you and your team will be able to dedicate more time to the things that really matter.
The things that grow your business and prepare you for an increase in your revenue.
Conclusion
Within just five years, half of the new businesses around you are going to fail.
Will you be one of them?
Well, you’re the only one who can answer that question.
The truth, though, is that you likely won’t succeed unless you’re prepared for the future. And the best ways to prepare for the future is to integrate the right tools into your current processes.
The worst thing you can do is wait until it’s too late.
What you can do is use GMass, Asana, Slack, Venngage, Hootsuite, SurveyMonkey, and HelloSign to make you, your team, and your business more productive.
Only then will you have time to grow your business.
Otherwise, you’ll fall to the bad side of that 50% and regret not adopting the necessary tools that would’ve led you to the stars.
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