5 productivity tools that every startup must know about

Here are a few tools that early-stage startups can use to improve efficiency:

1. Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/): Social Media Management is something no business can ignore. But given the various number of popular social media platforms, it becomes hard to coordinate and track individual accounts.

Hootsuite is a social media management tool which lets you access and control all your social media accounts from a single dashboard. It lets you track, schedule and analyse posts for multiple platforms simultaneously.

Pricing: Freeware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware), but only three accounts can be managed under the Free Plan.

1. Nimble (www.nimble.com/): Most of our external interactions are scattered over different accounts, leading to a mess. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools come in handy here.

Nimble offers effective CRM Solution for small and medium businesses. It gathers your team’s contacts, calendars, email and social interactions with social profile details from everywhere. In their own words, ‘With intelligent context and insights to your contacts you can be quick, agile and smart with your relationships.’

Pricing: Paid, 15-day free trial available.

1. Asana (https://asana.com/)/ Trello(https://trello.com/) : To-do & Check-lists are undoubtedly extremely effective ways of staying organised. Project management tools can help you extend that effectiveness to your whole team.

Asana and Trello are two of the most popular project management tools. These tools can help you effectively manage team projects and tasks from a central spot. Asana is more advanced than Trello, but then certain advancements can be disadvantageous in themselves.

Pricing: Freeware, free plans effective enough for small teams.

1. Slack (https://slack.com/) /HipChat (https://www.hipchat.com/): If you are using Whatsapp Groups to interact with colleagues at your office, it is really time to move on!

Slack and HipChat are two great tools to manage communication within your team. You can group your communications based on projects/teams. Sharing files, links etc. also becomes seamless. They will practically eliminate the need to use mails for internal communication. Slack is more integration-friendly (and more expensive) than HipChat but again, do give both of them a shot.

Pricing: Freeware, but free plans are quite effective.

1. Recruiterbox (http://recruiterbox.com/):

Once you start hiring, it can become quite hard to track various openings and applications.

Recruiterbox is a recruitment management software which lets you easily handle various openings, tracks and review applications, assign responsibilities to your team, automate replies, customize questionnaires etc. Basically, it is a must-have tool if you are planning to hire aggressively.

Pricing:Freeware, but only 200 applications can be received under free plan.