Essential apps you need to succeed as a solopreneur

The idea of commencing a solopreneur journey might seem enticing, but it also has several challenges attached to it.

There is a lot on your plate. From managing accounts to maintaining an online reputation. Planning tax to exploring new ways to delight customers. You need more than proficiency in your field to manage all aspects of your business and maximize your profits.

Fortunately, the market has a broad spectrum of business tools that can help you in staying on top of your activities.

Incredible business tools every solopreneur needs

No matter whether you are a designer, content writer, consultant or a virtual assistant, here are incredible tools to streamline your solopreneur business.

Productivity tools

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort” – Paul J. Meyer

There would be hardly any solopreneur who wouldn’t want to improve their productivity as it is crucial for boosting business profits. Increased productivity means faster work and better outcomes.

However, maintaining a high level of productivity becomes difficult when you need to handle everything alone. For succeeding as a solopreneur, it is necessary to work smarter and focus your efforts in the right direction.

Using tools like Salesmate, Basecamp, and Todoist you can easily minimize inefficiencies and achieve your productivity goals.

Salesmate CRM – All in one CRM for solopreneur

As a solopreneur, you are expected to keep track of many things. Like customer details, scheduled appointments, and interactions with your esteemed customers. Salesmate, an intuitive and smart CRM can be of great help in doing all this effectively.

Using this high-end sales CRM software, you can stay organized and keep a tab on everything that matters to you. All your crucial sales details and sales communications are systematically streamlined in a centralized location to avoid confusion and clutter.

With Salesmate:

• Get notified about your important meetings and follow-ups.
• Create multiple pipelines and gain better control over your deals.
• Seamlessly integrate with your favorite app and work efficiently without toggling between applications.
• Automate most of the unnecessary tasks and increase your productive hours.

Basecamp – Project management tool

With a long list of tasks, there are chances that you might lose track of things.

Thankfully with a project management tool like Basecamp, you can eliminate such situations and complete your projects in real-time. It is a perfect solution for solopreneurs to maximize productivity and managing scope creep.

With Basecamp-

• Find each detail related to your project at one place
• Receive timely alerts about upcoming and due tasks
• Track the progress of your project
• Stay informed with a neat timeline

Todoist – Task management

Todoist is another excellent productivity tool that helps in handling various projects without pain. Easily sync it with all your devices and manage your tasks efficiently from anywhere. It also offers integration with popular apps like Google Drive and Dropbox to help you work with more functionalities.

With Todoist-

• Set reminders to ensure you don’t miss deadlines
• Add labels to find essential tasks quickly
• Automate some of the time-consuming activities
• Create filters to save your vital task views

Email marketing tools

Email marketing is the connecting link that bridges the gap between the solopreneurs and their buyers. It helps in increasing the visibility of the product and building powerful relationships with the customer base.

However, managing email marketing sometimes becomes difficult for a one-person company. This is why you require the latest tools like MailChimp and SendGrid to overcome your marketing challenges.

MailChimp – Marketing platform for small business

MailChimp is the best way to power your email marketing. In just a few clicks you can reach the masses and promote your product/services globally. It has a simple interface and is customizable. Moreover, it even offers a wide spectrum of basic email templates to save time and effort.

With Mailchimp you can:

• Seamlessly create and design email newsletters
• Easily set up a mailing list to organize your subscribers
• Set workflows and automate emails
• Find out how many subscribers have opened and read your email with easy-to-understand analytics

SendGrid – Email delivery service

Sendgrid is one of the best cloud-based email platforms that solopreneurs can use to communicate and engage with their customers. It resolves the challenges of email delivery and assists you in transactional email management. SendGrid offers excellent email analytics and round the clock live support.

With SendGrid, you can:

• Automatically send receipts to customers
• Create personalized email templates
• Segment transactional emails as per your purpose
• Receive detailed statistics for your email campaigns (like open rate, bounce rate, clicks and unsubscribes)

Content writing

As a solopreneur you are expected to play many roles, one of them is even being a content writer. You need to develop brochures, blogs, website pages and social media content for attracting potential buyers. You surely wouldn’t want to publish content filled with errors on your site. So, take the help of tools like Grammarly and Hemingway Editor to create an impactful copy.

Grammarly – Free writing assistant

Writing becomes a strenuous task when the thought of grammar comes in mind. Doesn’t it? Well with best-in-class grammar checkers like Grammarly you do not need to worry about punctuations or incorrect spellings. This smart tool catches grammatical errors and provides suggestions with better alternatives for strengthening your sentences.

With Grammarly, you can:

• Enhance vocabulary
• Check plagiarism
• Avoid wordiness and Improve your writing style

Hemingway editor – Readability analysis

Draft clear and impressive content with Hemingway Editor. It is an excellent tool that identifies hard-to-read sentences, passive voice and complex words or phrases in the content. The best thing is that it uses a color code to highlight issues.

With Hemingway editor, you can:

• Eliminate complicated words
• Format your text
• Improve readability by splitting the sentences

Prepostseo – Content optimizing toolkit

Perfecting content becomes a tough chore when you need to balance SEO, readability, and originality, right? Fear not; with a top-tier toolkit like

Prepostseo at your reach, you can take a breath of relief. It has all the essential tools that a content writer requires to get the job done. In addition, it provides tools to check for uniqueness, grammar, and readability issues and offers ways to optimize your content.

With Prepostseo, you can:

• Check for plagiarism.
•  Optimize keyword density.
•  Ensure grammar issues
•  Improve readability and content structure

Social media management

Being in a challenging business where you need to work alone, you might not be having enough time for social media. However, you can’t avoid it as it helps in spreading awareness about your company. Don’t worry, with the help of tools like Buffer and Hootsuite you can easily manage your social media accounts

Buffer- Social media management

Ensure you have a stream of relevant content flowing into your social media account in real-time with Buffer. Seamlessly manage multiple social media accounts in one place and schedule a post for engaging your customers.

With Buffer, you can:

• Find out what kind of content is performing with in-depth analytics
• Identify the best time to post content
• Track effective phrases from the post of other users

Hootsuite – Social media marketing & management

Know who is talking about you on various social media sites and view multiple streams at once with Hootsuite. It is the idle solution for social media marketing. Besides, Hootsuite even allows you to create insightful reports for finding out the effectiveness of your social media strategies.

With Hootsuite, you can:

• Schedule messages in advance.
• Keep your account organized by dragging and dropping profiles from one stream to another.
• Address your customer queries instantly by viewing all the questions in one place.

Task Automation

As a solopreneur, you are already running short of time, so you cannot afford to waste on extra activities. Take a smart step and automate such tasks with a tool like Zapier

Zapier – Work automation

Connect various apps and automate your workflow with Zapier. Bid goodbye to the tasks that add little value to your day and accomplish more with this smart automation.

With Zapier, you can:

• Speed up various business processes
• Add visibility to your workflows
• Create zaps to connect multiple apps

Invoicing apps

Don’t have time to create invoices?  Well, this is the common problem that most of the solopreneurs face. After all the hard work and efforts, you surely would want to get paid on time. Add ease to your invoicing process and do it quickly with tools like InvoiceNinja and QuickBooks

Invoice Ninja – Free open-source invoices

Simplify your billing process and ensure secure payment with Invoice Ninja. This easy-to-use invoicing tool can help you in creating customized invoices without any hassle. Invoice Ninja integrates with more than 50 payment channels so that you get paid faster for your product or services.

With Invoice Ninja, you can:

• Easily create quotations and convert it into invoices for payments
• Build professional invoices by choosing your preferred template
• Enable password protection to keep your client’s sensitive data secured

QuickBooks – accounting software

Keep your finances in order and track your expenses with QuickBooks. It is advanced accounting software that helps you in creating invoices, paying bills and monitor regular business transactions.

With QuickBooks, you can:

• Automate payments
• Create profit and loss reports
• Sort your expense into various categories

Time tracking apps

Working independently means you have your own rules. So, there are chances that you might end up wasting time and delaying work. Moreover, sometimes you would even have to outsource work from other professionals. In such circumstances, it would be wise to use time-tracking tools like Minterapp and Harvest.

Harvest – Online time tracking solution

Harvest is a useful time-tracking tool for solopreneurs to ensure the work is completed without delay. It is quick and easy to operate, besides monitoring time, it also aids in creating and sending professionals invoices to clients.

With Harvest, you can:

• Create detailed reports for gaining information about time and project
• Streamline time-tracking process
• Quickly analyze and update weekly timesheet

Toggl – Time tracking software

Toggl is a powerful time tracking and reporting tool for teams as well as solopreneurs. You can manually feed time tracking or choose to do that in real-time.

With Toggl, you can:

• Assign billable hours to your tasks.
• Compare project timelines and spot problems instantly.
• Set up reminders for important tasks.
• Use the app on iOS or Android.

Wrapping Up

These top-notch tools that can help you grow as a solopreneur provided you use it sincerely. Each tool mentioned here has abundant benefits. Make the most of it and simplify your work as a solopreneur.

We think a simple CRM should be your top priority to make your solopreneur life a bit easier. If that’s your top priority, don’t forget to checkout Salesmate CRM. You can try every feature without any cost for 15 days. Then, you can pick from two simple-affordable plans!