10 great tools for startups we use daily

There's a plethora of small and large tools out there that make life easier for startups (such as ours) to be product while maintaining a small foot print. While we constantly try new tools and apps, there is a list of 10 really well-done tools for startups that we can't go without even for a day.

Our favorite 10 tools for startups

1. Google Drive.

There really is no way around some kind of office suite, and even though Google really stopped offering much for small teams on their free plan, it still remains a highly productive environment that constantly evolves and cuts down overhead.

2. Trello.

All project management tools have a problem, they won't fix your organizational discipline. Trello at least makes it fairly easy to organize groupwork, and its kanban view is quite flexible. We currently use it for non-developer tasks only and constantly play around with ways to accomplish the one thing that is the most fun: moving "cards" into the "done" column.

3. HipChat

Atlassian's group chat solution has neat integration options and just works quite well. We are not super happy with the native clients yet (Ubuntu, Android), but we are sure those will improve as well. Until then we use the web client mostly. They are also experimenting with voice and video chat functionality, it will be interesting to see how that adds to our productivity.

4. Kickofflabs.

We are currently testing their suite of features for our pre-launch. It seemed like the painless option among all the viral launch tools out there, and it has a decent feature set while maintaining super easy set up. It will not do magic, a great landing page is nothing without visitors, but it is quite easy to constantly adapt and improve it.

5. Mailchimp.

Of all the mailing solutions out there, Mailchimp wins in terms of usability and features. It was not always that way. I can remember a time where it was almost impossible to use. They really came a long way. Not to say that there is no room for improvement, but it is almost fun to use now. Especially helpful are its integration features and a few days ago they further streamlined the mailing editor.

6. Shutter.

I chose this as a stand in for any good screenshot tool you prefer on your operating system. I use the really versatile Shutter on Ubuntu and I keep it busy almost all day round. Pictures do say more than a thousand words, so in most cases it is easier to send a screenshot than to describe a problem long and tediously. The most used tool is the selection tool, you can quickly capture a visual bug and send it to the UI team for evaluation.

7. WPEngine.

With all the resources you dedicate to your main product, keeping up with proper hosting of your communication channels is really just another annoying thing. We have tried a few options and just recently switched to WPEngine, which has given our blogs quite a boost so far. It is a very reliable Wordpress hosting platform that takes its main mission very seriously. So serious, they in fact ban bad plugins.

8. Appear.in.

This is a fairly new tool out there for videoconferencing. Based on HTML5 and WebRTC, it is an in-browser alternative to Google Hangout that works without any user accounts or plugins. You can reserve a room, share your screen or chat. So far however, it does not adapt well to low bandwidth as Skype and Hangout do, but definitely check it out, we liked the idea a lot.

9. Sublime Text.

A really versatile code editor that comes with a distraction free mode (my favorite, I use UberWriter for similar purposes), API and a lot of useful features for coding to your heart's desire.

10. Github.

Duh, the obvious one last. While we work with a variety of code repositories in Lingohub (next to Github the most prominently supported platform is Bitbucket), Github is our main workhorse.

Bonus tool

Here is another tool as a bonus: IDEA. This IDE environment for Java and other languages comes with a nice set of integrations and productivity features. Lastlly, we obviously eat our own dogfood and use Lingohub to localize Lingohub :)

I am looking forward to reading your tips, what are the most exciting new tools nobody's ever heard of? Comment below! Find us on Twitter at @Lingohub.