How to Create a Successful Startup

Ever wondered how to create a successful startup?
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You’ve got to find what your recipe for success looks like to you. There is no one-size-fits-all for successful startups – all startup stories are different. Running low on manpower and experiencing rapid growth? It might be time to automate certain systems in order to meet your goals.
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With that in mind, we’ve gathered a list of our favourite tech tools that we use to help us reach our goals. These tools complement our working style and team and are what we'd suggest to anyone looking to create a successful startup.

1. Building the site

When it comes creating a successful startup, building your site is important. As an online marketplace, we have a big website that requires constant updating and managing. Our developers do an amazing job of fixing any bugs or issues that might come up, but they don’t have the time or resources to manage every new page we want to build or edit.

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We needed to find software that allowed us to create, publish and manage our website and its content in a way that didn't need help from the developers at every stage. That’s where a Content Management System comes in.

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This software enables your team to use your favourite website frameworks and services to build working products. We use ours on a daily basis to build, update and optimise sections of our website, allowing us to free up our developer’s time to work on our bigger projects.
Examples: Webflow, Squarespace

2. A way of talking to your customers

When you’re a growing company with a large client base, you need to find an efficient way of managing your database and communicating with customers in order to provide excellent customer service. When thinking about how to create a successful startup, talking to customers should be at the centre of everything you do.

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In our web-centred world, it didn’t make sense for us to communicate with our clients via the phone and email. Find a customer messaging software that you can connect up to your website – it makes it easy to connect with your visitors and communicate with them in real time.
You should try instant messenger, email or a bespoke support centre. Our account managers are now available to respond to requests immediately as and when they come in.
Examples: Drift, Crisp, FreshChat

3. Content scheduling

Social media is hugely important for any company wanting to promote their brand. But manually posting several times a day to multiple platforms is an incredibly time consuming and inefficient process. There are plenty of different social media management software models out there that allow you to plan and schedule parts of your content strategy all in one place.

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From blogs and emails to Twitter and LinkedIn posts, you can create and schedule quality content every day of the week. The software will then publish your social media posts automatically at the time that you have set.

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We plan all of our content on this type of software, which then allows team members to work on multiple projects at one time.
Examples: Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Buffer, Hubspot.

4. Management tools

When you’re working at a startup, it can be a struggle to keep track of your team’s workload.

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You’re all working on so many projects simultaneously, that staying up to date on who’s doing what can seem like an impossible challenge. That’s why we use a company management web application that’s designed to help teams track their workload.

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You can manually add in your to-do list, assign it to a team member, category or project and set a deadline. You are then sent a notification straight to your inbox every few days to remind you when a task is nearly due or overdue. You can also message members of your team via the management tool and assign tasks to other people whenever you need a helping hand.
Examples: Trello, SalesForce
Financial management: QuickBooks accounting solutions

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So there you have it, our tech recipe for startup success. Finding the right programs to suit your setup can be a challenge, but with so many fantastic companies engineering innovative solutions to the problems a startup can face, you’re bound to find the perfect recipe of your own.