6 Underrated Tools Every Small Business Owner Should Bookmark
There are endless software options for running a business, and most lists cover the same big names. These six are smaller, often free to start, and each solves one specific problem well. Below is what each one does, when it is worth using, and how to get real value out of it in your first hour.
1. Miro: plan visually with your team
Miro is an online whiteboard where your whole team can add sticky notes, shapes, arrows, images and documents to the same board at the same time. It replaces the conference-room whiteboard that gets erased at the end of the meeting, and it works just as well when half your team is remote.
Small businesses get the most out of it for brainstorming sessions, quarterly planning, mapping how a customer moves from first visit to purchase, and sketching the screens of a website or app before anyone designs or builds them. Miro's template library covers most of these, so you rarely start from a blank board.
Tip: before you hire anyone to build a website or app, map your current customer journey on a Miro board, one sticky note per step. It is the fastest way to spot where people drop off, and it gives a designer or developer a clear brief to quote against.
2. SurveyMonkey: talk to customers before you build
SurveyMonkey makes it quick to build a survey, share it by link or email, and see the results summarized in charts. For a small business, its best use is customer discovery: finding out what your customers actually struggle with before you spend money on a new product, service or feature.
The quality of the answers depends on the questions. A few rules that make a big difference:
- Ask about the problem, not your solution. "How do you handle scheduling today?" beats "Would you use our scheduling app?"
- Ask about past behavior, not future intentions. What people did last month is more reliable than what they say they would do.
- Keep it short. Five to ten questions gets far more completed responses than twenty-five.
- End with an open question and an optional email field, so you can follow up with the most interesting respondents.
The free plan is enough for a first round of discovery. Paid plans add things like more responses, logic that skips questions based on earlier answers, and exports.
3. Mail Tester: keep your emails out of spam
If your invoices, newsletters or sales emails land in spam, it does not matter how good they are. Mail Tester shows you how your email looks to a spam filter, for free, in about a minute. Here is how to use it:
- Open the site and copy the unique test address it gives you.
- Send a real email to that address from the tool you normally use, such as your inbox, your CRM or your newsletter platform.
- Go back to the site and check your score out of 10.
The report checks whether your domain's SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are set up, whether your sending server is on a blacklist, and whether your content or links look spammy. Missing authentication records are the most common problem we see, and they matter more than ever: Gmail and Yahoo now require them from anyone sending email in volume. Run a test whenever you change email providers, set up a new domain, or launch a campaign.
4. Crunchbase: research companies and investors
Crunchbase is a database of companies, their funding rounds, their leadership and the investors behind them. Each investor profile shows the companies they have backed, so you can see who actually invests in your industry, at your stage and in your region, instead of pitching a generic list.
It is useful even if you never raise money. Use it to size up a competitor (how much they have raised and how fast they are hiring), to research a prospective client before a sales call, or to build a prospect list of recently funded companies, which often have fresh budgets for new vendors.
Tip: when you find an investor who fits, look at the founders of their portfolio companies. A short note from one of them is a much warmer introduction than a cold email.
5. USPTO trademark search: check a name before you commit
Before you buy a domain, order signage or print a logo, search the USPTO trademark database for the name you have in mind. It is free, it takes a few minutes, and it can save you from an expensive rebrand or a cease-and-desist letter after you have already built a following.
Search more than the exact spelling. Try variations, sound-alikes and plurals, and pay attention to whether a match is "live" (active) or "dead" (abandoned or expired). A similar name in a completely different industry may not be a problem, while a close match in your own line of business usually is.
Keep in mind that the federal database is not the whole picture. In the United States, a business can gain rights to a name simply by using it, so also search Google, your state's business registry and the major social platforms. For any name you plan to register or invest heavily in, confirm with a trademark attorney.
6. Similarweb: estimate competitors' web traffic
Type a competitor's domain into Similarweb and it estimates how many visits the site gets, where those visitors come from (search, social, referrals or direct), which countries they are in, and which other sites they visit. It is one of the few ways to see inside a competitor's marketing without access to their analytics.
The numbers are estimates, and they get less reliable for small sites with little traffic. Use them to compare competitors against each other and to spot patterns, such as a rival getting most of its visitors from social media while you rely on search, rather than as exact figures. Pair it with your own data from Google Search Console for the full picture.
Ready to build?
Hopefully these tools help you explore your idea a bit more. If you want to start bringing your business idea to life, book a free consultation with our team.
