The cost of starting up a business, especially an online one, is at an all time low. Scrappy startup owners don’t need to pay for enterprise level tools, as almost everything you need to start growing and making real revenue is available for free.

The most obvious tools are almost not worth mentioning as they have become so integral to how startup business is done. Google Analytics provides powerful analytics functionality, WordPress is ever popular and Skype is widely used amongst tech entrepreneurs.

1. Evernote

Organise your entire filing cabinet for free and in the cloud. Access it anywhere using the Android or iPhone apps. Another very useful feature for startup founders is that Evernote lets you scan documents directly into the system using the Fujitsu Scansap S300. I can’t quite describe how useful this is as it sounds fairly mundane but it really does allow you to move closer to a near paperless office and allow you to search important documents by tags, rather than have to rifle through stacks of dead trees.

2. Google Apps

Many people don’t realise that you can use Google Apps to setup Gmail on your own domain. So our something@startupwizz.com email address can be managed within a Gmail interface, rather than using Outlook or Thunderbird.

3. Freshbooks

For B2B startups who invoice customers Freshbooks is an incredibly useful invoicing tool that saves you having to create a nice looking template, print out the invoice, create a PDF of it then send it to your customer. Freshbooks neatly does it all for you and even sends a paper copy in the mail if you need. Paid search management startup Pixelo use Freshbooks to invoice their clients and claim their customers love it as well this it allows them to see when their customers have viewed an invoice and how much is outstanding.

4. Mailchimp

Aweber and Mailchimp are the two main contenders for the email marketing app de rigeur but Mailchimp pips it for me as the usability is excellent.

5. Survey Monkey

Getting feedback from your customers and even employees is always a useful exercise. Even if you decide to completely disregard what they say, it’s always good to know what your customers think they want. But that’s another story.

Survey Monkey lets startup owners easily get feedback en masse and feedback is what allows you to iterate your product, improve it and ultimately succeed in the startup business.

7. Shopify

Not quite free, but still worth mentioning. Creating an online store has never been this easy and flexible. I know of companies doing $200k+ a month in turnover using a barely modified version of the default shopify template. There have always been open source, free and cheap shopping cart solutions for those who want to start an ecommerce business, but frankly they were pretty terrible. OScommerce was bulky and looked about 10 years out of date, Zencart was very similar, Magento is very neat but had some speed issues at the start. However Shopify is a very flexible and powerful way of getting selling straight away, the whole process has been made very simple, yet powerful enough to host stores that actually sell a lot of goods.

Another notable mention is Vennder who recently got in touch to tell us about their Shopify style ecommerce platform.

A nifty use for Google Translate is to search in other languages, Google’s example is to try searching for “sushi recipes” in Japanese. Or “pasta recipes” in Italian.

Very smart…

This type of tool can very useful for marketing your startup to international markets from day one, without having to wait for expensive translations or hire linguistic talent.

Everyone knows the story of how Studiviz managed to create a clone of Facebook in Germany, soak up all the initial marketshare and then sell what was basically a Facebook script with a German skin for 100 million Euros.

Facebook have since learnt their lesson and have aggressively expanded to international markets.

But if your startup happens to strike gold in your country, the lesson seems to be that you need to use all the tools available to make sure that noone reskins your idea and starts eating up market share elsewhere.