It’s not easy being a solo entrepreneur. But that’s showbiz baby.
Since you’re ridin’ solo, you are forced to wear many hats which can be both exhilarating and exhausting, depending on the day. Thankfully, technology and the era of internet has made working alone easier than ever.
There are tools and apps and goodies galore to help you make the most of your day, get “all the things” done, and even do them on a budget. Keep reading for some our best “gotta have ‘em” tools to help make your solo venture successful.
Google Calendar
If you aren’t yet using Google Calendar, what are you waiting for? Yes, you can go old school. But Google Calendar lets you create important reminders, sync across platforms and devices, allow other people to view or input information to your calendar, and so much more. You can also schedule regularly occurring events to repeat and make everything pretty and color-coded, should you so desire. Seriously, we aren’t sure there are downsides to this one.
Dropbox
Cloud-based storage is essential in today’s biz landscape. Dropbox makes it easy and syncs up with a variety of different tools and apps, making life easier. You can pay for as little or as much storage as you need, and upgrade or downgrade any time.
Google Drive
You can do the same thing with Google Drive that you can do with Dropbox. Both make excellent cloud-based storage options. Some apps will only work with one or the other, and some clients and businesses will only use one or the other, so you might consider using both Drive and Dropbox to cover your bases. They are both great for all your online storage needs.
Wise Stamp
This is a great little tool to create a professional email signature to append to every email you send out, to keep your brand consistent and share information about you and your business. The nice thing is that it’s free if you don’t mind their Wisestamp logo and a few limitations. You can always upgrade later if you want to remove that and create more signatures, but for a solopreneur, the free version should work pretty well.
HelloSign
Of course, there are always papers and documents and contracts to sign in a solopreneur’s life. Hello, Sign makes eSigning easy and stress-free, entirely online. No more faxing, attaching and emailing documents, or other clunky solutions. Out with the old, in with the new!
Scanner Pro App
There will be times that you simply have to scan a document for some reason. When that happens, you can use this app right from your smartphone. It’s like carrying around a scanner in your pocket, and we dare say it makes doing all things business-y infinitely easier.
Boomerang for Gmail
If you feel like you’ve got a constant flow of emails to send and emails to check, try Boomerang. It integrates right with Gmail and allows you to schedule the emails you send out. Plus, Boomerang will remind you if you don’t hear back on something you sent and remind you to follow up on important emails you can’t deal with just yet.
Evernote
Feel like you have a ton of ideas, to-dos, and irons in the fire? Enter the beauty of Evernote. It’s a place you can consolidate all of your rad entrepreneurial ideas and projects and prioritize them. You can clip things straight from the web, capture inspiration, ideas, photos, and voice recordings and never miss a step.
Workflow Max
Handle everything from invoicing and estimates, to purchase orders and reporting, and so much more. They offer a 14-day free trial, so you can give all the bells and whistles a whirl, and after that, it’s just $15 a month for one little solopreneur. It’s the ultimate in helping you wear all the hats and manage your workflow while juggling multiple projects.
Assistant.to
This is another extension for Gmail users. It lets you book meetings quickly and easily, with no accidental double bookings. It also lets people know when you’ve scheduled or rescheduled a meeting and makes syncing up with clients and partners for meetings as painless as possible. Just a click enables you to schedule meetings right from your email. How fast can you say easy peasy?
PDF Expert
This tool is excellent for helping you manage essential PDF’s related to your business. You can edit and fill out forms and contracts, annotate them and make notes, combine files when you need to, swap out images and text, sign important documents, and more. The best part is you can download it for free and see how you like it.
There you have it, friends. But this list is by no means exhaustive. There are so many tools and apps available to solopreneurs these days to improve productivity and workflow and help keep you at the top of your solo game that we could probably go on for days. Hopefully, though, this short list will give you a place to start while still being kind to your budget.
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