Guide • August 12, 2014

Become Your Own Boss with These Tools

8 apps & services to start and run your own business

Striking.ly

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You could shell out a couple thousand for a custom website. Or you could get a gorgeous, mobile-friendly, feature-rich, SEO’d-out scrolling one-pager in a matter of minutes without needing to know a thing about design or coding… all for the unbeatable starting price of free.

Go to Striking.ly
Unsplash

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You need some nice images for your homepage, but acquiring professional photos is expensive. Save your pennies and head over to this curated repository of completely free, high-resolution ambient images that have all been released into the public domain.

Go to Unsplash
Swipe

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Real talk: People do judge a book by its cover. So create slides that make ’em judge you well with this browser-based tool that lets you drag and drop content, create polls, and add text easily with Markdown. The result? A gorgeous, responsive deck you can present on any device from anywhere.

Go to Swipe
Rapportive

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Make your email life more personal and efficient with this Gmail plugin that transforms your inbox into a detailed rolodex by showing contacts’ professional info from LinkedIn, plus their Twitter handle, Skype address, shared contacts, and more.

Go to Rapportive
JawboneUP Coffee

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You need two things to be an effective boss: caffeine and sleep. But your coffee habit may be keeping you up at night. Download this iPhone app to have the quantitative living experts at Jawbone analyze your joe intake and help you get your fix without ruining your rest.

Go to JawboneUP Coffee
Timely

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The irony of timesheets is that filling them out is a time suck. This simple tool fixes that by letting users schedule their hours in advance and/or schedule and log them simultaneously. For the boss (that’s you) it’s the perfect way to monitor productivity.

Go to Timely
Wave

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Accounting. Payroll. Invoicing. Payment processing. Big companies have whole departments to handle this stuff. But all you need as a small-business owner is this versatile platform that syncs to the cloud and automates all your administrative tasks.

Go to Wave
GAget

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One compliment from Grandma does not a killer website make. That’s why you need this Google Analytics app for Mac and iOS that shows you crucial, up-to-date stats like your traffic numbers, where visitors are coming from, etc., in gorgeous graphs.

Go to GAget