All The Tools I'm Using In My Business in 2024 to Stay Productive and Organized
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As a business owner that is obsessed with online tools and apps that make running your business easier, I'm always curious to see what other business owners are using in their business. And I figure if I'm curious about it, then you guys are probably curious about it too.
So in today's video, I decided to share my top business tools that I use to run my business in 2024. These are the tools I use on a daily basis that help me stay organized and productive as a designer and small business owner.
Website platform
the number one tool that I use in my business is Squarespace. You guys, if you've been around my channel, you know that I love Squarespace. Squarespace is what I use for my website. It's what I designed my templates on, and it's what I recommend for most of my clients to use as well.
Squarespace is an all in one website platform that's super easy to use, and it's very intuitive and it has a drag and drop builder that makes it easy for anybody to create a beautiful website.
And one of the main reasons why I use and love Squarespace so much is that I don't have to worry about any technical details. For years, I have been a loyal WordPress fan, but as my business grew, I found it extremely cumbersome to constantly have to log into my website, see that there is yet another update that I have to do, that there is another plug-in to find, because the one that I had stopped working or was no longer updated.
And I just didn't want the headache of dealing with all the tech issues that arose on the backend. And thanks to Squarespace, I don't have to worry about any updates, backups, or anything of the sort. I just can focus on what I do best, and that is designing websites, designing templates and working on my business.
Now Squarespace does come with a 14 day free trial, but if you want to save 20 percent off of any Squarespace plan and get a six month trial, you can do so by either working with me on a custom design or you can snag one of my templates and you'll get the same thing.
Marketing Platform
The next tool that I use in my business is Kartra *(affiliate link). This is a newer tool that I switched to at the beginning of this year, and I absolutely love it. Now, I've heard of Kartra before, and I was always curious to give it a go, to give it a try, because of everything that it can do.
Kartra, if you're not familiar with it; is an all in one platform that makes it easy to run your business. It basically has super powerful features that allows you not only to build a website, if all you want is a simple website with no blogging abilities, but more importantly, it allows you to build sales funnels, create landing pages, sales pages, create funnels for your business, offer bump sales, upsells, downsells, and handles your email marketing as well.
You can sell digital products as well as physical products using Kartra and you can also send marketing campaigns, sales campaigns, and, create opt in forms, map out your entire funnel so that you can get a bird's eye view of how people are entering your funnel, how they're moving through your funnel and how they're finally converting. And on top of that, it's super easy to use because it has a drag and drop editor that makes it easy to build your landing pages, sales pages, and even your website pages.
If you're curious to try Kartra out yourself, you can get a 30-day free trial when you use my link* to sign up for the trial *(affiliate link).
Online Calendar & Appointment Scheduling
Now, this next tool is another switch and a recent addition to my tech stack. And that is TidyCal. Before TidyCal, I was actually using Acuity Scheduling. And because I started using Acuity Scheduling way back in 2016 or 2017; when I started using Squarespace, I actually got their Emerging Entrepreneur plan for free and I was grandfathered in as part of that, because I was using Squarespace.
Now, while I was very happy with Acuity Scheduling and the fact that I was still getting that Emerging Entrepreneur plan for free, the truth is I didn't, and I still don't know how long that's going to last because Squarespace recently bought Acuity Scheduling and let's face it at any point in time, they can change their mind and say that that feature is no longer available and from this point forward, everybody will have to start paying for Acuity Scheduling.
Now, another thing that slightly bothered me is that the design of Acuity Scheduling is, while it's very clean, it's also very rough. There's just something about it that always kind of bothered me on the back end when I was looking at it.
And then I discovered TidyCal in December of last year and I found out that it has a lifetime license So you only have to pay once and you get to use it forever. It was something like $29 dollars at that time and I jumped on the deal. I found it through AppSumo, and basically haven't looked back.
I get almost all of the features that I had in Acuity Scheduling in TidyCal. The aesthetic of TidyCal appeals to me a lot more than Acuity, even though visually they are somewhat similar, but TidyCal has just has this softer feel to it. And it's easier on the eyes, at least in my experience.
And I love the fact that it's super intuitive and easy to use. I can book all kinds of appointments with it. I can add custom questionnaires to each and every appointment. I can accept payments for my appointments. I can integrate with Google Meet as well as Zoom. I can redirect them to a custom page after they have booked an appointment.
Basically all of the tools that I had in Acuity Scheduling, all of the features that I was using in Acuity Scheduling, I can use in TidyCal without any issues, and I don't have to worry about suddenly being switched to a paid plan.
Client Management
Next up we have Dubsado *(affiliate link). Dubsado is what I use to handle all of the contracts for my clients. So basically when somebody books either my VIP Design Day or my Brand and Web Design package, I use Dubsado to send them their custom proposal, contract, and invoice, and they can take care of all of that in one go.
Now I know a lot of freelancers and small business owners use HoneyBook and prefer HoneyBook because it has a nicer aesthetic to it, but unfortunately, as somebody who lives and operates in Croatia, HoneyBook is not meant for me. I cannot use it as an international business owner and Dubsado does cater to international business owners. So that is why I use Dubsado.
Social Media Scheduler
Next up, we have SocialBee *(affiliate link). SocialBee is one other tool that I have gotten off of AppSumo and I've gotten the lifetime license for it and I use it to schedule all my social media posts when I'm active on social media. I'm not the best at keeping up with social media I'll admit that.
But when I do post, I use SocialBee, which allows me to post to Facebook, Instagram, as well as TikTok and also Pinterest. However, I don't use them for Pinterest. I prefer just manually pinning directly to Pinterest. That's how I handle all of my pinning.
The best thing that I like about SocialBee is that they allow you to set up libraries, which basically allow you to republish posts that you have already published and they also have the ability to create variations for each post. So technically you can take one little caption for Instagram and create several different variations, queue them up in the library, and then SocialBeeee will automatically post them and each time it will be a different variation of the post, once it runs out out of all variations, they will repost again the first variation of that post.
So that is something that I'm looking to set up in 2024. And if you're interested in tutorial on how I actually schedule my social media posts, leave me a comment down below and I will create that tutorial for you.
Quiz Builder
After that we have Interact *(affiliate link). Interact is a quiz software which I've spoken about on this channel before. I have a tutorial on how to integrate Interact in Squarespace as well as how to integrate Interact with Flodesk. Interact is what I use for my quiz that helps you figure out what's your website style.
And I love how easy Interact makes it to create quizzes of all kinds, whether you want a scored quiz or a personality type quiz, you can basically create it with Interact.
Project Management
After that, we have Asana. Asana is my project management tool of choice, and it's how I keep track of everything that I need to do in my small business when it comes to client work, when it comes to my template shop, when it comes to basically every other aspect of my life.
Community
And the last tool on this list that I'm going to mention is Heartbeat *(affiliate link). Heartbeat is another tool that I have gotten off of AppSumo and it's a tool that I'm using to power my free community, as well as communities that I will be creating to support my students in my courses, as well as those who purchase my templates.
I want to say I bought it in early 2023, but I honestly can't remember. I've had it for a while and I have just now gotten around to playing with it and exploring all of the features that it has to offer. And I'm absolutely loving the fact that you can create different chat rooms, different subgroups within one major group, that you can even host courses on it, that you can have a paid community as well as a free community.
Anyway, lots of cool features to explore, and if you're interested in learning more about how I used Heartbeat, let me know in the comments. And that is another tutorial that I can make. And if you want to know how Heartbeat compares to other community platforms out there, let me know. And I will gladly make that tutorial as well.
Final Thoughts
And those are all the tools that I'm using in 2024 to run my business. If you have any questions about any of these tools, let me know, leave them in the comments down below. I'd love to hear from you guys. And if you want to know, if you want to see more tutorials about these tools, let me know as well, and I'll be more than happy to make them.
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