As someone who has created my own startup, I understand how difficult it can be to for startups during the early stages. There can be so many problems including the lack of funding, the lack of business relationships or the lack of talent in the team. Therefore, I would like to share 4 different products and support schemes that helped me. Cloudways Startup Program Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that uses servers from other hosting providers such as Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Service and Google Cloud. They have a that aims to help startups by providing free credit for hosting, mentorship and free premium tools worth up to $6,000 per year. Cloudways Startup Program You will get all this for free; there is no need to give away equity for all these benefits since Cloudways understands the difficulties startups are facing and would like to give a helping hand. Skup builds Shopify apps to help businesses sell more items from their store. They offer a wide range of Shopfiy apps including a dropshipping and upselling app. Skup These tools are very cheap costing from just $7.99 per month and it can help you complete long and boring dropshipping tasks with just a few clicks. Most importantly, their apps aim to help you increase your revenue. Techstars is an American accelerator program that provides funding, mentorship and support to your company. Unlike Cloudway’s Startup Program, in return for the funding and support, you do have to give Techstar equity in your company but the biggest value in Techstars is the coaching experience the entrepreneurs get. Techstars It’s not just mentorship where you can ask for advice when you need it but they provide you with compulsory and extensive training. You will build lots of connections and learn a lot through their program and it will bring your business to the next level. KW Finder The internet has now become the strongest tool for businesses. You can target customers from all around the world through the internet. The most cost effective way to advertise your business online is to improve your search engine rankings. Even though it takes a lot of time to improve your rankings, you are only required to do the work once and traffic will come in forever. One tool I use to help me plan my SEO strategy is . KW Finder KW Finder is a much cheaper alternative than other SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMRush and Moz. You can get it for as cheap as 30 euros per month if you go for the annual plan, whereas other tools cost around $100 per month. KW Finder is a tool that helps you with your SERP (search engine ranking position) analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, backlink analysis and SEO metric analysis. You may wish to hire a third party to do your SEO but as a startup, it can be difficult to hire someone as SEO costs a lot of money so if you decide to do it yourself, KW Finder is a must have tool for you. I hope that you can utilize these tools to your advantage and bring your business to the next level like how I did.
