The Resources Guide for Small Businesses + Designers
Pssst—may contain affiliate links, but we use + love all of these!
For Small Biz Owners
Noissue
Sustainable packaging
Obsessed with this brand is an understatement! They’re an amazing source for sustainable custom packaging and their platform is super easy to use. They also plant a tree for each order!
Creating a fun, relevant quiz to your business is SUCH a good way of building your email list. Interact makes it super easy to get your first quiz up and going in order to grow your audience.
I recommend this project management tool for design + other small business alike—it’s insanely powerful and helps you get so organized. Pssst—check out my ClickUp System for Designers!
It does have its occasional frustrating UI issue, but I have yet to find something to replace the organizational power that Notion has. It works as a great database for all of your business SOPs.
Flodesk is seriously like the Apple of email marketing! Its minimal interface and beautiful, easy-to-edit templates make sending out newsletters actually enjoyable.
Are you looking to give your business that extra personal touch? Bonjoro will be your secret weapon. Easily send and track personal videos after someone gets in touch or books with you.
Now that I’ve signed up for LastPass, I don’t know how I ever got by without a password manager. It also makes sending passwords to your team or contractors way more safe and secure.
Survicate is A+ for creating customer feedback surveys both on-site and in-email. This is also a great sales tool as it allows you to collect feedback in case your prospect is too busy to respond.
Zapier is like the glue of any modern-day business with lots of programs working together. Does a certain software that you use not have an integration you’re looking for? Zapier is your answer!
It’s the biggest site hosting platform for a reason—it just works. Plus, a lot of platforms such as Shopify and Squarespace integrate directly with it, making it super easy to get set up.
Are you a bit overwhelmed with how to get set up with a branded email? Look no further than Google Workspace—it’s simple to use and means you get to keep all your fancy Gmail plugins.
Wave is a super clean, streamlined, and free accounting software for small businesses. I much prefer it over Quickbooks for keeping track of your biz expenses and cash flow.
Are you a Shopify designer looking to standardize your process to never forget another detail again? Check out our free Shopify Checklist—this is the exact one we use in our Shopify projects.
My life changed FOREVER the minute I found Content Snare. I had tried many ways of collecting website content, but none were as streamlined as I hoped. This was the answer to all my problems.
Unsplash/Pexels are great, but sometimes you wish you had something a little more curated + high-end. Death to Stock Photo is a great resource for designers that want to elevate their stock photo game.
This tool has such a special place in my heart! Coolors.co makes creating and tweaking color palettes super easy to the point that it almost feels like a game. I couldn’t live without it!
We’ve all been there—embarrassingly missing a call with a potential client because of a time zone error. I use this Time Zone Converter alllll the time now to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I used to write all my code in the Shopify/Squarespace editors (eeek!). Life got way better once I switched over to Visual Studio Code. Pssst—you’ll want to download the Beautify plugin, too.
Discord is like Slack and Facebook groups had a baby, but make it way more casual! Shameless plug—join out our Discord server Brand Designers International for a chill place to learn + grow your business.
I’m hearing a lot of buzz about Adobe XD lately, but let me tell you Figma is Where. It’s. At. It’s SO much more powerful, robust, intuitive, not to mention it’s free up to a certain amount of projects!
If I had to pick one item out of this list that I suggest you really utilize in your business, it’s Loom. This has revolutionized the way I manage projects + explain my design decisions to clients.
As designers we’re always switching between a billion windows—Magnet makes this so much easier! It lets you snap your windows in all sorts of configurations using keyboard shortcuts.
What we use as our CRM—it’s everything that we wish Dubsado was and more. Really powerful automations make sales super streamlined and stress-free! Spendy but worth it.
This Chrome extension is uber-handy when you need to screenshot an entire webpage for things such as your portfolio or giving feedback. You can download the site as a PNG or PDF.
