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The Apps and Software That Help Solopreneurs Run a Business
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items Practical apps and software that can help you run your business, whether you're just getting started or already juggling everything on your own. These are the tools solopreneurs reach for to build a website, create content, work with AI, design graph...
Sections
6
START: Everyday Business & Productivity
CREATE: Writing & Content
DESIGN: Graphics & Visual Content
VIDEO: Turn Ideas Into Visual Content
PROMOTE: Get the Content Seen
MANAGE: Money & Business Administration
START: Everyday Business & Productivity
Before you build anything online, the basics have to be covered: documents, a website, and a place to host it. These are the tools I lean on to keep the foundation of my business running.
Best for: Documents, spreadsheets, email, presentations, file storage and everyday business work. Microsoft 365 sits at the center of a lot of businesses. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneDrive cover most of the everyday work a solopreneur nee...
Compare Microsoft 365 Plans & Pricing (Formerly Office 365)
Best for: Websites, WordPress, domains, hosting and getting a business online. Hostinger has become one of my primary tools for building and managing websites. It combines hosting, domains, WordPress tools and several newer AI features in one place.
Hostinger
Best for: Building simple web apps and online utilities with AI assistance. Horizons is different from a traditional website builder. You describe what you want to build and work with the AI to create and revise the application from there.
Hostinger Horizons
CREATE: Writing & Content
Once your business has a home online, the next step is getting ideas into words. These are the tools I use to draft, polish and organize content faster.
Best for: Writing help, research, brainstorming, editing and general business thinking. Claude is the AI assistant I turn to most for writing and thinking through business problems, from drafting articles and emails to organizing ideas before they be...
Claude
Best for: Long-form blog content, SEO-focused articles and speeding up the first draft process. SEO Writing AI is built around producing longer web content, with features aimed specifically at bloggers and website publishers.
SEO WRITING
Best for: Reviewing writing, grammar, spelling and readability. Even when the ideas are finished, writing still needs another set of eyes. Grammarly is a useful final review step for emails, articles, documents and other business communication.
Grammarly
Best for: Presentations, visual documents, guides and turning an idea into a structured presentation quickly. Gamma takes written information and helps convert it into something more visual, without starting from a blank presentation.
Gamma
DESIGN: Graphics & Visual Content
With the words in place, the next step is making things look good. These are the tools I use for graphics, images and everyday visual design.
Best for: Social graphics, website images, PDFs, presentations, banners and everyday design. Canva is one of the easiest tools for a small business owner who needs professional-looking graphics without being a graphic designer.
Canva
Best for: AI-generated images, creative concepts and images that need text incorporated into the design. Ideogram is another way to create original visuals when stock photography or standard templates aren't quite what you're looking for.
Ideogram
Best for: More advanced PDF, photo, design and creative work. Adobe covers a much wider range of creative and document tools. For projects that need more control over documents or creative assets, Adobe fills that gap.
Adobe
Best for: Turning an idea into a working app without writing code. My favorite AI platform for turning ideas into working software in seconds. You type your idea in plain language, and Lovable builds a real app around it, frontend and backend include...
Lovable
VIDEO: Turn Ideas Into Visual Content
Some ideas work better on video than on the page. This is the tool I use to make that jump without a production team.
Best for: Turning ideas and written content into short-form or longer video. InVideo AI helps take information that might otherwise stay in an article or script and move it into video format.
InVideo AI
PROMOTE: Get the Content Seen
A good article, guide or product doesn't do much if nobody finds it. This is the tool I use to send people back to my content.
Best for: Content discovery, visual search and sending visitors back to useful website content. Pinterest is different from most of the tools on this list, since it's primarily a discovery and marketing platform rather than a creation app. It gives v...
Pinterest
Best for: Visual content discovery, brand building, and driving traffic back to a website through Reels, posts and Stories. Instagram works the same way as Pinterest on this list: it's a promotion platform, not a creation tool. It's where I share the...
Instagram
Best for: Short-form video discovery and reaching new audiences through browse and search. YouTube Shorts gives short video content another place to be discovered outside of a website. It's a natural next step for anything already produced with InVid...
YouTube Shorts
MANAGE: Money & Business Administration
Creating websites and content is only part of running a business. These are the tools I use for the less glamorous, necessary financial side.
Best for: Small-business bookkeeping, income, expenses and financial recordkeeping. QuickBooks gives small-business owners a more organized way to keep financial activity together instead of relying on scattered records.
QuickBooks
Best for: Tax preparation and filing.
TurboTax isn't an everyday productivity tool, but it fits at the end of the workflow: the financial records kept all year eventually have to turn into tax information.
TurboTax isn't an everyday productivity tool, but it fits at the end of the workflow: the financial records kept all year eventually have to turn into tax information.
Experts for Small Business Taxes - TurboTax - Intuit