The Solopreneur’s Launch Kit: 7 Essential Tools to Start Your Business This Weekend

According to data released by Finder, 3,092,374 business applications were submitted in Q1 and Q2 of 2025. In 2024, the year finished with 5.21 million business applications. That’s actually a year-on-year decrease of 4.77%, with the economy and business markets making it increasingly difficult for standard business models to thrive. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20% of small businesses fail in their first year, and 50% fail within five years. Those numbers have never really changed.

For people going it alone, it feels even more daunting.

But don’t let us put you off. Yes, there’s competition. And yes, it’s difficult. But there’s an endless list of tools available to you.

Below, we’ve designed a ‘solopreneurs’ launch kit with our opinion on 7 of the most essential tools to help you start a business by next weekend.

A Free Website Builder

There are excellent free website builders available, such as Wix. You get a full suite at your disposal without having to pay expensive membership fees. If you do pay for a package, you can access features like transferring your domain name if you purchased it from a third-party source such as GoDaddy.

With Wix, you get access to hundreds of templates, all free to use. Within that template, you can completely customize it so that, if you want, it doesn’t even resemble the original.

The estimate is that there are between 1.2 and 2 billion websites, with 252,000 new sites created daily in 2024. Your business needs a website, and it needs to stand out. 46% of searches on Google include local intent, and the 3.5 billion daily queries on Google prove search engines still win over social networks to find information (Hubspot).

Canva

Canva follows on nicely from our website tool; the two go hand in hand.

This one doesn’t need as much explanation, but if you’re going to use a website builder, Canva is the artist for the designs you add when you’re building a website. Canva is a graphic design platform that allows you to create visual content like logos, banners, videos, slideshows, business cards, and so much more.

We will argue that you need a bit more of a creative eye than with your website builder, and if that’s not for you, there are more options. Canva is free and easy to use, but only if you’re good at designing. If you’re not, you can outsource logo and banner design on Fiverr, with some freelancers charging a respectable fee because they’re new and trying to secure work.

Social Media Tools

Social media tools will be your best friend, and we’ve got two for you. Social media is where it’s at. 90% of local businesses use social media in their marketing strategy, and 78% rely on it to help drive revenue. And there are plenty of tools that help you do just that.

Link in bio

A link-in-bio tool is a relatively new concept that helps turn followers into customers, drive traffic from social media, and track your performance. It’s a clickable link placed into your social media profiles. A common example is Linktree, but hopp.co by Wix is the best Linktree alternative, helping you to track social media engagement and audience interactions.

If you go on any business social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, they’ll have clickable links in their bio. The issue was that these platforms only allow you to put one link in the bio, and that’s why platforms like Hopp emerged that let users have multiple URLs and serve as a landing page for businesses. Common customer redirects include:

• Links to other social media profiles
• Landing page links
• Promotions

Bio links are a surprisingly powerful tool for brands. You can learn about your customers, fine-tune promotions, and see a nice improvement in traffic flow optimization and monetization.

Hootsuite

The reality is, no one wants to be chained to their phone at 10 AM every day just to hit “publish.” Or, worse, wake up earlier than that and have to manage everything else about running a business and still think about social media posts.

Hootsuite lets you schedule your social media posts in advance, meaning you can spend a couple of hours loading up your week with a glass of wine (you’ll need one or two when you’re starting a business) or even your month and then walk away.

It also helps you monitor what’s working. Maybe your posts land better on Tuesday afternoons than Thursday mornings. You’ll only know by tracking metrics like viewer engagement and numbers, and Hootsuite makes that easy. Engagement streams let you see comments, mentions, and DMs across platforms in one dashboard.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an excellent content marketing platform that allows you to analyze what content performs best, find trending topics, identify key influencers, and, just as importantly, understand why all that’s happening.

For example, if you’re a fitness coach, a quick search might show that “10-minute morning workouts” are trending, while “hour-long gym splits” are definitely not a thing anymore. With that information, you can direct your social media posting towards where the clicks are going.

It also helps you see and analyze your competition. Who’s getting the shares, the comments, and the backlinks? What angles are they using? It’s all the information you can find on BuzzSumo.

BuzzSumo essentially hands you the cheat sheet to content relevance.

Trello for Organization

Trello is a common one. It’s an organizational tool that, in the beginning, might seem irrelevant, but you’ll thank us for it later.

Big businesses and organizations use Trello to streamline work management and project collaboration. You can use it for any project, workflow, or team. And, yes, we know you won’t have a team unless you’re setting your business up with a partner, but even for solo use, we think it’s an excellent tool. 

You’ll have multiple tasks you need to do each day, and using a task management tool seems like the logical answer to help you see what tasks you’ve done and what tasks are remaining. You’re less likely to forget things and more likely to complete tasks.

Abacum for Financial Planning

This one might not sound as sexy as Canva or Wix, but trust us, it matters more.

According to SCORE, 82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems. Cash flow is a massive issue, especially initially. You might see sales flowing from your Etsy account and clients lined up, but if your money isn’t moving efficiently, you’ll become part of the statistics.

Abacum takes the complexity of financial planning and makes it digestible. You can forecast scenarios, track expenses, and see how long your runway really is. For a solopreneur, it’s essential. Financial clarity changes your decision-making. Instead of panicking every time a bill comes in, you already know what’s covered and what adjustments to make.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of business tools that make starting a business less stressful. We won’t say they make starting a business easy, but they definitely streamline the process and will get you up and running faster. Any problem you face, just do a quick Google search to see if there’s a tool to help you.

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