Imagine that you are a CEO running a startup. You are busy building a product that solves a real problem for customers while pitching to investors, and trying to build the right team, get the right structures and processes in place, and find the right tools to work with. Entrepreneurs have 99 problems but picking the right tools to build their dream product shouldn’t be one of them.
To build effective and impactful teams and products, startup founders need to leverage tools in order to streamline their processes and make integrations easier. There are an abundance of these tools in the market today, covering everything from ideation, design, marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), fundraising, data, and so much more. Choosing which tools to utilize is not an easy decision for new entrepreneurs. This becomes even more complex when time and resources are crunched, not leaving room for extensive testing with different options.
As part of Catalyst Fund, we offer flexible capital and tailored venture-building support to our companies, and recognize the nuanced and often complex needs of our founders. To ease the tool selection process for our startups, we introduced Catalyst Fund Perks which offers a suite of tools across different disciplines. We have built affiliations with organizations whose tools our own team actively uses and experiments with, which allows us to also help the startup teams quickly implement and integrate these within their own systems.
"Building a tech startup is like building a house. You don’t spend time manufacturing bricks, instead you buy them and use them to build the walls. More often than not, we see startups manufacturing bricks. With the wide range of tools that startups today can take advantage of, we ask our startups to not spend time and money building parts of their solutions that aren’t core to their businesses," says Javi Linares, Senior Venture Builder in our Catalyst Fund team.
Here are 10 tools for startups to consider:
9. SmileID | KYC verification – By combining Government identification validation with proprietary face verification software, Smile Identity offers Africa’s most advanced digital know your customer (KYC) solution, enabling entrepreneurs and institutions to pursue rapid Pan-African growth with confidence.
"It is so powerful for startups to collaborate with other startups, especially in the African tech ecosystem where partnerships are solidifying the underlying tech infrastructure. We are doubly thrilled to see our own alumni stepping in to support new cohorts of Catalyst Fund startups. SmileID, who was part of our earlier cohorts, has now built relationships with a number of recent graduates, and is also more widely enabling early-stage fintech startups scale their go-to-market strategies," says Rasima Swarup, our Portfolio Engagement Manager.
We are proud to be able to offer this growing list of tools as Catalyst Fund Perks alongside our bespoke venture building support. We’ve tested these tools along with our portfolio companies, but know that not every tool will work for every startup, and there are even more needs and use cases we want to be able to support.
Do you use another tool which we’ve missed out? Or are you building a tool that you’d like to offer our startups as a Catalyst Fund partner? We’d love to hear from you. Write to us: hello@thecatalystfund.com
Read more from our team at Catalyst Fund