12 tools solopreneurs and small businesses rely on to get more done

When you’re a solopreneur, founder, consultant, or freelancer, running your own business means wearing every hat. You’re the sales exec, chief marketing officer, customer support team, account manager, IT pro, head of operations …

On top of all that, you’re trying to figure out which of the hundreds of small business apps and tools will actually make things easier. With so much on your plate, you can’t afford for your software to be hit or miss. And you definitely don’t have time for a complex setup process or steep learning curve.

"Tech should reduce friction, not create it,” says Terry Oppong, host of ThaCollabs Podcast and founder of BlackBand. "If it doesn’t help my business grow or run smoother, I skip it."

So, where should you start?

We’ve rounded up 12 of the best business tools, according to solopreneurs, freelancers, consultants, and small business owners. These are the no-code apps they use every day to take repetitive tasks off their plates and move faster, so they can spend more time on what they do best. Plus, all of these tools offer a free trial and/or free plan, so you can take them for a spin before committing to a subscription.

1. Calendly

(Okay, we’re a little biased. But hear us out.)

If your business runs on client meetings, your scheduling process needs to be easy and quick. Calendly is a user-friendly scheduling platform for small businesses that takes the time-consuming work — and endless back-and-forth — out of booking and managing meetings.

“Calendly has become part of my daily toolkit,” says Wiktor Dyngosz, CEO and founder of Peakforce, an IT consulting and implementation firm. “I use it to coordinate calls with clients, partners, and my team without the usual back-and-forth. I’ve set up reminders and follow-ups that go out automatically, so I don’t have to think about them. It saves me at least a few hours each week.”

Here’s how it works: 

You connect your calendar(s) to Calendly and set your available hours. Calendly uses this info to show your availability, so you never have to worry about double bookings. When you share your booking page, available times are automatically shown in invitees’ time zones — no mental math required.

Calendly uses this info to show your available meeting times on your booking page. When you share your Calendly booking page with prospects, they can choose an open time that works for them. In less than a minute, your meeting is booked!

You can also:

• Get paid for your time by collecting payments at booking

• Automate meeting reminders and follow-ups via email and SMS

• Embed your booking calendar on your website

• Automatically assign appointments to the right team members

• Customize your booking page to match your brand

• Connect with 100+ other apps, including video conferencing, task management, and communication tools

"Calendly saves me a ridiculous amount of back-and-forth scheduling client calls and SME interviews. I love that I can bill for coaching, and that it syncs with my GCal so I never miss a call," says Rosanna Campbell, a freelance content writer and coach.

“Calendly saves me a ridiculous amount of back-and-forth scheduling client calls and SME interviews.”

Rosanna Campbell

B2B SaaS Content Writer

2. Stripe

If you need to process payments online, chances are you’re choosing Stripe. Stripe’s no-code payment tools make it especially easy for solo business owners to charge for products and services. You can build, customize, and send an invoice in just a few clicks, or create and share a custom payment page — no website required. 

There are also countless integrations available for Stripe users, so you can connect the other tools you use to run your business. And if you use Calendly to book client meetings, we have a Stripe integration, too.

By integrating Stripe with Calendly, you can collect payments at booking, reducing no-shows and ensuring you’re paid for your time. Here are a few ways small businesses use Calendly + Stripe:

• Sell coaching sessions

• Get paid for your expertise as a contractor or consultant

• Charge for “can I pick your brain?” sessions

• And much more — your time is valuable!

Rachel Bicha, a B2B content strategist, uses Calendly + Stripe to book and charge for client calls and workshops. “I have a Calendly link with an hourly consulting rate built in via Stripe,” she says. “When someone that fits my ICP wants to pick my brain, they can book 30 minutes or an hour with the associated consulting fee and pay when they book their calendar invite. Super simple.”

“It consolidates the scheduling and payment into one step the client can take care of in a few minutes at their convenience.”

Rachel Bicha

B2B Content Strategist

3. LinkedIn

You probably already know LinkedIn as the go-to platform for networking and job hunting — but it’s also a powerful channel for growing your business.

By sharing insights, business updates, and thought leadership, you can build a strong LinkedIn following and leverage that to find new customers. LinkedIn also offers a Premium Business product that’s specifically designed to help solopreneurs and small businesses grow, expand their network, and find new connections. 

Premium Business features like custom buttons, featured profile content, and built-in AI writing assistants help users receive 13x more profile views on average compared to free profiles. When you’ve put in the work to create and share valuable content, those additional views can result in more inquiries and potential customers.

Plus, if you’re using a scheduling tool like Calendly, it’s easier than ever to add a custom ‘Book an appointment’ button to your profile that links to your booking page, so engaged followers can book time with you on the spot.

Corrina Owens, a founder and go-to-market advisor, doesn’t have a website for her business. Instead, she uses a LinkedIn Premium Business profile with a ‘Book an appointment’ button to bring in new client inquiries.

“LinkedIn is my digital storefront, and with the ‘Book an appointment’ button with Calendly now integrated directly into my profile, scheduling a meeting is effortless — no extra steps, no separate website.”

Corrina Owens

Founder and GTM Advisor

4. Typeform

Typeform is a form builder that makes it easy to build interactive forms, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more.

With customizable layouts, templates, and themes, there are countless ways to use Typeform as a solopreneur. Here are three of our favorites:

1. Get to know your customers: Learning from your customers is a vital part of growing a business. Building feedback forms on Typeform makes it easy to collect feedback and conduct research, so you know exactly what’s on your clients’ minds.

2. Collect more data about prospective clients: Typeform’s lead gen forms make it easy to get the info you need from inbound leads. Use conditional logic to ask specific questions based on how they fill out your form, so you don’t miss any important details. 

“Typeform has replaced multiple clunky form solutions I previously tried, allowing us to collect better data in fewer steps.”

Terry Oppong

Host of ThaCollabs Podcast and Founder at BlackBand

3. Schedule meetings right from your forms: If you use Calendly to book client meetings, you can embed your Calendly booking page as a question block directly in your forms with the Calendly + Typeform integration.

You can even choose which booking page the respondent sees based on their responses. Leads and clients don’t have to leave the page to schedule a call with you, and you collect the info you need to prep for the meeting. A win-win!

The solopreneur's guide to building your tech stack

Seasoned solopreneurs and tech pros share their advice for choosing tools and scaling your business.

Read the playbook

5. ActiveCampaign

As your business grows, manual email blasts aren’t enough. So how do you keep in touch with prospects and clients? ActiveCampaign is an email marketing, marketing automation, and customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to help businesses create top-notch customer experiences.

ActiveCampaign helps you manage all aspects of your marketing and sales funnel. You can:

• Reach the right people with targeted emails, landing pages, and email marketing campaigns

• Nurture and grow relationships using marketing automation, SMS tools, personalized content, and event tracking

• Move leads through your sales process with tools like lead scoring and pipelines

• Keep customers engaged with live chat, loyalty programs, and predictive content

• Simplify email content creation with generative AI tools

With so many marketing and CRM features in one place, ActiveCampaign is a great multitool for entrepreneurs and small businesses who need to get a lot done. 

"It used to take me a week to do one email. Now, with AI, it’s three emails a week. It removed the hesitation to even start," says Amy Chinitz, founder of Spark Joy New York.

“I credit a lot of my confidence in business and sales to what I’ve learned through ActiveCampaign.”

Amy Chinitz

Certified KonMari Consultant and Founder at Spark Joy New York

Plus, with the Calendly + ActiveCampaign integration, your Calendly contacts are automatically added to ActiveCampaign, so you can track meeting activity, add them to custom email lists and automations, and send personalized follow-ups right away.

6. Canva

When you’re wearing all the hats in your business, creative tasks can feel overwhelming. Canva makes it easy to create professional, on-brand visuals — without needing a graphic design background.

With a massive template library, simple drag-and-drop editing, and AI-powered tools, it’s easy to turn ideas into graphics, social media posts, presentations, logos, marketing materials, and even videos.

"I’ve been a loyal stan of Canva since 2017 and that’s not changing!” says Jade Walters, Founder and Employer Branding Consultant at The Ninth Semester. “All of my graphics are created on Canva."

Your visual content is a key part of creating a memorable brand, and Canva helps keep everything looking polished, consistent, and uniquely yours. And if you’re working with freelancers or contractors to help with your design work, Canva offers real-time team collaboration tools.

7. Wix

For many businesses, a strong online presence includes a well-crafted website — but you might not have the time or budget to hire a web designer right away. That’s where website builders like Wix come in. Wix is an all-in-one website builder that provides everything you need to launch a professional site — no coding required.

Wix offers hundreds of pre-designed templates (plus an AI website builder), an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, and built-in features like SEO optimization, ecommerce functionality, and even email and digital marketing tools.

As your business grows, Wix can scale and grow with you. They offer more advanced features like custom domains, analytics, and integrations. You can even add Calendly to your Wix site by embedding your booking page, so visitors can book time with you as soon as they’re interested.

8. Zapier

For solopreneurs and small teams who do it all themselves, even the best mix of tech can leave you with time-consuming, manual tasks, like copying info from one app to another. Enter workflow automation.

“If I have to do something more than once, I automate it,” says Anna Burgess Yang, a freelance content marketer and journalist. 

With over 8,000 app integrations, Zapier helps you automate tasks between the tools you already use — no coding required. Instead of doing the same manual work over and over, you can create Zaps: custom workflows that run in the background.

Creating a Zap is easy:

1. Choose which apps you want to connect

2. Set the trigger (the event that starts the automation) in the first app

3. Set the action (what you want to happen) in the second app

Once configured, the Zap runs continuously in the background, so you can set it and forget it.

For example, let’s say you use Calendly to book intro calls with leads, and you keep track of potential clients in a Google Sheet. You can set up a Zap that automatically adds a new spreadsheet row for each new intro call booking, filling in details like name, email, and meeting date. No manual copy and paste required.

“Most of the apps I use are connected to Zapier, so Zapier is running in the background, automating hundreds of tasks for me every month. This frees up an incredible amount of time and mental bandwidth since I don't have to think about repetitive or tedious tasks.”

Anna Burgess Yang

Freelance Content Marketer and Journalist

The Calendly app for Zapier is available on all of Calendly’s paid plans. You can easily build custom Calendly integrations to handle administrative work, reminders, follow-ups, and more. (Check out eight of our favorite Calendly and Zapier automations.)

9. MailerLite

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to build relationships with your customers. If you’re looking for a user-friendly, intuitive email tool, MailerLite makes it easy for you to stay connected with customers.

If you’re brand new to email marketing strategy, MailerLite is a great choice. You can create and send branded emails in minutes, including newsletters, automated welcome sequences, and promotions of new products or services.  

Whether you’re launching a course, nurturing leads, or re-engaging past customers, you can set it up once and let campaigns run in the background, so you’re staying top-of-mind in your audience’s inbox. And it’s free until you hit 1,000 subscribers, so you can get started without a large investment, and scale as your business grows.

10. HoneyBook

HoneyBook is an all-in-one client management platform built for solopreneurs and small business owners. From initial customer inquiries to final invoicing, HoneyBook helps you manage leads, clients, projects, invoices, and payments. 

You can send branded proposals, contracts, and invoices in just a few clicks, and even automate follow-ups so you’re not chasing down signatures and payments. Templates for contracts, invoices, proposals, and more make it easy to personalize every step of the customer journey, so each interaction feels thoughtful and consistent. Plus, all plans include access to HoneyBook Finance, a business checking account with built-in bookkeeping and accounting tools.

“I’ve tried several invoice management platforms and none compare to HoneyBook. I’ve been a loyal fan since 2022. I use this to send out invoices, track payments, and manage client projects.”

Jade Walters

Founder and Employer Branding Consultant at The Ninth Semester

You can pick and choose which of HoneyBook’s small business tools you use, so you don't get bogged down with features you don't need. They also offer a number of integrations — including Calendly — so you can keep the tools you love while taking advantage of the HoneyBook features that match your business needs.

11. Kajabi

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform designed for creators looking to start online businesses, sell digital products, and connect with customers. With features like website and landing page builders, digital marketing tools, payments, and a built-in CRM, Kajabi helps users monetize their knowledge in the form of online courses, coaching, podcasts, community memberships, and more.

“Kajabi makes my life very easy,” Justin Welsh, a solopreneurship expert who sells courses and runs a private network of entrepreneurs, shared on X. “It bundles my landing pages, forms, customer CRM, payments, coaching, and courses together. It's truly my favorite tool for the cost.”

Our favorite part? When integrated with Calendly, solopreneurs can embed their booking calendars directly into their Kajabi pages. The integration handles client scheduling, so you can spend less time on software and more time helping clients reach their goals.

12. Linktree

When you’re growing your audience on social media, it’s important to give them an easy way to learn more about you and your business. 

Enter the “link in bio.” While most social media platforms only let you include one clickable link in your profile, link-in-bio tools like Linktree turn a single link into a customizable landing page with multiple links, giving your followers easy access to all the content you want to highlight.

As a solopreneur, for example, your Linktree might contain links to your website, newsletter, social media profiles, and booking page.

Samantha and Danielle Glassman, founders of branding and design agency Aperitif Collective, share their Linktree in the agency’s Instagram bio:

The first link is for a free intro call. With the Linktree + Calendly integration, the link opens an embedded Calendly booking page, so visitors can schedule right from Linktree:

Linktree users who add the Calendly integration generate seven times more bookings. “We’ve been using Calendly for a while now to schedule client calls,” says Samantha Glassman, Graphic Designer and Creative Director at Aperitif Collective. “Having it linked through our Linktree makes it super easy for potential clients to book time with us without the back-and-forth.”

Your tech should work as hard as you do

It can take some trial and error to build a tech stack that truly fits the way you work. One thing that makes a big difference? Choosing apps that work well together. When your tools integrate and share info, you can cut down on repetitive tasks, save time, and avoid the chaos of switching between apps that don’t sync.

"It’s easy to get blinded by all the bells and whistles to the point that we forget to ensure all of our tools can work together and simplify things, not complicate them," says Darnell Brown, Founder of Bulletproof Hustle and Forge.

“I'm always asking myself which tools play nicely together and whether they’ll help me improve my relationship with my audience.”

Darnell Brown

Founder of Bulletproof Hustle and Forge

Let automation and productivity tools handle the repetitive behind-the-scenes tasks, so you can stay focused on your clients, your work, and your business growth.