25+ Must Have Apps for Startup CEOs

1Merriam-Webster

If we pretend it's 2001 again, or perhaps think back to how integral it was to have access to dictionaries, thesauruses, and the pocket forms of them both, we see clearly the benefit of having it installed onto a smartphone. 20 years later in 2021. Moreover, having a direct access to an alphabetical order of words, definitions, some American, Urban colloquialisms, and synonyms. It does include a light thesuarus. If you need to spellcheck on the go, it's a great tool to have. It works offline and is a free app to download. It's also a free website to access from any internet-conntected device via web browser. Merriam-Webster is a widely used dictionary service, and a useful alternative may be Dictionary.com.  

2Cash App

If you deal with money on a basic level, Cash App can help solve simple day to day financial needs. It's not a bank, so for traditional bank services, this is not a viable alternative or replacement. But for basic money purposes that most people are using banking services for in today's time, are probably able to be facilitated through Cash App. Cash App is a peer-to-peer payments app that also grants it's users their own free debit card with pin number to spend money and transactions from the balance held in their Cash App account. Your billing address can be updated from directly within the app. 

They don't handle refunds or losses, so make sure that you understand the culture behind Cash App is to spend money between people who trust each other. They don't deal with Scams or Frauds that take place on their app. This is not a marketplace with a social aspect and a store for sales. Further, it's not recommended to send money to anyone through Cash App unless a relationship is established. 

Instances and uses where Cash App are not recommended:

• Soliciting sales with cold call tactics. If someone randomly wants to sell you something and offers their Cash App as a place of service, this isn't going to be protected by Cash App. The chances to where they can take your money and not offer their services (which is a scam / fraud) will be contingent on if you can verify the person on the other end's business professionalism and the agreements within their services, and not the terms & agreements of Cash App's services.

3eBay

The best place to get a very close to accurate view of the world's prices through a luxury, quality lens is eBay. On eBay you get to see the market price versus the direct competitive "black market" right beside it. What's more, you can round out your understanding of the market's current response to the economy. For example, if you check in daily on your business's industry and market, you can watch your most important business upgrades dwindle or rise in price due to competition and other emerging markets forcing the price to change. The pace of these changes usually vary between industries; technology, which dives down in value pretty quickly, is never really a safe bet. Consumer or not, even in B2B markets where enterprise level technology is invented for other businesses to use and profit from in consumer markets or other business markets, are affected the same. If you really want to see how competitive the markets are, you can combine your research between eBay, Amazon, and OfferUp. Find out more on each of these similar and sometimes rivaling companies in the list coming up.

4Firefox by Mozilla

Firefox is a web browser available on for download on multiple platforms, i.g. App Store, Google Play, Mac OS, and Windows operating systems. Where they set themselves apart from other web browsers like Google Chrome is that they're ran by a nonprofit Mozilla that makes browsers, apps, code and tools that put people before profit and with the belief that "privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet". 

5Post Affect!

Post Affect! is a creative community and monetized social network. We offer eMagazine support for digital blogging and video vlogging, and news reporting.

Embedded with various tools for the next century, here you can take your content marketing and product marketing to a different dimension. We take "5th dimension" thinking to the next level and help create 5th dimension results!

Business brands can create close-knit communities and support the creative economy by hiring talent local and abroad. Establishing a pop up shop or long term e-commerce business is easy to manage inside Post Affect's software.
Paying yourself and your staff / team members can be based on hourly wages or commission or both, and you can pay yourself and your team directly in your own back office. We're integrated with PayPal for payment services.

Your company is guaranteed marketing materials, content creation, as well as content marketing, social media management, and paid advertisements through Post Affect's ad rollout. Your business and product will be front and center in communities that share interests in your product, guaranteeing quality leads and customers.

6PayPal

PayPal is one of the leading platforms in transactions for reasons as simple as how many people already use it, or as serious as tracking online and business-related transactions for their digital business. PayPal is a recommended platform when you have an online/digital business, need to make transactions and collect funds into an account, and when you need a handy and light Point of Sales (POS) app to process credit and debit cards. There are other options as well that rival PayPal, so if PayPal isn't your choice for transactions, continue reading to find out about alternatives we recommend.

7Discord

A great place for communication at large, you can start different sized chat rooms and channels for different reasons and grroups. 

Lots of different hobby groups, professional teams, and even managers and team members use Discord to stay in communication within group chats and sub group chats. Usually coupled with Twitch, many of Discords users are from a live streaming, gaming, and hobbyist culture, not to say that Discord isn't for anyone else, but if you do come from those backgrounds, it'll feel more homely and gets the job done.

If Discord isn't your favorite, we have an alternative you may like, so keep reading for more. 

8Wikipedia

Wikipedia Foundation is responsible for the most dominant Wiki on the web currently with Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is an online, free access multilingual encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It's maintained by a reputable community of online users so as to not be overrun by trolls on more unmonitored hobby- and gag-defined communities. 

An encyclopedia is defined as "a book or set of books giving information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject and typically arranged alphabetically." 

That said, this is a world- and community-ran online encyclopedia which can be updated at any time. The purpose for this recommendation to all CEOs is the dated information of certain history and pop cultural records which are all sited with sources. As with the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the dates of origins can offer insight to challenge the status-quo within your ventures.

9Pinterest

Pinterest is a bookmarking and photo saving website and social media network. The power of Pinterest lies within your personal usage as a tool combined with the insights it offers to you as a business owner. Pinterest, like Post Affect, is one of the more leading-edge social networks on the web because of it's flexibility and diversity in it's visibility and cultivating an authentic solution to it's user's needs. 

Pinterest can serve you as a vision board for your own concerted interset in self-organization and directing your next game plan. It can assist in project management and communication across visual teams in a business setting. You can create "boards" labeled with their own names, "pin" photos from Pinterest's worldwide database of user generated content which is sure to have something close to what you're looking for if not exactly (and if it doesn't you'll need to upload it or get a little dramatically creative to express your idea, which could turn into a whole different board on it's own just for explanation purposes), then invite people to your board or leave it private. 

You can also create public boards and curate moods, themes, feelings, memes, cooking, fashion, thoughts, expressions, and more, and grow your own following. 

A person who puts together artistic visuals from other places and people online (or in person), is called a Curator.

10Mail.com + Your Default Mail App

A place to do your normal day-to-day -- and even intensive business communications on a regular basis. A lot of people aren't very aware of the many different email alternatives. And if you want the absolute best experience, you'll need to start to do a little research on prices, because it'll absolutely cost you. Will it break your pockets? We discuss these different paid advantages in various other articles, but for now this is one of the top 10 free electronic-mail options on the web.

You have different options of emails such as: 

1. @mail.com
2. @email.com
3. @usa.com
4. @myself.com
5. @consultant.com
6. @post.com
7. @dr.com
8. @execs.com
9. @europe.com
10. @engineer.com
11. @asia.com
12. @writeme.com
13. @lname.com
14. @techie.com
15. @contractor.com
16. @accountant.com
17. @workmail.com
18. @musician.org
19. @artlover.com
20. @cheerful.com
21. @publicist.com
22. @cyberservices.com
23. @instructor.com
24. @angelic.com
25. @muslim.com
26. @religious.com
27. @graphic-designer.com
28. @fast-service.com
29. @californiamail.com
30. @graphic-designer.com

The best part about having access to such a colorful array of options for emails is their marketing ability. If you're a contractor, you would benefit from creating an email under @contractor.com. If you're an assistant or financial accountant for a company or brand, you may benefit from @accountant.com. Some of these email domains help distinguish your product on a business card immediately, and futher brand awareness and recognition. A lot of these "soft hacks" can save a lot of extra time explaining what could be a critical selling point in your brand.

11Twitch

Twitch is a live streaming, video broadcasting social media network by Amazon geared toward video gameplay and hobby videos. You can use this space to upload and to livestream different genres of hobbies and activities that you think people will tune into. Right now, Twitch is a great place for DJs to host live parties and monetize their set performances. It's also a place you can monetize your content if you're looking to host your media and material.

12Amazon

Amazon is a more retail price-oriented marketplace that sets a value on it's products aove normal garage sale tactics that take place on apps like eBay, OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace (which is built into Facebook). Amazon will guarantee a price set geared toward the manufacturer's suggested retail price, or MSRP, which is almost identical to the product's release price. It's usually unchanging, or perhaps the changes that take place are so insignificant to the average buyer who usually can make a safe bet on buying used gear for a much lower price, that it almost looks as if there are no price changes at all.

Amazon does sell used goods, but they usually sell them at a markup that reflects a maintenance price and repair price on the product that they consider it a full restoration and refurbished quality. And because of the nature of the vendors on Amazon, a refurbised product may come with it's own return policies based on the company's distribution, which makes it easier for Amazon to do what it does -- provide a marketplace -- and step aside and allow the relationship between the buyer and warehouse to be based on ther terms between the two parties.

The goal in using Amazon as a CEO is understanding the nature of the value of your own business goods, the business upgrades you plan to purchase, and to challenge the information across other markets when necessary, like OfferUp, eBay, your local pawn store, etc, to understand the constant changing nature of the open and controlled markets around you. This research can lead to a upper hand in avoiding consumer and prosumer mistakes by supporting a hyped product that may have no value or benefit to your company, thus not offering the upgrade as marketed to create and yield large profits on your ignorance.

13Canva

Two words: Graphic Design.

Three more: On the go.

This app is special for reasons starting with it's freemium model that allows everyone a basic free service for graphic designers, and that it's use is geared for entry-level designers. The only major learning curve is one you can't really avoid when opening a new software, and that curve is just getting to know the software and interface itself. Once you know where everything is, this app is a breeze. 

The main recommended use of this app is to have no excuse when it comes to communicating your message to your audience. At this stage in starting a business, it can and it will be expensive to hire an in-house graphic designer, which is something that all modern companies should aspire to. But the truth is that it's a hat someone's gotta wear, but Canva makes the experience way less dreadful than one can imagine.

The app comes with all sorts of templates to get you going in the right direction, and you can cut and paste your information directly into the designated text areas. Years of learning is what it takes to become an advanced Adobe Photoshop master or Corel Draw designer. But in just minutes you can create beautiful, elegant, creative, professional, pop style art boards, flyers, instagram stories, and more for all purposes you can imagine. It just takes you opening the Canva app with a small intention; to create.

14Pexels

Stock photos for free. It doesn't get any better. 

This is a community of photographers and visual creators who make and upload beautifully captured and themed images that can fit various creative stories, thoughts, ideas, etc. 

Photographers can upload their work and in exchange for allowing their photography to be used with a free creative license and with full name credit to the original photographers, creative content curators can use the images to help tell their stories online. To give thanks, you can donate to the creator of the image in the same place you download their work. 

Because the license is free and is a new concept, it may be easy to forget that there is still an active license and to honor the license, the user must credit the artist. This not only settles the agreement between the user and photographer, but credits the artist for their talent that they offer free of monetary charge through Pexels.

15Unsplash

Like Pexels, Unsplash is a great community and database of stock photography for just about anything you can think of. A feature I find really great about Unsplash is that you can hire the photographer for future work if their name has a verified check next to "available for hire" by their profile name. 

Using Unsplash and crediting the artist as you would even when you pay for a license, allows the artist to expand their reach and gain visibility. The pressure point with Unsplash is to make sure you do your part and credit these amazing photographers for their work.

16Dropbox

A cloud to upload and transfer files to and from, store your work without fear of losing anything, and an easy way to keep your computer-based business neatly filed. These days, the mobile phone market is catching up in the cloud race, so they offer cloud directly on your phone and charge you after you reach a certain limit. 

Dropbox beats phone clouds by giving access to them from multiple platforms which is very hard to manuver on propietary branded apps and devices. It isn't awfully hard, but there's a tricky challenge in trying to pair an iPhone with Google Cloud, and an Android or PC with iCloud. So Dropbox wins in that space.

17Quora

Quora is a place where people ask questions and get them answered by users of different expertise and backgrounds. The questions range from very much about a specific brand or product by a company that isn't widely known, to frequently asked questions that you could likely ask a stranger in the city.

What's more, if you have your own business or product that you excel in, you can list advice on the product and create Q/A walkthroughs for potential customers.

You can expect to find challenging different results and mixed answers, as well as verified solutions and questions that have been successfully answered. 

18Slack

Slack is a business-oriented communication app and tool for teams, employees, managers, executives, some clubs, and other professional organization members. Like Discord, you can open communication channels, but because this is geared toward professional teams, it's made for companies and organizations to have more control of the inner coms. If you're looking to have a more open approach, Discord would be more in your favor. But if you're a strong team of pros who need to stick together through a consistent medium, try Slack.

19FaceTime

FaceTime, now available on Google Play, is one of the greatest apps in video communication for reasons such as quality in experience, ease of use, integrated tools, and now, accessibility. FaceTime started as an Apple only product, being only available on iPhone, iPad, iMac, and Macbook. Now available on Android via Google Play, meetings just got more interesting as the high-quality communication app just became accessible to the other side of the industry-share pie chart, the larger majority of smartphone users in the world; Android users.

Using FaceTime can help save time with contacts and the trouble of accessing people through apps that are down right buggy and glitchy. FaceTime, proven one of the more respected and used video chats even amongst popular apps like Messenger, may take over as far as interest in fixing bugs and accessibility between apps, as do other developers with for example, video games that become cross platform for PS5, Xbox, Android, iOS, and PC.

FaceTime is recommended for just about anything from professional meetings, one-on-one mentoring, tutoring, teaching, classes, etc. And combined with Cash App or PayPal, you can have your own one-on-one coaching business with clients you trust.

20Dailymotion

The biggest rival known to YouTube is still widely unknown to YouTube users, which as of now is shocking, especially considering the market share between video-based social networks. Dailymotion is one of the best quality video uploaders on the planet, and doesn't have nearly the same censorship issues as YouTube, that I would like to bet is guaranteed based on their clever algorithm and homepage news feed. 

Like YouTube, you can uploade short- and long-form videos, broadcast from your own channel, change your own url, grow your subscribes and audience directly from your own page, and cater to your video-based community directly within Dailymotion if that's your choice.

Dailymotion is available as an app on iOS and Google Play, and accessible at Dailymotion.com.

21Google Translate

A great tool for spell check in English, and in other languages as you may come to grow your business with different cultures. 

It's sometimes stated that Google Translate isn't the greatest or most reliable in language translation, and while this may have been someone's experience; Google Translate is recommended for reasons like challenging different status quo concepts and to gain a basic understanding or awareness in situations where Google Translate may be helpful to you. Translating paragraphs may lose some of the quality or intention through translation but this is sometimes unavoidable as you cross language barriers. The main thing would be to avoid certain analogies and definitely to avoid unconscious euphemisms which may accidentally offend.

Translation itself is usually a high paying salaried career, so, take it with a grain of salt!

22GoFundMe

GoFundMe is a place to express your need for support and ask your community to financially help. GoFundMe allows you direct access to the funds you raise for your cause and takes a fee for hosting your cause. Unlike other fundraising sites, you can access the funds you raise instantly without reaching a threshold. Great for raising funds for startup business equipment, college funds, support for moving, any accidents or natural disasters, or other forms of help.

23Duolingo

Learn language in a fun way with Duolingo. Free with ads, and paid for a version without ads. Recomended for expanding your horizons, getting ready to travel across the world and build relationships with different language speakers. Fun, incentivized, and gamified, Duolingo will have you feeling confident in a new language after committing for just a week. Imagine where you'll be after studying Spanish for 3 or 4 months, consistently, for free!

24Lyft

There are a few upcoming car-share and riide-share apps and comapnies but Lyft is usually the greatest option for finding low and affordable fares to and from the city. If you ever need to get to and from a meeting, get a client to and from a location, or get somewhere faster than waiting for someone else, Lyft offers you (and the people you know) the freedom of getting out of a jam and into where they need to be. Traffic and all, Lyft is agreat way to get around on your own time and get things done.

25Square

It wouldn't be right to think about a digitally advanced business and not think of Square. The mobility you need to run transactions and file the history of them can't be done without a "shopping cart" function in your digital possession. Square is a place where you can process credit card transactions and digital transactions. Square is the more business oriented brand of Cash App, which owns Cash App, too.

26Bonus: Kickstarter

Because we listed it's intense rival, GoFundMe, we nudged this one to the bonuses, because it wouldn't be right not to mention it. 

Kickstarter is about raising funds, but you need to reach a goal in the eye of the public which shows and builds trust as they watch your growth in realtime. It's competitive nature is what drove us to list GoFundMe so that people can grow their company and business at their own appropriate pace. 

Kickstarter is definitely a great option for those who strongly would like to prove to the public and their silent partners that their product is absolutely ready for the world. 

27Bonus: YouTube

What you don't know about YouTube is what makes YouTube a bonus. Skip the obvious benefits of uploading videos and growing a following... Y

ou can upload your own videos and make them "unlisted" and private so that you can have a more direct way of monetizing the views that you allow in. If you want to teach from a video series, you can monetize and charge a fee for access to a private playlist, and other different and creative ways to control your content.

Playlisting is probably the most important yet overlooked feature about YouTube -- which is likely going to save it from being trampled when the streaming wars get more heated with content and accessibility. Creating Playlists on YouTube don't really trigger a huge response from YouTube's algorithm (and that may change within the next 5 years so don't stop Playlisting on YouTube) but they do pop up within the search, and after becoming relevant enough they will make top 10 and top 5 results, which is extremely important especially considering Google users who pride themselves in having their business or product pop up on the first page of Google after being searched.

Playlisting is about organizing and inviting, and there is nothing that will be more inviting about YouTube in the future than an organized space to dive into, especially if it's ad-free and pre-monetized for the viewers pleasure.

28Bonus: Facebook

Selling content online is important but making a Facebook account is not the first step in establishing your business. It will be the icing on the cake after you have your major distribution channels mapped out. Once prepared, Facebook will actually become your advertising channel and you will then have more control over your own sales channels because they will not operate solely on Facebook, but instead Facebook-assisted. 

Advertising through Facebook is integral and a major opportunity that changes constantly, and your target audience moves frequently as people have their own minds, thoughts, and change interests naturally. Your audience may be open to certain ads one day because of the needs they have, but if their needs are met by another service, your ad tomorrow will no longer suit them. Facebook is not a tool that businesses can use to spy on the public, but to invite to their product if it suits their needs.

Creating content as a business varies vastly from creating content as a creator and artist. Businesses usually find a medium to convey their artistic interests to the public by hiring an artist and crediting their brand and platform for bringing together two parties that would not have met if not for the authenticity of the artist hired by the business.

If you are an artist who also has a business out of their art, you will have to maintain both your business needs and your community needs which sometimes don't intersect at being sold a specific product, but just by being a part of the same community.

29Bonus: TikTok

TikTok is important for the next-generation CEO for the same reasons as Facebook. The advertising potential is massive, and if you advertise your product in an engaging and authentic manner, your product visibility and sales should be positively affected.

As an artist who creates for a living, TikTok is a great medium for direct immersion in an active community of curators and fans, so TikTok is highly recommended if hashtags help you find your community. TikTok responds better to hashtags and doesn't have as many reports as shadow bans from it's users but that is not to say that TikTok doesn't shadow ban it's users at all.

Using TikTok is a great platform for multimedia creators who make audio and visual combined artwork as the platform is geared toward visual effects and muted videos with music overlays.

30Bonus: Twitter

Twitter creates a professional streamline of all your favorite content and gives you a direct channel on your homepage. Your subscriptions are based on who you follow, and your homepage is a news feed tailored to what you may be more intersted in from the people you follow. You can follow your local news, government officials, business CEOs, creatives, artists, journalists, fans, and bloggers from around the world and join in on any conversation that allows you to reply or reply with the original "tweet" attached.

31Bonus: Tumblr

You can use this as a place to organize your thoughts like one would on Pinterest, or you can use this a space for your portfolio. Really, it's up to you. Blogging and micro-blogging is defined by the user, so if you want to use a template that helps your embedded media from other sites like YouTube look really good, this is the place. You can basically make a band website, a corporate website, I mean, really, just about anything. If you're a highschool baller, you can put your highlights up there, too. Reserve your own username which doubles as your url, and you can mask your url by buying one from GoDaddy or a domain host from elsewhere, and now you have a fully functioning website that no one has to know is hosted by Tumblr. Enjoy 😉

32Bonus: Robinhood

If you want to find out about stocks and are ready to get involved in stocks as soon as you can, Robinhood gives you a pretty good jumpstart into that type of industry. They also give you a newsletter or news feed of what's going on, and what usually and generally has to do with the stocks that you buy. So it requires your sensitive information in order to verify your identity and send you your dividens. You do have to pay taxes on income such as stocks, so before you do actually invest in stocks, you can use your opened account to learn about stocks. And if you grab a code from a friend, you'll get $5 in free stock, and so will they. Pretty useful.

33Bonus: MicroVentures

MicroVentures is another space to look into if you want to learn about startups in action. MicroVentures is a live marketplace type of experience where users can invest in a company or product, and can also sign up to list their own company or product to capture investments. If you want to see how startups raise capital, this is a good place to look.

34Bonus: LinkedIn

If you want professional visibility, this is it. Facebook is good for business, but LinkedIn is great for business. The impression and response you'll get from LinkedIn will be drastically different because of the users and the culture of the two very different platforms. They may seem similar at first glace, but LinkedIn is a very high ranking competitor in the business-social space and should not be ignored.

35Bonus: Fiverr

If you need a place to find jobs or gigs from different people, places, or marketplaces, this is one to consider listing your skills at or searching for gigs at. If you want to find a good model of how some consistent selling freelance artists, try looking for successful creators on Fiverr to see what works in their approach to the app.

36Bonus: Etsy

Another good place to list your services and goods to sell, Etsy. Some people say they have tough requirements which is something to be mindful of if you plan to use it as a primary platform. If you look into different platforms and marketplaces, they all may have different pros and cons, so be sure to check this one out and measure those differences to see if this is for you.

37Bonus: Last.fm

Just like Pandora, Last FM will help you find music in a similar fashion. You can look into your music history and you can find songs that are tagged in a way they kinda DJ themselves to you. If you've used Pandora then you definitely know how this works already. Having an alternative is pretty useful and you can find a different variety of music. It's also worth looking into as a replacement to Pandora if you need one.

38Bonus: Gmail

Gmail is one of the most popular emailing services, and if you use it socially in a way, like corporate America sort of abuses especially during the holiday seasons from Nov-Dec but pretends they don't have a hardcore email grabbing campaign, you'll actually find yourself networking in a way that you probably wish you did before. So when you tap into your contacts and realize that emailing is one of the most normal methods of maintaining contact, you'll want to start an actual email campaign. Be mindful to how corporate it is to just send a bunch of "spam" out, and make your message authentic. Gmail is already really socially adapted so you can organize it pretty well using their service.

39Bonus: WinRAR by RARLAB

WinRAR is really good for opening RAR files, and its available on iOS and Google Play Store. Alongside RAR files, you can unzip just about anything even ISO files for you PC gamers out there. It's a handy all-in-one unzipper to use, so you won't need anything else, really. It's come in handy for a lot of sticky tech situations that other unzip applications can't help with.

40Bonus: IndieGoGo

IndieGoGo is a lot like GoFundMe and other crowdfunding platforms, so if you need an alternative, check it out. It's got plenty of traffic and use, and it's own community of interested people. There are categories and a lot of what I saw people use IndieGoGo for was art-based projects. So if you're looking to fund an album, video game development, or film, this would be a godd community to look into for  your next crowdfunding event.

16Dropbox

A cloud to upload and transfer files to and from, store your work without fear of losing anything, and an easy way to keep your computer-based business neatly filed. These days, the mobile phone market is catching up in the cloud race, so they offer cloud directly on your phone and charge you after you reach a certain limit. 

Dropbox beats phone clouds by giving access to them from multiple platforms which is very hard to manuver on propietary branded apps and devices. It isn't awfully hard, but there's a tricky challenge in trying to pair an iPhone with Google Cloud, and an Android or PC with iCloud. So Dropbox wins in that space.

17Quora

Quora is a place where people ask questions and get them answered by users of different expertise and backgrounds. The questions range from very much about a specific brand or product by a company that isn't widely known, to frequently asked questions that you could likely ask a stranger in the city.

What's more, if you have your own business or product that you excel in, you can list advice on the product and create Q/A walkthroughs for potential customers.

You can expect to find challenging different results and mixed answers, as well as verified solutions and questions that have been successfully answered. 

18Slack

Slack is a business-oriented communication app and tool for teams, employees, managers, executives, some clubs, and other professional organization members. Like Discord, you can open communication channels, but because this is geared toward professional teams, it's made for companies and organizations to have more control of the inner coms. If you're looking to have a more open approach, Discord would be more in your favor. But if you're a strong team of pros who need to stick together through a consistent medium, try Slack.

19FaceTime

FaceTime, now available on Google Play, is one of the greatest apps in video communication for reasons such as quality in experience, ease of use, integrated tools, and now, accessibility. FaceTime started as an Apple only product, being only available on iPhone, iPad, iMac, and Macbook. Now available on Android via Google Play, meetings just got more interesting as the high-quality communication app just became accessible to the other side of the industry-share pie chart, the larger majority of smartphone users in the world; Android users.

Using FaceTime can help save time with contacts and the trouble of accessing people through apps that are down right buggy and glitchy. FaceTime, proven one of the more respected and used video chats even amongst popular apps like Messenger, may take over as far as interest in fixing bugs and accessibility between apps, as do other developers with for example, video games that become cross platform for PS5, Xbox, Android, iOS, and PC.

FaceTime is recommended for just about anything from professional meetings, one-on-one mentoring, tutoring, teaching, classes, etc. And combined with Cash App or PayPal, you can have your own one-on-one coaching business with clients you trust.

20Dailymotion

The biggest rival known to YouTube is still widely unknown to YouTube users, which as of now is shocking, especially considering the market share between video-based social networks. Dailymotion is one of the best quality video uploaders on the planet, and doesn't have nearly the same censorship issues as YouTube, that I would like to bet is guaranteed based on their clever algorithm and homepage news feed. 

Like YouTube, you can uploade short- and long-form videos, broadcast from your own channel, change your own url, grow your subscribes and audience directly from your own page, and cater to your video-based community directly within Dailymotion if that's your choice.

Dailymotion is available as an app on iOS and Google Play, and accessible at Dailymotion.com.

21Google Translate

A great tool for spell check in English, and in other languages as you may come to grow your business with different cultures. 

It's sometimes stated that Google Translate isn't the greatest or most reliable in language translation, and while this may have been someone's experience; Google Translate is recommended for reasons like challenging different status quo concepts and to gain a basic understanding or awareness in situations where Google Translate may be helpful to you. Translating paragraphs may lose some of the quality or intention through translation but this is sometimes unavoidable as you cross language barriers. The main thing would be to avoid certain analogies and definitely to avoid unconscious euphemisms which may accidentally offend.

Translation itself is usually a high paying salaried career, so, take it with a grain of salt!

22GoFundMe

GoFundMe is a place to express your need for support and ask your community to financially help. GoFundMe allows you direct access to the funds you raise for your cause and takes a fee for hosting your cause. Unlike other fundraising sites, you can access the funds you raise instantly without reaching a threshold. Great for raising funds for startup business equipment, college funds, support for moving, any accidents or natural disasters, or other forms of help.

23Duolingo

Learn language in a fun way with Duolingo. Free with ads, and paid for a version without ads. Recomended for expanding your horizons, getting ready to travel across the world and build relationships with different language speakers. Fun, incentivized, and gamified, Duolingo will have you feeling confident in a new language after committing for just a week. Imagine where you'll be after studying Spanish for 3 or 4 months, consistently, for free!

24Lyft

There are a few upcoming car-share and riide-share apps and comapnies but Lyft is usually the greatest option for finding low and affordable fares to and from the city. If you ever need to get to and from a meeting, get a client to and from a location, or get somewhere faster than waiting for someone else, Lyft offers you (and the people you know) the freedom of getting out of a jam and into where they need to be. Traffic and all, Lyft is agreat way to get around on your own time and get things done.

25Square

It wouldn't be right to think about a digitally advanced business and not think of Square. The mobility you need to run transactions and file the history of them can't be done without a "shopping cart" function in your digital possession. Square is a place where you can process credit card transactions and digital transactions. Square is the more business oriented brand of Cash App, which owns Cash App, too.

26Bonus: Kickstarter

Because we listed it's intense rival, GoFundMe, we nudged this one to the bonuses, because it wouldn't be right not to mention it. 

Kickstarter is about raising funds, but you need to reach a goal in the eye of the public which shows and builds trust as they watch your growth in realtime. It's competitive nature is what drove us to list GoFundMe so that people can grow their company and business at their own appropriate pace. 

Kickstarter is definitely a great option for those who strongly would like to prove to the public and their silent partners that their product is absolutely ready for the world. 

27Bonus: YouTube

What you don't know about YouTube is what makes YouTube a bonus. Skip the obvious benefits of uploading videos and growing a following... Y

ou can upload your own videos and make them "unlisted" and private so that you can have a more direct way of monetizing the views that you allow in. If you want to teach from a video series, you can monetize and charge a fee for access to a private playlist, and other different and creative ways to control your content.

Playlisting is probably the most important yet overlooked feature about YouTube -- which is likely going to save it from being trampled when the streaming wars get more heated with content and accessibility. Creating Playlists on YouTube don't really trigger a huge response from YouTube's algorithm (and that may change within the next 5 years so don't stop Playlisting on YouTube) but they do pop up within the search, and after becoming relevant enough they will make top 10 and top 5 results, which is extremely important especially considering Google users who pride themselves in having their business or product pop up on the first page of Google after being searched.

Playlisting is about organizing and inviting, and there is nothing that will be more inviting about YouTube in the future than an organized space to dive into, especially if it's ad-free and pre-monetized for the viewers pleasure.

28Bonus: Facebook

Selling content online is important but making a Facebook account is not the first step in establishing your business. It will be the icing on the cake after you have your major distribution channels mapped out. Once prepared, Facebook will actually become your advertising channel and you will then have more control over your own sales channels because they will not operate solely on Facebook, but instead Facebook-assisted. 

Advertising through Facebook is integral and a major opportunity that changes constantly, and your target audience moves frequently as people have their own minds, thoughts, and change interests naturally. Your audience may be open to certain ads one day because of the needs they have, but if their needs are met by another service, your ad tomorrow will no longer suit them. Facebook is not a tool that businesses can use to spy on the public, but to invite to their product if it suits their needs.

Creating content as a business varies vastly from creating content as a creator and artist. Businesses usually find a medium to convey their artistic interests to the public by hiring an artist and crediting their brand and platform for bringing together two parties that would not have met if not for the authenticity of the artist hired by the business.

If you are an artist who also has a business out of their art, you will have to maintain both your business needs and your community needs which sometimes don't intersect at being sold a specific product, but just by being a part of the same community.

29Bonus: TikTok

TikTok is important for the next-generation CEO for the same reasons as Facebook. The advertising potential is massive, and if you advertise your product in an engaging and authentic manner, your product visibility and sales should be positively affected.

As an artist who creates for a living, TikTok is a great medium for direct immersion in an active community of curators and fans, so TikTok is highly recommended if hashtags help you find your community. TikTok responds better to hashtags and doesn't have as many reports as shadow bans from it's users but that is not to say that TikTok doesn't shadow ban it's users at all.

Using TikTok is a great platform for multimedia creators who make audio and visual combined artwork as the platform is geared toward visual effects and muted videos with music overlays.

30Bonus: Twitter

Twitter creates a professional streamline of all your favorite content and gives you a direct channel on your homepage. Your subscriptions are based on who you follow, and your homepage is a news feed tailored to what you may be more intersted in from the people you follow. You can follow your local news, government officials, business CEOs, creatives, artists, journalists, fans, and bloggers from around the world and join in on any conversation that allows you to reply or reply with the original "tweet" attached.

31Bonus: Tumblr

You can use this as a place to organize your thoughts like one would on Pinterest, or you can use this a space for your portfolio. Really, it's up to you. Blogging and micro-blogging is defined by the user, so if you want to use a template that helps your embedded media from other sites like YouTube look really good, this is the place. You can basically make a band website, a corporate website, I mean, really, just about anything. If you're a highschool baller, you can put your highlights up there, too. Reserve your own username which doubles as your url, and you can mask your url by buying one from GoDaddy or a domain host from elsewhere, and now you have a fully functioning website that no one has to know is hosted by Tumblr. Enjoy 😉

32Bonus: Robinhood

If you want to find out about stocks and are ready to get involved in stocks as soon as you can, Robinhood gives you a pretty good jumpstart into that type of industry. They also give you a newsletter or news feed of what's going on, and what usually and generally has to do with the stocks that you buy. So it requires your sensitive information in order to verify your identity and send you your dividens. You do have to pay taxes on income such as stocks, so before you do actually invest in stocks, you can use your opened account to learn about stocks. And if you grab a code from a friend, you'll get $5 in free stock, and so will they. Pretty useful.

33Bonus: MicroVentures

MicroVentures is another space to look into if you want to learn about startups in action. MicroVentures is a live marketplace type of experience where users can invest in a company or product, and can also sign up to list their own company or product to capture investments. If you want to see how startups raise capital, this is a good place to look.

34Bonus: LinkedIn

If you want professional visibility, this is it. Facebook is good for business, but LinkedIn is great for business. The impression and response you'll get from LinkedIn will be drastically different because of the users and the culture of the two very different platforms. They may seem similar at first glace, but LinkedIn is a very high ranking competitor in the business-social space and should not be ignored.

35Bonus: Fiverr

If you need a place to find jobs or gigs from different people, places, or marketplaces, this is one to consider listing your skills at or searching for gigs at. If you want to find a good model of how some consistent selling freelance artists, try looking for successful creators on Fiverr to see what works in their approach to the app.

36Bonus: Etsy

Another good place to list your services and goods to sell, Etsy. Some people say they have tough requirements which is something to be mindful of if you plan to use it as a primary platform. If you look into different platforms and marketplaces, they all may have different pros and cons, so be sure to check this one out and measure those differences to see if this is for you.

37Bonus: Last.fm

Just like Pandora, Last FM will help you find music in a similar fashion. You can look into your music history and you can find songs that are tagged in a way they kinda DJ themselves to you. If you've used Pandora then you definitely know how this works already. Having an alternative is pretty useful and you can find a different variety of music. It's also worth looking into as a replacement to Pandora if you need one.

38Bonus: Gmail

Gmail is one of the most popular emailing services, and if you use it socially in a way, like corporate America sort of abuses especially during the holiday seasons from Nov-Dec but pretends they don't have a hardcore email grabbing campaign, you'll actually find yourself networking in a way that you probably wish you did before. So when you tap into your contacts and realize that emailing is one of the most normal methods of maintaining contact, you'll want to start an actual email campaign. Be mindful to how corporate it is to just send a bunch of "spam" out, and make your message authentic. Gmail is already really socially adapted so you can organize it pretty well using their service.

39Bonus: WinRAR by RARLAB

WinRAR is really good for opening RAR files, and its available on iOS and Google Play Store. Alongside RAR files, you can unzip just about anything even ISO files for you PC gamers out there. It's a handy all-in-one unzipper to use, so you won't need anything else, really. It's come in handy for a lot of sticky tech situations that other unzip applications can't help with.

40Bonus: IndieGoGo

IndieGoGo is a lot like GoFundMe and other crowdfunding platforms, so if you need an alternative, check it out. It's got plenty of traffic and use, and it's own community of interested people. There are categories and a lot of what I saw people use IndieGoGo for was art-based projects. So if you're looking to fund an album, video game development, or film, this would be a godd community to look into for  your next crowdfunding event.

16Dropbox

A cloud to upload and transfer files to and from, store your work without fear of losing anything, and an easy way to keep your computer-based business neatly filed. These days, the mobile phone market is catching up in the cloud race, so they offer cloud directly on your phone and charge you after you reach a certain limit. 

Dropbox beats phone clouds by giving access to them from multiple platforms which is very hard to manuver on propietary branded apps and devices. It isn't awfully hard, but there's a tricky challenge in trying to pair an iPhone with Google Cloud, and an Android or PC with iCloud. So Dropbox wins in that space.

17Quora

Quora is a place where people ask questions and get them answered by users of different expertise and backgrounds. The questions range from very much about a specific brand or product by a company that isn't widely known, to frequently asked questions that you could likely ask a stranger in the city.

What's more, if you have your own business or product that you excel in, you can list advice on the product and create Q/A walkthroughs for potential customers.

You can expect to find challenging different results and mixed answers, as well as verified solutions and questions that have been successfully answered. 

18Slack

Slack is a business-oriented communication app and tool for teams, employees, managers, executives, some clubs, and other professional organization members. Like Discord, you can open communication channels, but because this is geared toward professional teams, it's made for companies and organizations to have more control of the inner coms. If you're looking to have a more open approach, Discord would be more in your favor. But if you're a strong team of pros who need to stick together through a consistent medium, try Slack.

19FaceTime

FaceTime, now available on Google Play, is one of the greatest apps in video communication for reasons such as quality in experience, ease of use, integrated tools, and now, accessibility. FaceTime started as an Apple only product, being only available on iPhone, iPad, iMac, and Macbook. Now available on Android via Google Play, meetings just got more interesting as the high-quality communication app just became accessible to the other side of the industry-share pie chart, the larger majority of smartphone users in the world; Android users.

Using FaceTime can help save time with contacts and the trouble of accessing people through apps that are down right buggy and glitchy. FaceTime, proven one of the more respected and used video chats even amongst popular apps like Messenger, may take over as far as interest in fixing bugs and accessibility between apps, as do other developers with for example, video games that become cross platform for PS5, Xbox, Android, iOS, and PC.

FaceTime is recommended for just about anything from professional meetings, one-on-one mentoring, tutoring, teaching, classes, etc. And combined with Cash App or PayPal, you can have your own one-on-one coaching business with clients you trust.

20Dailymotion

The biggest rival known to YouTube is still widely unknown to YouTube users, which as of now is shocking, especially considering the market share between video-based social networks. Dailymotion is one of the best quality video uploaders on the planet, and doesn't have nearly the same censorship issues as YouTube, that I would like to bet is guaranteed based on their clever algorithm and homepage news feed. 

Like YouTube, you can uploade short- and long-form videos, broadcast from your own channel, change your own url, grow your subscribes and audience directly from your own page, and cater to your video-based community directly within Dailymotion if that's your choice.

Dailymotion is available as an app on iOS and Google Play, and accessible at Dailymotion.com.

21Google Translate

A great tool for spell check in English, and in other languages as you may come to grow your business with different cultures. 

It's sometimes stated that Google Translate isn't the greatest or most reliable in language translation, and while this may have been someone's experience; Google Translate is recommended for reasons like challenging different status quo concepts and to gain a basic understanding or awareness in situations where Google Translate may be helpful to you. Translating paragraphs may lose some of the quality or intention through translation but this is sometimes unavoidable as you cross language barriers. The main thing would be to avoid certain analogies and definitely to avoid unconscious euphemisms which may accidentally offend.

Translation itself is usually a high paying salaried career, so, take it with a grain of salt!

22GoFundMe

GoFundMe is a place to express your need for support and ask your community to financially help. GoFundMe allows you direct access to the funds you raise for your cause and takes a fee for hosting your cause. Unlike other fundraising sites, you can access the funds you raise instantly without reaching a threshold. Great for raising funds for startup business equipment, college funds, support for moving, any accidents or natural disasters, or other forms of help.

23Duolingo

Learn language in a fun way with Duolingo. Free with ads, and paid for a version without ads. Recomended for expanding your horizons, getting ready to travel across the world and build relationships with different language speakers. Fun, incentivized, and gamified, Duolingo will have you feeling confident in a new language after committing for just a week. Imagine where you'll be after studying Spanish for 3 or 4 months, consistently, for free!

24Lyft

There are a few upcoming car-share and riide-share apps and comapnies but Lyft is usually the greatest option for finding low and affordable fares to and from the city. If you ever need to get to and from a meeting, get a client to and from a location, or get somewhere faster than waiting for someone else, Lyft offers you (and the people you know) the freedom of getting out of a jam and into where they need to be. Traffic and all, Lyft is agreat way to get around on your own time and get things done.

25Square

It wouldn't be right to think about a digitally advanced business and not think of Square. The mobility you need to run transactions and file the history of them can't be done without a "shopping cart" function in your digital possession. Square is a place where you can process credit card transactions and digital transactions. Square is the more business oriented brand of Cash App, which owns Cash App, too.

26Bonus: Kickstarter

Because we listed it's intense rival, GoFundMe, we nudged this one to the bonuses, because it wouldn't be right not to mention it. 

Kickstarter is about raising funds, but you need to reach a goal in the eye of the public which shows and builds trust as they watch your growth in realtime. It's competitive nature is what drove us to list GoFundMe so that people can grow their company and business at their own appropriate pace. 

Kickstarter is definitely a great option for those who strongly would like to prove to the public and their silent partners that their product is absolutely ready for the world. 

27Bonus: YouTube

What you don't know about YouTube is what makes YouTube a bonus. Skip the obvious benefits of uploading videos and growing a following... Y

ou can upload your own videos and make them "unlisted" and private so that you can have a more direct way of monetizing the views that you allow in. If you want to teach from a video series, you can monetize and charge a fee for access to a private playlist, and other different and creative ways to control your content.

Playlisting is probably the most important yet overlooked feature about YouTube -- which is likely going to save it from being trampled when the streaming wars get more heated with content and accessibility. Creating Playlists on YouTube don't really trigger a huge response from YouTube's algorithm (and that may change within the next 5 years so don't stop Playlisting on YouTube) but they do pop up within the search, and after becoming relevant enough they will make top 10 and top 5 results, which is extremely important especially considering Google users who pride themselves in having their business or product pop up on the first page of Google after being searched.

Playlisting is about organizing and inviting, and there is nothing that will be more inviting about YouTube in the future than an organized space to dive into, especially if it's ad-free and pre-monetized for the viewers pleasure.

28Bonus: Facebook

Selling content online is important but making a Facebook account is not the first step in establishing your business. It will be the icing on the cake after you have your major distribution channels mapped out. Once prepared, Facebook will actually become your advertising channel and you will then have more control over your own sales channels because they will not operate solely on Facebook, but instead Facebook-assisted. 

Advertising through Facebook is integral and a major opportunity that changes constantly, and your target audience moves frequently as people have their own minds, thoughts, and change interests naturally. Your audience may be open to certain ads one day because of the needs they have, but if their needs are met by another service, your ad tomorrow will no longer suit them. Facebook is not a tool that businesses can use to spy on the public, but to invite to their product if it suits their needs.

Creating content as a business varies vastly from creating content as a creator and artist. Businesses usually find a medium to convey their artistic interests to the public by hiring an artist and crediting their brand and platform for bringing together two parties that would not have met if not for the authenticity of the artist hired by the business.

If you are an artist who also has a business out of their art, you will have to maintain both your business needs and your community needs which sometimes don't intersect at being sold a specific product, but just by being a part of the same community.

29Bonus: TikTok

TikTok is important for the next-generation CEO for the same reasons as Facebook. The advertising potential is massive, and if you advertise your product in an engaging and authentic manner, your product visibility and sales should be positively affected.

As an artist who creates for a living, TikTok is a great medium for direct immersion in an active community of curators and fans, so TikTok is highly recommended if hashtags help you find your community. TikTok responds better to hashtags and doesn't have as many reports as shadow bans from it's users but that is not to say that TikTok doesn't shadow ban it's users at all.

Using TikTok is a great platform for multimedia creators who make audio and visual combined artwork as the platform is geared toward visual effects and muted videos with music overlays.

30Bonus: Twitter

Twitter creates a professional streamline of all your favorite content and gives you a direct channel on your homepage. Your subscriptions are based on who you follow, and your homepage is a news feed tailored to what you may be more intersted in from the people you follow. You can follow your local news, government officials, business CEOs, creatives, artists, journalists, fans, and bloggers from around the world and join in on any conversation that allows you to reply or reply with the original "tweet" attached.

31Bonus: Tumblr

You can use this as a place to organize your thoughts like one would on Pinterest, or you can use this a space for your portfolio. Really, it's up to you. Blogging and micro-blogging is defined by the user, so if you want to use a template that helps your embedded media from other sites like YouTube look really good, this is the place. You can basically make a band website, a corporate website, I mean, really, just about anything. If you're a highschool baller, you can put your highlights up there, too. Reserve your own username which doubles as your url, and you can mask your url by buying one from GoDaddy or a domain host from elsewhere, and now you have a fully functioning website that no one has to know is hosted by Tumblr. Enjoy 😉

32Bonus: Robinhood

If you want to find out about stocks and are ready to get involved in stocks as soon as you can, Robinhood gives you a pretty good jumpstart into that type of industry. They also give you a newsletter or news feed of what's going on, and what usually and generally has to do with the stocks that you buy. So it requires your sensitive information in order to verify your identity and send you your dividens. You do have to pay taxes on income such as stocks, so before you do actually invest in stocks, you can use your opened account to learn about stocks. And if you grab a code from a friend, you'll get $5 in free stock, and so will they. Pretty useful.

33Bonus: MicroVentures

MicroVentures is another space to look into if you want to learn about startups in action. MicroVentures is a live marketplace type of experience where users can invest in a company or product, and can also sign up to list their own company or product to capture investments. If you want to see how startups raise capital, this is a good place to look.

34Bonus: LinkedIn

If you want professional visibility, this is it. Facebook is good for business, but LinkedIn is great for business. The impression and response you'll get from LinkedIn will be drastically different because of the users and the culture of the two very different platforms. They may seem similar at first glace, but LinkedIn is a very high ranking competitor in the business-social space and should not be ignored.

35Bonus: Fiverr

If you need a place to find jobs or gigs from different people, places, or marketplaces, this is one to consider listing your skills at or searching for gigs at. If you want to find a good model of how some consistent selling freelance artists, try looking for successful creators on Fiverr to see what works in their approach to the app.

36Bonus: Etsy

Another good place to list your services and goods to sell, Etsy. Some people say they have tough requirements which is something to be mindful of if you plan to use it as a primary platform. If you look into different platforms and marketplaces, they all may have different pros and cons, so be sure to check this one out and measure those differences to see if this is for you.

37Bonus: Last.fm

Just like Pandora, Last FM will help you find music in a similar fashion. You can look into your music history and you can find songs that are tagged in a way they kinda DJ themselves to you. If you've used Pandora then you definitely know how this works already. Having an alternative is pretty useful and you can find a different variety of music. It's also worth looking into as a replacement to Pandora if you need one.

38Bonus: Gmail

Gmail is one of the most popular emailing services, and if you use it socially in a way, like corporate America sort of abuses especially during the holiday seasons from Nov-Dec but pretends they don't have a hardcore email grabbing campaign, you'll actually find yourself networking in a way that you probably wish you did before. So when you tap into your contacts and realize that emailing is one of the most normal methods of maintaining contact, you'll want to start an actual email campaign. Be mindful to how corporate it is to just send a bunch of "spam" out, and make your message authentic. Gmail is already really socially adapted so you can organize it pretty well using their service.

39Bonus: WinRAR by RARLAB

WinRAR is really good for opening RAR files, and its available on iOS and Google Play Store. Alongside RAR files, you can unzip just about anything even ISO files for you PC gamers out there. It's a handy all-in-one unzipper to use, so you won't need anything else, really. It's come in handy for a lot of sticky tech situations that other unzip applications can't help with.

40Bonus: IndieGoGo

IndieGoGo is a lot like GoFundMe and other crowdfunding platforms, so if you need an alternative, check it out. It's got plenty of traffic and use, and it's own community of interested people. There are categories and a lot of what I saw people use IndieGoGo for was art-based projects. So if you're looking to fund an album, video game development, or film, this would be a godd community to look into for  your next crowdfunding event.