What freelancer doesn’t love a new app or tool that promises to improve their business? Here are a couple that have popped up over the past few weeks. As a bonus, these ones are fun to play with.
Canva
If you’re in need of new business cards, flyers or photo promo cards, Canva will help you create your own using customizable templates. The site has some free images and designs as well as the option to upload your own images, but there’s also a wide variety of images and designs that you can purchase. Canva has been around for about a year and a half and is rated highly on tech sites. Although hiring a graphic designer to create your business cards will no doubt result in better branding for your freelance business, Canva seems like a good option if you’ve got time or money constraints.
Quote generator
There are a couple of other interesting tools on the website of a software company called BeeWits. While their main product seems to be a web design project management kit, BeeWits has also created a great little quote generator tool (mainly intended for web designers, but useful for other kinds of freelancers, too) and, most recently, an hourly rate calculator aimed at helping freelancers figure out what they should be charging. It asks you to input your annual income and the amount you’d like to increase it by along with the number of billable hours you work each week and a variety of business expenses. It’s a fun little tool to play around with and will likely get you thinking about the value of your time — a useful thing for a freelancer to pause and consider on a regular basis.
