20 new business tools to run, grow, and scale your business

Here's a scene that might feel familiar.

It's Tuesday morning. You've got a new hire starting in four days with no onboarding plan. Three invoices sitting unpaid. A potential customer who filled out your contact form two days ago and hasn't heard back. Your website went down sometime last night, you found out from a Google alert, not your own monitoring. And somewhere buried in a Slack thread, a designer left a comment on a Figma file that was supposed to go to the developer three days ago.

None of this is a disaster on its own. Together, it's just...Tuesday.

Here's the good news: 20 powerful tools just joined IFTTT. Not as standalone apps you'll open once and forget, but as connected pieces of a business that actually talks to itself. Tools that handle the handoffs, send the alerts, log the details, and take the Tuesday morning pile down to something manageable.

Start a free trial of IFTTT Pro and let your automations handle the small stuff, the follow-ups, the status updates, the things that eat twenty minutes before you even realize it.

From first hire to first invoice

Every business has a backbone: the internal machinery that keeps things moving before a single customer ever shows up. Hiring, project tracking, scheduling, getting paid. It's not glamorous work, but when it breaks down, everything else does too.

These six tools are the backbone, connected.

BambooHR: HR that doesn't make everyone nervous

BambooHR is the people platform that somehow makes HR feel...human. Time-off requests, onboarding checklists, performance reviews, employee records. It's all in one place, and it doesn't require an HR degree to navigate.

Add a new hire and automatically trigger a Slack welcome, a task list, and a spreadsheet entry, all before they've found the coffee machine.

Smartsheet: project management your whole team can use

If regular spreadsheets are the scrappy intern, Smartsheet is the MBA. It handles everything from simple task lists to complex project timelines, resource planning, and cross-team workflows, all in a familiar grid that won't make you feel like you need a manual.

Connect it and row updates, status changes, and new entries can automatically ping your team, create cards, or fire off emails.

Cal.com: the end of "when are you free?" email chains

You know the drill. "Are you free Thursday?" "Not Thursday." "What about Friday at 2?" "I have a call." Three days of silence. Cal.com ends this. It's open-source, fully customizable, and connects cleanly to your existing calendar setup.

When a booking lands, trigger a CRM update, a confirmation email, or a pre-meeting prep workflow, so the experience runs itself before you've opened your laptop.

FreshBooks: send invoices, get paid, move on

FreshBooks is accounting software designed for humans, not accountants. Clean invoices, easy expense tracking, solid reporting. It makes the financial side of your business look as professional as it actually is (or aspires to be).

Connect it and invoice activity, whether created, paid, or overdue, can trigger notifications, log to a dashboard, or kick off a client follow-up automatically.

Xero: your finances, finally in one place

Xero is the accounting platform that millions of small businesses trust with their numbers. Bank reconciliation, payroll, tax prep, financial reporting. It handles the complexity so you can focus on actually running the business.

Hook it up and new invoices, overdue bills, and payments can trigger SMS alerts, Slack messages, or Google Sheets entries, so your finances stop living in a silo.

Linear: ship faster without losing track of what's broken

When your product team is juggling bug fixes, feature requests, and a roadmap that keeps shifting, something always gets missed. Linear is the issue tracker built for teams who are serious about moving fast. Clean, keyboard-driven, and fast enough that people actually use it.

Connect it and new issues, status updates, and approaching due dates can automatically route to Slack, Google Calendar, or GitHub.

Get found, get customers, keep them

Operations keep the lights on. Growth is what you're actually here for. These eight tools cover the full arc of attracting someone who's never heard of you, turning them into a customer, and making sure they stick around.

HubSpot: the CRM that earns its keep

HubSpot is a full-funnel CRM and marketing platform. Contacts, deals, tickets, form submissions, pipeline stages, all tracked in one place. And the free tier is legitimately useful, which in SaaS is basically a miracle.

Connect it and new contacts, deal stage changes, and form submissions can trigger Slack alerts, email sequences, or task creation, so your pipeline moves the moment someone walks in the door.

MailerLite: grow your list without the overhead

MailerLite is an email marketing platform that punches well above its price point. Automation workflows, landing pages, pop-ups, A/B testing, all in a tool that won't make your accountant cry when they see the invoice.

Connect it and new subscribers can sync to a Google Sheet, notify your team in Slack, or trigger a follow-up in another tool the moment they sign up.

Campaign Monitor: emails your audience will actually open

Campaign Monitor built its reputation on one thing: emails that actually look good in the inbox. Beautiful templates, smart segmentation, A/B testing. It's the email platform for businesses that care whether their newsletter lands or just languishes.

Connect it and campaign sends, new subscribers, and unsubscribe events can flow straight into your CRM, your spreadsheets, or your team's Slack channel.

SendGrid: your emails, actually delivered

SendGrid is the email platform businesses trust to send transactional and marketing email at scale. Reliable delivery, dynamic templates, and detailed analytics all in one place.

Connect it and bounces, unsubscribes, and new contacts can trigger instant alerts, CRM updates, or list changes, so nothing gets missed.

Intercom: customer support that actually scales

Intercom is the customer communications platform that makes every customer feel like they've got a direct line to you, even when they technically don't. Live chat, AI-powered support, automated outbound messaging. It's how fast-growing companies make personal feel scalable.

Connect it and new conversations can instantly notify your team, create support tasks, or trigger a follow-up, because the worst thing you can do to a customer who reaches out is leave them hanging.

Ghost: write, publish, and get paid

Ghost is a professional publishing platform built for creators and businesses who want to build a media business around their content. Rich editor, email newsletters, paid memberships, and audience analytics, all in one place, open source, so you own your audience and your revenue.

Connect it and new posts, paid memberships, and subscriber activity can automatically trigger distribution workflows, CRM updates, or cross-posts to other platforms.

Wistia: video hosting built for business

Wistia is the video platform built for business, not cat compilations. Host your marketing videos, demos, and product explainers, then use Wistia's built-in CTAs, email capture gates, and engagement analytics to turn views into actual leads.

Connect it and new video uploads can notify your team, log to a content tracker, or kick off a distribution workflow, so new content gets the attention it deserves instead of sitting there waiting to be found.

Lemon Squeezy: digital products, zero complexity

Lemon Squeezy is a commerce platform built for selling digital products, SaaS subscriptions, and memberships, with payments, tax compliance, and licensing handled for you. Templates, ebooks, software licenses, courses. It's all covered.

Connect it and new orders, subscription starts, and cancellations can trigger thank-you emails, CRM updates, or Slack alerts, so every purchase starts a relationship, not just a transaction.

The infrastructure nobody sees but everyone needs

Nobody talks about the tools in this section at dinner parties. But when they're missing or broken, you notice immediately. These four tools are the layer underneath everything else: your site, your brand, your store, your outreach.

Cloudflare: your website's first line of defense

Cloudflare does its best work when nobody notices it. DNS management, DDoS protection, performance optimization. It's the infrastructure layer that most small businesses don't think about until something very, very bad happens. Don't be that business.

Connect it and SSL expirations, DNS changes, and security events can trigger instant alerts, so you find out before your customers do.

GoDaddy: your website shouldn't go down while you're in a meeting

GoDaddy is already where millions of small businesses manage their domains, hosting, and online presence.

Connect it and domain status changes, expiration warnings, and DNS updates can fire off Slack messages, SMS alerts, or Google Sheets logs, so nothing about your online presence catches you off guard.

Wix: your whole web presence, in one place

Wix is the website builder that grew up. What started as a drag-and-drop site creator is now a full platform: ecommerce, appointment booking, CRM, and more, all living under the same roof as your website.

Connect it and form submissions, new bookings, and store orders can automatically log to a spreadsheet, notify your team, or kick off a follow-up sequence.

Apollo: a full sales engine for small teams

Apollo is what happens when a massive B2B contact database meets CRM tools, outreach automation, and sales intelligence, and the result actually fits in a small business budget. It's how scrappy sales teams compete with the big dogs.

Connect it and new contacts, deal updates, and enriched leads can automatically sync to your CRM, drop into an email sequence, or notify your team, so no prospect sits untouched longer than they should.

Bring your business to life

Some tools aren't about keeping the lights on. They're about making your business look and feel like the real thing. These two help you show up with intention, whether that's a polished brand system or a product people can actually wear.

Figma: design, collaborate, stay on-brand

Figma is the collaborative design platform where teams design, iterate, and ship digital products together in real time. Browser-based, real-time collaborative, and flexible enough for everything from a quick social graphic to a full brand system.

Connect it and file updates, new comments, and version changes can notify your team in Slack, create GitHub issues, or trigger tasks in Asana, so design feedback actually makes it into the workflow instead of dying in a thread.

Printful: branded merch without the warehouse

Printful is the dream for any business that wants to sell branded products without turning the spare bedroom into a fulfillment center. Custom apparel, accessories, home goods. They print it, they ship it, you take the credit.

Connect it and new orders, shipment updates, and cancellations can sync to Google Sheets, ping your team in Slack, or trigger a customer thank-you automatically. (You still have to design the hoodie, though.)

Put it all together: four ways to automate your business

Every tool above works on its own. But the real unlock is what happens when you start connecting them. To give you a sense of what that looks like in practice, here are four common small business scenarios and the applets that make them run automatically. Think of these as starting points, once you see how the pieces fit together, you'll find a dozen more places to plug them in.

1. Running your content operation without the busywork

Publishing is only half the job. The other half is making sure the right people see it, your list grows from it, and your team knows when something goes live. When your publishing, video, and email tools are connected, a new piece of content sets the whole distribution sequence in motion without anyone having to manually push it along.

2. Launching a new product or digital offer

Launch day has a way of exposing every gap in your workflow. When your commerce, email, CRM, and content tools are wired together, the moment something goes live sets everything else in motion. Buyers get followed up with. Your team stays in the loop. And the content that supports the launch keeps working long after you hit publish.

3. Landing and keeping a new customer

The gap between someone showing interest and becoming a paying customer is almost always a timing problem. When your website, CRM, support, and billing tools are connected, every touchpoint happens at the right moment without anyone having to manually trigger it. The experience feels personal. The follow-through is automatic.

4: Send the invoice, collect the money, move on

Chasing payments is one of those things that eats more time than it should. When your billing and accounting tools are connected, invoices go out on cue, payments get logged automatically, and nothing sits in a queue waiting for someone to remember it. The financial side of your business takes care of itself, the way it was always supposed to.

The minutes you didn't know you were losing

Most businesses aren't losing time to big problems. They're losing it to small ones: the follow-up that didn't go out, the update nobody sent, the invoice that sat unseen. 20 new integrations just joined IFTTT to take care of exactly that. Connect the tools you already use and get back to the work that actually moves the needle.

Start a free trial of IFTTT Pro today.