Top 13 'Runway-Extending' Business Tools to learn for Pre-Seed Startups to Maximize Their Capital - Goh Ling Yong
For a pre-seed startup, the most terrifying sound isn't a "no" from a VC. It's the silent, relentless ticking of the clock as your bank balance dwindles. This is your runway—the number of months you have before the cash runs out. Every decision, every hire, and every subscription fee directly impacts how long you get to stay in the game. It's the ultimate resource constraint, and managing it is your number one job.
In this high-stakes environment, founders often fall into two traps. They either splurge on a "professional" tech stack that bleeds them dry, or they try to do everything manually with spreadsheets and grit, burning their most valuable asset: their time. Both paths lead to a shorter runway. But there’s a third way—a smarter way. It’s about building a lean, powerful, and capital-efficient machine from day one.
The secret lies in choosing your tools not just for their features, but for their ability to extend your runway. These are tools that offer immense value for free, replace the need for an expensive hire, or automate work that would otherwise consume countless founder hours. This isn't about being cheap; it's about being strategic. Here are 13 of the absolute best runway-extending tools that every pre-seed startup should master to maximize their capital and give their vision the time it deserves to take flight.
1. Notion: Your Startup's Second Brain
Notion is more than just a note-taking app; it's an all-in-one workspace that can replace a half-dozen other subscriptions. Think of it as a set of LEGOs for your company's information. You can build your company wiki, manage your product roadmap, track candidates, create a content calendar, and even run a simple CRM, all in one place. Its flexibility is its superpower.
For a pre-seed startup, this consolidation is a massive money-saver. Instead of paying separately for a project management tool, a documentation platform, and a database tool, you get it all with Notion's incredibly generous free plan. This not only saves you cash but also reduces the cognitive overhead of switching between multiple apps, making your small team more focused and efficient.
Pro-Tip: Don't start from scratch. Use Notion’s extensive template library. You can find pre-built setups for investor updates, user research notes, and lightweight task management. Customise a "Startup OS" template to have your entire company hub up and running in a single afternoon.
2. Figma: Collaborative Design Without the Price Tag
In the early days, you don't need a full-time designer, but you absolutely need good design. Figma is the industry-standard tool for UI/UX design, and its free "Starter" plan is a gift to pre-seed founders. It allows you to create high-fidelity mockups, interactive prototypes, and all the design assets your developers will need.
Figma extends your runway by empowering non-designers (like you, the founder) to create professional-looking product designs. Its collaborative nature means you can work in real-time with a co-founder or a freelance developer, iterating on ideas instantly without endless email chains. This speed and accessibility mean you can get a viable product prototype in front of users and investors faster, which is critical for securing that next round of funding.
Pro-Tip: Use Figma's "Community" tab. You can find thousands of free UI kits, icon sets, and wireframe templates. This allows you to build your app's interface using pre-made, professional components, saving you hundreds of hours of design work.
3. Canva: Professional Marketing Materials for Everyone
Your startup needs to look credible long before it feels credible. This means polished pitch decks, professional social media graphics, and clean one-pagers. Hiring a graphic designer for every little thing is a fast track to an empty bank account. Canva is the solution. It's a ridiculously easy-to-use design platform that makes anyone look like a design pro.
Canva's free version is a powerhouse, offering thousands of templates for everything from Instagram posts to investor pitch decks. By using Canva, a founder can create all the necessary marketing and sales collateral in-house, saving thousands of dollars that would have gone to freelance designers. This empowers you to maintain a consistent and professional brand presence across all channels without touching your precious capital.
Pro-Tip: Create a "Brand Kit" in Canva, even on the free plan (you can manually save your brand colors and upload logos). Use it consistently across all your designs. This simple step will make your startup look far more established and professional than it is.
4. Slack: The Digital Office (on a Budget)
Effective communication is the lifeblood of a startup, especially with a small, fast-moving team. Slack is the undisputed king of team chat, and its free plan is more than enough for most pre-seed companies. It centralizes all your internal conversations, integrations, and notifications, creating a single source of truth for your team's day-to-day operations.
While it may seem like a simple chat app, Slack extends runway by saving your most valuable resource: time. It drastically reduces the need for internal emails and long, inefficient meetings. A quick question can be answered in a channel, a file can be shared instantly, and important updates are seen by everyone. The free plan's 90-day message history is a perfect forcing function, encouraging you to document important decisions in a more permanent home (like Notion!).
Pro-Tip: Make heavy use of integrations. Connect GitHub to a #dev channel for code updates, your customer feedback form to a #feedback channel, and your Twitter mentions to a #social channel. This turns Slack into a central nervous system for your entire startup.
5. HubSpot for Startups: A CRM That Grows With You
Managing customer relationships is crucial from day one, but enterprise-grade CRMs can cost a fortune. This is where the HubSpot for Startups program comes in. It provides access to their powerful marketing, sales, and service hubs at a massive discount—often up to 90% off in your first year. This includes a world-class CRM that is completely free, forever.
This program is a game-changer for capital efficiency. You get enterprise-level tools for a fraction of the cost, allowing you to build a sophisticated sales and marketing engine from the very beginning. You can track deals, manage your sales pipeline, send marketing emails, and provide customer support, all from one platform. It’s a principle I, Goh Ling Yong, have seen work wonders with the startups I advise: invest in platforms that provide scalable leverage without the upfront cost.
Pro-Tip: Start with the free HubSpot CRM immediately. Even if you only have 10 contacts, start logging every interaction. When you do eventually qualify for the startup discount, all your data will be in place, ready to be supercharged by the premium marketing and sales features.
6. MailerLite: Powerful Email Marketing, Generous Free Tier
Building an email list is one of the highest-ROI activities a startup can do. It's a direct line to your earliest supporters, potential customers, and future brand advocates. While there are many email marketing platforms, MailerLite stands out for its user-friendly interface and one of the most generous free plans available (up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month).
MailerLite extends your runway by giving you a professional email marketing and automation platform for free while you find your product-market fit. You can build landing pages, create pop-up forms, and set up automated welcome sequences without spending a dime. This allows you to nurture leads and build an audience, which is invaluable when it's finally time to launch your product.
Pro-Tip: Use the automation feature on the free plan to create a simple "welcome series" for new subscribers. Send a sequence of 3-5 emails over a week to introduce them to your brand, explain the problem you're solving, and offer them value. It’s a powerful way to build trust on autopilot.
7. Tally.so: The Form Builder That Doesn't Gouge You
You need feedback. Lots of it. You need to survey potential users, collect beta sign-ups, and get feedback on your MVP. Most online form builders have frustrating limitations on their free plans, forcing you into a paid subscription just as you're starting to get traction. Tally is different. It offers unlimited forms, unlimited questions, and unlimited responses, all for free.
This isn't just a cost-saving, it's a "data-gathering" enabler. Because there are no limits, you can run as many surveys and collect as much feedback as you want without worrying about hitting a paywall. This allows you to iterate faster and build a product that users actually want, which is the ultimate way to de-risk your venture and make your capital go further.
Pro-Tip: Embed Tally forms directly into your Notion pages to create a unified feedback dashboard. You can create a page for "User Interviews," and for each user, embed a Tally form with your standard questions. All the responses will be neatly organized right where you need them.
8. Vercel: Deploy Your Website in Seconds, for Free
In the early days, you shouldn't be wasting time managing servers. Your focus should be on building and shipping your product. Vercel is a hosting platform that makes deploying modern web applications and websites incredibly simple. With a direct integration to GitHub, you can push code and see your site go live almost instantly.
Vercel's free "Hobby" plan is unbelievably powerful and sufficient for most pre-seed startups' production needs. It provides a global CDN, automatic SSL, and enough bandwidth to handle significant traffic. This saves you from the cost and complexity of setting up and managing cloud infrastructure on platforms like AWS or Google Cloud, saving both money and precious engineering hours.
Pro-Tip: Use Vercel's "Preview Deployments" feature. For every new code change you push, Vercel creates a unique, shareable URL. This is perfect for testing new features internally or showing a specific version to an investor without affecting your live production site.
9. GitHub: The Foundation of Your Tech Stack
If you're building any kind of software, a version control system is non-negotiable. GitHub is the industry standard for hosting and managing your code. It's where your most valuable asset—your intellectual property—lives.
GitHub's free plan for teams is a cornerstone of a lean startup. It provides all the core features you need: private repositories, issue tracking, and project management tools (GitHub Projects). It fosters collaboration between your founding engineers and ensures that your codebase is secure, backed up, and well-managed from day one. This foundational stability prevents costly technical debt and development chaos down the line.
Pro-Tip: Establish good "pull request" (PR) hygiene from the very beginning, even if you're a team of one. Create a simple PR template that requires a short description of the changes and how to test them. This discipline will pay huge dividends in code quality and team scalability as you grow.
10. Hotjar: See What Your Users See
Google Analytics tells you what users are doing on your site (e.g., 50% bounced from the pricing page). Hotjar tells you why. It's a user behavior analytics tool that provides heatmaps, session recordings, and on-site surveys to give you a qualitative understanding of your user experience.
Hotjar’s free "Basic" plan is an invaluable tool for product development. You can literally watch recordings of real user sessions to see where they get confused, what they click on, and where they get stuck. This insight is worth more than a dozen focus groups and can save you months of building the wrong features. By identifying and fixing usability issues early, you improve retention and get to product-market fit faster.
Pro-Tip: Place a Hotjar heatmap on your most important pages, like your homepage and pricing page. Let it run for a week or two, then analyze the "click" and "scroll" maps. You'll be shocked at what people are (and aren't) interacting with.
11. Wave: Free, No-Nonsense Accounting
Managing your finances is critical, but paying for expensive accounting software when you have minimal transactions feels like a waste. Wave offers a surprisingly robust and completely free accounting, invoicing, and receipt-scanning platform designed for small businesses.
For a pre-seed startup, Wave is the perfect starter accounting tool. You can connect your bank accounts, categorize expenses, and send professional invoices to your first clients without any monthly fees. This keeps your books clean from the start, making due diligence much smoother when you go to raise your seed round. It extends your runway by eliminating a recurring software cost at a time when every dollar counts.
Pro-Tip: Use the Wave Receipts mobile app to scan and digitize every single business receipt the moment you get it. This habit will save you from a massive headache during tax season and ensures you can claim every possible business expense.
12. Clerky: The 'Lawyer-in-a-Box' for Startup Formation
Legal fees can be terrifying for a new founder. The costs of incorporation, founder agreements, and fundraising paperwork can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Clerky is a platform that automates and standardizes these legal processes for a flat, transparent, and much lower fee.
Clerky is a massive runway-extender because it replaces thousands of dollars in billable hours from a law firm with a reliable, streamlined software product. You can form your Delaware C-Corp, issue stock to founders, and even handle your seed financing rounds using industry-standard documents. This ensures your legal foundation is solid without draining your initial capital on preventable legal costs. My friend and fellow investor Goh Ling Yong often highlights that a clean cap table and standardized legal docs from a service like Clerky can significantly accelerate a funding round.
Pro-Tip: Use Clerky's "Post-Incorporation Setup" package. It handles critical but often-overlooked steps like the election of the board and the foreign qualification, ensuring your new company is fully compliant from day one.
13. Zapier: Your No-Code Automation Engine
Your founding team's time is your most precious, non-renewable resource. Every hour spent on manual, repetitive tasks is an hour not spent talking to users or building your product. Zapier is an automation tool that connects thousands of web apps, allowing you to create automated workflows (called "Zaps") without writing a single line of code.
Zapier's free plan, which allows for 100 tasks per month, is perfect for automating your most critical early-stage workflows. For example, you can create a Zap that automatically adds a new Tally form submission to a Notion database, then sends a notification to a Slack channel. This saves countless hours of manual data entry and context-switching, directly translating that saved time back into productive runway.
Pro-Tip: Identify one repetitive task you do every day. Is it copying email sign-ups from MailerLite to a spreadsheet? Is it manually posting blog updates to Twitter? Build your first Zap to automate that single task. The small win will open your eyes to the power of automation.
Your Stack is Your Strategy
Choosing your tools as a pre-seed startup isn't a trivial administrative task—it's a core part of your financial strategy. A bloated, expensive tech stack can sink you before you even set sail. A lean, powerful, and capital-efficient stack, like the one outlined here, acts as a force multiplier, giving you the leverage to compete with much larger and better-funded players.
Each of these 13 tools is designed to do one thing: give you more time. More time to find customers, more time to build your product, and more time to prove your model. They help you preserve your most critical resource—your runway—so you can focus on what truly matters: building a business that lasts.
Take a hard look at your current toolkit. Are you paying for things you don't need? Are you doing things manually that could be automated? Making a few strategic swaps today could add weeks, or even months, to your startup's life.
What's the one runway-extending tool you can't live without? Share your favorite in the comments below—let's help each other build smarter.
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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