Our favorite digital tools for building startups: Marketing and Creative Edition

25madison
7 min readMay 20, 2021

If you caught the first edition of this story last month, you already know our favorite tools for Workflow Management and Research. We’re building on that lineup and dishing out our Marketing and Creative tool essentials.

Spoiler alert: if you’re looking for a start-up starter pack, Webflow and Figma top our list as must-haves.

By: The Studio Team at 25madison

Marketing

ActiveCampaign: Goldilocks email platform

When it comes to email marketing platforms, we’ve tried them all. Mailchimp, Sendgrid, ExactTarget, Responsys, ActiveCampaign and more. While they all have their ideal targets, our favorite for startups is ActiveCampaign. It’s the Goldilocks of marketing platforms with the right amount of functionality for early-stage companies looking to lean into automated marketing. The functionality is sophisticated enough for career marketers to build elaborate automated campaigns while maintaining simplicity within the UI. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you play around in the tool for a few hours and watch a few tutorial videos, you can quickly build out personalized, multi-touch campaigns.

BeePro: Email coding WYSIWYG

When we’re launching an email marketing campaign, BeePro is our go to email design tool. BeePro makes creating beautiful emails easy. With the ability to simply drag and drop elements that we want to include in the email body, we can quickly create emails that we’re excited about sharing. We love the marriage between Figma, Beepro, and ActiveCampaign. What we design in Figma is easily stitched together in BeePro and distributed through ActiveCampaign.

But really, we’re just thankful that email building has come a long way since the days of HTML coding in Dreamweaver.

Pro Tip: BeePro’s HTML export function, complete with image hosting is perfect for providing the email code for other distribution partners to distribute on your behalf.

Typeform: The natural language form creator

Typeform is everything, seriously. It’s such a simple survey and form platform but is incredibly…

25madison

25madison is an NYC-based venture studio, incubating companies from the ground up and investing in early-stage companies. Learn more at 25madison.com.