Your Free Startup War-Chest : Tools, Tips & Tactics

by | Jun 25, 2015 | Entrepreneurship | 0 comments

Below is a curated list of tools and resources to help you launch, build and scale your startup, all segmented by their respective categories.

Arm yourself.

Idea Generation & Validation

Idea Generation & Validation
  • LeanCanvas — Battle-hardened business model tool.
  • QuickMVP — Easiest way to test your ideas, without wasting time or money.
  • Generator — The quickest way to make a landing page for your startup.
  • The Name App — Find a name for your brilliant idea.
  • Germ.io — Get from idea to execution.
  • Naminum — Discover a perfect company name.
  • Product Hunt — Best new products, every day.
  • Proto.io — Web platform enabling users to create fully interactive mobile app prototypes. Prototypes that feel real.
  • Startuptabs — Startup discovery search engine.
  • ErliBird — Early adopter feedback and beta testing community.
  • Launching Next — The world’s most promising startups. In one place.
  • IdeaSquares — Bringing business ideas to the crowd. Feedback and advice.
  • Surveypal — Transform online surveys into great customer experiences.
  • Qualaroo — Behaviour insight surveys.
  • SurveyMonkey — Create surveys. Get answers. For all primates.
  • Google Consumer Surveys — Market research that’s fast and accurate.

Team Workflows & Productivity

Team Workflows & Productivity
  • Slack — Team communication in one place.
  • Asana — Project MGMT tool for teams both large and small
  • Trello — The free, flexible, and visual way to organize anything with anyone.
  • Evernote — Your life’s work, organized in one place.
  • Basecamp — Chaos, organized. Manage and finish your projects, together.
  • Markticle — A highlighter for the internet.
  • Pocket — Save an article for later. Put it in your Pocket.
  • WeTransfer — Email large files (up to 2GB) free.
  • Cyfe — All in one dashboard. Sales. Social. Marketing. MGMT. Free.
  • GoogleDrive — All your files. Ready when you are. Wherever you are.
  • DropBox — Free, shared cloud storage.
  • OneTab — Save up to 95% memory and reduce tab clutter. It’s that simple.
  • Focus — A Mac app that blocks distractions for you.
  • 1Password — A password manager and secure wallet for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.
  • WorkFlowy — Organize your brain… And manage your to do lists.
  • Streak — CRM in your inbox. Turns your GMail into your new sales funnel.

Content Creation

Content Creation
  • Hemingway — Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear.
  • Grammarly — Makes you a better writer by finding and correcting up to 10x more mistakes than your word processor.
  • Pexels — Best free stock photos. In one place.
  • DesignersPics — Free hi-res photos for personal and commercial use.
  • Startup Stock Photos — Go. Make something.
  • PicJumbo — Totally free photos.
  • Medium — Everyone’s stories and ideas. In one place.
  • HubSpot Blog Topic Generator — Plug in key words and away you go.
  • ZenPen — The minimal writing tool of the web.
  • Liberio — Simple ebook creation and publishing right from GoogleDrive.
  • WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin — Plan and manage your blog posts right in your calendar.
  • Portent — Headline idea generator.
  • Compressor.io — Optimize and compress your images online.
  • Buffer — Schedule and automate social media.
  • Latergram — Schedule your Instagram posts.

Marketing & Analytics

Marketing & Analytics
  • Google Analytics — Deep analysis of your website engagements, acquisition and behaviour.
  • MailChimp — Send better email. Simply.
  • HubSpot — The world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform with 11,500+ customers in 70+ countries.
  • Customer.io — Email people based on what they do (or don’t do) in you app.
  • Really Good Emails — A collection of the best email designs in the universe.
  • Crazy Egg — Heat map and scroll map reports of how your visitors engage with your website.
  • KISSmetrics — Customer Intelligence & Web Analytics. The insights you need to optimize your marketing.
  • BuzzSumo — Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. Use plugins to drive lead generation.
  • Quick Sprout — Complete analysis of your website.
  • WordPress SEO by Yoast — A better way to do SEO via WordPress.
  • HubSpot Marketing Grader — Analyze your marketing efforts… Free.
  • Sidekick by HubSpot — Powerful profiles in your inbox. Email tracking and profile mgmt. Everyone needs a Sidekick.
  • KeywordTool.io — Free alternative to Google Keywords
  • Browseo — How search engines see your site.
  • FullContact — Stay Fully Connected and Master Your Contacts.
  • Rapportive —Get LinkedIn profiles right inside your inbox. Rapportive shows you everything you need to know.

Growth Hacking & Development

Growth Hacking & Development
  • Growth Hackers — A community, unlocking growth. Together.
  • Instapage — Makes building and A/B split testing landing pages simple.
  • Untorch — growth hacking referral tool.
  • Google PageSpeed Insights — See how your site performance is doing.
  • Blocs — Build fully-coded websites without touching a line of code.
  • Codefresh — Your complete development environment, in the cloud.
  • GitHub — Powerful collaboration, code review, and code management for open source and private projects.
  • Divide.io — An open source backend library.
  • Exit Monitor — Turns exiting website visitors into leads.
  • PetitHacks — Small hacks. Faster growth. A collection of Acquisition, Retention, & Revenue hacks used by companies.
  • Optimizely — A/B testing you’ll actually use.
  • WordPress — Create your new website for free.
  • Bootswatch — Free themes for Bootstrap.
  • Invoice to me — Free invoice generator.
  • Social Locker WP Plugin — Get users to pay for your content with a ‘tweet’.

Design

Design
  • UXCam — User experience testing for mobile and websites.
  • Canva — Incredibly simple graphic design platform for the web.
  • Pixlr — Full stack graphic design program online.
  • Social Image Resizer Tool — Optimize your images for social.
  • FlatIcon — A search engine for 16000+ glyph vector icons.
  • FontAwesome — The iconic font and CSS toolkit.
  • Bit.ly — Shorten and share your URL’s
  • Dribble — A treasure trove of “freebies” on Dribble.
  • The Noun Project — Icons. Drag, Drop, Done.
  • GraphicBurger — Tasty design resources made with care for each pixel.
  • Marvel — Free design resources from amazing designers.
  • UI Space — Freebies for User-Interface and User-Experience.
  • Pixeden — Free design resources
  • TETHR — The most beautiful iOS design kit you’ve ever seen… also happens to be free.
  • Material Palette — Generate and export your material design palette.
  • Coleurs — Pick any color. Anywhere on your screen.
  • Colorful Gradients — Computer generated gradients in a number of different styles.
  • Flat UI Color Picker — Best flat colors for UI design.
  • Filament — Floating and customizable social sharing bar.
  • ReciteThis — Turn quotes into beautiful visuals.
  • Crowdfire — Follow and unfollow on Twitter and Instagram.

Inspiration & Learning

Inspiration & Learning

Danny J. Williams

Venture For Canada | Fellow
Halifax, Canada
t. +1.(902).880.0272
w. http://dannyjwilliams.com/

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