This is a guest post by Ben Keene. You can find out more about Ben here.
It feels like we’re in a new period of easy-to-use online tools to test, launch and build our projects. We are less dependent on developers (in the early stages at least) and the biggest challenge is finding the time to figure out which tools work best for us.
In workshops at Escape and Virgin, and with my own projects I’ve seen the need for these tools increase. I’ve spent too much time and money withTribewanted and other projects trying to build bespoke online platforms when, so often for our audience, less is more. The lean startup movement has cemented this mindset.
Whatever you need the answer is probably already ‘out there’ and it won’t be expensive. Of course, time is pretty valuable — so hopefully some of these will help save you some of that, as well as the cash too.
One thing is for sure, there is no excuse for not pushing your idea cheaply, quickly and smartly out into the world.
Website Building
For personal branding, user-testing, product launches or full-blown businesses.
Strikingly: Slick landing pages your Granny could build.
Launchrock: Smart email-gathering product launch pages
Squarespace: The best non-coding web-builder I know.
Divi: Putting the rest of the WordPress themes to shame.
Fiverr: Logos for a fiver. Designed by humans. Yes, really.
Withoopmh: Logos for nothing. Designed by robots.
Feedback & Validation
Rapid feedback on ideas, prototypes and products can lead to quality market validation and future campaigns.
Twitter: Open a twitter account with the name of your idea. Follow 100+ people/orgs in the industry that your idea is in. Check back 24 hours. If 20% or more followed you back, you have something.
User Testing: Get videos of real people speaking their thoughts as they use your website or mobile app
Typeform: Elegant and fun new way to get people to give you online feedback.
Google Forms: Simple, quick and all integrated with your google world.
Survey Monkey: Old school, but still great for online surveys.
Optimizely: A/B test your landing page. Also see Parse.
Payments
Taking payments is a big one for most startups and this is where I’ve seen the biggest jumps forward over the last couple of years.
Stripe: Finally a decent alternative to paypal with actual customer service.
Square: Replaces the till / register / chip & pin.
gocardless: Recurring payments by Direct Debit (EU only)
Moonclerk: More recurring payments integrated with Stripe
Plasso: Payments made easy.
Social Marketing
Email: Sometimes its best to cut out the fluff and just email. Make it personal!
Mailchimp: Claims to be better than email. Often is.
Facebook: Still the biggest referrer of traffic for most startups.
Tweetdeck: Manage your social media marketing easily.
Hootsuite: If you don’t like tweetdeck — great for scheduling.
Instagram: Fashion, food & travel startups — this is your home.
Intercom: Shows you who is using your product and makes it easy to personally communicate with them.
Blogging
Medium: Here we are!
Maptia: The future of travel writing
Ghost: Like Medium.
Tumblr: Biggest blogging platform in the world today
Events
Meetup: Lots and lots of events businesses only live on here.
Eventbrite: Tickets for everything.
Picatic: Event ticketing with crowdfunding tool and you pay what you want!
Maps
Google: The original.
Pinterest: We did a cool map of the world’s treehouses using pinterest.
Book Keeping
Xero: Small business accounting in the cloud
Kashflow: Does the books so you don’t have to!
Analytics and Metrics
Google: The original analytics app but not that user friendly.
Crazy Egg: Prefer pictures to numbers? Heat map visuals of where people click on your website.
Go Squared: Easy to use web analytics.
Mix Panel: Actions speak louder than page views.
Kiss Metrics: Gives you the insights you need to optimize your marketing.
Webmention: for keeping tabs on who is talking about you.
Control your inbox
Unroll.me: for controlling your inbox.
Slack: An alternative for email for teams
You want more? Really? This is the rest of the startup toolkit iceberg.
This is also brilliant from Rik Lomas: How to run a startup without ruining your life.
Thanks to Jonny from Maptia and Dom from Escape for shaping this toolkit with me. Please add your tools to this list in the comments below — I’m always on the look out.
