StartupResources.io — Issue #109
Hi, it’s Jói, pumped that it’s Friday again. How has your week been?
Tool of the week
This is similar to Lead Forensics or Leadfeeder, in that it identifies the companies visiting your web site based on email address, except for that use case, it’s completely free. Where they make their money is if you want to do account-based marketing by showing ads to some of these same companies on premium publishers across Europe. That second part is maybe not so interesting for those of you in the US, but the free features compete quite well with fairly expensive offerings.
Tools discovered recently
LeadQ | Qualify leads faster — www.leadq.io
If you’re doing any outbound sales or marketing, and if you’re currently doing pre-qualification on your leads list by loading up their website, taking a quick look at it, and then categorizing as a potential lead vs. junk, then this is the tool for you. You upload a CSV containing the websites you want to look at, and it generates large snapshots of each of them so that you can go through them very fast and mark them good or bad, Tinder style. I had a case for CrankWheel where we were doing exactly this, looking at a huge number of B2B websites to see if they had some form of “Get a Demo” call to action, and this tool would have saved us a LOT of time. Check it out, there are some free credits and then it’s pay-as-you-go.
FirstPromoter | Affiliate and referral tracking for SaaS — firstpromoter.com
If I were starting an affiliate program today, I’d probably go with this. Great pricing compared to many of the others, and is custom-made for subscription businesses.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider — www.screamingfrog.co.uk
Downloadable tool for PC, Mac and Linux that allows you to quickly crawl, analyse and audit a site from an onsite SEO perspective. Freemium, then 159 GBP per year.
Sutori | Visual stories — Www.Sutori.com
Interesting tool for business and education, lets you generate visual stories that are supposed to be more engaging than a slideshow. Freemium.
Full Page Screen Capture | Chrome extension — chrome.google.com
I use this quite a lot. Sometimes all you need is just a full static screen capture of the web page you’re on (including ALL of the web page, not just what shows up above the fold). This extension does a good job and is free.
Articles for this week
SaaS Product Validation Techniques — ryanbattles.com
Product validation is the crucial foundation for building a successful startup, a process that cannot be taken lightly. Here’s a good round-up of techniques you can use to validate your product before spending too much on building it.
Product Monetization Strategies — www.departmentofproduct.com
Fairly deep piece on generating ideas for how to monetize your product.
Content Marketing Analytics: 11 Ways Data Can Inform Your Content Strategy — www.alexbirkett.com
Tons of actionable advice on how to be a data-driven content marketer.
Don’t Let Your North Star Metric Deceive You — www.reforge.com
Having a single metric that you make your most important one is a good idea, however as this article goes into in detail, the north star metric is often an “output metric” (i.e. a result not completely under your control) and you should often also identify “input metrics” that you want to track, that influence your north star metric.
That’s it for this issue
I have a question for you to think about. I spent this week on vacation in sunny Barcelona with my spouse. It rained a couple of days, and something I noticed was that as soon as it was about to start raining, in any of the popular tourist destinations you would see folks pop up, selling cheap umbrellas for €5, that they probably bought off Aliexpress for under €1 each. Now, it would be hard to sell these while it’s dry, and once it’s started pouring it’s too late, but somehow they manage to hit that sweet spot where you can tell it’s about to rain, or it just started drizzling, and that’s when they probably make 90%+ of their sales. Which leads me to my question: What’s your “umbrella moment” for your business? The timing or circumstance where you can make a sale very easily?
Until next time!
Cheers,
Jói
P.S. Need someone to help you with your business plan, or even with fundraising for your startup? I’ve talked about Toptal before, but mostly for programmers. They also have financial professionals to help your business, who are vetted as being in the top 3% (and there is the same money-back guarantee for the first couple of weeks if you find that things aren’t working out). If you end up checking out Toptal, please do me a favor and use our affiliate link to help support this newsletter!
