StartupResources.io — Issue #135
It’s a chilly Friday in Iceland as I write this. Fortunately we have the wonders of modern technology to keep us warm. None of this week’s tools literally provide heat, but they are nevertheless hot 🔥🌶
⚙️ Tool of the week
ChargeDesk | Billing support system — chargedesk.com
This is a bridge between your payments/subscription system and your support system, letting your customer support agents resolve more billing issues more easily. Looks super awesome. Supports all the major customer support systems, and all the major payment/subscription gateways and services. Starts at $29/month after a free trial.
🛠 Tools discovered recently
Freshping by Freshworks | Free 1-minute uptime monitoring — www.freshworks.com
Here’s a free uptime monitoring service from a reputable company, that actually gives you a large number of 1-minute monitors absolutely for free (typically the free services do 5-minute or 10-minute monitoring). Nice!
Continually | Automatic responses to common chat requests — continual.ly
The idea here is to convert more website visitors to customers by responding automatically, so that visitors don’t get the dreaded “we’ll get back to you tomorrow” autoresponse from your on-site chat. Free for up to 1,000 page views per month.
Slidebean | Online presentation software — slidebean.com
This presentation tool aims to separate your content from your design, making it a lot quicker to make presentations. Looks interesting, and is free for a limited number of presentations.
Zapier Paths | Conditional workflows — zapier.com
Many of you probably already use Zapier, and if you don’t here’s one more reason to love it. You can now build conditional workflows, so that your execution logic branches based on the input data from your trigger. Very cool!
Buy Me A Coffee | Free and easy way to monetise your content — www.buymeacoffee.com
This is an easy to set up and free way to get financial support from your audience without being too pushy.
🤓 Articles of the week
What Founders Need to Know: You Were Funded for a Liquidity Event — Start Looking — startupresources.io
In this syndicated post, Steve Blank reminds founders who’ve taken funding that they need to look for potential acquirers.
Selling Software To Large Businesses
This article on selling SaaS or software to large enterprises, even as a solo founder, really rang true for me based on my own experiences. It’s part of a newsletter sequence by the same author, check out the signup link near the bottom of the article if you’d like more from him.
The Ultimate Email Prospecting Guide: Best Practices & Tips — www.voilanorbert.com
A good and comprehensive guide for email prospecting, by the folks at Voila Norbert who provide one of the premier tools for this. Cold email can work and can be relevant, but please don’t spam!
11 B2B Copywriting Tips to Boost Engagement Right Now — www.elisedopson.co.uk
Good, clear advice for keeping readers more engaged with B2B copy. It’s more about website copy than emails, but some of the advice will be relevant for your cold emails, newsletters and onboarding sequences as well.
Creating Brand Identity for Small Business — businessarticleshub.com
I liked this one. Who says a business can’t have a thought-out brand identity even if you don’t have the $$$$$ to contract with an agency for the work?
😢 That’s it for this issue
I have a pile of stuff left that needs to get done this week, and it’s almost the weekend. Better get cracking! How about you? Anything exciting in store for the weekend? I hope so.
Cheers,
Jói
P.S. Need a freelance programmer? Toptal is my go-to place if I need to find someone good, fast. They hire only the top 3% and back up the professionalism of their folks with a money-back guarantee for the first couple of weeks if you don’t feel like things are working out. If you end up checking them out, please do me a favor and use our affiliate link to help support this newsletter!
