Aug 11, 2017
StartupResources.io — Issue #73
Hi again folks,
Another week, another issue!
I finally had time to wrap up the second installment of the $0 Subscription Startup Stack series. I meant for the second part to cover sales and marketing, but just writing the sales part it’s already longer than the first installment, so this will now be a 4-part series, not a 3-part one, and the next one will discuss no-subscription tools for marketing. I hope you read and enjoy!
Below are the results of last week’s one-click survey. Looks like a large majority of the community are mostly busy making money either on the inbound or outbound side. Me, I’m one of the outliers mostly doing customer support lately, but that’s because of the Appsumo thing which is dying down now.
We have fewer answers this time than for the first couple of surveys so I’ll lay off for a couple of weeks on the surveys and then hit you with something so incredibly exciting you won’t be able to resist answering.
Article of the week
The $0 Subscription Startup Stack — Part 2 of 4: Start selling — startupresources.io
This is the second part of my series on how to run a startup without paying any fixed monthly subscriptions. I hope you enjoy it, and I’d love your feedback!
Tool of the week
Hunter TechLookup — techlookup.hunter.io
This is similar to BuiltWith except in reverse. Can be great for prospecting. Say for example you have a new plug-in for WordPress users whose sites are in Japanese, Hunter TechLookup would let you derive a list of these websites, you can even filter for popularity or search for an intersection of multiple technologies.
Tools I actually used recently
Aircall | Cloud Based Call Center App — aircall.io
I used this in the early days, it’s grown more sophisticated since then (and a bit pricier, but still not terrible). It’s a very easy way to set up various types of call centers in the cloud. No hardware needed, they have a mobile and a desktop softphone and can also forward to mobile phones, and they integrate with CRMs and Helpdesk software.
AVOXI Cloud Communications — Business VoIP — www.avoxi.com
Since I listed Aircall, I’ll also list what I switched to for cost reasons when Aircall increased their rates, which is AVOXI. They’re an old-school VoIP provider, you use a softphone on your PC or you can use a desk SIP phone. They will also do cellphone forwarding. Comparing the interface of Aircall and AVOXI is like looking at Microsoft Bob vs. iOS, but AVOXI is solid and we got a very competitive rate for our needs.
Freerange Stock | Totally Free Commercial Photography and Textures — freerangestock.com
There’s quite a lot here, with a decent search engine and a usable license. Just note that they also list photos from Shutterstock (in a separate section from the free results). I’m using this for my latest blog post.
SiteGuru — Check your website for SEO and usability issues
It’s a free SEO checklist, which found some issues on www.startupresources.io that I was unaware of (and am probably still working on by the time you read this 🤓), and provided actionable insight. If you sign up using your email, they’ll analyze up to 25 pages on your site.
Tools discovered recently
FunnelDash — Facebook Ad LTV & ROI Tracking
If you’re fairly sophisticated in analyzing your marketing spend, this might be for you. It does long-term LTV and ROI measurements for Facebook ads, for a significantly longer period than Facebook itself will track.
Hypersay — Engage audiences during live presentations — hypersay.com
Anyone here giving live talks? This looks like an interesting tool you could try. It lets you add quizzes and other forms of interaction that are attached to the slides you are showing, that audience members can participate in using their mobile device.
LogoCrisp — Create your own Logo for Free Online — www.logocrisp.com
Here’s another logo maker to try out. Compared to Logojoy which we had a discount for last week, this one has a lot more symbols/graphics going for it so you’ll get some more colorful logos. It also gives you a lot more options right away, which for some may be great (I got a slight case of choice anxiety).
A marketplace for help with marketing. Maybe worth exploring even if only to discover the different categories of marketing you might want to spend more effort on.
Articles for this week
How We Doubled Traffic & Revenue, and Tripled Our List Size in 8 Months — rankingformula.com
This is a very specific case study with lots of data showing how they built traffic, revenue and the email list for their blogging website using pure white hat techniques.
Top 157 Sales Tools: The Complete List (2017) — www.saleshacker.com
A huge list of tools related to sales, with a brief description of each. My goal: To be on this list in its 2018 update. Also, I’ll be looking at a bunch of these in more detail and will highlight the best ones in upcoming issues.
Content Curation Tools: The Ultimate List for Beginners and Pros — www.curata.com
Another absolutely monster list, this one of content curation tools of various types. As with the other huge list, I’ll be taking a look at a bunch of these in more detail (I’m curating content, after all…) and will highlight any that I find particularly interesting.
Artificial intelligence: Professor Toby Walsh on 10 ways society will change by 2050
Another very forward-looking article. Food for thought on what the next set of opportunities in technology could be.
That’s it for this issue
Last weekend, my spouse and I took a long weekend break to drive the ring road around Iceland (and then some — about 1600 km / 1000 miles in total) to see the sights and camp four nights in our car (who doesn’t want that?). It was a fantastic trip.
An idea we had as we were doing all of that driving was: Why isn’t there an interactive location-based guidebook app for our phones that could tell us about interesting stuff as we drove past it, and that could possibly even answer questions related to the sights around us. Anybody know of some startups building something like that?
Thanks for reading. Until next week!
Cheers,
Jói
PS
If you need to find solid freelance software developers, designers or finance experts and you don’t want to waste time taking chances, I’d recommend taking a look at Toptal. They screen to find the top 3% of freelance talent, and there’s a 2-week no-risk guarantee if you’re not happy with the talent they match you with.
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