StartupResources.io — Issue #86
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Hi, it’s Jói, which means it’s already Friday!
I hope you got everything done that you wanted this week. I’ve been busy celebrating my spouse’s birthday as well as my own, and I got to exercise my (very old) stone masonry skills a bit as part of some renovation we’re doing, so I’ve been working a bit less than usual, but nevertheless with my team at CrankWheel we did manage to launch our WordPress plug-in, which I’m quite excited about.
Growth tip
Whenever you publish something online where you link to or mention others or their articles, products, resources, or companies, send them a quick email to let them know about your thing and nonchalantly encourage them to share it.
I do this all the time and it helps build relationships, drive shares, and can open doors for other things.
Since I do this so often, I’ve wondered whether to build a Chrome extension to help do this job by letting you select the relevant links in your article, for which the extension would automatically dig up product/article titles, email addresses of those you should inform, and automatically composing and sending the emails for you. This is essentially what my VA does today for this kind of outreach, and it could be 90% automated. Let me know if such a tool would be of interest to you (just reply to this email)!
Tool of the week
Zencastr
This is what I used last time for the CrankWheel podcast, and I think I’ll be using it from now on. The sound quality it achieves by recording both sides individually and then doing post-processing is quite good (judge for yourself) and miles better than simply recording a phone call or Skype conversation. I think it’s especially good considering that neither I nor my interviewee had any kind of special microphone or audio setup. Very reasonable pay-as-you-go scheme for post-production, or you can get a free trial of their monthly plan that includes additional features and plenty of post-production.
Tools/resources I actually used recently
Complice | Daily Goal Progress & Planning — complice.co
I’ve been testing this for the last few days, it’s essentially a pretty sleek implementation of Benjamin Franklin’s morning question of “What good shall I do today?” as well as the “What good have I done today?” evening question, plus some other best practices for focusing your work and achieving your goals. So far it looks quite useful. 14-day free trial.
The Ultimate Growth Hacking Resource
This document by Deep Kakkad, which I am sharing with his kind permission, is a fantastic list of free tools, articles, growth hackers to follow, books to read, and much more to help you on your growth hacking journey.
PixelMe — Retargeting links
This is a link shortener that lets you add retargeting pixels (e.g. for Facebook or Google retargeting) to an interstitial page that is shown briefly before showing the destination page. Useful for shortening links that you share outside of your own domain or that you boost (e.g. using Quuu), so that you can retarget users who have seen content you shared that was not your own. I started using it recently for CrankWheel.
Share Email as Link (Chrome Extension) — chrome.google.com
This is a pretty neat, simple extension, with a freemium version. Lets you create a link that you can use to share the contents of any of your Gmail threads with anyone (no sharing permissions involved — just the link).
Tools discovered recently
Create professional infographics in minutes. Grow your audience.
A little pricey, but seems interesting for folks who put out a lot of infographics. No design skills needed as far as I understand it.
Scheduler | Restream.io
This lets you schedule pre-recorded videos to go out as live streams on multiple platforms. The underlying Restream platform that lets you live-stream to 30+ platforms at once is also quite interesting. Free version available of both.
Newsletter of the week
Failed Startup Interviews: Failory — failory.com
Failory is a community where failed startup owners tell their stories and the mistakes they committed so that future entrepreneurs can learn from them. Quite interesting, making it one of my favorite newsletters that I actually read from end to end quite often.
Articles for this week
Persuasive Techniques in Website Optimization: The Ultimate Guide for SaaS (100+ persuasion techniques)
A very comprehensive guide to persuasive techniques you can use on your website. It’s a HUGE article of about 32K words. They say it’s a guide for SaaS but I’d say 95% of the advice is good for any web-based business.
Being a Startup Founder is a minimum wage job — Here’s the proof
This article says that 50% of founders are making less than $6 an hour. Some of the advice for how to avoid that revolves around taking in less investment. What do you think?
Our Odd Startup: 3 ½ Guys, No VC, Profitability, and Patience
I like this one as it tells of a startup the likes of which I think a lot of folks reading this are running: A fairly small niche play that can still be very successful.
That’s it for this issue
As always it’s a pleasure and a privilege writing this newsletter for you. I hope you enjoy the selection of tools and resources and that you find stuff here that actually helps you build your startup.
If there’s anything you’d like to see improved, please reply to this email to let me know.
Cheers,
Jói
