StartupResources.io — Issue #93
Happy New Year!! And Happy FFOTY (First Friday of the Year 😜). It’s Jói, back in your inbox once more.
I hope you’ve had a wonderful holiday season and are raring to go now that a new year has started. Here’s to a great 2018!!
Sponsored tool of the week 👍
Downtime is costly, NodePing Uptime Monitoring — nodeping.com
Driving traffic and capturing customers is challenging enough for a startup. If your site isn’t working right, it’s impossible. NodePing is a cost effective way to make sure your sites and services are working well so you can get on with running your business.
Articles for this week
Building a Repeatable, Scalable & Profitable Growth Process (for SaaS) — www.slideshare.net
For SaaS folks, this presentation will be quite valuable. Maybe nothing you haven’t heard before, but very concise and ties things together regarding the phases you need to recognize, the models for sales (salespeople vs. no salesforce) and the difference they create, and more.
Retention is Hard, and Getting Harder — Here’s Why — www.reforge.com
Good read on retention and why it’s getting harder, in particular I think looking at things in terms of channel fatigue is a good approach.
Blogging Statistics and Trends: The 2017 Survey of 1000+ Bloggers — www.orbitmedia.com
Bloggers are working harder and writing longer posts, and blogging frequency has gone down a bit. Higher frequency still predicts better results though, as does having an editor look at your work before publishing.
155 Irresistible Power Words To Drive Sales To Your eCommerce Store
An article on power words and how to use them. Applicable to any copywriting, not just for e-commerce.
Tool of the week
LambdaTest | Browser compatibility testing in the cloud — www.lambdatest.com
This service is similar to BrowserStack (which I use and have recommended in the past) but at about 50% lower price point, plus these folks have a free plan for limited monthly testing. Lets you test live (within your browser) on 1400+ browser versions, and also do screenshot tests and responsive tests across multiple browsers simultaneously.
Tools discovered recently
Simple Invoices | Invoice clients, store credit cards — simpleinvoices.io
Makes it easy to send and pay invoices in seconds. $10/month.
Beacon | Lead Magnets in Minutes — beacon.by
Tool to convert existing blog posts into eBooks. Similar to Designrr, but Beacon has a free plan if you’re OK with having their co-branding.
Give it a URL and it’ll create a minimal type of brand guide from that URL (colors and fonts). May be useful for inspiration… also goes well with the next tool.
Frontify | Brand guide management — frontify.com
This is a tool to create and manage a brand guide. Probably more interesting for agencies and medium-sized operations and up, as the pricing may be a bit high for small startups.
Resources discovered recently
30 Templates & Vector Kits to Design Your Own Infographic — www.hongkiat.com
Lots of free kits to use when building infographics.
BaseUI | Design Faster Than Ever (for Sketch) — getbaseui.com
This is a collection of 180 templates for Sketch to start a design easily. You can pick your own colors, change fonts, etc. There is also a free version with 40 templates.
unDraw | Colorful illustrations — undraw.co
Fair number of vector illustrations that are MIT licensed. What’s neat is, you can customize them to use a specific highlight color (e.g., to match your brand) before downloading.
That’s it for this issue
Thanks for reading. As always, it’s a pleasure and a privilege putting together these newsletters for you.
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Cheers,
Jói
