When me and my co-founder decided to startup, many advised us that it’s not easy. That we knew, and hence we ignored. The purpose of starting Coatom was not to make money, or to get fame, or to be our own boss. But it is a reflection of what we’re enjoying today in life through coaching and we thought we should let many more to benefit from it. We are connecting the world to coaches through Coatom.
Coatom is a lean startup, both by the features to deliver its promises and also in terms of investment. While Eric helped us — indirectly — to make the former lean, we want to thank 10 different startups (all forms and sizes) for making the latter a reality. We've spend hardly any money yet (few thousand US dollars until now), and we’ve an awesome product which is almost ready and going live by end of April.
You may know few of these startups for sure. But we are certain that the rest would be a surprise to you.
1. Shihabs.com
Shihab is our friend and a gifted designer from Bangalore, India. We know him for years now and he has got a boutique design shop online. He helped us creating the Coatom logo, web page designs for our early validation as well as the private-beta pages (currently live), and the actual product UI. Amazingly talented and we love his this work among all. If you want to create an awesome logo / landing page for your startup, try him once. He can give you some outstanding design options, we guarantee!
Shihab is also on board at Coatom as a consulting director for creating brand and user centric designs. Take a look at his design for validating the Coatom idea.
2. Bufferapp.com
Buffer is one of the most useful tools for any startups to engage with their audience through social media. Their simple scheduling and content recommendations are helping us to share relevant content to all who follow us on Twitter and Facebook. They do have a free plan, but limited to only one social media account. Since we want to manage both our Facebook and Twitter accounts, we have their awesome plan. It’s seriously awesome for just $10 per month.
Besides the company, we love the founder as well. We’ve blogged about Joel a month back.
3. Canva.com
Although Shihab is on board and helping us with design, we use Canva extensively for creating creative assets for social media as well as designs for the website. I’m a reasonably creative marketeer — besides a product guy — but do not know how to use Photoshop. Canva fills that gap so nicely and today I’m able to create decent designs with ease. And you should know that it’s absolutely free!
They also have a paid plan where you pay $1 per a professionally made image / photo if you need.
4. Mailchimp.com
We saw little over 1,000 users signing up during our pre-launch campaign in Jan. As the product is few months away then, we wanted to engage with them. Like many, we also used Mailchimp.
It’s brilliant in just one word. In less than 3 minutes, our first campaign was ready!
Their free plan for 12,000 emails per month is more than sufficient to keep the audience engaged for a startup. They've included everything in the free plan — Simple management of mailing lists, advanced segmentation & targeting, ready-to-use templates & wizard, mail merge previews, etc.
I don’t think we would have got this stunning results — 56% open rate and 15% click through rate — for a campaign if we didn't use Mailchimp.
5. Betali.st
I read this blog post in Jan which lists the no: of websites where you can list your startup to get visibility and traffic while it is in beta. We did that at most places suggested, but one site stood out clearly — Betali.st. It is the top most referral traffic source for us.
Almost 30% of the signups happened through them and we can’t thank them enough than writing about it. They reviewed us in less that 2 weeks after submitting in Jan and still we get traffic from them. More than the traffic, we are delighted with the recognition and opportunities we’ve got through them. Many potential partners discovered us there and wrote to us.
By the way, this submission is free. You can pay $49 to expedite the review (within 48 hours), if desired.
6. Medium.com
You are reading this post on our blog, but we have a better blog on Medium. A select few posts from this blog are there at our official medium page and we are thankful to Joel for adding them to the LifeTips — a curated collection on Medium.
Medium helps startups to build brand among its target audience through curated collections — like LifeTips — which are followed by a niche, but highly relevant audience. This most popular collection should help you to identify the niche for your startup offering.
Evan Williams — the founder of Medium — is another startup founder we love, and we've blogged about his simplicity.
7. Uservoice.com
We would have struggled if we didn't have Uservoice. There are about 40+ FAQs we have related to Coatom and it will be at least a 2 days of effort for us to put it on our website. With uservoice, we did that in less than 2 hours. Absolutely stunning and extremely simple to set-up.
Yes, it’s free for a limited use, but that’s more than enough for a startup. We look forward to use their widget (support+feedback+suggestions, all in one) when we take Coatom live — it’s really cool!
8. Peek.usertesting.com
While we were getting good feedback about what we are building, we thought it will be interesting to know what a random user think of us. Our search for a reviewer landed us on Peek, a simple crowdsourced user testing tool from usertesting.com.
On a Sunday, one random user landed on our site and spend over 5 minutes reviewing it. The feedback was positive and we blogged about it. You should know that Peek is free for 3 reviews per month. Try it out if you haven’t yet.
9. Codebrahma.com
Codebrahma is one of the best RoR development company we've come across so far. They are specialized in building MVPs for startups.
They are in command of building the awesome Coatom platform and their CEO — Anand — was the first employee of the popular Interview Street. His team has been working smart for the last one month and getting the Coatom ready for its launch by end of April.
Of course, the development is not free — but very cost effective in case you don’t have a tech co-founder on board. Some of their MVPs are here and this include the Angelist of India.
10. Redfern productions
Meet Chris, the founder and creative director of Redfern productions. He just finished creating an awesome curtain raiser video for us. Again not very expensive for a startup in case you would like to have a professionally made video for your startup. While we were scouting for someone to build a video for Coatom, we stumbled upon his short film — Lucy.
It’s worth watching!
Now this has been our experience so far. Would you like to add to the list based on your startup building experience? We would love to hear about those.
