Tools that had an impact on my life as a startup founder
I’ve started my first company 12 years ago, when I was 22.
During that time I’ve learned that being a founder is not an easy job. It’s like having the worst boss you could ever have inside your head. Building at a startup is not a 9 to 5 job. It’s the most demanding job you can ever have: It doesn’t end when you leave the office, but it becomes a lifestyle. You’re a founder at the gym, at a pub, while having a beer with your friends, in bed with your girlfriend, in every social and personal context. Because you know that your own future is in your hands and that it all depends on your actions, you’re in a constant pursuit of opportunities to gain exposure, traction or adoption. It’s like a virus, but that kind of a virus that you don’t wanna get rid of too soon.
There are many key areas that you’ll have to handle: validating your product, keeping your team focused and motivated, seeking investment, handling the cash flow, networking with the key influencers in your industry, generating good-quality traffic at the lowest cost possible and converting it into trials, getting feedback from the customers, closing strategic partnerships, etc.
With a startup there are so many opportunities to chase and so many things to get done. So what’s the best approach when you have so many things to do and so little time to do them all? Prioritise to do’s and use the best tools available.
Below are the best free and paid tools I use to fulfill my needs as a startup founder. Before starting to use them (or any other tool for the matter) by yourself, make sure they support the best thing to do for each and every stage. Nowadays, it’s about how you are spending your most precious resource: time.
Validating your product
Make sure that you differentiate your product from the competition and then scan the web for key influencers in your market. Get in touch with them, find out what are their needs and get feedback on your solution.
Tools to use:
Free: Twitter Search and LinkedIn
Paid: Tweepi ($19)
Tweepi is a nice tool that you can use to identify and follow specific users interested in your topic. For example, we are targeting users tweeting about A/B testing, CRO software and growth hacking. With Tweepi, we instantly got a list of 2300 users in our target, sorted by another tool that measures someone’s online influence, Klout Score. We contacted these people and presented our solution and got 10 key people from the industry to give us a porfessional feedback.
Keeping your team motivated
It’s happiness that keeps us going. In a great Ted Talk, The happy secret to better work, Shawn Anchor reveals that happiness inspires productivity. So, making sure that you and your team are happy is also part of building a successful startup.
Tools to use:
Free: Weekly creative and entertaining gatherings, taking lunch together or having a beer after work, etc.
Paid: Tinypulse ($19/month)
Tinypulse is a product that helps you to get valuable feedback from your team. Having so many things to pay attention to, from time to time, you might forget why you’re building this together with your team: to make something valuable, outstanding, to feel happy and accomplished, to follow your passion…you name it. Tinypulse is the kind of tool that keeps you on track by sending a few simple questions to the team. Then it provides weekly insights about your team’s morale and needs
Growth hacking
Growth hacking means so much more than traffic acquisition. Everyone can spend money to get traffic. You can use PPC to validate your UVP, website and pricing, but on the long run you want to use the leverage effects to gain exposure and to become more effective by decreasing the promotional costs. Positive Word of Mouth and recommendation are the most valuable channels to bring traffic on your website.
Tools:
Unbounce (from $49)
If you want to quickly have a professional landing page that you can bring traffic to, then Unbounce is the solution. It allows you to build, publish and test pages without I.T. support and to also use one of their 80 fully customizable templates
Marketizator (from $19) Disclaimer: this is the tool I’m building right now
Marketizator is a 3 in 1 conversion rate optimization platform. You can recover abandoned visitors through exit-intent triggered interactions, be more relevant through web personalization with dynamic variables replacement (city, keyword, etc), find the best converting version of your website through A/B testing with a simple visual editor and get valuable insights with segmented surveys. On top of these, you can even negotiate and generate conversation scenarios with branching logic, so that you can capture qualified leads.
Sneak-peaking
Tools to use:
BuiltWith (from $295)
BuiltWith is a tool that allows you to see how big is the market penetration of any technology player. You can find things like how many top 10000 websites are using your competitor’s technology, what is the market distribution in a specific industry, and you can even download a list with leads — all the websites that are using technology X.
Want to see the main referrals and keywords that bring traffic to a specific website? Or to feel like you are in their analytics account? Try SimilarWeb Pro and you can do it. I used it to compare 20 different websites with over 20k unique visitors/month.
Managing your financials
In business, it’s about the numbers. So keeping an eye on your financial status and forecast, not mixing the personal money with those of the company and being able to track your progress are part of the process of building a startup, too.
Tools to use:
Free: Excel, Google Docs
Paid:
Pulseapp (from $14)
Pulse app is a easy to use tool to keep track of your cash flow. You can see realistic reports and what-if reports, so that you can decide how much you can spend in the next period.
Liveplan ($19)
Liveplan is an easy to use tool for creating and adjusting your business plan. One of its great features is a scoreboard that allows you to track the past performance of your business and to adjust your focus on what matters the most.
Seeking investment
First of all, remember is not about the money. As Gary Vaynerchuk stated: “My dad taught me that when you borrow money it’s the worst day of your life.” Almost all of Inc 500 companies bootstrapped their way to success.
But if you do need investment, act rationally and go after the big fish. Don’t waste too much time hunting for investors, but focus on your tasks and make sure to have a stable product. If your business is worth to invest in, the investors will come to you. ☺
Tools to use:
Paid: Dealmarket
Dealmarket is a new service that connects investors with entrepreneurs and vendors. You can post your company’s deal here and get contacted by real investors, interested in what you have to offer.
Networking with key-people in your market
Even though we’re doing online businesses, relationships matter a lot. And good networking means real leverage. Keep in mind that being noticed by a strong influencer or journalist in your industry and convincing him to spread the word about your company could be worth more than getting a new customer.
Tools to use: LinkedIN, Twitter
Paid: LinkedIn Premium
You can’t imagine how important InMails can be. Besides other benefits, LinkedIn guarantees that you pay only for getting an answer from key influencers you want to get in touch with. So you get to pay around $60 to get in touch with 10 important people in your industry, which is almost equal with the average CPC in AdWords ☺
Traackr (from $500)
Traackr helps you monitor and interact with industry influencers, see their activity, manage relations with them. It also helps you to create reports on what they are talking about and how your brand and those of your competitors are perceived in the market.
Nurturing your current users
Tools to use: Intercom (from $49)
Having a customer means having a relationship. Suitable for SaaS companies, Intercom is a CRM for web apps that allows you to have conversations with your users based on their in-app behaviour. You can segment them by using criteria such as influence score (remember Klout), number of followers on Twitter and then send them notifications in-app or by e-mail.
Of course, there are a lot of other useful tools, but I’ve found that these made a difference for me in terms of performance. However, don’t forget that it’s not only about the car. It’s about the driver, also.
