My Favourite Startup Tools for Devs
As I’ve moved from failed startup idea to failed startup idea, and convinced my girlfriend that “this is the one, just give me some space to finish it and we’ll finally spend lots of time together”, I have actually picked up a few tools that are immensely useful.
Here are a few tools I seriously recommend that you consider if you ever decide to put your relationship on the line and get one of your own ideas up and running.
Feel free to leave a suggestion or two of your own in the comments.
Lean Stack
One of the best ways to be clear about your business idea and stay focused is to summarise the key aspects. Based on Lean product development principles and inspired by the Business Model Canvas, Lean Stack lets you create online lean canvases.
Simple but very useful — the lean canvas
Once I’ve summarised a business idea on a lean canvas I find it so much easier to reason about and communicate to others. Even though Lean Stack costs money, it’s only $19 per-month. And it’s so useful it’s one of the few tools I’m happy to pay for during the initial stages of a new product idea.
Lean Stack does have other features. In addition to the Lean Canvas, Lean Stack generally guides you through the different stages of running a startup using Lean Principles and practices including analytics.
Launch Rock
Is your idea any good? Is it worth spending 6 months of your spare time on or quitting your job for? The sooner you find out, the better you can prioritise your life around it, right?
Launch Rock is useful because it helps you to create coming soon pages very quickly so that you can gather feedback as fast as possible about whether your idea is worth pursuing.
create and launch a coming soon page in minutes — fully customisable
There are a number of competitors to Launch Rock including Unbounce. So if you are going to create a coming soon page it’s worth having a look around. But not all of them are free like Launch Rock. You can also create your own coming soon pages with the help of Wrap Boostrap.
Wrap Bootstrap
If you’re not a designer then creating an attractive, usable website or coming soon page may be an arduous or even futile endeavour. Whilst off-the-shelf CSS themes can be a bit ‘samey’, they’re the best option I’ve found without having to pay a designer.
Wrap Bootstrap is bursting with very reasonably-priced CSS themes using the bootstrap framework. And there are always new templates popping up. So don’t worry in the early stages of your startup about using an off-the-shelf template is my advice.
Fast and cheap compensates for a lack of uniqueness for many startups
In my experience WrapBootstrap.com is the busiest and best marketplace for bootstrap themes.
Google Analytics
Once you’ve got a coming soon page or an MVP up-and-running, you’ll almost-certainly want to get insights into how your users are using it to shape development of your product. In my experience google analytics is both powerful and very easy to get started with.
There are many other analytics packages out there that I don’t have enough experience with to comment on yet. For now, GA covers the basics very well and it’s free.
Sharethis
For many, if not every consumer-facing product, virality is the most important factor in growth. Sharethis is a simple option that will create a customised widget with share links to nearly all social media sites.
Creating a share banner with sharethis it’s literally just a few clicks
Admittedly Sharethis imposes some limits about the share messages that it creates. However, if you want to quickly knock-up your own coming soon page, Sharethis can be super-simple for getting the sharing icons on there as shown below.
A banner I made with sharethis
I haven’t looked into the analytics side of Sharethis, but they seem quite promising.
Heroku
You could probably spend ten years of your life just deciding which cloud hosting platform to deploy your code on. Fortunately Heroku is flawless and I keep going back every time.
A free tier that is completely free (including custom domains). Automated deployments on push to git. Tonnes of plugins that you can spin up in just a few moments like Elasticsearch. Keep doing what you’re doing Heroku.
Heroku has the best free-tier
FreeImages.com
Finding images for your coming soon page or MVP can take a while if you don’t want to spend a lot of money. Especially when stock image sites want you to sign up for membership and preclude you from buying just a single image.
Admittedly you’re not going to get the best of the best images on freeimages.com, but on occassion I’ve genuinely been able to find images good enough for a landing page or a twitter account background.
It’s worth checking freeimages.com before you spend money on other sites.
Parse.com
I love using parse for simple key-value storage. I also love the very generous free tier that’s certainly enough to get you up and running.
Recently I used parse to store email sign ups from a coming soon page. Once I’d registered on parse.com, almost all I had to do was use the code below to process each sign up:
val email = body("email").head
val po = new ParseObject("LandingPageEmailSubscription")
po.put("emailAddress", email)
po.saveInBackground()Once users started signing up I was then able to view them in the parse web admin UI which shows flat rows of data. And I used their HTTP API to get my data out.
Parse works amazingly-well for small flat data-sets
