Are you trying to build a startup (product)? Are you just looking to level up as a founder? well I made a list of my favorite tools I currently use, or have used before. Enjoy!

Disclosure, I am the founder of Founderfox a mobile app designed specifically to help founders level-up, join a community that will empower you to learn, connect, pitch, and share all kinds of cool startup shit.

Ideation

GoogleDocs- I use this because I can quickly brain dump things and then easily send them to my cofounder and he can jump in and add to it, its free and easy to use and its mobile.

Slack- We use Slack even though we sit next to each other, we mainly use it just to quickly pass files (assets..etc) and jump in every now and again to chat in Slack groups, mainly SSG (Startup study group)

For generating actual startup ideas, this is something you need to figure out on your own :)

Naming and all that jazz is done using Namecheap.com (domain purchasing) also I advise checking The USPTO to see if the name you want is trademarked..etc. http://www.uspto.gov/trademark

here is some other cool resourses I know

Building

If you can code, perfect!.. If you can design, great! if you can’t do any of that, then try these tools

For development needs you have tons of options but you’ll need to pay for them, try https://gun.io/ I have herd some good things with them, you can also try to find a cofounder who can code (Twitter + LinkedIn). It will get expensive if you’re paying out of pocket for development. (unless you’r outsourcing to India, but don’t do that)

If you want to learn to code try Codecademy or Codeschool also One month rails is cool.

For mobile dev start here first then branch out. Here is my fav, this one helped me huge, its called Appcoda after I did all of these classes, I just started building my own apps and learning on the fly with Stackoverflow and google.

Dev stuff

https://www.publicapis.com

Design

I use Sketch to do all my designs, but I am a visual designer. I do lots of hand drawings and I can whip up fun logos, icons or layout an entire app using Sketch, its really powerful (good bye Adobe PS)

If you need to find a good designer, check out Behance.net or Dribbble and I am sure you will find someone for hire, or find an inspirational design direction for your product. For mobile check out http://pttrns.com/ and http://www.mobile-patterns.com/ and http://uigifs.com/

You can also check out places like 99designs or you can always ping me haha. Again I recommend the designer/developer cofounder tandem, it will make life easy for you, if you’re not a “maker”.

For my design process I use a white board in the garage (my office), pens, paper then I go right into pixels to polish the design. From this point if any motion needs to be thought out, depending on time I will A) Animate my designs in Adobe Animate, or B) find examples of ones we like and can push further in code. Check http://capptivate.co/ for examples.

Landing page

Try Squarespace.com, they have a landing page template you can customize, and integrate mailchimp (one click), analytics, add custom domain..etc for $8/mth.

Free Art, Backgrounds..ect https://www.pixelsquid.com

You can also try https://www.strikingly.com they offer cool templates for mobile apps, some basic analytics and a DB for email signups to live (export to computer).

I am sure their are tons of other options but don’t waste too much time on this step, you just need a professional looking website for people to signup for beta on.

You can set up Google Analytics or if you’re mobile only you can set up Mixpanel or just use Crashlytics, but please remember you need to monitor your users.

Set up your free mailchimp account so you can start collecting users emails from your website. This will help you email them all at once, when your produc tis ready to be used. They have lots of easy to customize templates availible to use, they offer analytics..etc

https://www.launchrock.com

https://www.instapage.com

Get a terms and conditions page to protect your startup https://termsfeed.com

Beta

Try Betalist, pay the $99 to get featured instantly, we got over 1500 new signups in 4 days from using them and http://startupli.st/ at the same time. Also submit to http://killerstartups.com/ and http://launchingnext.com/. All this should help you get your first 100o beta testers for your product.

Launching

Product Hunt is the king of this so far

I highly recommend checking this Medium post by @rrhover https://medium.com/gv-notes/tips-for-launching-a-product-from-the-founder-of-product-hunt-b23b388feb7. PH helped us get over 3000 App downloads in 1 day. #grateful for them.

Become a twitter master, learn all the tricks of Twitter, it will help in ways you could have never imagined.

Send out your Mailchimp email blast to all your signups, this will drive them to your product. Watch your analytics to see the effects of your hard work.

It might be time to incorporate your startup now, try https://www.clerky.com/ they are really easy and affordable.

Getting funding after you prove shit

Try tweeting your product link to guys like @jason, @sacca @hunterwalk. It also helps if you get some PR on @techcrunch or @venturebeat they might be contacting you.

Don’t send them your 50 page pitch deck full of BS, reach them on a personal level on Twitter naturally, if your product is any good, VCs will already know about you. Don’t raise too soon, you will give any too much stock in your startup away. Stay lean and work fast, if you can’t quit your day job yet don’t worry keep hustling at night. (I did it)

Make a profile here https://angel.co. This is a cool tool to calculate founders stock http://foundrs.com/

Done for now, I’ll come back to this to add more..

Follow me @koridhandy for more good stuff like this.

Cheers.