Platforms as a Service, low/no-code platforms, image editors, accessibility checkers, web form tools, checklists for selling to enterprises.
A list of best practices for getting the most accuracy out of LLMs like GPT-3/4 through structured prompts.
A community of interest for marketing / sales / product launch landing pages. Create a free account and post your landing page along with a description of what you hope it will achieve, and get community feedback from people who have experience with building landing pages.
A simple, no-account-required tool that generates custom background images for web pages, presentations, and other sources. You can set your own colors and parameters and generate embeddable code or a downloadable image. Includes a generous free tier or pay $6 to provide lifetime access for your startup.
API-driven image optimizer to help companies reduce their largest contentful paint (LCP), one of the core web vitals that google uses to evaluate page ranking.
Chat, shared inbox, knowledgebase, and other tools for customer success teams. Be sure to look for the startup pricing offer on their website; 6 months free for qualifying startups.
A twitter thread with links to well-known products/companies and their vision statements. If you are working on your own product vision statement these can help with inspiration.
An extremely comprehensive guide to launching and scaling marketplace businesses. Includes a cheatsheet and detailed content for the product and technical founders.
Considered the best resource for companies building marketplace business. Includes examples from companies in a variety of industries. This is a must-read.
A comprehensive overview of important metrics for companies using a product-led growth (PLG) strategy
An excellent overview of what attrition and retention mean for startups, how to calculate them, why they matter, common causes of attrition, and some steps to prevent unnecessary attrition.
An interview with Matt Hertz, an early Ops leader at Birchbox, Rent The Runway and Shyp, about what startups need to have in place to be ready to transition to a 3PL.
A set of web/mobile components that you can use for product inspiration or to modify and implement on your own site. Includes entire design systems from leading organizations. Before using any component be sure to check that it is marked as open source.
Simple website monitoring (emails you if your website is offline or down). Paid plans include notification via text message.
An online questionnaire to help you estimate the cost of building a software-only MVP for a web or mobile app. Note that the final screen includes a lead generation tool for a no-code platform, but you can use the 'traditional agency model' estimate as a reasonable expectation for outsourced development costs.
A questionnaire to help you figure out how much it would cost to outsource development of your app. Not a substitute for a formal vendor quote. No registration required. Prices reported in Euros.
Connect separate data sources and build workflows that trigger based on customer interaction. You can use Zapier to build a basic back office workflow before investing in a custom tool.
Online datbase/spreadsheet, useful for visualizing and sharing data in a number of ways.
Build high-quality interfaces for websites, flow diagrams and more.
Visual designer that allows you to create functional websites and web applications without code.
A community platform as a service. Supports courses, brand communities, membership models, podcast communities, etc.
A two-sided-marketplace-as-a-service platform.
A cloud-based image editor with a generous free tier that's useful for cropping and cleaning photos and images, as well as extracting elements of Photoshop and Illustrator files.
An alternative product positioning framework that tries to streamline the version used in Crossing the Chasm.
Open source tool (it is part of the Google Chrome web browser) that can be used to audit your website for issues with performance, accessibility, SEO optimization, and more. It offers detailed recommendations for every issue identified.
An overview of best practices for building a community around your startup or building a community-based startup.
A free, open source tool to generate random user profile data.
A16Z article on how to use data to inform company decisions
Create and embed form and data collection. Free tier allows 10 questions per form and 10 responses per month.
An excellent collection of resources for starting, operating, and growing a SaaS business. Modules on finding product/market fit and SaaS pricing for low-touch and high-touch markets are particularly worth reading.
Self-evaulation tool to ensure that your software has the features expected by enterprise sales channel
Self-service ecommerce platform. Set up and manage a storefront, manage inventory & shipping, and more. Large set of plugins and extensions to add functionality.
A search engine for software development firms. Search by budget, location, technologies used, industry/market focus, and specialties like user experience design, DevOps, QA, and more.
A model for thinking about the costs of software development beyond launch.
Techniques you can use to build and launch your software MVP if you don't have a founder with experience developing software.
This guide is designed to provide developers with a solid understanding of HIPAA guidelines and their implications for application development.
An open source toolkit that allows you to monitor your website (or web-based application)'s availability and post to a status page if it is down.
A rapid prototyping tool for web and mobile development. Generate screen mockups for user testing or just for inspiration. Includes a free tier.
Hundreds of thousands of royalty-free (and attribution-free) images for use in marketing materials, websites, social media, and more.
Website recording tool - visualize your users' flow through your site to optimize for increased conversions or whatever is key to your business. Free tier supports 35 recordings per day and has a 1,050-recording-per-month limit.
Free stock photos for personal and commercial use.
Photos primarily of office environments and tech. All content is free for personal and commercial use.
Enormous library (2.4 million images) of royalty-free and no-attribution required photos.
Useful and powerful online design tool. Generate marketing materials, website images, and social media posts. Free to use.
Stock photos featuring Black and brown people. A broad variety of categories and visual styles.
Illustrations for digital projects featuring Black people in a range of art styles and areas of focus. Illustrations are sold in packs that focus on different industries or themes.
Stock images of diverse avatar ui for product design
Quest is an automated frontend platform that allows dev teams to convert design systems and components into production-ready code automatically.
From First Round Review - Knoetic founder's guidebook for finding and onboarding your first 1,000 members.
Virtual and on-location physical product shoots, including video, headshots, model services, and video. Locations in Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver, but can work with virtual photo shoots. Pricing is a la carte; $39 per photo selected or $93 per video/animated GIF.
Chat-based customer service tool with a generous free tier (2 agents, CRM, SMS integration). Paid plan adds automation and productivity tools.
An all-in-one Website visitor analysis platform including session recording, heatmaps, live chat, conversion funnel tracking, surveys, announcements, and more. Generous free tier.
Outsourced custom video creator for onboarding, product tour, and marketing videos. You provide a script, visual assets, and style/tone prompts and the company will send you a professionally narrated and edited video.
An all-in-one community management platform. If your startup relies on building a community, Tribe is worth taking a look at as an alternative to custom development. The free tier covers up to 100 members.
A very thorough document from Aimably that covers best practices for managing your spend on Amazon Web Services as you scale. Many of the techniques in the document also apply to other cloud providers as well.
A powerful Large Language Model (LLM) that can be used in a variety of startup activities, from content marketing to building a product roadmap to refining your pitch deck. Pricing is based on tokens used, where 100 words entered or generated is about 75 tokens. New users start with $18 in credit (or about 750,000 words) to use within the first 3 months.
