Searchable List of Tools, References, and Best Practices

An article by Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund about how to think about fundraising. Have 4 plans for your business: * What if you can't raise any money? * What if you raise under your goal * What if you hit your goal * What if you exceed your fundraising goal

A comprehensive playbook on raising a Series A round, from Alpaca VC

A web application that allows you to search for Angel Investors that match your criteria of interest.

A Google Sheet with contact info and typical check size for hundreds of Angel Investors. This is crowd-sourced and entries are not vetted.

A list of Gen Z VCs. If your product is aimed at younger audiences, it may be an easier 'sell' with younger VCs

A comprehensive and up-to-date list of 750 VC funds that make seed-stage investments, including the sectors they focus on.

A very thorough set of best practices and tips for presenting your startup to potential investors. From Stripe Atlas and Y Combinator.

Self-evaluation tool that gives founders some idea of what VCs will ask in technical due diligence

Free term sheet generator. Incorporates best practices. Still needs legal review.

Sample forms used by Foundry Group when investing. Useful for review of common terms or as a starting point for negotiating.

Model legal documents from NVCA

YCombinator benchmarks for raising a Series A

from Mark Suster's blog

Investor update newsletters

Powerpoint alternative for pitch desks and other presentations

Glossary of common VC terms

100+ templates that can be themed. Imports directly to PPT, Google, and Keynote

Website with information about early-stage companies including investments and executives. Monthly and annual subscriptions available, but beware this is an expensive service. The free tier may be enough for most early-stage companies.

Website with information about early-stage companies including investments and executives. Monthly and annual subscriptions available, but beware this is an expensive service. The free tier may be enough for most early-stage companies.

700+ pitch decks categorized by funding raised, industry, and funding round. Also includes decks used to raise grant funding, crowdfunding, and debt financing.

A searchable database of VCs by thesis - sector, check size, series, etc.

Guided pitch practice questions that can help you address weaknesses in your pitch.

Free self-assessment tool to help you determine whether you are in a position to raise venture funds. Very detailed and helpful categories and ratings. Note that the form asks for registration but if you prefer not to be added to mailing lists you can enter fake data during registration.

Guideline for startup technical due diligence. Useful for founders and for potential acquirers.

Having trouble getting started with a pitch deck? Try writing out answers to these questions first.

Track files you share externally. Useful for investor management as part of a fundraise or for salespeople to work with enterprise customers.

Short (<2minute) video clips from VCs from firms like Sequoia, First Round, Upfront, and Greylock about how they evaluate pitches, companies, markets, and more.

A meta-blog-post from Mark Suster with some practical advice before you start your fundraise, including links to other posts on the subject.

A DIY tool for startups to build Investor portals. Include information on the team, key metrics, your current investor deck, links to existing investors, and more.

A list of VC funds from emerging fund managers. Exclusively lists VCs whose fund is under $100MM and primarily focus on checks under $4MM.

Investor lists by stage (seed, A, B), sector focus, and location. Most investors list funding range and sweet spot for check size.

A twitter thread with a few best practices and things to consider before you cold-email an investor with your pitch. Tweets by Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund.

An overview of the differences between pre-money and post-money SAFEs and how they can impact your startup fundraising.

Free, registration required. This calculator helps early-stage founders plan for SAFE and Convertible Note financings by modeling the impact of their conversion in a future priced round. Built using common market terms, but the terms of your financing may be different.

1200 Pitch Decks from well-known companies, categorized and searchable.

A twitter thread from Warren Schaeffer with best practices for leveraging your network to get connections to investors.

If you plan to raise funds from investors you’ll need two separate slide decks; an investor/teaser deck and a pitch deck. This template from 500 Startups is a good baseline for your investor/teaser deck. The PDF version is free, but you’ll need a paid Slidebean account to get an editable version.

A ‘list of lists’ curated by OpenVC.app . It contains pointers to 23+ databases of active investors that you can use to target your fundraise.

A basic spreadsheet you can use to help organize your pre-seed or seed fundraise, from Elizabeth Yin (GP at Hustle Fund). Instructions for how to use it at https://twitter.com/dunkhippo33/status/1387175910453907460

Free searchable list of active angel investors, compiled and maintained by First Round Capital.

A set of 40+ questions you’re likely to be asked by VCs in a pitch meeting, delivered flashcard-style with the question printed and an option to flip the card and see hints for how to answer.

An Airtable of 300 investors who do not require (or explicitly refuse) warm intros. Note that no contact info is provided but you can get them through twitter DM or find their email with hunter.io .

A research-backed reference for developing your early-stage pitch deck. Includes templates in PPT and Google Slide format.

A fundraising network that matches companies with individual angels and angel syndicates. An excellent resource for pre-seed and seed-stage companies to identify potential investors.

A list of nearly 600 female-identifying active angel investors. Curated by Lolita Taub.

Based on a spreadsheet tracker by Elizabeth Yin, you can use this to keep track of your investor outreach and progress while you raise VC money.

A very comprehensive guide from Elizabeth Yin (GP at Hustle Fund) on raising a Seed Round.

A detailed guide from Alpaca.vc on how to craft an announcement about your fundraising round to maximize press coverage.

A very comprehensive overview of the start of startup fundraising as of 2022. Includes a breakdown of differences in pitch decks for successful companies (those that completed their fundraise) vs those who didn’t.

A Google Sheet to help VC-backed companies plan out scenarios around fundraising. You enter the equity allocations for founders, staff, advisors, and amount raised or percentage diluted in up to four fundraising rounds, and the spreadsheet will show you exit outcomes.

An excellent overview of processes for small businesses to raise capital, including a detailed description of options for raising capital under various SEC exemptions.

A plain English overview of investment term sheets; why they exist, what they contain, and how to use them.

A thorough overview of how to write an investor intro email, with examples and a template.

A brief but effective example of a forwardable investor intro email, written by Tristan Pollack. This is a good template to use when you’re asking someone in your network to send an email to an investor on your behalf.

A series of revenue, growth, fundraise size, and valuation benchmarks based on Founder Institute’s survey data.

An overview of how and why to raise a friends & family round as your first fundraise.

An excellent overview of revenue-based financing - what it is, why it can be a better source of working capital than venture or debt financing, and some guidelines for when it makes sense for your company vs. when it’s not a good fit.

A public database of over 450 SaaS company valuations, including company name, revenue, type of valuation (funding round, M&A, etc), and revenue at time of valuation. Curated by the team at https://founderpath.com/products/valuations

A simple website to help you test your web page unfurls on the major social networks; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pintrest. Includes a few checks to make sure your content is optimized for each platform.

DIY podcast/video/online meeting editor with collaborative features built for teams.

Crowdsource your logo, website, and other brand visuals. Describe your business or product and get concepts from multiple designers, plus a feedback and voting mechanism to help you select the best one.

Ad-free tool to quickly find domain name options for your business.

Domain name registration tool. First year price will depend on the domain selected.

A free tool to help you explore keywords for Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. Start with a keyword or a URL and find relevant search terms and the cost-per-click to advertise on them.

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.

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 photos featuring Black and brown people. A broad variety of categories and visual styles.

Email marketing platform. Free tier includes unlimited contacts, but is limited to 300 emails per day.

Free presentation themes and infographics, mainly targeted at PowerPoint & Google Slides users but can be helpful inspiration for any presentation.

An email 'warming' tool that helps new companies that are planning to generate cold email campaigns improve reputation and avoid spam filters.

Email 'warming' tool. For new companies that want to send marketing email, a warming service builds your email reputation, which can help boost deliverability and ensure your emails don't end up in spam. The free tier supports email to 50 inboxes, but you will need to provide a credit card.

Self-Service Product Launch Video creator

Stock images of diverse avatar ui for product design

A curated collection of free visual resources for products - free sample illustrations, personas, landing page templates, etc.

Free logo generator. Generates high-quality results. Not a permanent solution but a good temp logo option.

landing page template builder. low price point ( $19/year), fewer built-in templates.

landing page template builder. higher price point but more features

Mailchimp is one of the leading email marketing and automation platforms. Pricing depends on number of contacts you have in your database.

Curated list of email copy ideas and best practices

Automatically optimize the file size of images to reduce download time.

Mailer for product, creatives, communicating with backers. lighter weight than mailchimp.

Newsletter creator/mailer

Graphic design, stock photo, video, sound, presentation templates. $16.50/mo

Questions to answer before hiring for a logo design

A huge repository of growth marketing tools and best practices.

A low-cost toolkit for helping users manage & optimize their SEO

Insights and survey results from 1,500 marketers covering every aspect of marketing.

Manage multiple social media channels in one place. Track engagement across different channels. Free tier supports up to three social media channels (each channel is one account on one network) then $60 per channel per year after that.

An extremely thorough guide to email marketing for customer acquisition. Includes templates and example drip campaigns.

Free online self-paced courses on marketing and growing your mobile app. These courses lead to a certification as a mobile growth professional.

A meta-list of 257 categorized tools to implement and manage SEO.

Several tools from Google to support digital marketing efforts. Heavy focus on B2C Ecommerce, retail, market research, audience identification, and search trends.

A suite of self-service SEO and SEM tools to help you identify search engine ranking and prioritize your ad spend.

A comprehensive list of negative keywords (terms that you can enter to explicitly not have your ads shown against) primarily targeted at companies that sell B2B.

A tool to help you generate content marketing material that outranks the competition for specific keywords. Dashword offers several excellent SEO tools for free: A tool to generate additional keywords, a tool to automatically generate meta descriptions for articles, a content optimization checker to tell you how your page ranks against other highly ranked pages for keywords, and a tool to generate content briefs to support your content marketing efforts.

A library of very detailed information on online marketing, fundraising, social media, and other topics, all written with an emphasis on nonprofits.

An overview from Sprout Social on the best times to post on social media based on an analysis of their data set.

A social media management platform that allows you to coordinate your startup’s activities on all the social media platforms you use; schedule posts, engage with replies, build brand awareness, and more.

A free tool from Dashword that lets you find related searches for a particular term, based on real search data. Results include monthly volume and Google Ads bid price.

[From First Round Review] Includes tips on brand positioning, selecting a company/product name and domain name, and building a block of creative assets for your startup.

[From First Round Review] A series of workshop exercises you can use to help define your brand. You might also want to review the related Brand Positioning Recipe.

This free tool from copy.ai will generate three variants of google ad headline and body copy from prompts you provide.

An excellent overview of Google’s Search Intent framework. Describes how Google classifies searchers, and discusses ways to optimize your content to target specific intents.

[From First Round Review], a set of criteria to determine if your startup is ready to hire a full-time marketer, and tips for how to do so.

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.

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.

An all-in-one Website visitor analysis platform including session recording, heatmaps, live chat, conversion funnel tracking, surveys, announcements, and more. Generous free tier.

A comprehensive suite of AI-powered marketing copy tools, including short and long-form content. Jasper’s boss mode automates a great deal of manual effort needed to review & edit copy. Pricing is based on words per month and starts at $24 for 20k words. Also includes an AI art generator for $20/mo extra.

A suite of AI-powered copywriting tools that can generate everything from ad copy to long-form blog posts and content marketing ideas. The free tier allow you to generate 2,000 words per month, and paid plans are based on the amount of monthly words you need to generate.

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.

Self-service tool that hosts links to your startup’s website, social media profiles, and more. Extremely useful for social media profiles such as Instagram, twitter, and LinkedIn where profile pages support only a single outbound URL. Very generous free tier - startups generally will not need to use a paid plan.

A Notion database created by https://forthright.tech to help you manage your content calendar. It allows you to track all the content you want to share out and identify content that hasn’t been re-shared in a while, or is potentially out of date and needs to be updated.

Generate short-form social media clips from webinars, zoom calls, and long form video. Entry level tier allows for 45 minutes of exported video per month.

AI-generated product videos. Submit either a text script (free tier) or voiceover (paid) and Elio will generate a product video using one of their 25 AI-generated narrators.

A social media management platform that allows you to coordinate your startup’s activities on all the social media platforms you use; schedule posts, engage with replies, build brand awareness, and more. Also includes keyword monitoring and CRM integration.

This spreadsheet from Sprout Social shows the hours of the day and days of the week that are best for posting to Facebook, Instagram, twitter, and LinkedIn. Times are standardized to U.S. Central Standard Time, so consider your audience’s location when using this chart.

A social media management platform that allows you to coordinate your startup’s activities on all the social media platforms you use; schedule posts, engage with replies, build brand awareness, and more. Also includes a library of content you can incorporate in your posts.

Find salary ranges for specific job titles and locations.

Find salary ranges for common job titles. Includes a location filter.

Constantly-updated guidebook with recommendations and best practices for equity comp in startups

Marketplace for spot project talent (design, development, copywriting, marketing support, etc

Marketplace for project or ongoing staffing. Hourly and fixed-fee options. Tends to be more expensive but higher quality than Fiverr.

From First Round Capital. A 50-question checklist and accompanying article that provides a framework for identifying a co-founder fit.

A marketplace to connect with potential cofounders and early-stage employees.

Community for matching co-founders and early-stage employees

Data from Pitchbook's survey of company option pools, broken out by stage of company and financing amount.

Learn how to write an effective job posting that respects candidates.

Things to consider when trying to find a co-founder.

An interactive questionnaire to help you and your co-founders allocate initial equity fairly. A good way to use this is to have each founder fill it out separately and compare answers.

YCombinator’s advice on setting co-founder equity. tl;dr: Unless there is a very good reason, set cofounder equity equally and use a 4 year vesting schedule.

YCombinator’s Startup School is one of the best resources for founders out there. This video covers techniques you can use to find a co-founder and build a lasting partnership.

A self-paced online course from Carta focused on how equity works in startups - from key terms, to negotiating compensation, tax implications, cap tables, and more.

A thorough overview from Will Larson on managing engineering organizations. Likely applies more to larger/later stage startups.

Carta’s guide based on benchmark data for sizing an option pool at each round.

Self-reported salary and benefit packages, mainly for software roles. Data is more complete for Bay Area companies and large firms, but worth using as a guide.

A SaaS Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to help you coordinate hiring, track applications and manage candidates through your recruiting pipeline. Free tier allows one open job posting at a time.

Carta’s Director of Insights shares how 18,000 pre-seed and seed-stage startups split their equity.

150+ links to take-home tests for engineering hires. Each test is categorized by language, job function, and seniority. Free as of the time of review.

A very comprehensive database of hires made by startups including job title, salary, equity, location, and company information (size, fundraise stage, and valuation).

A SaaS Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to help you coordinate hiring, track applications and manage candidates through your recruiting pipeline. Startup tier allows 3 open jobs at any time.

An interactive guide designed to help reduce friction, manage conflict, and improve collaboration in co-founding teams. Includes sections on personal motivations, working style, and partnership.

Representative org charts for a hypothetical SaaS company after Series A, B, and C funding. At earlier stages the positions needed will vary too much to offer advice on best practices.

Outsourced provider of SOC2, ISO27001, and HIPAA compliance auditing.

Guide to implementing security best practices based on your company's traction

From FINRA. Startups will need this in place to get some types of business insurance and typically when selling in to enterprise.

A feature-rich tool to help you generate a complex password.

Using a password manager is one of the best cybersecurity practices your business (and you personally) can undertake. Lastpass is $3/user/month for individuals and business plans cost $4/user/month.

Using a password manager is one of the best cybersecurity practices your business (and you personally) can undertake. 1Password costs $3/user/month, but as your company grows the per-user price decreases.

Using a password manager is one of the best cybersecurity practices your business (and you personally) can undertake. Bitwarden is free for up to two accounts, and $3/mo/user after that.

Outsourced provider of SOC2, ISO27001, PCI DSS, and HIPAA compliance auditing.

Google’s productivity suite. Includes GMail, Calendar, Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet. Priced per user. Listed first year price assumes 2 founders on the Starter plan at $6/mo.

A comprehensive overview (including links and references) of best practices for security for your application (if your startup is software-based), your corporate network (physical or virtual), and personal devices.

For early-stage companies that have purchased cybersecurity insurance and found it requires annual training for all staff, this training has a free tier. Staff can sign up for an account directly and take a screenshot of the completion page and forward it to the person responsible for compliance. This type of program is far less effective than a paid plan but can be used until company revenues allow you to invest in a proper cybersecurity program.

A free, open source tool to generate random user profile data.

Online datbase/spreadsheet, useful for visualizing and sharing data in a number of ways.

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 alternative product positioning framework that tries to streamline the version used in Crossing the Chasm.

A two-sided-marketplace-as-a-service platform.

A feature-rich two-sided marketplace platform. On the expensive side but more features.

A community platform as a service. Supports courses, brand communities, membership models, podcast communities, etc.

low-code software/app development tool

Accessability best practices

Customer Service/Success automation tools

Self-service ecommerce platform. Set up and manage a storefront, manage inventory & shipping, and more. Large set of plugins and extensions to add functionality.

Embed payment processing in your site

Embed payment processing in your site

SaaS subscription billing platform

Create and embed form and data collection. Free tier allows 10 questions per form and 10 responses per month.

Create and embed form and data collection

Visual designer that allows you to create functional websites and web applications without code.

Build high-quality interfaces for websites, flow diagrams and more.

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.

Free stock photos for personal and commercial use.

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.

Considered the best resource for companies building marketplace business. Includes examples from companies in a variety of industries. This is a must-read.

This guide is designed to provide developers with a solid understanding of HIPAA guidelines and their implications for application development.

Enormous library (2.4 million images) of royalty-free and no-attribution required photos.

A comprehensive overview of important metrics for companies using a product-led growth (PLG) strategy

Quest is an automated frontend platform that allows dev teams to convert design systems and components into production-ready code automatically.

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.

Simple website monitoring (emails you if your website is offline or down). Paid plans include notification via text message.

From First Round Review - Knoetic founder's guidebook for finding and onboarding your first 1,000 members.

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.

Chat-based customer service tool with a generous free tier (2 agents, CRM, SMS integration). Paid plan adds automation and productivity tools.

A list of best practices for getting the most accuracy out of LLMs like GPT-3/4 through structured prompts.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Photos primarily of office environments and tech. All content is free for personal and commercial use.

Techniques you can use to build and launch your software MVP if you don't have a founder with experience developing software.

An extremely comprehensive guide to launching and scaling marketplace businesses. Includes a cheatsheet and detailed content for the product and technical founders.

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.

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.

Useful and powerful online design tool. Generate marketing materials, website images, and social media posts. Free to use.

Best practices for product interview questions

Aggregator for verified market research statistics

Companion online course to The Mom Test with additional exercises and practice. Udemy frequently discounts this course so if you try on a different day you can save up to 50%.

Create targeted surveys of global users. Segment by dozens of demographics. Listed price is a baseline - more complex surveys will cost more.

Build user personas for customer research, user experience design, or other purposes. You will be prompted to provide contact information to Hubspot in order to access the finished personas.

An overview of best practices and examples of user personas, from Justinmind. Site links to a free Powerpoint-based persona template.

One of the most influential books written on marketing and selling high tech products. First released in 1991, now on its third edition.

Embed your product screenshot in stock photos. Useful for showing web and native applications in use.

Self-service tool and social network for promoting early-stage startups and products. If you are considering a startup idea it's a good idea to search Product Hunt launches to see if there are any other emerging competitors. You can also promote your product for free here when you launch.

A discussion board for startup ideas. People submit problems they have that they would be willing to pay to have solved, and users upvote the best ideas.

Subreddit for sharing and vetting startup ideas

Subreddit for sharing and vetting hardware-related startups

Find out if your startup name has negative connotations in other languages

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.

Searchable library of registered word marks and visual trademarks/logos, from the US Patent and Trade Office. To be sure you are clear when registering a new trademark you should have an attorney perform the search and assist with registering the mark, but for researching whether terms you are interested in are already registered by companies, this can help.

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.

A thorough overview of methods entrepreneurs can use to identify a market opportunity.

A summary of the key takeaways from the Mom Test Book, written by a founder as a way to help reinforce learning.

A list of market research questions for B2B/SaaS companies. Includes a Notion template you can import.

from Tom Tunguz

Automated Payroll Management

Automated HR/benefits service

Fractional CFO

Fractional CFO

SaaS Bookkeeping, Tax, and fractional CFO services. Fees based on monthly expenses.

A framework for calculating startup costs, provided by the SBA. Mainly targeted at retail businesses but the framework included is adaptable.

A reference set of financial statements based on a fictional early-stage tech company.

Banking built for startups. FDIC-backed, integrated credit cards, reporting, and more.

Early-stage SaaS financial model for reference.

OnlyCFO’s Substack post on how as a startup founder to read an income statement and use it to drive your business.

SaaS accounting and invoicing software similar to Quickbooks but with a free-forever tier.

OpenVC did a very thorough comparison of twelve different SaaS financial models (some paid, some free) across a number of categories. Links are provided to each model.

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.

The most popular small business accounting tool. Scales well to growth-stage. You can generally find accountants and fractional CFOs with experience specifically in Quickbooks.

A self-service questionnaire to help you figure out how much your startup will cost to build.

OnlyCFO’s Substack post on how as a startup founder to read your balance sheet and use it to drive your business.

A robust tool to help you build out financial models and compare plan vs actual over time. Stick with the free tier until your business is generating enough to cover the paid tier at $250/mo, which includes import from accounting software and other features.

An Excel-based starter financial model. Offers three versions - a SaaS B2B model, a B2C Ecommerce model, and a blank model that covers other types of startups.

An excellent overview of the types of finance support your startup should have based on your fundraising stage.

Google Sheets-based templates for several different types of businesses; SaaS, marketplace, E-commerce, transactional, services, and enterprise sales. Free, but asks for an email address to download them.

A service that allows companies to sell their recurring revenue for cash.

A scenario-based financial modeling tool. Cost per month increases based on annual revenue - prices start at $25/month

An analysis of founder salaries for companies at pre-seed through Series A, from OpenVC (and drawing data from Carta and other sources. tl;dr : In the U.S. $50k at pre-seed, $100k at seed, $150-$200k at Series A.

Scenario-based financial modeling tool. Annual price has two tiers: $500 for under $100k revenue, $1k for over.

HR, payroll, benefits, compliance as a service. for startups (under 25 people) the basic plan is $49/mo per person. $99/mo includes access to benefits plans.

A thread from Clint Murphy, veteran startup CFO, that covers the three key financial statements founders need to know, what they cover, and how to use them to guide your business.

Standard agreement for structuring advisor relationships

Company formation as a service

self-service cap table scenario modeling tool

Payroll / HR service

DIY platform for founders to get legal paperwork done - from incorporation to routine filings. Price shown here reflects basic service - more specialized forms and requirements will have additional costs.

A framework to help define equity split among co-founders

Self-service legal documents including privacy, ToU, GDPR, NDA, MSA, MoU, SAFE/fundraising, founders agreement, and new hire onboarding. 3 free documents per month with registration

Privacy notice with a plain-language summary designed for readability.

From the Cooley Law Firm, this document walks through the basics of trademark and IP protection for startups.

Comprehensive insurance and HR solutions provider, focusing on startups and small businesses in Western Pennsylvania.

An extremely thorough guide from Clerky covering a number of key concepts related to early stage company incorporation, fundraising, hiring, and other aspects that often involve legal support.

From the Cooley Law Firm, this is a self-service mutual NDA generator. Enter information about both parties and answer some other questions and it will generate a signable mutual NDA.

Corporations and LLCs are required to list a registered agent in the state of incorporation. This service gives you a postal address to use as the registered agent and will scan mail that comes for you. Especially useful for remote-first companies with no physical office space.

An e-signature tool (similar to DocuSign) for proposals, quotes, and contracts. Generous free-forever tier.

A guide from a 5-time founder with best practices for setting up systems to support your first hire and beyond.

Insurance as a service - provides general liability, E&O, cyber, and other insurance packages matched to vertical and company stage. Specifically targeted at startups.

Corporations and LLCs are required to list a registered agent in the state of incorporation. This service gives you a postal address to use as the registered agent and will scan mail that comes for you, although this service only offers California addresses. Especially useful for remote-first companies with no physical office space.

From Founders Institute and modeled after the Advisor Equity agreement they maintain - this document allows startups to contract for services with equity payment. As with other legal documents that bind your startup, you should consult an attorney before executing this document with any service provider.

Outsourced Cap table management, 409(a) evaluations, and other legal services.

This PDF from Cooley Law is an example of a VC diligence request.

This tool from the Cooley Law Firm runs through a series of questions and generates a Terms of Use for you to use on your site.

An e-signature and contracts management tool to avoid paper & fax signatures for contracts, proposals, and agreements.

Manage your startup’s equity and valuation, including cap table, 409(A), fundraise modeling, and sign & send. Free tier allows for up to 25 stakeholder entries.

EU-based company that offers a self-service generator for privacy policy, terms of service, and cookie policy, with a specific focus on GDPR compliance.

McKeever Conwell discusses tips, tricks, and best practices for sending cold emails. A useful video for both sales and fundraising.

Self-evaulation tool to ensure that your software has the features expected by enterprise sales channel

Industry-leading CRM. Aimed primarily at later-stage companies with a dedicated salesforce.

early-stage company CRM

CRM that's built in to Gmail

CRM focused on early-to-mid-stage startups. Good blend of features and complexity.

Jason Lemkin's (SaaStr) advice on how to design a sales comp plan for your startup (and why you shouldn't just use best practices from enterprise sales comp plans)

Find email addresses for employees of a company when you only have the domain name. Extremely useful for sales prospecting and cold outreach. Free tier allows 25 searches per month.

A template service contract/master service agreement for Software-as-a-Service startups, provided by Y Combinator. The information you should customize to your startup is highlighted in yellow. We strongly recommend you have an attorney review the finished product before using it with customers.

Free analytics framework. Very feature-rich, can be complex to use.

See what paths users take through your site. Free plan capped at 1000 journeys per month.

A16Z article on how to use data to inform company decisions

Analytics and metrics dashboard

Open Source analytics and metrics dashboard

visualization tool for google analytics and other data sources

Privacy-focused analytics. GDPR and CCPA compliant. No cookie warning. Open source & hosted options.

A Google sheet from Tomas Tonguz at Redpoint that lists metrics you should include in quarterly Board presentations. It covers six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. There’s an accompanying blog post that describes how to use it here: https://tomtunguz.com/saas-startup-metrics-template/

A detailed overview of SaaS sales and pricing strategy for consumer, SMB, narrow verticals, and larger businesses.

SaaS Pricing Guide (PDF) from PriceIntelligently

SaaS pricing tools (paid)

Very useful book on tactics for pricing - software focused