Entrepreneurship A to Z
Over 300 Entrepreneur Resources.
Entrepreneurship is hard, very hard. Many times it feels like you are the only person in this world who understands what you are going through. But, let me remind you, you are not alone. You are not the first or the last person to go through this fabulous journey.
The even better news, is many before you are trailblazers and they have laid the ground work. This loooooong list of resources give you everything you need to get on your entrepreneurial way.
Everything! I mean EVERY. SINGLE. RESOURCE. you need to start your entrepreneurial venture form A to Z. Get a cup of coffee, some snacks, a pen, paper, and your laptop; dig in!
A/B Testing
A/B testing is comparing two (or more) variations of a product in order to determine which one performs better.
You will spend you wheels for a long time without it.
- Google Analytics and Google Optimize – Google Analytics and Google Optimize offer one of the best data collecting and A/B testing solutions around and you can get just about everything you need for free.
- Optimizely – Optimizely offers a range of products but it’s Optimizely Web which provides the A/B testing and other features for optimising web pages.
- VWO – A lot like Optimizely but a lot more budget-friendly.
- Zoho PageSense – Ultra-affordable, scalable CRO & personalization.
- HubSpot – The all-in-one marketing & CRO platform
- Leadformly – Dedicated web form A/B testing from the best form builder in the industry.
- Unbounce – Landing page A/B testing from the most popular landing page builder in the game.
- Convertize – Affordable A/B testing & personalization.
- Kameleoon – Easy-to-use A/B testing & personalization for enterprise brands.
- Convert – The testing platform designed for agencies and CRO experts.
Analytics
Software for business analytics takes a deeper dive, helping to identify weaknesses, alerting policymakers to unanticipated events, fixing potential problems, and even forecasting future performances.
- Qlikview – QlikView allows users to visualize data relationships using specific colors for related and non-related data with automatically maintained data association, compressed to 10 percent of its native size.
- WooRank – SEO, Social Media, Mobile Optimization, Usability reports.
- Sisense – incorporates dynamic and robust text analysis functionalities that enable users to transform unstructured text into valuable business intelligence.
- Buffer – free social media engagement stats.
- Google Analytics – free web analytics and optimizer.
Bloggers
Blogging is a proven way to promote your business and drive traffic to your site or other content you have available.
It increases the consumers’ engagement with the products and its advocacies.
- Wix – the easiest website builder for blogging.
- WordPress with Bluehost – the world’s most popular content management system (CMS).
- Tumblr – essentially a social media platform with microblogging capabilities
- Medium – the best traditional blogging site.
- Ghost – best blogging platform for publishers, entrepreneurs, and developers.
- Blogger – the best free blogging platform.
Business Plans
A business plan is a written document that describes in detail how any business defines its objectives and how it plans to achieve its goals.
A business plan lays out a written roadmap for the financial and operational success of your business.
- SBA’s Build Your Business Plan Tool – The SBA’s Business Plan Tool is a step-by-step guide that allows you to save your progress and come back to it for up to six months.
- Enloop – With this tool, you add in your information, and Enloop automatically writes your plan based on your details.
- LivePlan – an online service that simplifies the business planning process while providing assistance with budgeting, forecasting, and performance tracking.
- RocketLawyer – Business owners can create a customized, printable business plan with RocketLawyer by following an online step-by-step interview process.
- Stratpad – StratPad’s step-by-step approach and cloud-based business planning software help small business owners create a plan in less than a day.
Cloud Storage
A way for businesses and consumers to save data securely online so that it can be accessed anytime from any location and easily shared with those who are granted permission.
Cloud storage also offers a way to back up data to facilitate recovery off-site.
- Dropbox – free cloud storage that you can share.
- Github – the world’s largest open source community.
- Joyent – powerful public cloud and private cloud software solutions.
- Box – secure content sharing, management, and collaboration.
- AWS Free Tier – cloud solution from Amazon.
- IDrive – full-featured overall online backup service
- SugarSync – an intuitive file-syncing service with good mobile apps.
- Microsoft OneDrive – default online storage and syncing service for Windows 10 and Office 365.
- Google Drive – One of the slickest, fullest-featured, and most generous cloud storage and syncing services.
Competition | Ads/PPC Analysis | Assess and Dominate
Spy, model, watch, stalk, whatever it takes. Know thyself and know thy competition.
The best way to dominate your niche is to know who has previously dominated and do it better than them.
- KeywordCompetitor – gets your competitors’ paid keywords, ads, and landing pages. It also updates you daily on any changes to ads, keyword positions, and landing pages so you know if competitors are gaining on you.
- Spyfu – it provides rather specific information regarding keywords your competition is bidding on and seeing the greatest success with.
- iSpionage – allows you to gain insight into competitors’ effective keywords, ad copy, and ad budget.
- SEMrush – allows you to quickly find your advertising competitors based on the keywords you plan to target. Then you can click on your competitors to see what other keywords they target their ads toward and the ad copy they use.
- Adbeat – allows you to uncover any advertiser’s online strategy and see what works for them, spy on ad copy split testing, and find all unique creatives used by an advertiser.
- WhatRunsWhere – A tool highly recommended for developing a strategy that helps combat big market player dominance.
- Google Adwords – a free AdWords tool and Keyword Planner.
- The Search Monitor – This is a fantastic tool for search and affiliate marketing. Get insights from comScore about advertising in your industry as a whole.
Content and Marketing
Content – in terms of content marketing – is media created by an organization for the purposes of piquing their audience’s interest and increasing brand awareness.
Your content is THE most important part of your online presence, next to Branding. You have to strategize how you promote your content. The more engagement you get from your audience, the higher your Google rank will be.
- HubSpot – a leading growth platform with thousands of customers around the world. Comprised of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and a powerful free CRM, HubSpot gives companies the tools they need to grow better.
- BuzzSumo – the world’s most-loved content marketing software. They empower businesses to connect with their audiences. BuzzSumo provides social insights for content marketing and SEO campaigns.
- Scoop.it – it helps millions of professionals and hundreds of companies publish and share content online. Scoop.it automates content marketing to generate traffic and leads.
- Canva – Canva empowers users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, and other visual content.
- Rock Content – Rock Content is a global leader in Content Marketing. They help companies plan and execute strategies that are focused on business generation.
- Infogram – is the data visualization platform that brings out the best in your data.
- UpContent – UpContent is a leading intelligent content discovery technology that helps you build trust and deepen relationships with curated content.
- Mintent – Mintent is a content marketing platform used by mid-sized and large teams to plan, produce, publish, and measure marketing content.
- Curata – Curata enables marketers – for the first time, to harness the power of content creation, curation, and analytics to yield a more predictable and successful stream of content.
- Paper.li – With Paper.li you can do the work of a marketing team by yourself and from your mobile, in minutes. Personalized content, self-publishing website, social sharing, and newsletters.
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding simply refers to the idea of raising funds for a project or cause through a large group of people online. If you fall short of your capital, here are some best sources for crowdfunding.
- Kickstarter – known for helping tech and creative entrepreneurs fund their projects before getting a loan or raising money for venture capital.
- Indiegogo – mostly used for creating campaigns for tech innovations, creative works, and community projects.
- Causes – the world’s largest online campaigning platform focused on social, political, and cultural issues. It brands itself as a social network for people who want to make a difference faster and more effectively.
- Patreon – popular among digital creatives, such as YouTubers, podcasters, and bloggers. As opposed to you collecting one-off campaign donations, you have a subscription model where patrons regularly contribute a set amount of money every month or per creation.
- GoFundMe – The crowdfunding site collects a 2.9% processing fee and 30 cents for every donation. As it’s not an all or nothing fundraising site, you keep everything that you raise.
- CircleUp – It offers both equity capital and credit financing. It provides a platform to network with experts, retailers, and entrepreneurs.
- Lending Club – It’s a form of debt crowdfunding that’s usually easy to qualify for and is often faster than going through a regular bank.
Customer Satisfaction and Support
Know your customer, know want they want, how they want it, and if they are happy with it.
Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Remember, business is buying and selling, income/revenue and expenses. Without a customer you don’t have a business.
- Qualaroo – is a unique customer feedback software. Its Artificial Intelligence-based Sentiment Analysis is powered by IBM Watson’s Natural Language Processing capabilities.
- InMoment – aims to drive positive results for your brand and find solutions to optimize your customer’s experience with a customer experience management solution.
- Clarabridge – solutions are purpose-built for customer experience, drawing actionable insights from every customer interaction in one platform.
- Qualtrics – automatically routes recommended actions to the people in the best position to make changes, helping organizations drive continuous improvement.
- Feedbackify – you can start an instant feedback process for your site visitors with no registration required, leading to vastly lower feedback drop-out.
- OpinionLab – works on the concept that you should listen to customers, but pay more attention to reacting quickly to their feedback.
- Wootric – manages all parts of customer experience (CX) management, whether gathering feedback over the customer journey, analyzing large scale data, or driving growth and increasing revenue.
Design
Logos, thumbnails, graphics, marketing materials and more. If you aren’t familiar with graphic design (and most of us aren’t) you need to get familiar or hire someone who knows what they are doing. You are living in a visual world.
- Adobe Photoshop – the most popular software for graphic design and is used by millions of artists around the world.
- Sketch – a Mac-only graphic design program that focuses mainly on digital design. These digital designs are used to create websites, apps, and interfaces.
- Adobe Illustrator is a design software that is centered around vector design.
- Affinity Designer – a cheaper alternative to illustrator, which is especially suitable for someone who is in the early stage of a design career.
- Adobe InDesign – This graphic design software is used primarily in the publishing industry because you can design magazines, info sheets, books, posters, interactive PDFs, brochures, etc. with it.
- CorelDRAW – With this graphic design program, you can create professional vector illustrations.
- Xara Designer is built for both bitmaps and vectors. The program can handle desktop publishing, graphic design, illustration, photo editing, all in one place.
- GIMP is a free graphic design software that works on many platforms like Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
- Gravit Designers – This is another free graphic design software that can be used to create vector-based designs.
- Visme is an online design tool that goes above and beyond basic design capabilities, without requiring you to learn any complex software.
- Vectr – can be used to create vector graphics.
- Colorcinch – You can quickly and easily edit photos using the array of editing tools to adjust exposure, contrast, color, etc, or crop and rotate images.
- Canva – This free online graphic design software allows you to create designs easily and quickly.
- PixTeller is an easy to use editor tool that can be used to create graphic images (downloadable in PNG, JPG, PDF format) and animations (downloadable in MP4, GIF format).
Discovered
Become found, searched for, and discovered.
- Google Trends – provides the most popular online searches.
- inSparq – offers a suite of three products that are designed to help retailers engage customers and, hopefully, grow sales.
- Shopalize – provides a social commerce platform to help merchants increase social sharing and customer referrals from social media to their ecommerce stores.
- Curisma – Social shopping site Curisma calls itself a “social taste network” where people discover products shared by others with similar interests.
- Product Hunt – discover the hottest new products.
Distribute
Get your name, products, and brand out to the world.
- HARO (Help A Reporter Out) – share your expertise with a reporter.
- PRWeb – the highest-rated press release service.
- ProfNet – connects experts and journalists.
- Boost Your Posts on Facebook – promote posts on Facebook.
- Market Wired – provides news distribution and social communications solutions.
Email Lists and Marketing
Your email list is the only thing you truly own. You don’t own your platform, you don’t own your applications, you don’t own your social media. You do own your email list and it is the only thing you could use to start completely over if you had to.
- Constant Contact – one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing services in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.
- Active Campaign – ActiveCampaign gives you the email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools you need to create incredible customer experiences.
- SendinBlue – a complete SMS and email marketing software for businesses. They are one of the fastest growing email marketing platforms in Europe.
- Drip – a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.
- ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.
- AWeber is one of oldest and most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.
- GetResponse is another very popular email marketing solution. It is extremely easy to use and simplifies email marketing for small businesses.
- Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan.
E-Commerce and Drop Shipping
If you want to sell online and reduce inventory, these are the links for you.
- Shopify is now the leading ecommerce solution in the market with over 1 million businesses across 175 countries. Shopify’s retailers cover a gamut of sizes and industries.
- BigCommerce is best for SMBs & MM who require a lot from their ecommerce platform with large or complex catalogs.
- Magento is one of the most popular open-source ecommerce platforms in the world.
- WooCommerce is a free, open-source WordPress shopping cart plugin owned and developed by WordPress.
- Squarespace is a New York-based Software-as-a-Service company that provides website and ecommerce store building and hosting to customers. Customers use drag-and-drop functionality and pre-built website templates to create their web pages.
- Wix.com is a cloud-based website builder that allows users to create online stores through drag-and-drop tools.
- Big Cartel is an ecommerce platform by artists, for artists. Started in 2005, this SaaS site builder focuses on creators who need a place to sell artwork, clothing, jewelry, and photo prints.
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud, formerly known as DemandWare, is an enterprise-level ecommerce platform that offers a full range of features and capabilities that make it an excellent fit for multi-national companies that process millions of dollars in orders.
- Volusion is one of the longest-lasting ecommerce platforms in the market. It still remains popular and stable despite the entrance of recent competitors like Shopify and Wix, with over 30,000 stores using the system and having generated over $28 billion in sales.
Freelance HQs
You can’t do it all. And if you are doing it all by yourself you are doing it big enough.
- Freelancer – great place to find outsourcing for small businesses.
- upWork – allows you to hire low-cost freelance talent.
- Loot – on demand social freelancers.
- Elance – you can browse profiles before hiring freelance help.
- TaskRabbit – You are busy, so why not outsource errands and skilled tasks to others?
Founding and CO-Operation
Your team and your network will keep your company going when you don’t have the energy.
- CoFoundersLab – helps you locate a co-founder by city or industry.
- FounderDating – a premiere site for connecting founders and co-founders.
- Founder2be – helps you find a co-founder for your startup.
- YouNoodle – founder matching through competitions.
- FounderSoup – connecting you to “a network of Entrepreneurial Stanford engineers, designer, doctors, marketers, salespeople, etc.
- StartHawk – a new startup looking to create a community where entrepreneurs and co-founders can meet and discuss their ideas.
- FoundersNation – provides a very simple search tool for finding your co-founder or for checking out people who want to be co-founders and are looking for an opportunity to arise.
- Startup Stash — curated directory of resources & tools to help you build your startup.
- Startup Deals — deal bundle for the best resources and tools to help founders launch and build startups.
- Userinput — get on demand feedback about your website, app, or idea from real people from as little as $39.
- Pressfarm — find journalists to write about your startup.
Growth and Expansion
- Growth Geeks — find and hire growth hackers.
- Ladder — Growth Playbook with 600+ ROI-driven tactics to help you grow your business and new tactics added every month.
- NinjaOutreach — influencer marketing tool, search and connect with bloggers and social media influencers.
- Maitre — create viral waiting lists easily integrated with your existing autoresponders, landing pages, templates.
- Snip.ly — add custom call-to-action buttons on every link you share, so you can effectively engage your audience with other people’s content.
GroupThink *In a Great Way
- Start Up Nation was founded by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs. It is a free service so there is no charge to join.
- The Small Business Hub – This amazing community provides you with guides, templates, videos, articles and information in all forms and a blog to share your ideas.
- The Small Business Bonfire – a smaller community, but it is top of my list. It is also a free community and you have access to amazing tools for small business owners which you definitely can’t get anywhere else.
- Partner UP – Social networking for small businesses.
- Entrepreneur.com – Everything you ever need to know in one stop.
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization – the most influential entrepreneur community in the world.
- Young Entrepreneur Council – “America’s most elite entrepreneur organization.”
- Startup Grind – These are the top startup events in the World. They have monthly events in 150+ cities each month.
- FoundersCard – hosts networking events and provides premier benefits.
- Young Presidents’ Organization – a network of successful chief executives and business leaders who are under the age of 46.
Legalities
No one likes it, but it is necessary. Legal forms, terms, agreements, and documents.
- Rocket Lawyer — Best online legal service for legal documents.
- Incfile — Best online legal service for business formation.
- LegalZoom — Most diverse legal service.
- LegalNature — Best for self-service legal documents and forms.
- Avvo — Best directory of lawyers by practice area.
- UpCounsel — Best for outsourced legal departments and complex needs.
- LegalMatch — Best online legal service for finding an attorney near you.
Loyalty Programs
- CrowdTwist – loyalty and engagement solution help brands to acquire and retain customer relationships.
- UsingMiles help customers avoid this by managing all these loyalty points in one place.
- Chirpify is a social media-based loyalty marketing platform. The company encourages social engagement by converting social actions into rewards.
- Loyalty Prime is a SaaS platform that empowers organizations to create successful loyalty programs.
Market Analysis and Research
Market research can help you get accurate and specific information about your customers and competitors, which is a critical part of starting or expanding your business. Consumer demands impact and direct all aspects of your company’s activities and can determine the success or failure of your business.
Know your market and know your competition.
- Pew Research Center – a non-profit organization that conducts research and analysis across a diverse range of areas , offers insightful, rigorous and transparent data.
- GrowthBar – The quickest and easiest way to perform market research.
- Living Facts – a sister site of Pew Research Center, has the simple strapline, ‘about Americans today—who we are and how we live. Our goal is to inform and inspire. That’s it.’
- US Census – free market research.
- Sample Size Calculator – use to calculate the sample size that you’ll need for a market research.
- Qlikview – the window to the web. Google’s keyword tool is very popular as it accesses the best data – Google’s.
- Social Mention scours more than 100 social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, blogs, videos and images for mentions of your brand, competitors, or any keywords you wish to input.
- Google Trends – Shows how frequently your search term is entered into Google compared with the site’s total search volume over a specific period of time.
- Think With Google – This tool will give you all the information you need for uncovering market trends, understanding consumer behavior and gaining market insights, ready for your product launch.
- Facebook Audience Insights – It will give you information about two groups: 1) People connected to your Facebook page, 2)People on Facebook generally. It will help you create and target content, and find more people who match your target audience.
- R Studio gives you a range of statistical analysis tools to use with R. It requires that you know some coding, but it gives you tremendous power to create custom statistical analysis.
- Stats iQ – the world’s most powerful statistical analysis tool, that also happens to be the world’s easiest.
- Tableau is a tool for data visualization that needs no programming knowledge. It helps you see and understand your market research data pictorially, using analytics, visualization and business intelligence.
Mandatory Reading
- Inc. Magazine – focuses on growing companies in the U.S.. Businesses should make it a goal to land in the Inc. 5000, an annual list of the fastest growing companies in America. The part of the site most useful to new entrepreneurs is “Start-Up.” It’s loaded with super helpful reads on the dos and don’ts of business.
- Entrepreneur.com – The site’s “Inspiration Station” is dedicated to providing entrepreneurs insights to the industry leaders and pioneers of our time.
- The Economist – offers a wonderful, global perspective of the economy at-large. Highlighting socioeconomic factors and political effects in the world market.
- Bloomberg – a no-brainer for business owners.The leadership section is especially geared toward helping you make the right choices.
- Forbes – “Entrepreneur” section is a great way to stay updated. The section is less advice-driven and more centered around news that is relevant and interesting to business owners.
- Under 30 CEO – More advice for entrepreneurs, but this site is especially geared toward a younger audience. If you’re fresh out of (or still in) college, this is the perfect place for you to check out as you explore your entrepreneurial spirit.
- Problogger – a great blog to show you the ins and outs of effectively running a blog. Monetizing a blog is incredibly difficult, but this website could help you establish a blog that is successful enough to attract some ad money and subscriptions.
- Smart Hustle – a print and online magazine focusing on startup owners’ interviews, blogs, and tips. They publish it on a quarterly basis as a print and digital magazine.
- The Startup Grind – features success stories and interviews of top startup founders in over 150 countries where Google for Entrepreneurs is working.
Nomenclature
What’s in a name? A lot!
- Domainr: a free domain name search.
- Knowem – search tool for domains and trademarks.
- Naminum: helps you discover the perfect company name.
- Impossibility: “The best domain name generator ever.”
- Wordoid: suggests creative names for your product, domain, or product.
- Fantasy Name Generator – Countless generators for countless names.
- BNG – To use this name generator, just input a word or words, and it generates a list of possible business names. The tool will also identify which domain names are available for each possible business name.
- NameMesh is a business name brainstorming tool that helps you find a name for your company, app or product with just a simple search.
Payment Processors
- PayPal – the most popular online payment solution.
- Stripe – similar to PayPal because it’s user-friendly, requires no monthly or membership fee, and promises a safe shopping experience.
- Amazon Pay – you can quickly and easily reach out to Amazon users.
- X-Payments – PCI DSS certified, meaning it passes the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This is the highest safety level you can get for your customers and your online store.
- Braintree focuses strategically on mobile users – Owned by PayPal, it benefits by having access to the millions of people who use the popular payment solution.
- Due – not only a payment solution. It’s a complete system which allows you to take care of all your invoices in one place. Keep organized with all your payment information in one location. Enjoy lower rates than credit cards.
- GoCardless is a wonderful choice if you collect recurring payments from your customers.
- Adyen – available in 200 countries and supports 250 local payment methods. It won the Nora Solution Partner Excellence Awards in 2019 for Best Security and Anti-Fraud Solution.
- CyberSource is a top payment solution because of its risk management. It has more than 300 fraud detectors to ensure your customers and your online store are safe.
- TransferWise dubs itself as “a cheaper way to send money internationally” and is a fantastic PayPal alternative if you make lots of international transfers.
- Google Pay – another popular PayPal alternative. This service is a fast, simple way to pay on websites, in apps, and in-store using cards saved to your Google account.
- Payoneer helps businesses get paid quickly and securely. It’s particularly good for small and medium-sized businesses. In fact, this PayPal alternative places a special focus on market sectors such as e-commerce, online advertising, freelancing, and vacation rentals.
Product Launches
Launching a product? Get off the ground with these below links.
- Carrd – a one-page website platform that you can use as a landing page for your campaign. The service is free and full-customizable. However, the brand also provides website templates to let you have a great design even if you have no graphics experience.
- Drift – a conversational marketing platform that provides artificial intelligence (AI). You can use this system to talk to every single one of your website visitors in real-time.
- Notify – lets you know anytime your band gets talked about on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other sources.
- Instapage – lets users create more relevant landing pages for online ads. It lets entrepreneurs and marketing professionals visually edit a page. You can create a website without developer know-how.
- Unbounce – build, publish and test landing pages for your product.
- LaunchSquad – creates a press release, content and videos for your product launch.
- LaunchRock – “a site builder dedicated to early customer acquisition.”
- MixPanel – The tool features analytics for user conversion, activation, retention, etc. You can also use this for various activities, such as keeping track of data and report making.
- Qualaroo – tool lets you target participants according to their movement, pattern, location, cookies, and other factors. This advanced targeting method helps you acquire better data.
- Zapier – lets you access multiple websites such as Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Twitter, and more with one site. This automation platform lets users streamline 2,000 web apps and organize them for better collaboration.
- Airtable – a smart spreadsheet that gives brands a choice to store and organize data. It can be likened to Excel and Google sheets, except that this tool is more customizable.
Project Management
- BaseCamp – popular project management; free for up to two months.
- Trello – organize and monitor projects visually.
- Campfire – team collaboration that features a real-time chat.
- Wrike– delivers full discretion over your tasks and allows you to collaborate with your whole team.
- Asana – combines elements of project management, file storage, and collaboration and helps to manage projects across a team without email.
- Podio is a flexible and highly customizable online hub for work and team communication.
- Notion – will give you a completely different take on project management. It helps to plan and discuss projects, share everything with the team, and keep track of all the ideas.
- Redmine is an open-source project management tool, made highly flexible by its volunteer community.
- Zoho Projects – one of the best-known tools for simple project management, that can help teams streamline their upcoming work and tasks.
- LiquidPlanner is a collaboration tool that combines project management and time-tracking.
- ProofHub is an online project management software that is trusted by hundreds of remote teams to bring everything to one place.
- Troop Messenger is a compact remote work tool for small, medium, and large enterprises. This high functionality, low-complexity tool addresses various domain specificities.
Q and A’s
- Quora – ask or answer questions related to your industry.
- LinkedIn – the world’s largest professional network.
- StackExchange – expert answers to your questions in 137 different communities.
- Reddit – large community who network by sharing relevant content.
- Onstartups – the discussions on this hub are great for information and networking.
Remote Work
- Asana – converse and assign tasks with team members without email.
- Skype – call or message anyone from anywhere in the world.
- StartMeeting – free audio conferencing.
- Yammer – a private social network designed just for companies.
- Hipchat – private group chat, instant messaging and file sharing.
- Slack is a messaging remote work tool that everybody loves. A digital space that helps in communication among teammates, allows them to share ideas, share comments in real time so everything moves swiftly.
- Krisp – a noise cancelling app that helps remote professionals and teams be more productive. It removes background noise on both sides of the call, so you and your call participants can take important calls from anywhere.
- Todoist – for you if you are looking for geeking out on the organization of tasks for your remote teams. It gives all the core features that include tasks, subtasks, lets you create projects, add notes and upload files, set reminders, flags and a productivity chart.
- Blink is a comprehensive app that empowers communication and enhances productivity for remote teams. It is designed to transform employee experience as a mobile responsive and unified communication platform.
Social Media Management and Automation
Monitoring social media can be a pain. These are some of the top tools used to monitor and respond to customers on social media. They’ll give you a good idea of what’s going on.
- Hootsuite – “Manage social networks, schedule messages, engage your audiences, and measure ROI right from the dashboard.” all-in-one social media scheduling, monitoring, and analytics
- Tweetdeck – “the most powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement.”
- Adstage – manage all of your Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Ads in one place.
- Buffer Publish – for straightforward social media scheduling
- Zoho for team-based social media management
- MeetEdgar for automating your social media posts
- Loomly for generating post ideas for social media
- Iconosquare for managing Instagram business accounts
- Tailwind – helps to plan, create, execute and optimize marketing campaigns on digital platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.
- Awario – a social media monitoring app that will help any business get related updates in no time.
Social Media Marketing
- HubSpot – one of the best online marketing and web analytics systems.
- Sendible for lead generation on social media.
- Later for cheap (or free) visual social media marketing
- Ubermetrics – the leading Content Intelligence platform for Marketing & PR experts. The Ubermetrics Content intelligence platform is an AI-driven technology transforming public content into meaningful insights for effective content-driven communication strategies.
- SnapRetail – a SaaS company that offers online marketing solutions. SnapRetail takes the guesswork out of what to say to your customers and integrates all of your favourite social media networks into one powerful tool.
- ContentStudio is a content discovery and social media management platform to help businesses manage and streamline their content marketing workflow.
- Metigy is all about making the challenging and time-consuming parts of the marketing process, easy and fun! They help you save time by automating mundane tasks, allowing you to focus on actions that make a real difference to your business and bottom line.
- Planable – a platform that allows agencies and social media marketers to collaborate with their clients. A tool that speeds up the way social media campaigns are managed.
- Mention – the leading tool for brand monitoring and reputation management etc. for enterprises and agencies. User reviews to blog comments, leading brands choose Mention to track the most important conversations about their brand, competitors, and industry across the web.
- ContentCal is the ultimate tool for creating social media content production workflows, building your content plan, publishing content to multiple platforms, understanding content performance and responding to conversations.
- SocialPilot is a social media scheduling and marketing tool for social media professionals, digital marketing agencies, social media power users, bloggers, and any individuals who want to increase their social media presence effectively.
- Sprout Social – enables brands to find, form, and deepen the connections with their social audience. A suite of deep listening and analytics and social management enable organizations and brands of all sizes to be more open, real, and empathetic on social.
- Socialbakers – a trusted social media marketing partner to thousands of businesses of every size.
Surveys and Polls
- Google Consumer Surveys – fast, accurate market research from Google.
- SurveyMonkey – free online survey software. The world’s leading survey platform enabling curious individuals and companies.
- Typeform – create online surveys and forms. Turns average forms & surveys into a powerful brand communication tool for your business. Create forms, surveys, quizzes and so much more to grow your audience, improve just about anything, and validate or invalidate your best ideas.
- Qualtrics – little higher end but one of the best platforms for surveys out there.
- Tally – create polls…in no time.
- Google Forms is a survey administration software included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google.
- kwiksurveys – a user-friendly and efficient online survey tool. Key features of kwiksurveys include analysis, pattern identification, data comparison, custom reports and team accounts.
- Survicate – a powerful survey and feedback management software that helps businesses capture more customer feedback and deliver a better customer experience.
- SurveyLab – a fast-growing solutions-based company offering innovative and web-based tools. Their web service allows them to create professional surveys, collect responses and analyze data in real-time.
- SurveyGizmo – takes data out of dashboards and puts it into the hands of people who take action through the systems they use every day.
- Responster – a beautiful and easy-to-use survey tool that helps companies and organizations interact more efficiently with their customers, partners and employees.
Time Management
Time is finite. We all need to do better to optimize our efficiency. The below links will help keep you on track.
- Self-Control –a Mac application that blocks out distracting websites for a specific amount of time.
- Concentrate – helps keep you focused by shutting down non-essential apps and websites.
- RescueTime – helps you understand daily habits so you learn to become more productive.
- Time Tracking – time tracking software to help you discover how much time you’ve spent on a project.
- FocusBooster – a digital pomodoro timer.
- Time Doctor is a team time tracking application. It helps to keep track of how each individual person is keeping track of their time and hence makes them accountable for their working hours.
- Scoro gives you all the tools you need for efficient time management, including time tracking, billing, work reporting, project & task management.
- ActiveCollab combines time billing with project management, making it easier to plan and track creative projects.
- Toggl is a no-hassle time tracking software that integrates with tens of different project management systems. It is the perfect add-on to your existing tools, helping you to be more productive throughout the day.
- Replicon is a comprehensive multi-feature solution that helps companies to track the time spent on work and bill their clients for finished projects.
- Timecamp – uses time-tracking for billing clients, measuring project profitability, or paying employees at the end of the month.
- Bill4Time – a very comprehensive cloud-based time billing software. It simplifies your billing, helps you recover lost revenue, and lets you track time and expenses from anywhere.
- Nutcache is an all-in-one project management tool that includes time tracking and invoicing features. It is meant for small teams that bill their clients on a project basis and are looking to plan their time more efficiently.
Task Lists
- Evernote – organize your daily projects in one workspace.
- Pocket – save important articles or videos to view later.
- Remember The Milk – to-do-lists and reminders.
- Wunderlist – lists that you can share with family or team members.
- Todoist – powerful to-do-list tool that comes with a task manager.
- TickTick is a fast-growing to-do list app that offers a wide array of features on just about every platform you can imagine. Adding tasks is quick thanks to natural language processing.
- Microsoft To Do – The main interface is clean and friendly, adding tasks is quick, but there’s a lot of flexibility below the surface.
- Things – This is an application with no shortage of features and yet it always feels simple to use. Adding tasks is quick and so is organizing them, but there’s seemingly no end of variation in ways to organize them.
Travel
- Trip-it – gives you a master itinerary of your travel plans.
- Shoeboxed – use to scan and organize receipts during travel.
- Where Nomads at – connects you with digital nomads all over the world.
- Time Trade – appointment scheduling software.
- Airbnb – great resource when you need last-minute or affordable lodging.
- Hopper analyzes billions of airfare and hotel prices a day—as well as its vast archive of historical data—to tell you whether to wait or book your trip.
- Roadtrippers – The app allows you to map your route with up to 7 waypoints free of charge.
- Skyscanner – Its “everywhere” feature allows you to look for surprising destinations simply by sorting by your budget and your travel timeframe.
Video
- Vimeo – a professional video platform and community. The platform helps anyone grow their business by making it easy to create and market high-quality, impactful videos.
- Wistia – professional video hosting equipped with analytics and marketing tools.
- Adobe Premiere Clip is a mobile video editing app (available on both iOS and Android devices). Once you have selected your images and video clips, you can let Adobe Premiere Clip create a video for you automatically or create a highly customized video yourself.
- FilmoraGo is such a comprehensive video editor app that you might feel like you are editing your videos on your desktop. Besides the usual features such as themes, text, transitions, it also offers a range of video editing features — trim/split, ratio/crop, speed control, reverse, voice over, audio mixer, and picture-in-picture. It’s amazing that FilmoraGo is free and it doesn’t add a watermark or limit the length of your videos.
- Adobe Spark Video provides multiple storyboards, layouts, and themes to help you put together amazing videos.
- Powtoon – create awesome animated and video presentations.
- Tracker – video analysis and marketing tool.
- Stupeflix – create free, unlimited videos.
- Wideo – another tool to create animated videos.
- Pixabay is best known as a resource for free stock photos, but is also has a great selection of free stock video clips available to download and use, no strings attached.
- Clipstill is dedicated to cinemagraphs – still photos containing a small repeated animation that plays on a loop.
- Videezy is royalty free for personal and commercial use, but users are asked to credit ‘Videezy.com’ in their projects.
- Videvo offers thousands of free stock videos contributed by its community of users.
- Headliner might be the easiest way to create a video with captions. You can upload a video and let it automatically transcribe the audio into captions or create a video simply uploading an article or an audio file. You can also upload or search for images, videos, and GIFs to be added to your video.
- Clipchamp Create is one of the most generous free online video editing tools.
- Splice is a video editing app by GoPro. According to GoPro, Splice “puts the power of a professional desktop editor at your fingertips”.
- Quik – another video editing app by GoPrp, which aims to let you create videos with minimal effort. As GoPro stated, “it automatically analyzes your footage to find the best moments, adds beautiful transitions and effects, and syncs it all to the beat of the music.”
- Typito is another drag-and-drop online video editor with a forever free plan. An interesting unique feature Typito has is the ability to add a branded banner on your video.
- Promo – a user-friendly video creation platform that offers access to over 23 million premium video clips and images, ready-made templates, pre-edited licensed music, unlimited clips and downloads.
- InVideo is a video creation platform to create video ads, promo videos, social media videos and more. InVideo comes power-packed with an extensive library of 2000+ templates, a full-fledged editor, millions of stock videos and images, effects and more.
- HippoVideo – A video engagement platform that helps you connect with your prospects and lifts your sales, marketing, and support efforts.
- FlexClip is a free online video maker that helps you easily turn photos and video clips into professional videos, no design skills required.
- Animaker – a SaaS-based software in the content & video making space. Their mission is to make the visual content simple for everyone.
- WeVideo – a cloud-based video creation platform, providing editing, collaboration, and sharing capabilities across any device.
Websites, Domains, and Hosting
You can’t do it without a website.
- HostWinds VPS – web hosting at only $2.95 per month.
- Siteground – secure and tailored web hosting.
- Strikingly.com – create mobile friendly websites in minutes.
- Host – 100 percent free Web Hosting (I’m affiliated with this company).
- DigitalOcean – cloud hosting specifically for developers.
- Bluehost – the best overall web hosting serviceWhile competition is cut-throat, Bluehost continues to impress in almost every aspect, delivering the complete package of speed, security, versatility and, most importantly, superb reliability for just $2.75 per month.
- Hostgator has surprised us with an exclusive offer that delivers some of the best shared hosting features we’ve seen for a very long time, with a slew of freebies like domain names, SSL certificate and marketing money.
- Hostinger is top of the list with its advanced solution. The cheapest plan provides unlimited bandwidth, hosting for up to 300 websites, and up to 100 email accounts per domain, plus a plethora of other features.
- InMotion Hosting is a popular web host that’s been in business for over 15 years, with an impressive array of plans on offer including reseller hosting.
- Hostwinds offers a range of dedicated server hosting with powerful configuration options for anything from general to heavy-duty use, which makes them ideal for hosting everything from company websites to gaming servers.
- Dreamhost – offers standalone email hosting among the range of different packages that this established web hosting services provider offers.
- GreenGeeks – proudly claims to be the ‘world’s #1 green energy web hosting provider’, not surprising given that it is dedicated entirely to green causes.
- Domain.com– better known as a good domain provider but their hosting plans are worth a look too, offering powerful and reliable hosting on a stable and secure platform.
- Liquid Web is an expert provider of high-end managed hosting solutions for everything from email to WordPress, WooCommerce, VPS, dedicated and assorted other cloud products.
- WP Engine offers a comprehensive managed WordPress service that can help you with setup, updates, security, performance optimization, troubleshooting and a whole lot more.
Wireframing
A wireframe is a two-dimensional skeletal outline of a webpage or app–mostly used by UX designers.
- Gliffy – allows you to “ create professional-quality flowcharts, Org charts, UML diagrams, Network diagrams, Wireframes, Technical drawings”.
- Wirefy – intuitive wireframes for web development.
- Frame Box – easy, sharable frame sharing.
- Pencil Project – a free and open-source GUI prototyping tool
- MockFlow – easy wireframing tool that you can collaborate with others.
- UXPin is a dedicated wireframing tool that has a beautifully intuitive interface, with clear icons, and a solid library of UI elements you can drag and drop into your wireframes, as well as components for Bootstrap, Foundation, iOS and Android.
- Axure allows you not only to create low-fi wireframes, but to add extra functionality and build high-fidelity ones too. You can use it to craft interactive HTML mockups for both websites and apps, and view your app design on your phone with a built-in share function.
- Balsamiq Mockups makes it very easy to pick up and start creating wireframes, even if you have no previous experience. We’d recommend it for anyone looking to put to get together a quick and low-fi wireframe, as opposed to a polished prototype.
- Adobe Creative Cloud is the industry standard when it comes to design software in general. There aren’t any specific wireframing features; it doesn’t offer libraries of interface elements, for example.
X, Y, and Z
13 more useful tools and resources to fulfill your entrepreneurial needs.
- Bookkeeping 101: Debits and Credits.
- Ultimate Guide to Invoicing for Freelancers.
- Accounting Basics.
- Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Business Online.
- Content Marketing Guide – my personal guide to everything content marketing.
- How to Hire Your First Employee.
- Resumator– performance recruiting software.
- Desktime – find or share spaces for coworking.
- LiquidSpace – find daily or hourly office and meeting rentals.
- Alibaba – purchase whatever you need directly from the manufacturer.
- Shapeways – a 3D printing service and marketplace.
- Google My Business – “connects you directly with customers, whether they’re looking for you on Search, Maps or Google+.”
- Paul Graham’s Essays