Startups of February — Beta List. Steward - Sales Research Done On-Demand. Really Good Emails - The Best Email Designs in the Universe (that came into my inbox) +300 Awesome Free Things for Entrepreneurs and Startups — STARTUPS + WANDERLUST + LIFE HACKING — Medium. The Complete Startup Toolkit (The Best Free Online Startup Resources Right Now) — Tools And Apps. Starting a business is hard. It’s even a more difficult when you don’t have the right startup resources, tools and business apps to do what needs to be done in time.
Entrepreneurs do everything they can to get their businesses to succeed. What startup founders really need are the best startup resources and tools to help them get out there to build and sell their products and services. This is an awesome curation of the best online resources and tools for startups, originally curated by Ben Tossell, Community Manager at ProductHunt 1. Startup Stash — A curated directory of 400 resources & tools for startups 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. rrrepo –Curated directories, for everything 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
Business - Growth Supply. The Ultimate Startup Toolkit - Unique curations of the best resources and tools for startups by Ben Tossell. Grow your audience by collecting and sharing engaging content. Enterprise Sales Guide. What tools do you use to monitor buzz about your startup? - Quora. Educating your users, when and where it's needed most | elevio. Groove Small Business Stack. 90 days free Zapier gives you internet superpowers to get work done. Easily connect and integrate over 250 of the most popular web services to save you time, money and earn back your freedom. 90 days free Figure out what people are doing on your website! The confetti and heatmap features are simple and affordable heat mapping tools to visually understand user behavior. 50% off for 3 months after trial Build, publish & A/B test landing pages without I.T. The landing page builder for marketers. 90 days free Planscope helps freelancers and teams manage their client projects.
We make it easy to answer, “Will this project get done on time and in budget?” 90 days free Applicant Tracking software doesn't have to be complex and tedious. This fundamental belief is the foundation of Workable: it's easy to learn and use, it's pretty, and it gets the job done. 90 days free Exit Monitor is the most powerful conversion rate optimization and lead generation tool. Blog of David Skok, Matrix Partners | For Entrepreneurs. 18 Extraordinary Lessons Learned from Interviewing The World’s Top SaaS Entrepreneurs. We’ve learned a lot from businesspeople at the top of their game. Here are some of the biggest takeaways. Six months ago, we launched a new series on this blog. We set out to interview successful entrepreneurs – businesspeople at the very top of their game – about how they took their businesses to $100K in monthly revenue… and beyond.
I expected it to be successful. After all, it was exactly the sort of thing I craved: the most valuable lessons from the entire careers of people much more successful than me, condensed into an easily readable format. But I didn’t expect it to have such an impact on our own business. The truth is, we’ve taken key insights from the monthly interviews, and applied at least one from each entrepreneur to Groove… and the results have been incredible.
Today, I’m sharing the top takeaways for us (yours might be different, which is why I encourage reading all of the interviews in their entirety) from the six interviews we’ve done so far. 1) Have a “Forever Free” Plan. Startup Stash - Curated resources and tools for startups. Ideal Customer Profile Framework. Fast User Testing ⋅ Five Second Test, Click Test and Nav Flow ⋅ UsabilityHub. Startup Best Practices #11 - The 9 Box Matrix Talent Model. McKinsey developed the 9 Box Matrix in the 1970s to help GE prioritize investments across its 150 business units. Not all business units were equally attractive. Some should receive investments and others should be divested. The 9 Box Matrix evaluated business units on two dimensions: industry attractiveness and competitive strength of the business unit.
At some point in the last 40 years, Human Resources teams co-opted this model as a talent management tool, and replaced the two industry axes with people specific ones: performance and potential, as depicted above. Because the HR model has never been standardized, there are quite a few variations in circulation. First, the company categorizes all their employees into these buckets. Next, the management team meets to calibrate their categorizations. Last, the management team implements a talent plan which invests in the four top right boxes and includes training, mentorship, assigning new projects and retention compensation. MailMentor.io: A Free Tool To Help Optimize Sales Emails.
Rebump. Introducing the Co-Outreach Sales Hack. Close.io – Stop logging calls and emails and start making them instead. Mechanizing business development with social media. Last year, I set a goal of adding 100 followers each week starting at 2000. I crossed the 3500 follower mark on Twitter this week. I’ve fallen a bit behind that goal but I have a wonderful group of people who actively engage with me on Twitter who are interested in the same things I am. As I’ve been cultivating this audience and community, I kept asking myself a question: who are most of these followers?
Who retweets me? I’ve looked for solutions to help me solve this problem. Looker | Business intelligence that helps customers use data to achieve success. Looker enables true data discovery. Infer: Predictive Lead Scoring for Sales & Marketing. Customer Success for the New Enterprise | Gainsight. Subscription Billing, Commerce & Finance Solutions - Zuora. 2014 SaaS Survey (Part 1) - A Survey of key metrics in over 300 SaaS companies. For the third year in a row, we worked together with Pacific Crest Securities, an investment banking firm with a specific focus on SaaS, to survey 306 SaaS companies.
This represents nearly double the # of respondents from last year, giving us deeper benchmarking data and insights to share on the growth and operations of the companies in this space. We also welcome this year the participation of OpenView, an expansion stage venture capital firm specializing in B2B Software, who brought additional support. I want to extend my personal thanks to the many readers of this blog who participated in the survey. My thanks also go out to David Spitz and his team at Pacific Crest Securities (@dspitz and @PacCrestSec, respectively on Twitter) for their hard work on the survey. Part 1 of the results of the survey, which focuses on growth rates and go-to-market trends, are posted below. Info about the Survey Participants A larger, more diverse group of SaaS companies participated this year:
The Angel VC. Blog of David Skok, Matrix Partners | For Entrepreneurs. SaaStr | Getting From $0 to $100m ARR Faster. With Less Stress. And More Success.