Startup Resources - 🛠 Top of the hunt

SparkToro - Market research and audience intelligence

This research tool from Rand Fishkin (Moz founder) is incredible.

Want to find out about the followers of a social profile? Easy. In seconds it'll you give you an analysis of what they talk about, what's in their bio, websites they visit.

Want to know who talks about a particular topic and where? Another quick search.

Find the podcasts people listen to, the videos they watch. You can really build a picture of an audience.

Very cool.

⚠️ There's a warning - it's expensive. But... you can do 10 queries per month for free. Try it out.

→ Get this

22 Onboarding Emails You Can Steal

Free download (in exchange for your email) of 22 example onboarding emails that you can tweak and use.

They come from Aaron Krall who helps SaaS with improving conversions and runs the awesome SaaS Growth Hacks group on Facebook.

The logic of the file is a little hard to follow but worth looking through to grab some ideas for your own onboarding.

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Inspireframe - Fast, easy website prototyping

This is a quick way to take the bits you like from other website designs and build a layout that you like. Use it as a starting point for your own designs.

Try the limited version with no sign up required.

→ Get this

Top 50 Slack

I don't normally share things that are paid only. But... this could be the perfect resource if you're trying to track down communities where your audience hangs out. 

If you're looking for ideas, validation, customers or just likeminded people to hang out with, there's probably a Slack community for you.

→ Get this

🏆 Sponsor

Validating an idea? Here's 12 podcasts to help you get it right

You've got a great idea for a business but how do you validate it to give yourself the best chance of success?

Easy - you learn from experts like Hiten Shah, Rob Fitzpatrick, Bram Kanstein, Sahil Lavingia and more in these awesome podcasts.

→ Get this

🤓 Articles

Outreach, SEO & Partners – How Zapier Grew To $50m ARR Fully Remote

9 growth tactics that propelled Zapier into the monster company that lives on every software integration page. 

Each tactic has an idea on how you can apply it to your business.

→ Read this

How I reached #1 on ProductHunt

(Not me - story by Frank Heijdenrijk)

The ups and downs, blood, sweat and tears that goes into launching a side project on Product Hunt and getting to number 1.

→ Read this

Why You Should Launch a Startup During a Recession

As much of the world is at the beginning of a recession, is now the right time to start something?

Jumping into uncertainty when 20%+ of populations are unemployed, probably doesn't feel right. But this short article gives some inspiration to do it anyway.

→ Read this

📢 Classifieds

🎧 Podcast

Zero to 5-figure MRR in just a few months by doing outbound sales - with Frank Breckner, founder of Finalytic

This episode is all about getting sales early on.

Forget marketing at the beginning, sales will a) help validate your product and b) bring in much needed cashflow.

Frank Breckner is the founder of Finalytic, a SaaS tool that automates financial reconciliations between other tools like Stripe, PayPal, Quickbooks and Airbnb.

Finalytic has gone from 0 customers in January to £10-20K MRR, 5 months later. Impressive growth.

I included a lot of notes on the episode. Just hit the link below...

→ Listen to this

📰 Newsletter

SpringUp Stories

A daily-ish collection of links & news from/for the indie maker community

I found SpringUp Stories early last week and have found it very useful.

Clemens Stromeyer pulls together around 10 tweets for indie makers. He adds some context so you know the bigger story and then you can go and dive in for more.

Why do I love it?

Unless you're on twitter all day you miss stuff. This is a nice way of surfacing interesting topics and conversations. And people - I'm finding new people worth following.

Why subscribe?

Feel like you're getting the good bits from twitter without the mindless scroll and endless quote tweets.

→ Get this

😢 The awkward end bit