Welcome to Start-up Resources Weekly. You’re a busy entrepreneur. Time and money are both important and precious. That’s why we hunt down the best tools, wisdom, and news and deliver them straight to your inbox. Every week.Hello 👋
How are you doing this week?
Yes, we’d really like to know. Go to the web version of this letter and tell us what’s happening in your start-up journey or new business.
There’s been only one subject on everyone’s minds this week - but we’re not going to mention that. We know that you know what we’re talking about.
Meanwhile, the wheels of commerce keep turning, and we’ve found plenty of fun tools and terrific articles to help you get ahead.
Read on to see what we discovered online.
See you next week,
Juliet Lyall
📚Articles
📈 Using Your Unfair Advantage
When you're starting out in business, sometimes it feels like your competition has an unfair advantage. A few common examples are; more money, a new tech breakthrough or a better business network.
It's best that you learn the truth now: business is not fair.
One of the best tactics to maximize your business success is to identify and use your unfair advantages. In his recent article for Flippa, Dan Fries suggests that entrepreneurs audit themselves to uncover their particular advantages.
How? By using the MILES framework.
This clever acronym represents:
Money
Intelligence and insight
Location and luck
Education and expertise
Status
Take a look and see how many advantages this exercise creates for you.
🏦 Need a Loan?
Financing your start-up usually involves digging into your own cash resources and those of your co-founders.
But, when those funds are getting low, you need to decide whether to raise money by diluting ownership or by taking a loan.
This article from FeedDough clearly explains what debt financing is and how it works. It also outlines the available sources for funding, along with the pros and cons for each option.
If you're considering a business loan - or diluting your ownership through equity financing - there’s a useful chart included to help you figure out what's right for your business.
🚀 Prepare Yourself for Success
Launching a start-up requires a ton of preparation.
This means not only having a strategy in place, but also preparing yourself for what lies ahead.
This Forbes blog post suggests three steps to better position yourself and your start-up for long-term success.
When you want to be around long term, you need to learn the basics of business, to understand your motivations, and also find out what worked for other founders.
It's a short article packed with great advice for new entrepreneurs.
SPONSORED LINK
🦄 SEOs with Skin in the Game
Smash Digital - a growth agency, filled to the brim with unicorn images and SEO memes.
A team of SEOs with actual skin in the game, ranking their own portfolio of profitable businesses, and offering the exact same services to clients.
An agency with so much link juice you’ll need a mop and bucket to clean it all up. Check. Them. Out.
🧰 Tools
😡 Do You “Rage Click?”
Microsoft Clarity has made its debut as a free analytics tool - complete with heatmaps.
Microsoft describes Clarity as:
A user behavior analytics tool that helps you understand how users are interacting with your website through features such as session replays and heatmaps.
Clarity gives website managers and marketers a deeper understanding of website visitor behavior.
You get individual session recordings that allow you to examine how users interacted with your site. You'll see where things are working smoothly and where people get stuck.
In addition, heat maps show you where users clicked and scrolled, and which parts of your page drive the most engagement.
We especially enjoyed the "Rage Click” report. Rage clicks occur when site visitors click several times on a portion of a web page they believe should hyperlink somewhere, but it does not.
There is a load of functionality that will provide you with the means to improve your visitor’s website experience.
Clarity is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) compliant - and FREE.
🚰 The Watercooler Is Here
If you use Donut in your Slack channel, you'll know that it's the ideal tool for introducing and connecting your team members.
Last week, Donut launched Watercooler as an antidote to Zoom fatigue and isolation. As the name suggests, Watercooler encourages brief, low-key conversations and suits all teams - remote or not.
With Watercooler, your business chooses from pre-selected topics and questions, and sets the frequency with which those questions are posted.
After that, everything happens automatically.
Just like Donut, Watercooler offers free and paid plans.
⌨️ BlaBlaBla
When we discovered this tool, we couldn't believe that we hadn't seen it before.
And, it's so much fun that we spent waaaay more time playing with it than we intended.
Even the name is brilliant: 'Blablameter'.
Blablameter checks a text for unnecessary words, and awkward grammar that obscures the meaning of your content.
You're rated on a BS index - but we're not sure how high that goes!
The web is full of meaningless advertising, blog posts, and nonsense published in the name of content.
Creating great content for your business is costly, which is why readability is so important. And, there are tools such as Readable for checking your content scores. (Incidentally, they suggest a readability grade of 8 or lower).
Just for laughs, we checked several content snippets from well-known websites. These sites all feature in the 100 Most Visited Websites by Search Traffic.
Here's how they ranked on the BlaBlameter:
🚽Article from The New York Times
Bullshit Index: 0.02
Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English.
✱ ✱ ✱
🚽Article from Business Insider
 |
✱ ✱ ✱
🚽Article from Medical News Today
Bullshit Index :0.95
Is this even English? You must be either a PR-Expert, Politician, Consultant or Scientist. If there is a message, it's unlikely it will reach anyone. Maybe you should spend less effort on trying to impress somebody.
Want to check your text?
🎥 Video
⏱️ You've Got 60 Seconds
Your elevator pitch must state your offer simply and concisely.
If you can't do that, you're likely to lose opportunities to promote your business, raise funds and expand your network.
If you think you're in need of practice, then you might be interested in Entrepreneur's latest season of the Entrepreneur Elevator.
Entrepreneurs get 60 seconds to pique the interest of a group of judges. These judges are also investors who vote whether to open the elevator doors or send the founder down and pass on investing.
This episode features only minority-owned businesses.
👋 The Awkward End Bit
That's it for this week.
How did we do this time? 😅
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