- LaunchRock – Create a viral “coming soon” landing page
- LaunchSoon – create a coming soon landing page
- Prefinery– Beta and Launch Mgmt software
- LaunchEffect – WordPress Landing pages for viral launches
- Ooomf – iPhone app store build/push/launch
- Unbounce – create, publish & test promotion specific landing pages
- Instapage – create a free landing page
- KickoffLabs -product landing pages
- LaunchGator – create a viral landing page
- Atmio – mobile landing pages
- Lander – create a landing page in minutes
- Ion – create landing pages that convert
Survey Tools
- Google Consumer Surveys
- SurveyAnyPlace
- Qualtrics – cloud-based survey, free account a complete game changer – incredibly well built and powerful
- Qualtrics Wiki – Joseph Williams
- Amazon Mechanical Turk – you can set up a question and get answers
- Using Mechanical Turk for Customer Discovery – Joseph Williams
- Qualaroo – target surveys, boost signups, increase usage
- KissInsights – survey visitors while they surf your site
- Wufoo – create contact forms, online surveys and event registrations
- AYTM – Ask Your Target Market
- Ethnio – Recruit real people from your website for user research
- Poplytics – online surveys and analytics
- AskYourTargetMarket – market research surveys
- SurveyMonkey– granddaddy of on-line surveys
- SurveyMoz – free on-line surveys
- QuestionPro – on surveys, plus templates
- SnapSurveys – online and mobile surveys
- PickFu – Instant Market feedback A/B testing, polls
- SurveyGizmo – free version, survey creation and data integration tools
- SmartSurvey – UK’s leading survey tool, complies with the Data Protection Act
- FormAssembly – Create order forms, service requests or registration forms and collect payment securely
- FluidSurvey – web/mobile/tablet surveys
- PollDaddy – from the makers of WordPress, powerful reporting & filtering
Tools for Finding Customer Contacts
- LinkedIn Alumni – awesome way to contact school alumni
- Data.Com – find business connections
- Rapportive – find contacts inside of Gmail
- Hoovers – phone and email contacts for sale
- Harrisinfo – sales leads for sale
- InfoUSA – email lists for sale
- ThomasNet – find any company
Tools for Determining Market Size / Demand
- Google Trends – what are the search trends for key items
- Google Insights – breaks down the search data by location
- Facebook ads – check out the total available market
- Google Keyword Tool – how many searches done per month on any keyword phrase
Find a Co-founder for Your Startup
- FounderDating – premiere site for founders/co-founders
- CoFoundersLab – find a co-founder in any city
- Stanford Business School Interns – hire a Stanford Bus School intern cheap
- YouNoodle – founder matching
- FoundersHookUp – Invite-only find a co-founder
- Foundrs – co-founder equity calculator
- How to hire developers – mike greenfield
- Startup Weekend – Launch a Startup and meet a co-founder
- Meetup – go to a Meetup!
- PartnerUp– small business site to find partners, business opportunities, real estate, etc.
- Angel List – Angel List jobs board
Startup Groups
- Lean Startup Circle – Google Group for startup advice
- LUXr – Lean UX residency
- Women 2.0 – Launch a startup for women
- Meetup – Meet people you’re interested in
- Top Startup Conferences (North America)
- Startup Weekend– Launch a Startup in 54 hours
- Startup Weekend Next – 5 weeks to build a startup for <$300
-
Startup America Partnership – access to Relationships, Opportunities and Knowledge
- The Lean Startup Machine – Launch a Startup in 48 hours
- Startup Monthly – Launch a Startup in a month
- Startup Grind – community looking to be educated, and network with the smartest startup minds
Most Popular Web Hosting Decisions of Y-Combinator Companies (2011)
Web Host: Amazon
Email Host: Google
DNS Host: Other/Self-Hosted (followed by Amazon)
Registrar: GoDaddy
SSL Issuer: GeoTrust
Certificate Type: Star
For a complete breakdown, visit http://jpf.github.io/domain-profiler/ycombinator.html
Debugging Javascript Using console.log & Conditional Blocks
When developing a site, you may have a main javascript file that contains various blocks of code for different parts of your site. As time goes on, this file could get really long and you may not want to break it up to keep minimize requests and the number of files to maintain. Sometimes you might accidentally have code in one block that is meant for one part of your site interfere with code from another. In addition, you may find it hard to see which blocks of code are getting executed. One way to overcome this is by setting up your code as follows:
/**
* Code to do one thing on one part of your site,
* e.g. slide show your product pages
*/
(function ($) {
$(document).ready(function () {
if ($("body.products").size() > 0) {
if (typeof console != 'undefined' && console !== null) {
console.log("slide show on product pages called.");
}
// put code here ...
}
});
}(jQuery));
/**
* Code to do one thing on one part of your site,
* e.g. custom animation your resources pages
*/
(function ($) {
$(document).ready(function () {
if ($("body.resources").size() > 0) {
if (typeof console != 'undefined' && console !== null) {
console.log("custom animation on resources pages called.");
}
// put code here ...
}
});
}(jQuery));
Embedding Google Maps into a Website
Google recently updated Google Maps and while it looks nice, I actually had to go back to the old (classic) Google Maps to find how to get the embed code to embed a map into a website. If you need to embed a Google Map into your website, you can follow these steps:
1. Go to maps.google.com and search for your location.
2. If you see the new Google Map, click on the gear in top right and select “Classic Maps”
Font Awesome: 361 Font Icons
Adding icons to a website can easily make it look more polished, but it can also be a hassle to find good fonts and deal with resizing them or styling them as images. I came across this site called Font Awesome that offers 361 fonts as icons so you can style these icons easily via CSS and easily include them into your site.
http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/
