Building Digital Products

IDEA MANAGEMENT AND SYNDICATION

• Medium: Everyone’s stories and ideas.

• Javelin: Test your startup idea without wasting time or money.

• Germ.io: Get from idea to execution.

• Skitch by Evernote: Your ideas become reality faster.

SURVEYS and A/B TESTING

• Typeform: Free beautiful online survey & form builder.

• Qualaroo: Get feedback from users with an interactive survey widget.

• Optimizely: One optimization platform for websites and mobile apps.

• Tally: Create polls in no time.

LEARN

• Coursera: Free online classes from 80+ top universities & organizations.

• Khan Academy: Free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

• Skillshare: Unlock your creativity with free online classes & projects.

• Codecademy: Learn to code interactively, for free.

• How to Start a Startup: As an Audio Podcast or As Online Course

• Startup Notes: Startup School invites amazing founders to tell their story.

• ThePitch (Podcast): Where founders pitch their startups to investors.

• Pricing Course: A free 9 day course on charging what you’re worth.

• GrowthHackers: Exactly what it sounds like.

EMAIL MANAGEMENT

• Mailchimp: Send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free.

• ManyContactsBar: Free contact form sits on top of your website.

• Hello Bar: Get more email subscribers.

• Sumome List Builder: Collect email addresses with light box popover.

• Sumome Scroll Box: Capture more email addresses, politely.

ORGANIZE & COLLABORATE

• Trello: Keeps track of everything.

• Evernote: The workspace for your life’s work.

• Dropbox: Free space up to 2GB.

• Slack: Free for unlimited users with few limited features.

• Google Hangouts: Bring conversations to life with photos, emoji and group video calls.

• Join.me: Free screen sharing and video/phone calls.

• FreeConferenceCall: Decent conference call quality (even international) for $0.

SUPPORT AND ENGAGE YOUR CUSTOMERS

• Intercom: A fundamentally new way to communicate with your customers.

• Zendesk: Brings companies and their customers closer together.

MOBILE

• Mobile Action: Killer app store optimization and analytics platform. All you need in addition to iTunes tracking to understand your app under <100k downloads.

• Parse: A free push notification service (up to 1MM messages/month) to integrate into your app.

• Apptentive: The tools you need to listen to, engage with, and retain your mobile customers in-app.

ANALYTICS AND EVENT TRACKING

• Mixpanel: Define and track events, segments, and funnels quickly and easily.

• Heap: Mixpanel without any development work needed to create events.

• Google Analytics: Your go-to free platform for tracking site visitors, mapping behaviors, and creating live dashboards.

FIND CONTENT AND TRACK TRENDS

• Buzzsumo: Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.

• Feedly: Compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customize & share.

• Google Trends: A new way of displaying trending searches.

SEO + WEBSITE ANALYZERS

• SimilarWeb: Analyze website statistics for any domain.

• Open Site Explorer by Moz: A comprehensive tool for link analysis.

• Ahrefs: Site explorer & backlink checker.

• Quick Sprout: Complete analysis of your website.

• SEO Site Checkup: SCheck your website’s SEO problems for free.

• SERPs Rank Checker: Free keyword rank & SERP checker.

• Google Pagespeed Insights: Check the performance of your site.

• Pingdom: Test the load time of a site.

SCREENSHOTS/MOCKUPS OF APPS AND WEBSITES

• Dunnnk: Beautiful mockups.

• InstaMockup: Create beautiful screenshots of your app or website.

IMAGE EDITORS

• Canva: Amazingly simple graphic design for bloggers.

• Social Image Resizer Tool: Create optimized images for social media.

SOCIAL MEDIA + COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT

• Pagemodo: Everything you need for a powerful Social Media presence.

• SocialRank: Identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter.

• WriteRack: The best way to tweetstorm.

• MyTweetLinks: Increases Twitter traffic.

• Latergramme: Easily plan & schedule your Instagram posts.

• Justunfollow: Follow / unfollow people on Twitter & Instagram.

• Ritetag: Instant hashtag analysis.

• Bitly: Create, share, and track shortened links.

• Addthis: Get more shares, follows and conversions.

• App Review Monitor: App reviews delivered to Slack and your inbox.

• Presskit Generator: Generate a Press Kit for your iOS App for free.

DESIGN RESOURCES AND INSPIRATION

•Figma: Design collaboratively, build prototypes, and leverage best-in-class integrations

• Freebbble: High-quality design freebies from Dribbble.

• Google Fonts: Free, open-source fonts optimized for the web.

• The Noun Project: Thousands of glyph icons from different artists.

• Premium Pixels: Free stuff for creatives.

• Fribbble: Free PSD resources by Dribbblers curated by Gilbert Pellegrom.

• SketchAppResources: Free graphical resources.

• Squarespace Free Logo: You can download free low-res version for free.

• Site Inspire: Web design inspiration.

• Land-Book: Product landing pages gallery.

• Icon Finder: Free icon section of the website.

FREE STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY

• Stock Up: Best free stock photo websites in one place.

• Pexels: Best free photos in one place.

• All The Free Stock: Free stock images, icons, and videos.

• Unsplash: Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.

• Startup Stock Photos: Go. Make something.

• Super Famous: Photos by Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter.

• Picography: Free hi-resolution photos.

• Pixabay: Free high quality images.

QA AND TESTING

• Window Resizer: See how your site looks on various screen resolutions.

• CrossBrowserTesting: Test your site on the same browsers and devices your customers use.

DISCOVER TOOLS & STARTUPS

• Product Hunt: Curation of the best new products, every day.

• Launching Next: Get the best new startups delivered to your inbox daily.

• Inbound: Get trending inbound marketing info in your inbox.

• AngeLlist: Where the world meets startups.

• Beta List: Discover and get early access to tomorrow’s startups.

NEWSLETTERS THAT DON’T SUCK

• Startup Digest: Personalized newsletter for all things startup in your area.

• Tech.co: A refreshing alternative to TechCrunch.

• TheSkimm: An edgy update on what happened in the last 24 hours.

OUTSOURCING

• Elance: Now apparently called UpWork.

• Guru: Find and hire talented freelancers for anything.

• Gun.io: Find the development help you need. You even get a “Hacker Ambassador” to show you the way.

LEGAL

• CooleyGo: Incorporation Packages and other free legal documents:

• Kiss: Free legal docs for startup founders and investor.

• Docracy: An open collection of free legal documents.

• Shake: Create, sign and send legally binding agreements in seconds. Free for personal use.