BUS-217 benefits and other free tools and tools for your startup.
Here are some benefits that BUS-217 students receive, as well as a list of free (and nearly free) resources every startup founder should be aware of.
AWS Activate
BUS-217 students receive a variety of free benefits from AWS, including AWS Cloud credits, AWS Business Support credits, exclusive members-only offers, and access to the Activate Console to help build and grow their businesses.
- $5,000 in AWS Activate Credits valid for 2 years
- 1 year of AWS Business Support (up to $1,500).
Our Activate Provider Organization ID (Org ID) is: 0rU79. You should enter this Org ID into the Activate Portfolio application form when applying for AWS Activate. Note: this Org ID is a case sensitive, unique identifier that should not be shared publicly.
Hubspot
HubSpot is an all-in-one software platform for CRM, Sales, and Marketing. Sign up at https://www.hubspot.com/startups and select “4thly” as the partner. You’ll receive up to 90% off as part of the partnership.
Vouch
Vouch is business insurance for startups. Vouch offers 10+ lines of proprietary coverage, from General Liability, EPL, D&O, to Cyber policies. 4thly participants can get a discount by going to: vouch.us/bretwaters
Notion
Get Notion for Startups – $1,000 package for free!
Zendesk
The leading set of digital products for Customer Experience (CX). 4thly participants receive:
- Six months of access to Zendesk Suite and Zendesk Sales CRM at no cost.
- Online office hour sessions with our startups customer success team
- Access to our Startups Community including events, content and resources
Sign up here: https://www.zendesk.com/campaign/partner-startups/?partner_account=0016R000038a1qfQAA
Carta
Carta is the best way to manage your cap table. They have a range of services for startup founders through their Carta Launch program: https://carta.com/private-companies/launch/
Free (and nearly free) tools every startup should know about.
Here’s a list of resources and tools every startup founder should know about..
Communication and Collaboration Startups have to be agile and fast-moving. And increasingly, startup teams are geographically dispersed, which adds another layer of complexity. Here are some indispensable tools for startup communication and collaboration.
Zoom There are many video conference platforms, of course, but there’s a reason why Zoom is the current market leader. (Free accounts limit meetings to 40 minutes).
Slack Don’t even try to run a startup without Slack. It is the best solution for real-time collaboration. (free accounts subject to some limitations)
GSuite Docs. Startup agility means being able to do real-time collaboration on documents and spreadsheets. Don’t be sending Excel and Word docs via attachments. 1996 is never coming back again. Use shared docs if you want a startup that can succeed in 2020.
Calendly Don’t be impolite by asking someone for a meeting and then taking 13 emails to find a mutually convenient time. Send them a Calendly link and say “just pick any time that’s convenient for you”. (free version gives a subset of functionality).
Competitive Research and Customer Development Any startup needs to do comprehensive research on the category they are entering. And you need to stay up on all the developments going on. But you probably can’t afford a research department. Fortunately, there are some amazing tools available!
Google Trends Want to know how interest in peanut butter cookies compares to the interest in chocolate chip cookies, over the past five years? Google makes search trends available for free at trends.google.com
Crunchbase Find out have much money each of your competitors have raised, who invested in them, and when. All available via the free version of Crunchbase.
Wayback Machine Want to know what Zoom’s pricing model was in 2015? The Wayback Machine has history screenshots of nearly every website. Free.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Let’s say you wanted to see a list of people with “Widget” in their title, working at companies East of the Mississippi, who started their job within the past 18 months, only at companies with more than 1,000 employees. The standard edition of LinkedIn won’t do that, but LinkedIn Sales Navigator will. An incredibly powerful tool. (free 30-day trial).
Owler Hard-to-find company data and smarter news alerts. Free version lets you follow 10 companies per month.
G2 and Capterra Are you selling software and services? You’ll want to read the reviews of your competitors.
Mockups and Prototyping
If you are building a product that will be delivered as software, website, or mobile app, there are tons of great tools available for doing mockups and prototypes. Here are a few of our favorites:
Balsamiq is an awesome tool for rapid mockups (free trial).
InvisionApp allows you to develop full interactive prototypes of mobile apps (free for 1 prototype).
Marketing There are tons of tools available today – you don’t even have to be a marketing expert!
Wufoo (forms and analytics).
Unsplash and Pixabay (royalty-free photos).
MailChimp (free account limited to one email list)
SendInBlue (free account has limits on some features)
Canva online design tool – free trial
Looka automatic design – free trial
Google Analytics
Google Optimize (you can create variants of different pieces of your website to test – pricing, designs, colors, fonts etc)
Google Tags
Design
Photopea (free online analogue of Photoshop)
Surveys
Survey Monkey Typeform
Contract Management You’ll need to quickly get contracts signed without annoying people by having them print it out, sign it, scan it, and send it back.
HelloSign.
DocuSign
Project Management
Trello Asana
Miro
Podio
Planning Poker
Website Building
Squarespace WordPress
Wix
Shopify (if you need an online store), monthly subscription starts at $29/mo
Google Sites
Bubble
Engineering
A free collaboration platform for developing web applications. Automatically manages real time collaborative editing, version control, and deployment.
Cloudflare (managed DNS for free)
Provides worldwide infrastructure for web content distribution to ensure that your website loads quickly no matter where your users are.
Github
A version control platform for code repositories. Securely track and distribute code across your team and external contributors and integrate it with your application servers.
Browser Dev Tools
Web browsers include sophisticated tools for developing and troubleshooting web content. Advanced performance analysis and logging are closer than you think.
VS Code
Code editor with a robust extension and integration community that integrates seamlessly with github.
Docker
Encapsulates applications in containers that can be shared and run across many different environments and types of infrastructure ranging from development to production.
Ubuntu (Linux)
One of the most popular variants of Linux that supports headless environments, desktop systems, or subsystems in environments like Windows 10.
Stack Overflow
If you’re an engineer, you’ve visited Stack Overflow: a community of engineers that ask and answer detailed questions about implementation of code and engineering solutions.
A popular service for learning how to use coding frameworks and tools. Driven by instructors in narrated, short videos that demonstrate concepts accompanied by downloadable examples you can run.
MDN Web Docs
An exhaustive and authoritative resource for documentation around web standards and APIs.
Find Freelancers
Upwork – find a freelancer for anything, sometimes at amazingly low rates.
Fiverr – great for small projects, sometimes as low as $5.
Amazon Mechanical Turk – good for microtasking (with used it for customer development and research – hired 100-200 people to complete our survey for $1)
Pitching https://starthouse.xyz/ – largest collection of example pitch decks on the internet.