Ideation
- Excalidraw - for quick diagrams and hashing out systems/ concepts
- Figjam - For ideating collaboratively and quickly, more in depth than excalidraw
- Pioneer Codex - Great resources from this stage onward
For inspiration
Customer Discovery
- Tally Forms - Like Typeform, but free-er and better-er
- AnswerThePublic - Instant Raw Search insight. Be careful you get a limited number of searches
- Yep.so - Validate ideas with Signups qucikly
- Tends Everywhere - Extension to help visualise trends in data based on keywords
Product
Building
- Autodesk Student Access - Autodesk tools, fusion, onshape, cfd, rendering and more
- Github Student Developer Pack - Lots of free tools, domain, cloud credits etc
- Figma - Design and prototype fast
- Jetbrains - Full featured IDE (with the best contextual intellisense I’ve used) free for students
- Zerocode - Build a MVP asap
- AWS Bootstrap - Deploy Fast on AWS
Websites
- USMO - Previously Landen, decent website builder. My preference is still a vps/hosting plan and something more tailored.
- Carrd - Basically USMO, I prefer it but honestly most will do
- Typedream - CMS and web builder
- Framer - Super fast website builder, their product was pitched, built and marketed perfectly. It’s a masterclass
- MailerLite - If you use their mailing list they offer pretty decent landing pages
Managing/Planning
- Notion - Great for managing project, Task Tracking etc, also a great api to build nocode tools
- Coda - Notion but not as good
- zcal - Calendly but better, book meetings etc
Testing
- Tally Forms - Again, better typeform, good for feedback
- Hotjar - Decent free plan for site analytics
- Microsoft Clarity - Capture user journey and more for free
Pitching
90% of the next categories tools will help here too
- Pitch.com - Like Slides, but better for one off pitches
- Pitchago - Later stage but super useful pitch analytics
Inspiration
- Billion Dollar Pitch Decks - Pitch decks before they were famous
Marketing
Design
- Doodle Ipsum - Free Character Image Generator
- Fontvisual - Compare fonts in real time
- Superdesigner - Tools that automate weird monotonous design tasks
- Unblast - Free things like icons, etc
- google fonts - free fonts
- fontbundles - paid fonts for free
- Icons8 - Loads of free icons great for Presentations
Inspiration
- Marketing Examples - Like the best ones
- LandingFolio - Landing Page Inspiration
Image & Photo
- Photopea - Free Photoshop on the internet
- Unsplash - Free Stock Images
- Remove.bg - Remove backgrounds from images easily
- Erase.bg - The above, but with “AI”
- Pika - Make screenshots pretty
- Mockoops - Make your previews sexy
Copy
- TLDR This - Summarize in a click
- Smart copy - Unbounces Copy Writing helper
Email Marketing
- MailerLite - One of the cheapest ones really good too.
Fundraising and Opportunities
on the way
Other interesting projects
- Arcade - Super Fast Demo Builder. I’ve early access and really love it
- Certificates - Graphy spinout tool - generates pretty things, super niche. Love it
- Brandbird - Fun twitter tools
- Giving Notion Coda power - as title says
- Desky - Really well though out and designed software
Note for next things: Superhuman is a really expensive (30euro per month) email client. It’s done every feature perfectly but I still don’t think it’s worth the cost. A lot of startups use it as a simile for speed and perfect execution with good looking interfaces
- Acapella - Superhuman for more than email, manage notion, figma, etc and organise. Inbox zero across all work by my short time with it
- Tempo - Free Superhuman for mac only
- Cron - My favorite calendar app, the real superhuman of calendars. It’s free, but on early access, I instantly got sent a copy, despite a waitlist, no idea why. Although there’s also:
- Track - Like the above but with NLP and more superhuman inspired
- Vimacal - another “Superhuman for Calendar” This carries the pricetag though