202+ Super-Duper Resources to Help Build Your First Product
In this carefully-curated collection, you'll receive information about all the tools and resources (but none of the guidance) you need to help build your first product.
↑ Available as a FREE pdf, for your reading pleasure
For expert guidance, you'll have to read the book ;-)
Most of these tools are free unless indicated otherwise.
Absolute favorites are denoted by a fire icon: 🔥
This list grew so long I had to put each section of a section on its own page:
- Name and Build Your Site - 10 sections with 48 resources.
- Marketing - 4 sections with 34 resources.
- Master Email Marketing - 3 sections with 12 resources.
- Use Graphics to Improve Products and Content - 8 sections with 52 resources.
- Name Your Price, Collect Your Money - 2 sections with 5 resources.
- Support and Reliability - 5 sections with 27 resources.
- Serious Business: Accounting and Legal - 3 sections with 8 resources.
- Other Fundamentals - 5 sections with 31 resources.
Name and Build Your Site
- Choosing a name — 12 tools for inventing great names or finding available domain names
- Domain Registration — 2 domain registrars I can recommend
- Hosting, static frontend only — 2 amazing tools for publishing a static front end: free
- Hosting, your own server (VPS) — 5 providers to reliably host your own server, with prices starting at $5 per month
- Hosting, platform as a service — Simpler than managing your own server, a PaaS will host your custom app in the cloud, here are 2 amazing examples
- Https/SSL/TLS — 4 tools for creating and perfecting Transport Layer Security on your site
- Static website generator / framework — 5 well regarded frameworks for generating your static website site
- CSS frameworks — 7 CSS frameworks, starting with Bootstrap, to give you a head-start building a site or application
- Bootstrap Extras — 5 sources of Bootstrap themes for every situations, (4 of them free)
- Website Templates/Themes — 4 places for free or high value website templates
Marketing
- Marketing, Keywords, and SEO — Press coverage, SEO tips, finding keywords, all your standard internet marketing material is covered in these 14 resources
- Social Media — 1 tool for your social media buffering needs
- Blog Post Title Templates — What can these 8 tools teach you about blog post titles?
- Research Sites (including Competitors) — 11 ways to perform competitor research and market research
Master Email Marketing
- Email — 2 tools to help manage email hosting
- Bulk Email, Mailing List, and Transaction Email — 6 tools for sending bulk email and transactional email... only 2 of them are mailchimp
- Email Templates — 4 collections to help you craft high quality emails
Use Graphics to Improve Products and Content
- Logo & Icon & Favicon & App Icons — 10 great sources of logos and tools for making logos
- Graphics Tools — 8+ useful tools for modifying images
- Mockups — 5 ways to make awesome mockups, prototypes and wireframes
- Diagrams — 5 tools for engaging diagrams
- Stock Photos / Stock Art / Free Art — So much amazing and free stock art from these 11 sites
- Screenshots — 5 ways of taking screenshots, or placing screenshots in perfect settings
- Fonts and Font pairing — 3 resources: one provides thousands of free fonts, the other two teach you what you desperately need to know about typography and pairing
- Colors/schemes — 4 tools to save you hours of fighting over color schemes
Name Your Price, Collect Your Money
- Pricing — How to set a price? 3 resources that give you the complete picture
- Payment Processing — 2 or 3 ideal payment processors
Support and Reliability
- Analytics — 4 ways to track and visualize metrics about your visitors
- Help/support system — 11 tools to use as a helpdesk, project management system, todo tracker, customer satisfaction checker and so on
- Screen share — Screenshare with your customers using either of these 2 tools
- Site Reliability — 8 tools covering: up time, link rot, DNS check, virus checks and speed, woah
- Forum and community — 2 ways to provide forum and chat facilities
Serious Business: Accounting and Legal
- Accounting — 2 ways to cook your books, one free, one effective
- Legal Stuff — A guide to the documents, and some great examples, in these 4 links
- Other Business Tools — Business model canvas and dasheroo dashboard, 2 useful business tools
Other Fundamentals
- Code Hosting — 3 safe places to store all your code
- Brain Storming/ Mind Mapping — 2 tools for mapping your muddled mind
- Focus — 9 tools to block distractions and improve your focus
- Academic Research — 4 places, tips or tools for finding and organizing academic papers
- Meta — 13 other people's directories of resources
Okay, that's the whole list... for now! I'm constantly revising it, adding more and taking things away.
Hey, hey. If you were to tweet about it and share the love, that would certainly be appreciated...
My book "Choose Your First Product" is available now.
It gives you 4 easy steps to find and validate a humble product idea.