Part two: More impressive (and free) tools for bootstrapping your business
The cool dashboards are coming.
Starting a company is many things — exciting, stressful, a little bit crazy and nothing if not a lesson in being resourceful. You learn to make the most of every minute of the day, and of every dollar you’re investing.
Whether you are bootstrapping or not, resourcefulness is as the heart of building a successful company.
And that’s why one article on free tools for bootstrapping wasn’t enough — I’m here to bring you part two.
Over the last few months, I have added more tools to my arsenal in the process of running Reset and I just could not keep them to myself.
Tools to Become an Analytical Genius
I use these tools to aggregate important information into my weekly marketing dashboard. I have found them all immensely helpful in summarizing key analytics easily and sharing them with my team.
Databox pulls data from a source you choose (social, google analytics, etc) into one customizable, visual dashboard. You can drag/drop sections and change timeframes to instantly see how your marketing (and other) efforts are working.
I love Databox because it is visual & informative. As a mostly visual person, I struggle to maintain focus with spreadsheets of data (I know, some of you are shaking your heads but this is a safe space!) so this was a game-changer for me.
Free Plan
I use this for my social dashboards (Facebook, Instagram) and Google Analytics and feed it into my marketing dashboard. It’s a great and easy way to share updates with my team as well.
- 3 connections, 3 users and 3 dashboards
- Full use of dashboard designer, integrations and scheduling of dashboard updates
- Slack integrations and goal tracking
Bonus — People will be very impressed with your beautiful dashboards, and they will actually look at them.
Hotjar is one of my favorite new tool discoveries because it (1) is super visual and (2) lets me see inside the actions of my website visitors in a slightly superpower-esque way. That’s a word.
Hotjar puts together a heatmap of visitor activity on your website and highlights where most of your clicks and movement is coming from. I use this to keep an eye on traffic patterns in an easily digestable way, and monitor tweaks to placement and link content.
Always keep tweaking, that’s my motto.
Free Plan
- Up to 2000 daily pageviews
- 3 heatmaps, 3 funnels and 3 forms
- 12 month analytics storage
Tools to Become a Marketing Superhero
There are so many marketing tools out there, but I gravitate towards the ones that make my life easier on the back end (integrating with my website) and deliver a beautiful customer experience.
I discovered Typeform late in the game, but that’s ok. While everyone else was using these fun, fluid and personalized forms I was over here in the dark ages.
Typeform helps you create beautiful and responsive forms, surveys and landing pages with a variety of integrations. You can make them simple or make them smart (rules & conditions), and of course the design features are pretty incredible.
Free Plan
I am in the process of transitioning some of my forms to this, and the free plan is a great way to test it out on a small scale. You host them with typeform or embed directly in your website.
- 100 responses/month
- 10 questions per form
They make filling out forms dare I say it, kind of fun?
Shout out to our social media rockstar Dakota Lowe for introducing me to Linktree. This is a simple but beautifully effective tool for linking a bunch of things to your instagram profile and helping your users find the right info quickly and easily.
It’s an easy way to make your Instagram profile work for you better.
Free Plan
This gives you pretty much full functionality outside of pro support, customization of design elements and analytics.
- Unlimited links + basic link click analysis
- Pre-set themes
My Favorite Tool for Inbox Mastery
I had to include a couple of life-changing inbox and administrative tools because these are my jam.
SparkMail is an email client that started out specifically for iOS users, but they just added Android — hooray! I have 2 Gmail accounts, and for the longest time was using Apple Mail — which from a UI perspective made me sad but also was simply a bit irritating to use at times.
Spark rescued me, and now I am an organized, email-automating and calendar streamlining machine. And a machine that gets to look at a beautiful UI.
It lets me easily toggle between e-mails, set different signatures, have one cohesive calendar and schedule my emails. I love scheduling emails because my work hours are often odd and I don’t want to be the person sending you an email at 2am.
We all spend a lot of time on e-mail, so I am a strong believer that at the very least our inboxes should be beautiful. Are you sensing a theme?
Free Plan
- Up to 5gb of storage
- 2 collaborators, limited email templates
So far, the free plan is right up my alley.
Ok, your turn — what are your favorites?
I’m always looking for new things to try and ways to be more organized. Send me a note in the comments for what you are obsessed with these days.
