WorkHappy.net: killer resources for entrepreneurs

LaunchRock

March 19, 2012 in 3 out of 5 stars, Free, Landing Pages, PR and Publicity

What is it?

LaunchRock: A service that provides a pre-launch page for your startup (you know, the "signup to be notified when we launch" type of site).

Heres the one I created for a project I'm working on for startup founders (and those aspiring to be).

Who makes it?

LaunchRock

Why is it the killerest?

In addition to a nice pre-launch page, it has good social integration, encouraging those who sign up to share it with their friends via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr or email. 

There are also some modest stats telling you your conversion rate, which can be helpful.

It's fairly easy to use, and they've thought of a lot of details like a confirmation email, social integration where you can pre-seed what they say when they share, an ability to export all of your subscribers for easy loading into your favorite email sending system, and domain mapping (i.e. you can point your own URL to your page).

If you feel too constrained by their limited template, you can embed the form on your own site, where you have more latitude.

What could be improved?

They offer a very limited ability to customize the design and layout for the fully hosted version. They have custom CSS "coming soon" which should help immensely. I was able to work around some of these limitations by using inline HTML and inline styles - which seem to be supported. It's fairly amenable to a little lightweight "hacking."

How much does it cost?

Free

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

p.s. see also: Launch Effect which I liked a bit better. It's a WordPress theme with the same purpose.

Launch Effect

November 4, 2011 in 4 out of 5 stars, A piece of software, Analytics, Free, Landing Pages

What is it?

Launch Effect: A free WordPress theme anyone can use to quickly create a professional looking, virally inclined pre-launch page for your upcoming product website, app, service, etc.).

Who makes it?

Barrel LLC

Why is it the killerest?

First let me state that I'm saving you some trouble, because I did this the hard way first. For my latest venture I started by building a pre-launch site from scratch. It's a couple pages, right? How hard can it be? Well - to do well, actually - kinda hard. Or, time consuming anyway. Consuming of time you should be spending building your New Thing.

1. It's very easy to set up - virtually anyone can do it.

I'm no WordPress guru, but I went from nothing to a fully launched site in just a few hours. First, I fired up a super cheap hosting account with my registrar NameCheap. Once my account was set up, I logged in, installed WordPress (literally a few mouse clicks), then downloaded the Launch Effect theme, uploaded and installed it in my WordPress, made a few tweaks, and my site was ready to go. 

2. It's got built in social-sharing tools and viral spreading motivation 

This is perhaps the nicest feature and something you likely wouldn't have time to build yourself. And it's all baked in, and very easy to configure. 

How it works: After someone gives you their email address, they're presented with a thank you message, and a panel of social icons they can click to share. 

Subscribers are also given a unique tracking link. When they use that link (or any of the icons) to share, you and they will both be able to see how many folks they've sent to the site, and how many signed up themselves.

Additionally, you can give them an incentive to share. On mine, I'm giving away a free lifetime account to someone who shares and leads someone else to sign up.

3. It's got great built in tracking

As mentioned above, each person who signs up will show up in your admin panel, along with the number of clicks they've sent you, and how many of those have also signed up (plus conversion rate). Both you, and they can see these stats at any time.

What could be improved?

Tracking your referrals is too confusing for visitors.

When a visitor shares, they have access to their referral, and conversion stats, but in order to see that information, they have to re-submit their email address into the signup form. Clever - but how on earth are they supposed to know that? There's really no good way to communicate that to them at this point.

It needs to integrate with MailChimp and/or Campaign Monitor.

First, it's very easy to export your signups in a CSV and import them into MailChimp - which, if you're only going to do that once, is no big deal. But ideally, you'd like to get an auto-response email to your signups. This would allow you to tell them about the referral stuff noted in my last complaint, as well as a few other bells and whistles that MailChimp offers.

It's a bit hard to fully customize without touching the code.

Out of the box, it probably does most everything you need, and you can certainly make a perfectly good-enough site without customization. But if what you want to do isn't exactly what the theme expects you to do, you'll need to dive into the css and/or php files. This is a minor niggle though, it has very solid customization constructs.

It has only a small subset of the available Google Fonts to work with. 

That said, they do natively support TypeKit and MonoType.

And I note, they're working improving it. This roadmap looks great.

How much does it cost?

Nothing (it's free)

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

p.s. Here's the one I set up. If you make one, please share it in the comments below.

 

Google Sites

July 23, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Collaboration, Free, Hosted "Office", Hosted software, Issue trackers, Productivity, Project management

What is it?

Google Sites: A poor man's (pretty darn good) intranet. An online, Google-hosted wiki-meets-project management software service. Google gobbled up Jot Spot (a hosted wiki service headed by Joe Kraus) before it even really got going, it was later re-born as Google Sites.

Who makes it?

Google

Why is it the killerest?

I have a growing and widely dispersed team for my latest venture. I've set up a Google Sites website which is serving as an "intranet" for this team, and it's working quite well.

It's like a wiki in that anyone (whom you allow) can edit or add pages or documents. It also has several built-in tools to help you create things like, a file download repository, a todo list, an issue tracker, or an announcements board.

There are also many more options available through "Gadgets" like a Google Calendar, a Presentation (read: Microsoft Powerpoint-like document), or a Spreadsheet. Plus hundreds of third party gadgets like maps, weather, games, news feeds, and chat. Not to mention a million other useless things no one would ever want (Woody Allen quotes?). Fortunately it's easy to ignore that stuff.

Most anyone can set one up and manage it, it's not difficult, there are no HTML skills required. You have some limited control over the look and feel; for example you can easily brand it with your own logo and colors.

They've made management of the site very simple. You can invite others as owners, collaborators or just viewers. You can also optionally make the site visible to everyone on the internet.

You get 100MB of storage space for free, and can bump that up to 25GB per account for their paid version which costs $50/user/yr.

They even have an API.

What could be improved?

My primary beef is no discussion forum built in. That would make it twice as valuable for us. Even if they just took Google Groups and married it in, we'd have a winner. This is a huge omission.

I would also like the option not to have previous versions of all my pages available to everyone. It's not a huge deal, but I don't need the last umpteen version of a page viewable forever, and there's no facility to disallow this.

How much does it cost?

Free for most everything, $50 per user per year for the deluxe version with lots of storage space.

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

ReviewBasics

October 16, 2007 in 4 out of 5 stars, Collaboration, Design, Free, Hosted software, Productivity, Project management

What is it?

ReviewBasics: Hosted software that allows you to submit, for review by others, a website, an image, a document (Word, PDF, Powerpoint), or a flash video. Others can add comments, drawings, emoticons, text, etc.

Who makes it?

SharpStyle Labs, Inc.

Why is it the killerest?

It's an impressive technical accomplishment. It's polished and easy to use.

Plus, it offers nice controls for the author: You can have comments visible just to the author, or to all reviewers. You can you write up a set of instructions for your reviewers. It offers a comments history. When done, you can filter all your stuff by date, by reviewer, and by files which have reviewer comments on them.

If you need to do asynchronous reviews, and/or if you have a geographically distributed team, this is a great resource.

What could be improved?

It feels a bit slow (which is probably because it's so rich, so that's forgivable).

If you want to submit a website for review, you can't do it as you are creating the workspace (like you can with everything else), you have to create the workspace, then dig around for it (they tell me this is going to be addressed soon).

How much does it cost?

Free

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

Altiris Software Virtualization Solution

October 9, 2007 in 5 out of 5 stars, A piece of software, Free, Productivity, Virtualization

What is it?

Altiris Software Virtualization Solution: A software prophylactic that any PC user can easily use.

It's software that allows you to install most any piece of software on a virtualized "layer." Then at any time you can remove the layer or deactivate the layer and it's like it never existed on your system at all.

Who makes it?

Altiris

Why is it the killerest?

First of all, it's very easy to use. It sounds intimidating, but it's not, give it a try.

I have a client who needed me to rip some video off the web. It was streaming video and there was no easy way to do it, but there were several spooky looking software programs that claimed to be able to do it for me. I didn't want any of those vile characters with their spyware diseases and other incendiary cargo gumming up my system. Furthermore, after the first program didn't work, I didn't want it fighting with the second one I installed (and 3rd and 4th and 12th). It was a dirty, filthy job and when it was done my system needed a long hot shower. Enter SVS. Because I had installed each piece of software on its own layer, when I was all done, I deleted all the layers, and my machine never knew we'd visited the red light district.

This software can also be used in an enterprise setting to deliver "software packages" (or layers) out to other computers.

Additionally, you can even find pre-virtualized software packages available for download now. Install, test and play with confidence.

What could be improved?

It's PC only.

It doesn't work with some software. (Software that sinks deep hooks into the system. But this is rare.)

How much does it cost?

Free for personal use, $29-$55 for multiple node settings.

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

Internet Retailer Magazine

July 9, 2007 in 5 out of 5 stars, A magazine, Free

What is it?

Internet Retailer Magazine: A free magazine (print, or online) focused on information relevant to internet retailers (and associated consultants, developers, etc.).

Who makes it?

Vertical Web Media LLC

Why is it the killerest?

It's a magazine consistently providing indispensable wisdom, ideas, statistics, data, analysis, case studies, and success stories. I'm a recent subscriber and I can't believe I didn't know about it earlier.

A couple examples: in this month's (July 07) issue, I learned that adding three or more payment options at checkout (e.g. Credit Cards, PayPal, Google Checkout) has raised sales by an average of 14% according to payments processor CyberSource Corp.

I also learned that Amazon (at the top of the list) spent $662mil on technology in 2006 on revenue of almost $11 billion (!!). Overstock.com was 2nd with $65mil in expenditures on revenue of $788mil, and Netflix 3rd with $48mil on revenue of $997mil.

What could be improved?

I can't recommend the email newsletter. It's far too often and noisy.

The spam/content ratio of the magazine is what you might expect for free, but the gems are easy to find.

It's only free for those in the U.S. :(
Fortunately it's also almost all online.

How much does it cost?

Free

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

Google Alerts

February 20, 2007 in 3 out of 5 stars, A service, Free

What is it?

Google Alerts: A service where Google will send you an email anytime a term you specify is found by its crawler. In other words: roughly any time a certain term is used on the Internet.

Who makes it?

Google

Why is it the killerest?

Because you can use it to watch what others are saying about you, your business, your industry or whatever else would give you a competitive advantage.

If desired, you can narrow it down to just what blogs, or the news say about a search term. You can also limit how often it emails you. From as-it-happens to once a week.

This service use to be horrible, inaccurate, incomplete, and late when it worked at all. About a month ago something magic happened and suddenly it works as advertised.

How much does it cost?

Free

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

Tubetorial

December 20, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, A website, Free, Screencasting

What is it?

Tubetorial: A site featuring polished, well-done video/screencast tutorials.

Who makes it?

Brian Clark and Chris Pearson

Why is it the killerest?

Free videos with excellent instruction focused mostly on online ventures including online marketing, Adsense, blogging and various other money-making stuffs. They even have some beginner HTML tutorial bits.

Check out killer stuff like:

• 5 Steps to Making Money From Keyword Research
• 7 Steps to Creating and Selling a Niche Information Product
• How to Build a Profitable Home on the Web

They also offer a handy RSS feed so you can keep up to date on the latest additions. Plus they're looking for suggestions and additional videocasting talent.

What could be improved?

Browsing the content felt a little clunky.

How much does it cost?

Free like fruitcake from Aunt Betty (only much tastier)

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

The Bootstrapper's Bible

November 22, 2006 in 5 out of 5 stars, A book, Free

What is it?

The Bootstrapper's Bible: An ebook full of wisdom, ideas and inspiration for startups/bootstrappers/entrepreneurs. I originally bought this book back in June of 2003 (it's free now). I was a struggling entrepreneur of just a few years and in my quest to read everything Seth had written, I purchased this ebook from Amazon. I devoured every word like a starving hyena on the fresh carcass of a Wildebeest.

Who makes it?

Seth Godin

Why is it the killerest?

Bootstrapper's Bible might be an immodest title, but it's right on. This book is well written, well thought-out, and perfectly targeted at those of you who would read this blog. It includes sound principles for startups, pitfalls, case studies (including one of id software who was last decade's 37signals), and practical steps for getting it right.

If you want to get re-energized, re-motivated and re-educated about your venture, this book is a must-read.

How much does it cost?

Free!

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

MediaFire

October 26, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, File uploading services, Free

What is it?

MediaFire: Another service offering simple file uploading/downloading through a web site as an alternative to emailing large files (as well as essentially offering free bandwidth for file downloads).

Who makes it?

MediaFire

Why is it the killerest?

There are several players in this space, these guys are the first to hit a home-run.

The service is ad supported, so it's free but should still survive.

The interface is near-perfect. No signups required, no maximum file size to worry about, and a host of simple delivery options when you're done uploading. It has a sexy upload meter showing you your progress.

If you'd like an account to manage your uploaded files, it offers that too.

All that, and it's free.

These guys are a testament to the power of doing something right. They're getting oodles of press, attention, and business.

What could be improved?

I'd like them to do a slightly better job of selling the benefits of their service and facilitating their use for novices (e.g. the "don't email large files, use us" approach that DropSend has taken). This would make it easier to unceremoniously refer clients, family members, etc. without having to help them understand why or how.

I must admit some slight nervousness about how they'll handle crushing bandwidth bills when this starts being used widely as free hosting/bandwidth for popular files. Will AdSense revenues be enough?

How much does it cost?

Free

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas