How to Find the Tools to Scale Your Startup

Hi I’m Jordan, I love helping people think & grow their products. Hope this helps! You can find me on Twitter :)

Starting a company is really hard. Sure you may read that on some random medium post, like this one, but it is near impossible to truly empathize with the difficulties of a founding a company until you are standing in the trenches of the startup battlefield sweating out the pain.

Something like 92% of new companies die within 3 years. Of the 8% remaining, only a handful end up making a major impact in the world.

As much as it is a game of skill and purpose, ask any rare successful founder in the industry and they will tell you that luck is certainly a very influential factor.

While you cannot directly control how lucky you and your team get, the least you can do is set yourself up for success by stacking the chips in your favor.

There are lots of ways to do this — some more proven than others.

• Work with the best people
• Raise the right money at the right time
• Find good mentors
• Use the right tools

This article focuses on how you can figure out what the best tools and resources are for the job at hand so that you can build your company faster and more efficiently.

If you want to build an extremely successful company in 2017, I’d argue that it has to be a technology company. Is that “me, living in the bubble speaking?” I do not think so. I truly believe that the best way to build a scalable, successful company in 2017 is to leverage tech.

Figuring out exactly which technology to make an integral part of our businesses can be extremely challenging. There are thousands and thousands of tools out there. The SAAS (software as a service) explosion has left many of us scrambling to steady and organize ourselves before we even begin to search for “the next big tool” that will improve our companies.

It’s scary!

Source

We know technology, when used appropriately, can help us build things faster. Build things bigger. Build things better.

But we don’t always know where to find the “right” and “best” technology to help us do that.

As a result, we spend tons of time searching and testing, rather than actually working. This is inefficient.

Luckily, and quite ironically, there are platforms and softwares designed specifically to reduce this friction and fix this problem.

They are the digital version of that employee at The Home Depot that always helps you find the right screw.

They are the filters that separate the signal from the noise.

Here are some resources to find the right tools to help your business grow!

1. Siftery

Siftery helps you discover Products that are most recommended by companies similar to yours. They compare companies who are close to you in industry or product and look for similarities / differences so that they can make a product recommendation. Whether you are looking for a marketing automation software or a development platform — they’ll help you find the industry standard, and then some.

2. Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a list of the best new products launched every single day. There, you’ll find a wide diversity of tools and toys that will help you accomplish pretty much anything — from a modern whiteboard to automation software. They recently launched Ask Product Hunt — a recommendation search engine powered by Product Hunt’s super powerful and experienced community of makers from around the globe.

3. FounderKit

FounderKit provides an assortment of reviews and advice from experienced founders who can recommend to you exactly which tools are right for your business. They make finding services easy — by algorithmically ranking the hottest and best services on the market. Their reviews are generally up to date as they provide transparent and real thoughts around popular products.

4. GitHub Marketplace

GitHub recently announced their GitHub Marketplace — a living collection of development tools and resources that you can build on to increase the efficiency and scale of your workflow. While their selection is limited, as the platform is just getting started, you can expect this to become a go to place for engineers to find their next favorite tool.

Once you find the right tools — organizing them is also really hard. Turns out we spend tons of time sifting through products we already use.

Usejournal (I have no affiliation to them) is working on a solution for this. Sign up for early access.

Hopefully one of these platforms can help you find the right tool at the right time that will help you build your company faster, stronger, and better! Feel free to reach out — I’d love to be of help.

Thanks so much for reading! My name is Jordan Gonen and I write blog posts every day. It would mean a ton to me if you could:

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If you ever have any questions, send me an email jordangonen1 at gmail dot com ! Thanks so much!