Tools & Startups to Watch
Happy Tuesday! Enjoy this week's batch of tools and startups. We're particularly intrigued by Exclamation, a product that automatically blasts your blog out to targeted subreddits. These are the kind of growth hacks we love seeing out there to use for ourselves and our clients.
If you think there are any startups or products we're missing out on, let us know! You can always keep the conversation going on Twitter. And if you like this newsletter, please share or forward to your growth-minded friends.
Sean from Growth Weekly
Link of the Week
How to Launch on Product Hunt Like a Boss
If you've got a new product, you're probably considering bringing it to the Product Hunt community. This article from Stefano Pisoni breaks down the best way to launch your product, from building a network on Product Hunt before launch and finding the best hunter, to what to do on the actual day of launch. Don't just throw your new app into the wind -- maximize the potential feedback (and business) you can receive on Product Hunt.
medium.com
Growth Tools
Switchboard - Work and Listen to Music Together
Here's a different kind of tool, but one that our friends who work remotely should appreciate. Switchboard is an app that allows you to listen to the same Spotify stream as friends, while also connecting to that person via video or voice-only so that when you speak, the app automatically lowers the volume of the music and lets you carry on conversation. It's a walkie talkie, intercom, and stereo all in one. Brought by CEO Jim Rand, you could use this product just as an intercom, but that's not quite as fun as sharing your Monday Morning jams with the team.
switchboardaudio.com
Coding Ninjas -- Vetted Developers For Your Project
You've got your great idea, but don't have the coding background or team to execute. Coding Ninjas saves the day by offering vetted developers to work on your project. Led by CEO Aleksandr Volodarsky, developers have to pass an initial interview, an English test, and a code quality test before they are hired and made available to you. When you submit a project, Coding Ninja sets you up with a developer perfectly matched to the task within 24 hours. Never stall again because you don't have a dev in-house!
codingninjas.co
Exclamation - Get your Blog on Targeted Subreddits
This wins Growth Hackiest product of the week -- Exclamation blasts your blog posts out to targeted subreddits. For those of you not familiar with Reddit, subreddits are topic specific forums where "redditors" submit posts and upvote and downvote the posts of others (for an example, check out r/growthhacking). Developed by Matt Henderson and the team at Scribble, Exclamation requires very little work on your side. Just send Exclamation a link when you publish a new post, and they generate a custom list of 10 targeted subreddits for each post you submit. Finally, they hand-submit the posts (to avoid getting flagged as spam) to the subreddits within 5 days. Your potential customers are on Reddit -- you should be too.
hiscribble.com
Chats by Landbot -- Easy to Set-Up Anti-AI Chatbot
If you're a regular reader of Growth Weekly, you know that we love Chatbots. Chats by Landbot takes a stand against AI heavy chatbots and instead utilizes a simple, button-based response system. CEO Jiaqi Pan and his team make it easy to create a chatbot to live on your website and interact with your potential customers. Cleverly, their website uses a bot to tell you about the bot -- click through, it's fun.
landbot.io
Drift - Conversational Landing Pages
Here's another easy to use chatbot for your site. Product manager Maggie Crowley and the team at Drift offer a customizable landing page with modifiable chatbots -- no coding required. You can choose the colors for the landing page so that it works seamlessly with the rest of your website. When your potential customer lands on the page, the chat interface takes up the entire window and invites the user into a friendly conversation that leads them wherever you want -- to submit an e-mail, schedule a meeting, download a report, or just back to your ecommerce store.
drift.com