Startup growth tools you probably don’t know about

Useful topic because many growth tools stay under the radar even though they can save founders significant time and effort. The right stack across automation, SEO, communication, and validation can create leverage without increasing team size. Foundersbar helps startups think about growth systems early so execution scales alongside the product.

Rob, using many tools to build a system is counter productive. Yes tasks that are not part of a system can be leveraged with tools. Integration of a end to end system is so hard to come by in todays SaaS landscape. Examples would be: Customer registration, onboarding, health checks and weekly messaging, with the end goal of conversion is a system most founders need. (intercom and hubspot are too expensive for most of us) Products like https://close.com/ and https://www.chilipiper.com/ are part of a system. Yet, after customer registration what can be leveraged to move the relationship to success?

Nice list. But I disagree that a tool like Unsplash is a "marketing" tool.

For me (and I think most people here on IH), a marketing tool is more directly connected to you getting more paying users.

Lemlist is a marketing tool, because it enables you to send cold email and get a response.

IMO, a marketing / a growth tool is a tool which enables to you get in touch with another person/people directly & get some reaction. With this logic/definition, here are some marketing tools for different channels:

Facebook: Facebook Ads itself (because it enables you to pay money and put yourself out there in front of people). Same with Google-Google Ads.

Cold email - Lemlist/MailShake. Like them because of their "warmup" tools

Reddit - Howitzer (helps you do Reddit DMs at scale).

Product Hunt - Their "Ship" membership which enables you to create an "Upcoming" page which they show to their users on the home page.

SEO - HARO (help a reporter out). It helps you directly get backlinks (you get reporter pitches and you submit a small story, if it gets accepted, they give you a do-follow backlink). Worked really well for me in the travel industry. Also cold email tools like Lemlist/Postaga mentioned in the article.

Was looking for an affordable keyword research tool.
Going to try out Keywords Everywhere, thanks for sharing this

Rob listened to your podcast with Sam and Ben! Loved your insights into the SaaS industry.

Had good success with https://skrapp.io - similar to Hunter. I've seen better results from these SaaS tools vs. annual-lock-in CRM data providers.

Also https://undraw.co (vector alternative to Unsplash mentioned here) is massive enabler for adding sensible graphics to marketing/features pages. There is a lot of variety in the illustrations now and the color-customizer lets you tailor things to your brand well.

How many of these tools are products of Tiny seed portfolio companies? I just checked several of them and it appears nearly all of them are.

Your suggestion here is is basically “use products I own equity in”.

Hunter.io seems pretty similar - if not identical - to ZoomInfo and other's in the space EXCEPT it gives you 25 free searches. That seems really generous, but I guess these systems are only as good as their scraped data. My questions is how different is Hunter.io from ZI? Is it pretty good?

Also, @robwalling - big fan of MicroConf.