An honest review of free & paid resources that helped In my journey as a solopreneur

Marketing

• Hubspot Blog: This is the best place to visit when you begin your marketing journey. There are various independent blogs that have better advice but those tips work after you understand the basics. That is why starting is here!
• Marketing Curated: A free marketing data library that helped to find new relevant insights about different marketing channels & social media brands.
• MailModo Resources: Originally Mailmodo is a email marketing tool, but they have free marketing resources like calendars, reports & Email Stash to help you get started with content & email marketing.
• Emarketer Blog: They have paid reports on different industries but you can view charts & articles about latest marketing news & data for free.

Copywriting

• Hemingway Editor: This tool is a lifesaver. Making sure you write engaging copy without errors is easy with help of it.
• Very good copy: This is a copywriting blog with most practical advice I’ve read. And he publishes genuine advice across other channels too.
• ChatGPT: I’m not a copywriter but I’ve read a lot of copywriting books and studied certain user reading frameworks. Giving prompts to AI with those guidelines is very helpful.
• Pinterest Boards: They are great resource to find new copywriting examples that worked in the past.

Web Design

• Font Testing Page: A free resource to test font design & sizes.
• Free Mockups Library: It is a google doc filled with links to free mockups for product packaging, templates & others.
• A bundle of new trendy free fonts: You can check the fonts here.
• Blob Lab: To create small design elements for your website. I like to add interactive elements and this free tool is helpful to me.

Analytics

• Mixpanel: They have a free plan which is nice to start getting some good data about what your early users are doing on your web app. And their API is a breeze to use in comparison to Google Analytics!
• Plausible: I personally use Plausible because my visitor's privacy is more important to me than tracking them.

Stock Images

• life of pix: A high-quality stock images library with professional photography. I find it more useful to find more standout content.
• Burst : This a free library from shopify to help ecommerce owners find stock content.
• Pexels: This is the most know library and have the content for most niches but you have to scroll a lot to find the perfect image.

Business

• Datahub: It is a collection of data around various elements of different industries. To helps me to understand the state of business in world.
• Harvard Business Review: The home to new advice and frameworks around business, a must subscribe blog.
• Convertio: To convert your business files easily into different formats. And it is free and easy to use.
• Lenny’s Podcast: This podcast is a must listen to learn about product management & growing a business.

Branding

• Brand Guides: Find brand guides of established brands like Pepsi, Mcdonalds, Bolt & others.
• Buyer Personas: Most buyer personas are created wrong, This guide will eventually help you define them in a different way.

Productivity

Founders Stash: Notion template, I personally use this template for myself to store and execute ideas and side projects. yeah, You are the 90% but this tool will help you with the rest.

Work

Marketer Hire: To hire top class marketers on contracts for certain projects.

Icons

• Iconbros: 21,000+ Free icons for you!
• Thenounproject: Free Icons and Photos for everything.
• Google Icons: Find 2,500 web optimized icons from google.

Agency

• I love creatives: If you run your own marketing, creative or design agency. You will find your ideal competitors & websites to look and have an inspiration rush.

Social Media

• The Social Juice: My own newsletter that covers latest social media news & insights that help you in real-time.
• Hootsuite’s Blog: Out of all the blogs from social media tools, I find the research & insights from hootsuite very useful for new entrepreneurs.
• Social Media Marketing Podcast: The podcast from Social media examiner is a nice listen to get insights from respected individuals in social media space.

Validation

• Product Hunt: It is a nice place to validate your SaaS Ideas but recently the quality of PH is decreased due to all things about AI. But still have a little bit of juice left in it.
• Usertesting: Do paid research to find if users trust your ideal product. One of my favorite paid testing resource.
• Wynter Research Panel: A high-ticket paid research platform to get advice from respected marketers, brand specialists & creatives.

AI solutions

• I love Futurepedia to find new AI solutions, there are many new libraries popping up about AI tools. But I will stick to this one, due to the easy to use UI and a better user experience.

Others I found but was not for me!

• Virgil Abloh’s website: The legendary fashion designer left a website behind to help entrepreneurs looking to build their own fashion brand.
• Attentive SMS Library: It is a free library filled with SMS marketing examples & campaigns to help marketers. A great resource for ecommerce and DTC people.

Honorable mentions:

• Facebook & Tiktok Ads library
• Hunter (io)
• Midjourney
• Tinywow
• reallygoodemails library
• seroundtable blog
• Notion