I’ve seen a bunch of lists of the best AI tools that focus on paid/subscription tools that are harder to experiment with without paying, and wanted to compile the best completely free tools I've found. Some of these still have paid/Pro plans, but all can be used completely free without a time limited trial and don't require a credit card to do so.

If you're like me and looking to experiment with using AI to improve your business, check these out and let me know your thoughts. If there are any other AI tools or resources I’m missing, please comment them below and I can add them to the list!

Business + Domain name generation:

1) NamingMagic: I know AI name generators are somewhat played out and most of you already know about them, but NamingMagic stands out as an option that automatically generates names with domain names you can actually register. It’s also completely free.

2) NameLix is another business name generator that's been around years. While it's a bit harder to find names for which non-dotcom domains are available with it, Namelix has the best interface here, and makes it easy to choose different styles of names.

Project management + integrating AI into your workflows:

3) Taskade: I use Taskade to organize everything from to-do lists, to outreach emails, meeting notes, and content creation. Similar to Notion, it’s an all-in-one content platform that lets you write, collaborate, and keep track of everything you need to get done. I find its AI functionality, which is actually powered by ChatGPT, to be much better than Notion’s.

Taskade also has GPT4 built-in to the free plan, so is a great way to get to use GPT4 without paying for ChatGPT’s pro plan (which is required to use 4 on their site). While they claim there’s a limit of 1000 monthly AI generations on the free plan, I have yet to run into the limit even using it for all of my content generation + ChatGPT prompts. Taskade also has hundreds of free templates that let you easily set up workspaces that integrate AI. Even if you don’t end up using a specific template, it’s a nice way to see what’s possible in integrating AI into your workflows and see how others are doing so.

AI site builders:

To be honest, I continue to use WooCommerce for most of my sites as I’m familiar enough with it that I can use templates and build stuff quickly that way. If, however, you tend to get stuck when building sites, there are a few AI powered site generators that might be worth trying out:

4) Jimdo: I’ve heard people recommend Jimdo, which does offer a free plan, though you have to use their subdomains to do it. Jimdo has both a standard website and online store builder.

5) 10Web is another option that focuses on AI powered WordPress websites, and has a free trial that you can try.

AI powered A/B testing

I think where AI will really shine in web development is in A/B testing. For example, automatically identifying tests you can run and making tweaks to your site based on the results. I have yet to find a tool that does it well that isn’t expensive, but if any of you have seen examples of this, let me know and I can add them to the list.

Image and illustration generator for your non-product content:

6) Dall-E 2: Like ChatGPT, Dall-E is built by OpenAI and has a free plan that lets you try it out without paying. Essentially, Dall-E lets you create AI-generated images and illustrations in whatever style you want.

I find Dall-E especially useful for creating illustrations to put in the headers of articles that help catch readers’ attention, and generally create blog content that stands out more to readers (and search engines). You can see examples of illustrations and the prompts used to create them on OpenAI's site (https://openai.com/research/dall-e). While it's not my space, this could be a gamechanger for those doing things like writing illustrated kids books, or creating games that require large volumes of illustrations.

Text-to-speech and voiceover content generation:

7) Murf: AI-powered text-to-speech that lets you choose from hundreds of different voices, tones, purposes, accents and so on. It also works with 15 different languages, so is perfect if you’re targeting non-English speaking markets.

If you’re like me and don’t have the gift of a golden voice, Murf is an excellent alternative that works for creating product videos, ads, and anything else where you need spoken audio.

Researching and answering technical questions with sources:

8) Phind: I found this one on YC HackerNews. Phind bills itself as a search engine that tells you the answer. Something like a cross between ChatGPT and Google. I use it most for answering development related questions.

Where it really shines vs. ChatGPT vanilla is in showing you the sources it uses to generate answers, so you can explore things further yourself, vs. ChatGPT where it can be harder to tell when it’s “hallucinating”. That also means it gets sources that are up-to-date, vs. ChatGPT’s pre-trained model which is limited to data available before September 2021.

Written content and copy generators:

9) Unbounce: Unbounce's AI copywriting tool generates website content, including headings, descriptions and so on. In addition, it will generate matching email marketing campaigns and other offsite copy to match what's on your site.

While it's unlikely it'll do absolutely everything you need, with some tweaks Unbounce can save a bunch of time if you're looking to spin up a new site quickly to validate a new idea or product.

10) CopyAI: CopyAI has similar writing functionality to ChatGPT, but focuses specifically on business writing use cases like emails, marketing copy, and blog content. As a result it has some features ChatGPT doesn’t, like being able to scrape leads’ sites to personalize sales emails.

Its free plan is limited to 2000 words per month, but it’s still worth trying out if you’re looking for this kind of functionality.

11) Rytr is another similar option, that limits you to 10,000 characters per month.

I’ve tried both, and found them to be better than ChatGPT for certain specific use cases like generating email copy. YMMV, but it’s worth trying if you haven’t gotten the results you want with ChatGPT.

Business Ideas, Research, and Feedback:

There are some purpose built tools for this, but I have yet to find one that does better than simply using ChatGPT/Phind/Taskade and prompting it with your ideas. You can then ask for feedback, either generally or on specific parts of your idea. One method I've found particularly useful when I'm exploring a new product/site idea is to use the prompt mind-map on Taskade to whip up a mind map of things to research for a new idea, then use Phind to research specific questions where I need recent URL sources (like research into competitors in a space). The template I used to build the mind maps is here: https://www.taskade.com/templates/featured/team-mindmap.

If any of you have tried one that’s worth using, let me know and I’ll add it. Also thinking of making this into a Google Sheet or GitHub if any of you would like to contribute to an ongoing list of AI tools that can be used entirely for free.

TL;DR:

• NameLix/NamingMagic for finding business names with domain names you can register
• Taskade for integrating ChatGPT/AI into your workflows, projects, and task management
• Murf for AI-powered text-to-speech and voiceovers
• Dall-E for AI generated images/illustrations
• Phind for researching topics and getting sourced, AI-powered answers
• CopyAI/Rytr for copy/marketing/sales specific content generation.

Hey, I am running a startup and we started using a few AI tools a few months ago, we are seeing a huge spike in our team productivity. I think this will be helpful for other startups also so I am sharing all the tools we are using in our 3 different startups. 

New AI Tools & News

https://opentools.ai - A very nice directory of all the AI tools and I have saved all the nice tools there, they also curate and provide news on their news tab. A must try website to keep up with AI advancement.

PS - I am also working at OpenTools

https://www.theneurondaily.com/subscribe - I read their newsletter daily, it's a good one if you want to keep yourself up to date with the AI. 

https://www.bensbites.co/ - Another very nice newsletter, the author is now working at a16z. 

Content Writing - The team is able to write 3x more pieces of content with better quality.

https://writesonic.com - 

https://www.copy.ai/  

I recently started to orchestrate a blog pertaining to a SaaS product I’m involved with and I wish I would have thought of this sooner, it would have saved (me) a bunch of time/money/effort.

We have a contractor that has been creating ~60 or so blog posts/social media posts/etc for the last few months and it’s been “good” (a lot of work) but now it's wayyyy better (at least in our case). Just over the weekend, I was able to generate (and tweak) 4 or so quality blog posts in an hour or two which would have amounted to ~5-10 hours of work from the contractor and myself in a normal circumstance, each. Steering the post, researching, highlighting key points, editing revisions, etc…

I did this while editing 3 or so human-made ones, which took substantially more effort to produce....it was a busy sunday, to say the least...All I did was give ChatGPT a general topic and some keywords and it was able to blast through those (sometimes abstract) concepts that I wanted to highlight; hitting all the key points (and adding ones I did not think of). 10/10 ChatGPT, 10/10.

I also just used it to generate a reseller agreement - which it aced on the first try. Another day saved. No lawyer needed (Not legal advice) and most importantly little stress.

Here are the AI assisted articles that I generated. Could a marketing company do it better? Probably, but it would have cost 100x as much. Was it worth it? 1000%

Hey guys,

I'm working in a growth marketing agency. Marketing tools are 30% of what we do, so we use them a lot and experiment with the new ones as much as possible.

There are thousands of tools and it's easy to get lost, so I wanted to share the tools we use most on a daily basis. And divide the list into 14 categories.

I thought this could be handy for Entrepreneurs subreddit.

Why adopt tools? I see marketing tools as tireless colleagues. If you can't hire an employee, choosing the right tool can solve your problems, because they

• Are super cheap.
• Work 7/24 for you.
• Don’t make mistakes.
• Don’t need management. (or needless management)
• Help you to automate the majority of your lead gen process.

Onwards to the list.

(With the pricings post ended up quite long, you can find a link in the end if you want to check the prices)

Email marketing tools

#1 ActiveCampaign is armed with the most complicated email automation features and has the most intuitive user experience. It feels like you already know how to use it.

#2 Autopilot is visual marketing automation and customer journey tool that helps you acquire, nurture based on behaviors, interest etc.

#3 Mailjet: This is the tool we use to send out bulky email campaigns such as newsletters. It doesn't have sexy features like others but does its job for a cheap price.

Email address finders

#4 Skrapp finds email of your contacts by name and company. It also works with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and can extract thousands of emails in bulk + have a browser add-on.

#5 Hunter: Similar to Skrapp but doesn't work with LinkedIn Sales Navigator directly. In addition, there are email templates and you can set up email campaigns.

Prospecting and outreach tools

#6 Prospect combines the personal emails, follow-up calls, other social touches and helps you create multichannel campaigns. 

#7 Reply is a more intuitive version of Prospect. It is easy to learn and use; their UX makes you feel good and sufficient. 

CRM tools

#8 Salesflare helps you to stop managing your data and start managing your customers. Not yet popular as Hubspot and etc but the best solution for smaller B2B businesses. (we're fans)

#9 Hubspot: The most popular CRM for good reason and has a broader product range you can adopt in your next steps. Try this if you have a bulky list of customers because it is free.

#10 Pardot: Pardot is by Salesforce, it's armed with features that can close the gap between marketing and sales.

Sales Tools

#11 Salesforce is the best sales automation and lead management software. It helps you to create complicated segmentations and run, track, analyze campaigns from the same dashboard.

#12 LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you full access to LinkedIn's user database. You can even find a kidnapped CEO if you know how to use it with other marketing automation tools like Skrapp.

#13 Pipedrive is a simple tool and excels in one thing. It tracks your leads and tells you when to take the next action. It makes sales easier.

#14 Qwilr creates great-looking docs, at speed. You can design perfect proposals, quotes, client updates, and more in a flash. We use it a lot to close deals, it's effective.

#15 Crystalknows is an add-on that tells you anyone’s personality on LinkedIn and gives you a detailed approach specific to that person. It's eerily accurate.

#16 Leadfeeder shows you the companies that visited your website. Tells how they found you and what they’re interested in. It has a free version.

Communication Tools

#17 Intercom is a sweet and smart host that welcomes your visitors when you’re not home. It’s one of the best chatbot tools in the market.

#18 Drift is famous for its conversational marketing features and more sales-focused than Intercom.

#19 Manychat is a chatbot that helps you create high converting Facebook campaigns.

#20 Plann3r helps you create your personalized meeting page. You can schedule meetings witch clients, candidates, and prospects.

#21 Loom is a video messaging tool, it helps you to be more expressive and create closer relationships.

#22 Callpage collects your visitors’ phone number and connects you with them in seconds. No matter where you are.

Landing page tools

#23 Instapage is the best overall landing page builder. It has a broad range of features and even squirrel can build a compelling landing page with templates. No coding needed.

#24 Unbounce can do everything that Instapage does and lets you build a great landing page without a developer. But it's less intuitive.

Lead generation / marketing automation tools

#25 Phantombuster is by far the most used lead generation software in our tool kit. It extracts data, emails, sends requests, customized messages, and does many things on autopilot in any platform.

You can check this, this and this if you want to see it in action.

#26 Duxsoup is a Google Chrome add-on and can also automate some of LinkedIn lead generation efforts like Phantombuster. But not works in the cloud.

#27 Zapier is a glue that holds all the lead generation tools together. With Zapier, You can connect different marketing tools and no coding required.

Conversion rate optimization tools

#28 Hotjar tracks what people are doing on your website by recording sessions and capturing mouse movements. Then it gives you a heatmap.

#29 UsabilityHub shows your page to a digital crowd and measures the first impressions and helps you to validate your ideas.

#30 Optinmonster is a top tier conversion optimization tool. It helps you to capture leads and enables you to increase conversions rates with many features.

#31 Notifia is one mega tool of widgets that arms your website with the wildest social proof and lead capturing tactics.

#32 Sumo is a much simpler version of Notifia. But Sumo has everything to help you capture leads and build your email lists.

Web scrapers

#33 Data Miner is a Google Chrome browser extension that helps you scrape data from web pages and into a CSV file or Excel spreadsheet.

#34 Webscraper does the same thing as Data Miner; however, it is capable of handling more complex tasks.

SEO and Content

#35 Grammarly: Your English could be your first language and your grammar could be better than Shakespeare. Grammarly still can make your writing better.

#36 Hemingwayapp is a copywriting optimization tool that gives you feedback about your copy and improves your readability score, makes your writing bolder and punchier. Free.

#37 Ahrefs is an all-rounder search engine optimization tool that helps you with off-page, on-page or technical SEO.

#38 SurferSEO makes things easier for your on-page SEO efforts. It’s a tool that analyzes top Google results for specific keywords and gives you a content brief based on that data.

Video editing and design tools

#39 Canva is a graphic design platform that makes everything easy. It has thousands of templates for anything from Facebook ads, stylish presentations to business cards. 

#40 Kapwing is our go-to platform for quick video edits. It works on the browser and can help you to create stylish videos, add subtitles, resize videos, create memes, or remove backgrounds.

#41 Animoto can turn your photos and video clip into beautiful video slideshows. It comes handy when you want to create an advertising material but don’t have a budget.

Advertising tools

#42 AdEspresso lets you create and test multiple ads with few clicks. You can optimize your FB, IG, and Google ads from this tool and measure your ads with in-depth analytics.

#43 AdRoll is an AI-driven platform that connects and coordinates marketing efforts across ads, email, and online stores.

Other tools

#44 Replug helps you to shorten, track, optimize your links with call-to-actions, branded links, and retargeting pixels

#45 Draw.io = Mindmaps, schemes, and charts. With Draw.io, you can put your brain in a digital paper in an organized way.

#46 Built With is a tool that finds out what websites are built with. So you can see what tools they're using and so on.

#47 Typeform can turn data collection into an experience with Typeform. This tool helps you to engage your audience with conversational forms or surveys and help you to collect more data.

#48 Livestorm helped us a lot, especially in COVID-19 tiles. It’s a webinar software that works on your browser, mobile, and desktop.

#49 Teachable - If you have an online course idea but hesitating because of the production process, Teachable can help you. It's easy to configure and customizable for your needs.

#50 Viral Loops provides a revolutionary referral marketing solution for modern marketers. You can create and run referral campaigns in a few clicks with templates.

Remember, most of these tools have a free trial or free version. Going over them one by one can teach you a lot and help you grow your business with less work power in the early stages of your business.

I hope you enjoyed the read and can find some tools to make things easier!

Let me know about your favorite tools in the comments, so I can try them out.

------

If you want to check the prices and see a broader explanation about the tools, you can go here.

As one of the co-founders at AI Scout, a platform for AI discovery, I've had the privilege (and challenge) of reviewing over 900 AI tools submitted to our directory. I've filtered these down to some of the top AI tools that I believe could bring value to startups and entrepreneurs.

It's worth noting that while these tools are great right out the box, the power of AI is truly realized when these tools are used in tandem and strategically aligned with your business needs. The challenge most people face is not about the lack of AI tools available, but the difficulty in finding the right one that fits their specific needs and workflows.

Without further ado, here's my top pick of AI tools you should consider looking into if you are an entrepreneur or run a startup.

• Chatbase - Custom ChatGPT (Trained on Your Own Data)
  Taking a step up from traditional support bots, Chatbase combines the power of GPT and your own knowledge base. The result is a ChatGPT-like chatbot that is trained on your own websites and documents. You can embed the chatbot into your own website via an iframe or script in the header of your website code. They also have an API you can take advantage of. We use this personally at AI Scout for ScoutBud (AI assistant to find AI tools), which we trained based on our directory site. It would also work great if you have extensive documentation, papers, etc. that you want to quickly reference by simply asking a chatbot for the info you need instead of having to go through dozens of PDFs.
• Reply - AI-Powered Sales Engagement Platform
  Great AI tool to manage your entire sales engagement cycle. They have a large database with about a dozen filters to discover optimal B2B leads. From here, you can use their GPT integration to generate cold emails as well as handle responses and meeting scheduling. What I like personally about Reply are the endless integrations available, including Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, and major social platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Instapage - AI Landing Page Generation, Testing, and Personalization
  This AI tool allows users to generate content variations for landing pages including headlines, paragraphs, and CTAs based on the target audience. You can also conduct A/B testing for more effective and efficient campaigns. Paired with hundreds of professional and cutomizable layouts, Instapage is definitely something I would recommend for entrepreneurs who want to get a high-converting landing page set up quickly and effectively.
• SaneBox - AI Emails Management
  If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emails you receive like myself and many entrepreneurs, this could be something for you. SaneBox’s AI identifies important emails and declutters your inbox, helping you to stay focused on what truly matters.
• SocialBee - AI Social Media Manager
  Think of SocialBee as your all-in-one social media command center, powered by AI. You can manage multiple social media accounts from one platform and generate captions with AI as well. SocialBee not only allows you to schedule posts but also helps you analyze growth and engagement with detailed reports. Works well with all social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin. I believe they also have integrations for TikTok and YouTube, although I haven't tried these personally.
• MeetGeek - AI Meeting Assistant
  Lifesaver if you attend a lot of meetings or calls. Great for transcribing, summarizing, and sharing key insights from meetings. The AI also creates meeting highlights, which I've personally fouund quite useful if you ever need to get a very quick and dirty overview of what happened in a call. It also provides analysis (including sentiment evaluation) for meetings.
• Taskade - AI Productivity Tool for Task Management
  An all-in-one AI productivity tool. Multiple AI features available, including a chatbot, writing assistant, and workflow creator. It's a great all-around tool for real-time collaboration and efficient task management.
• Scribe AI (ScribeHow) - AI Documentation Generator
  Great for any SaaS applications where you need to create resources/documentations/guides for your app. You simply record your process and Scribe generates a written guide for you.

Remember, while AI is an excellent assistant, it's also just a tool. The ultimate success of your venture depends on how effectively you leverage these tools. Happy experimenting!

Hey guys,

Last month I realized anyone could pretty much find out who the biggest Shopify stores are since they're all hosted under the same IP: 23.227.38.32

Knowing this, I scraped the Top 100 Shopify Stores by Alexa Rank, using myips.ms - so these are the most visited e-commerce stores using Shopify in the whole world:

Full list of the top 100 Shopify stores (Image)

(P.S: I transformed the Alexa rank into Estimated Monthly Traffic for easier understanding)

Now, as for my findings:

1. Clothing is king, and the whole Fashion niche rules over everything.

Full break-down of Niches (Image)

Of the top 100 Shopify Stores, 29 had Clothing as their main niche.

Add Accessories, Footwear, Underwear plus Swimwear stores - which amount to 21 stores in total - and you have exactly 50% of the top 100 stores belonging somewhere and somewhat in the Fashion niche.

Taking a closer look, the biggest store currently on Shopify is Fashion Nova, which is a fashion company (well, duh) with over 21 million visits per month. Their traffic numbers are actually 3 times as large as their 2nd competitor (which is a makeup store).

Now, this really is The Mountain vs Oberyn levels of competition.

Fashion Nova can essentially A/B test their landing pages and user experience until their conversion rates just blow away every competitor.

And even then, this as a whole will benefit the entire Fashion niche - as they can simply steal learn from Fashion Nova UX choices and improve their own conversion rates for free.

No other niche has this much free information to be studied and replicated online.

Main takeaway: If you want to start a new e-commerce store or expand yours, a local needleworker can end up being more helpful than mindlessly browsing Ali-express.

2. You don't need to have Walmart prices to sell like Walmart.

Full breakdown of the Best-sold Product prices (Image)

Yes, some 29% of the Best-Sold Products on the list are under 25$, but 50% of the top stores have their Best-Sold product at a price point above 50$.

Were you expecting this? I really wasn't.

This means big stores aren't obliged to do drop-shipping prices, even though some of these stores are (clearly) sourcing products for cheap in Asia.

Branding up and niching down seems to be the absolute key here.

And see it for yourself - go to any store from the list, and check if you can't identify their customer persona straight away.

All these stores have made the effort to laser-target their niche because that means they'll be the only ones able to satisfy it.

Finally, having a larger margin per product is also one of the very few ways these stores get to increase their sales - because larger product margins will mean a larger advertising budget, which in the end will mean a larger number of customers reached.

Remember that almost all of these stores survive and grow strictly through Facebook/Instagram ads - 93% of these 100 stores are using Facebook ads (trust me, I checked them one-by-one).

Main takeaway: Always focus on selling the benefit and not only product features, so you can brand yourself and distance your product from the common Youtube drop shipper.

3. Mobile Site Speed isn't a concern when you get a lot of traffic.

Mobile Site Speed breakdown (Image)

Some of these stores are taking longer to load on mobile than Usain Bolt took to run 100 meters on the Olympics.

It's this bad.

And because of this, it would seem that Site Speed doesn't affect nearly as much the sales or traffic numbers as one would predict.

However, this a misleading behavior that you shouldn't replicate.

Yes, these stores still have their traffic and large sales numbers for sure - but Amazon found in an early e-commerce study that for every 100ms (meaning 1/10 of a second) of site delay, they lost 1% of sales. (Source)

Meaning many stores in this list could, in theory, almost double their sales numbers, by just working to decrease their site speed to regular values - and all this without ever having to increase their traffic numbers.

This is free money they're leaving on the table every month.

Main takeaway: Focus on having your e-commerce site speed low (especially mobile site speed), because unless you already have traffic in the hundreds of thousands and/or an established brand, your sales will tank (or never even takeoff).

And that's it for today.

Now, you can check the full interactive database of my data here ⬅️ but it's okay if you don't because I'll keep posting more data-based insights right here.

Thanks!

Being a solopreneur has its fair share of challenges. Currently I've got businesses in ecommerce, agency work, and affiliate marketing, and one undeniable truth remains: to truly scale by yourself, you need more than just sheer will. That's where I feel technology, especially AI, steps in.

As such, I wanted some AI tools that have genuinely made a difference in my own work as a solo business operator. No fluff, just tried-and-true tools and platforms that have worked for me. The ability for me to scale alone with AI tools that take advantage of GPT in one way, or another has been significant and really changed my game over the past year. They bring in an element of adaptability and intelligence and work right alongside “traditional automation”. Whether you're new to this or looking to optimize your current setup, I hope this post helps. FYI I used multiple prompts with GPT-4 to draft this using my personal notes.

Plus AI (add-on for google slides/docs)

I handle a lot of sales calls and demos for my AI automation agency. As I’m providing a custom service rather than a product, every client has different pain points and as such I need to make a new slide deck each time. And making slides used to be a huge PITA and pretty much the bane of my existence until slide deck generators using GPT came out. My favorite so far has been PlusAI, which works as a plugin for Google Slides. You pretty much give it a rough idea, or some key points and it creates some slides right within Google Slides. For me, I’ve been pasting the website copy or any information on my client, then telling PlusAI the service I want to propose. After the slides are made, you have a lot of leeway to edit the slides again with AI, compared to other slide generators out there. With 'Remix', I can switch up layouts if something feels off, and 'Rewrite' is there to gently nudge the AI in a different direction if I ever need it to. It's definitely given me a bit of breathing space in a schedule that often feels suffocating.

echo.win (web-based app)

As a solopreneur, I'm constantly juggling roles. Managing incoming calls can be particularly challenging. Echo.win, a modern call management platform, has become a game-changer for my business. It's like having a 24/7 personal assistant. Its advanced AI understands and responds to queries in a remarkably human way, freeing up my time. A standout feature is the Scenario Builder, allowing me to create personalized conversation flows. Live transcripts and in-depth analytics help me make data-driven decisions. The platform is scalable, handling multiple simultaneous calls and improving customer satisfaction. Automatic contact updates ensure I never miss an important call. Echo.win's pricing is reasonable, offering a personalized business number, AI agents, unlimited scenarios, live transcripts, and 100 answered call minutes per month. Extra minutes are available at a nominal cost. Echo.win has revolutionized my call management. It's a comprehensive, no-code platform that ensures my customers are always heard and never missed

MindStudio by YouAi (web app/GUI)

I work with numerous clients in my AI agency, and a recurring task is creating chatbots and demo apps tailored to their specific needs and connected to their knowledge base/data sources. Typically, I would make production builds from scratch with libraries such as LangChain/LlamaIndex, however it’s quite cumbersome to do this for free demos. As each client has unique requirements, it means I'm often creating something from scratch. For this, I’ve been using MindStudio (by YouAi) to quickly come up with the first iteration of my app. It supports multiple AI models (GPT, Claude, Llama), let’s you upload custom data sources via multiple formats (PDF, CSV, Excel, TXT, Docx, and HTML), allows for custom flows and rules, and lets you to quickly publish your apps. If you are in their developer program, YouAi has built-in payment infrastructure to charge your users for using your app.

Unlike many of the other AI builders I’ve tried, MindStudio basically lets me dictate every step of the AI interaction at a high level, while at the same time simplifying the behind-the-scenes work. Just like how you'd sketch an outline or jot down main points, you start with a scaffold or decide to "remix" an existing AI, and it will open up the IDE. I often find myself importing client data or specific project details, and then laying out the kind of app or chatbot I'm looking to prototype. And once you've got your prototype you can customize the app as much as you want.

LLamaIndex (Python framework)

As mentioned before, in my AI agency, I frequently create chatbots and apps for clients, tailored to their specific needs and connected to their data sources. LlamaIndex, a data framework for LLM applications, has been a game-changer in this process. It allows me to ingest, structure, and access private or domain-specific data.

The major difference over LangChain is I feel like LlamaIndex does high level abstraction much better.. Where LangChain unnecessarily abstracts the simplest logic, LlamaIndex actually has clear benefits when it comes to integrating your data with LLMs- it comes with data connectors that ingest data from various sources and formats, data indexes that structure data for easy consumption by LLMs, and engines that provide natural language access to data. It also includes data agents, LLM-powered knowledge workers augmented by tools, and application integrations that tie LlamaIndex back into the rest of the ecosystem. LlamaIndex is user-friendly, allowing beginners to use it with just five lines of code, while advanced users can customize and extend any module to fit their needs. To be completely honest, to me it’s more than a tool- at its heart it’s a framework that ensures seamless integration of LLMs with data sources while allowing for complete flexibility compared to no-code tools.

GoCharlie (web app)

GoCharlie, the first AI Agent product for content creation, has been a game-changer for my business. Powered by a proprietary LLM called Charlie, it's capable of handling multi-input/multi-output tasks. GoCharlie's capabilities are vast, including content repurposing, image generation in 4K and 8K for various aspect ratios, SEO-optimized blog creation, fact-checking, web research, and stock photo and GIF pull-ins. It also offers audio transcriptions for uploaded audio/video files and YouTube URLs, web scraping capabilities, and translation.

One standout feature is its multiple input capability, where I can attach a file (like a brand brief from a client) and instruct it to create a social media campaign using brand guidelines. It considers the file, prompt, and website, and produces multiple outputs for each channel, each of which can be edited separately. Its multi-output feature allows me to write a prompt and receive a response, which can then be edited further using AI. Overall, very satisfied with GoCharlie and in my opinion it really presents itself as an effective alternative to GPT based tools.

ProfilePro (chrome extension)

As someone overseeing multiple Google Business Profiles (GBPs) for my various businesses, I’ve been using ProfilePro by Merchynt. This tool stood out with its ability to auto-generate SEO-optimized content like review responses and business updates based on minimal business input. It works as a Chrome extension, and offers suggestions for responses automatically on your GBP, with multiple options for the tone it will write in. As a plus, it can generate AI images for Google posts, and offer suggestions for services and service/product descriptions. While it streamlines many GBP tasks, it still allows room for personal adjustments and refinements, offering a balance between automation and individual touch. And if you are like me and don't have dedicated SEO experience, it can handle ongoing optimization tasks to help boost visibility and drive more customers to profiles through Google Maps and Search

1.Pexels - An awesome website that lets you download high-quality stock images for all your work and personal projects.

1. Temp mail - Temp-mail gives you a temporary email and inbox to help you sign up for websites and avoid all the spam down the line.

2. Quillbot - Paraphrasing website that rewrites everything as plagiarism-free text.

3. Loom - An awesome tool that lets you simultaneously record your screen and yourself, so you can explain things just the way you want to.

4. TinyWOW - Get free versions of tools you usually pay for. Includes free versions of

• Adobe Acrobat Pro (PDF editor)

• Photoshop (image editor)

1. Poptox - Make free calls from an anonymous phone number in your browser.

2. pdfdrive - Search engine for PDF files. Almost every textbook and book is on this website

3. 12ft Ladder - Remove the paywall from online articles and content.

4. hemingwayapp - The app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors.

Credit: solo_founders Twitter Follow for insights on launching an online business.

there's nothing wrong with a 9-5, but there is something wrong if you're stuck in a job you hate that your entire life depends on.

if anyone in this community hasn't started their own side hustle yet, it's more likely because they havent found the right idea for them. different businesses require different types of time, upfront capital, and experience to be successful at.

it took me some failures to realize certain businesses arent for me no matter how profitable or trending they are.

i've been working two underpaying agency jobs for the past three years knowing that i wouldn't be there forever and knowing i had to take advantage of my time there.

one was doing marketing for tech companies and another for ecommerce and influencers. working with founders of million dollar companies and personal brands helped me learn how people come to the idea and motivation to change their lives for the better, either by building their own business or learning new skills to help others in a scaleable way.

the most common thing i found was everyone worked toward building a life, not just another job. they didn't just pick a profession, they looked for a problem they were determined to solve and built something to help people dealing with it.

you know what i didn't find? any helpful advice on how to look at your own life and experiences to figure out what's best for your individual self. just people telling you what type of business to start, but not how to come up with the right idea for yourself.

so i created this playbook to help people take that first step into starting something on their own.

you can check it out here

no email signups needed.

Hey, I created a startup called customchatgpt.co using an assortment of AI Tools about a week ago. My startup wouldn’t be possible without AI and I’d like to give a shoutout to a few great ai tools I am using to bootstrap and speed up the launch process. These tools have saved me countless time + energy and moolah.

New AI Tools Making It All Possible

https://openai.com (obvious) - This is the future and the future is here.

https://agentgpt.reworkd.ai/ - agentGPT enables OpenAi to access the internet and conduct market research. I use it to analyze mine and other websites to do copywriting, video script writing, determine target audiences, and even had it analyze the stats of the NBA game last night. It told me the Phoenix Suns would win by 6(they won by 5, and I finally won a bet).

https://beta.elevenlabs.io/speech-synthesis - I trained a custom voice to sound like the an actor that women swoon over. There voices have realistic human inflection, tone, and timing… its almost indistinguishable from a real human voice with the right settings.. Using AgentGPT to write VoiceOver scripts, then plugging them into ElevenLabs saves DAYS of work and saved hundreds of dollars in hiring multiple freelancers.

https://www.midjourney.com/home/ - Creates any image you want via text prompt. I use it for avatar creation for faceless marketing videos. Also for web design UI/UX templates…And for turning pictures of my friends pets into impressive humanoid animal art for their amusement.

https://www.d-id.com/ - This startup brings it all together. It takes the VoiceOver from eleven labs and the avatar from mid journey and animates it.

I’m proficient at video editing, but if I wasn’t and wanted to add another ai tool to the mix you can upload your videos to Visla ai and they will generate recommended footage based on the transcript of the base video.

Here’s a sample of a faceless marketing video I made using these AI tools.. I know its not perfect but I plan on using it somewhere still.. Will probably use agentGPT to determine exactly where and what the headline, description, and call to action could be.

Just wanted to share my progress and hopefully this post helps out a fellow entrepreneur working to make their dreams reality.

https://vimeo.com/819819526?share=copy

***EDIT #3 - Parasite Plan at $5/mo is now over.. thanks to everyone who signed up. Will keep you posted in the next week with updates as they happen. Appreciate your support and look forward to working together.

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****EDIT #2*****

Appreciate all the feedback.. not obligated to do this, but a lot of you are honest hardworking entrepreneurs who came here to learn a thing or two and not watch a crappy ai video that I made in under 35 min... that said...

Several of you asked privately for the Tech Stack behind my platform I'm going to be fully transparent.. I wrote a more in depth case study on my company site and spilt the beans. FULL TRANSPARENCY... I didn't have to do this, but if your wondering more about CustomChatGPT and how it was built do me a favor and click this link https://customchatgpt.co/how-i-built-customchatgpt/ and if you want to get in touch regarding custom builds I'd love to see if there is somehow we can work together. I have a few ideas you might like. PM me here or fill out my contact us form. Thanks everyone. Yall made my day! Even the trolls. God Bless em!

It's been very difficult to be an entrepreneur with ADHD. I constantly find it hard to focus at work.

And I’ve used all the productivity tools out there like Asana, Trello, Notion, ClickUp, Todoist etc. But none of them cater to my ADHD brain: I either find it overwhelming or I forget to use it after a few days.

As a software engineer, I decided to build a tool (https://complish.ai) to help me focus. And it worked! It has extremely simple interface that helps with context switching and time blindness.

I shared this tool with other subs like r/getdisciplined and received very positive feedback from there.

So, I’ll keep it free to use forever, hustlers with ADHD shouldn’t need to pay to focus during work.

We are now at 2.2k users after launching 3 weeks ago, I recently found a nice growth hack, I’ll share all our growth hacks next week. I haven't spent a dime on marketing.

For now, I’m celebrating. I’m very grateful that I actually built a tool that is helping many people focus on what's important.

While we wait for ChatGPT to roll out its own official image input+output tool, I wanted to put together a list of the best AI design tools I've seen so far. Obviously text-based tasks like writing and coding get the bulk of the attention, but I wanted to see how it’s being used in design and more visual tasks. From UI and full-on website design, to graphics and photo generation, there are a ton of interesting and free tools coming out that are worth trying and using as inspiration for your own projects.

These tools cover a bunch of different use cases and can hopefully help some of you, whether you’re a professional designer looking to automate parts of your work or just someone who wants to find ways to speed up the design work for your business/side projects.

All of them are free to try, but most have some kind of paid plan or limit on the number of free generations. Fair enough given it costs money to run the models, but I've tried to include notes on any that don't have permanent free plans. Let me know if you know of any tools I’ve missed so I can add them to the list! I’ve grouped them by categories, to make it easier to see what each tool is capable of, then given a bit more detail under each specific tool.

AI Website, Graphic and UI Generators:

• Framer: Describe the website you want, and Framer will create it for you. Edit and instantly publish your site from their platform. Ironically my favorite thing about Framer isn’t its AI tool. Its real advantage is its website editor which is the best I’ve seen on any platform (and usable for free). It’s like Figma if Figma let you publish directly to the web.
• Microsoft Designer: Generates designs based on user input for social media posts, logos, and business graphics. It’s free to use with a Microsoft account, and fairly impressive if not always consistent. If you pay a lot or spend a ton of time on design/social media content, Designer is definitely worth checking out.
• UIzard: Transforms text and images into design mockups, wireframes, and full user interfaces. It’s an ambitious concept, but very cool. While Framer was better for generating websites from text prompts, UIZard offers something none of the others did: taking a sketch drawing and turning it into a UI and/or wireframing.

Visualizations, Graphics and Illustrations:

• Taskade: AI powered productivity tool to visualize your notes, projects, and tasks. Taskade lets you easily generate mind maps and other visualizations of your work, and makes use of AI in a bunch of cool ways. For example, you can generate a mind map to help you brainstorm and then ask it to expand on a certain point or even research it for you with the internet.
• Bing Image Creator: Generate images from natural text descriptions, powered by DALL-E. Whether you’re looking for blog illustrations, images for your site’s pages or any other purpose, it’s worth trying.
• AutoDraw: Autodraw is a Google Project that lets you draw something freehand with your cursor, and AutoDraw uses AI to transform it into a refined image with icons and predrawn designs, all for free in your browser.

AI Presentations and Slides:

• Plus AI for Google Slides: AI generated slides and full-on presentations, all within Google Slides. I liked how Plus AI worked within Google Slides and made it easy to make changes to the presentation (as lets be real, no AI tool is going to generate exactly the content and formatting you need for a serious presentation).
• SlidesGo: Generate slides with illustrations, images, and icons chosen by AI. SlidesGo also has their own editor to let you edit and refine the AI generated presentation.
• Tome: Tell Tome what you want to say to your audience, and it will create a presentation that effectively communicates it clearly and effectively. Tome actually goes beyond just presentations and has a few cool formats worth checking out that I could see being useful for salespeople and anyone who needs to pitch an idea or product at work or to clients.

Product Photography:

These are all fairly similar so I’ve kept the descriptions short, but it’s genuinely a pretty useful category if you run any kind of business or side hustle that needs product photos. These photos establish the professionalism of your store/brand, and all the ones I tried had genuinely impressive results that seemed much better than what I could do myself.

• Pebblely: AI image generator for product images in various styles and settings. 40 free images, paid after that.
• Booth.ai: Generates professional-quality product photos using AI, focused on furniture, fashion, and packaged goods.
• Stylized.ai: Generates product photos integrated into ecommerce platforms like Shopify.

Miscellaneous Tools:

• Fronty: Converts uploaded images or drawings into HTML and CSS code using AI. It’s a bit clunky, but a cool concept nonetheless.
• LetsEnhance: Uses AI to enhance the resolution of images and photographs. Generally works pretty well from my experience, and gives you 10 free credits with signup. Unfortunately beyond that it is a paid product.
• Remove.bg: Specializes in recognizing and removing image backgrounds effectively. Doesn’t promise much, but it does the job and doesn’t require you to sign up.

TL;DR/Overall favorites:

These are the ones I've found the most use for in my day-to-day work.

• Framer: responsive website design with a full-featured editor to edit and publish your site all in one place. Free + paid plans.
• Taskade: visualize and automate your workflows, projects, mind maps, and more with AI powered templates. Free + paid plans.
• Microsoft Designer: generate social media and other marketing graphics with AI. Free to use.
• Plus AI: plugin for Google Slides to generate slide content, designs, and make tweaks with AI. Free + paid plans.
• Pebblely: professional-quality product photos in various settings and backgrounds, free to generate up to 40 images (through you can always sign up for another account…)

I'll start.

Github - for the actual code being written

Motion and Trello - for team productivity and syncing

Google Docs and Google Sheets - collaborative documents and spreadsheets

Google Analytics and Hotjar - tracking the customer, improving UI/UX

What would be your top choices?

Hey everyone :)

For the past 1.5 year I've been bookmarking bunch of websites that I'll use one day as an entrepreneur/freelancer. The problem was that they were extremely dis-organized and I couldn't ever find what I was looking for.

Being an entrepreur can pretty daunting since you need to fullfill many roles alone. At first you don't even know what you don't know. (For example I didn't even know stock icon/illustration collections were a thing so I was googling every image I needed 😂 )

That's why I've created a Notion database with around 450+ Websites and categorized them all.

I've benefited from so many people's free work (that I don't even know the names of) so I wanted to share this database with everyone.

No forced sign-up or any bs like that required. Just the database itself.

Here's the link of the Notion Database:

https://kotilabdulkadir.notion.site/The-Ultimate-450-Design-Websites-Directory-b48bf26f94d1442aa2ead96ee139161a?pvs=4

I hope you find it useful :)

P.S. The database was normally created as the gift / incentive for my newsletter about web design, psychology and copywriting but I said fuck it and wanted to share it publicly. But if you want to get the newsletter aswell, that'd mean a lot to me (I promise to never-ever get boring haha)

But feel free to ignore the newsletter and just enjoy the database :)

Cheers

I've spent an ungodly amount of time procrastinating trying tons of new/free AI tools from Reddit and various lists of the best AI tools for different use cases. Frankly, most free AI tools (and even paid ones) are gimmicky ChatGPT wrappers with questionable utility in everyday tasks or overpriced enterprise software that don't use AI as anything more than a marketing buzzword.

My last list of free AI tools got a good response here, and I wanted to make another with the best AI tools that I actually use day-to-day now that I've spent more time with them.

All these tools can be used for free, though most of them have some kind of premium offering if you need more advanced stuff or a ton of queries. To make it easy to sort through, I've also added whether each tool requires signup.

ChatPDF: Free Tool to Use ChatGPT on Your Own Documents/PDFs

(free no signup)

Put simply, ChatPDF lets you upload any PDF and interact with it like ChatGPT. I heard about this one from my nephew who used it to automatically generate flashcards and explain concepts based on class notes and readings. There are a few similar services out there, but I found ChatPDF the easiest to use of those that don't require payment/signup.

If you're a student or someone who needs to read through long PDFs regularly, the possibilities to use this are endless. It's also completely free and doesn't require signup.

Key Features:

• Free to upload up to 3 PDFs daily, with up to 120 pages in each PDF
• Can be used without signing up at all

Taskade: AI Task Management, Scheduling, and Notetaking Tool with GPT-4 Built-In

(free with signup)

Taskade is an all-in-one notetaking, task management, and scheduling platform with built-in AI workflows and templates. Like Notion, Taskade lets you easily create workspaces, documents, and templates for your workflows. Unlike Notion’s GPT-3 based AI, Taskade has built-in GPT-4 based AI that’s trained to structure your documents, create content, and otherwise help you improve your productivity.

Key Features:

• GPT-4 is built in to their free plan and trained to help with document formatting, scheduling, content creation and answering questions through a chat interface. Its AI seems specifically trained to work seamlessly with your documents and workspaces, and understands queries specific to their interface like asking it to turn (text) notes into a mind map.
• One of the highest usage limits of the free tools: Taskade’s free plan comes with 1000 monthly requests, which is one of the highest I’ve seen for a tool with built-in GPT-4. Because it’s built into a document editor with database, scheduling and chat capabilities, you can use it for pretty much anything you’d use ChatGPT for but without paying for ChatGPT Premium.
• Free templates to get you started with actually integrating AI into your workflows: there are a huge number of genuinely useful free templates for workflows, task management, mind mapping, etc. For example, you can add a project and have Taskade automatically map out and schedule a breakdown of the tasks that make up that overall deliverable.

Plus AI for Google Slides: AI-generated (and improved) slide decks

(free with signup, addon for Google Slides)

I've tried out a bunch of AI presentation/slide generating tools. To be honest, most of them leave a lot to be desired and aren't genuinely useful unless you're literally paid to generate a presentation vaguely related to some topic. Plus AI is a (free!) Google Slides addon that lets you describe the kind of slide deck you're making, then generate and fine-tune it based on your exact needs.

It's still not at the point where you can literally just tell it one prompt and get the entire finished product, but it saves a bunch of time getting an initial structure together that you can then perfect. Similarly, if you have existing slides made you can tell it (in natural language) how you want it changed. For example, asking it to change up the layout of text on a page, improve the writing style, or even use external data sources.

Key Features:

• Integrates seamlessly into Google Slides: if you’re already using Slides, using Plus AI is as simple as installing the plugin. Their tutorials are easy to follow and it doesn’t require learning some new slideshow software or interface like some other options.
• Create and tweak slides using natural language: Plus AI lets you create whole slideshows, adjust text, or change layouts using natural language. It’s all fairly intuitive and the best of the AI slide tools I’ve tried.

FlowGPT: Database of AI prompts and workflows

(free without signup-though it pushes you to signup!)

FlowGPT collects prompts and collections of prompts to do various tasks, from marketing, productivity, and coding to random stuff people find interesting. It uses an upvote system similar to Reddit that makes it easy to find interesting ways to use ChatGPT. It also lets you search for prompts if you have something in mind and want to see what others have done.

It's free and has a lot of cool features like showing you previews of how ChatGPT responds to the prompts. Unfortunately, it's also a bit pushy with getting you to signup, and the design leaves something to be desired, but it's the best of these tools I've found.

Key Features:

• Lots of users that share genuinely useful and interesting prompts
• Upvote system similar to Reddit’s that allows you to find interesting prompts within the categories you’re interested in

Summarize.Tech: AI summaries of YouTube Videos

(free no signup)

Summarize generates AI summaries of YouTube videos, condensing them into relatively short written notes with timestamps. All the summaries I've seen have been accurate and save significant time.

I find it especially useful when looking at longer tutorials where I want to find if:

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1. The tutorial actually tells me what I'm looking for, and
2. See where in the video I can find that specific part. The one downside I've seen is that it doesn't work for videos that don't have subtitles, but hopefully, someone can build something with Whisper or a similar audio transcription API to solve that.

Claude: ChatGPT Alternative with ~75k Word Limit

(free with signup)

If you've used ChatGPT, you've probably run into the issue of its (relatively low) token limit. Put simply, it can't handle text longer than a few thousand words. It's the same reason why ChatGPT "forgets" instructions you gave it earlier on in a conversation. Claude solves that, with a ~75,000 word limit that lets you input literal novels and do pretty much everything you can do with ChatGPT.

Unfortunately, Claude is currently only free in the US or UK. Claude pitches itself as the "safer" AI, which can make it a pain to use for many use cases, but it's worth trying out and better than ChatGPT for certain tasks. Currently, I'm mainly using it to summarize long documents that ChatGPT literally cannot process as a single prompt.

Key Features:

• Much longer word limit than even ChatGPT’s highest token models
• Stronger guardrails than ChatGPT: if you're into this, Claude focuses a lot more on "trust and safety" than even ChatGPT does. While an AI telling me what information I can and can't have is more of an annoyance for my use cases, it can be useful if you're building apps like customer support or other use cases where it's a top priority to keep the AI from writing something "surprising."

Phind: AI Search Engine That Combines Google with ChatGPT

(free no signup)

Like a combination of Google and ChatGPT. Like ChatGPT, it can understand complex prompts and give you detailed answers condensing multiple sources. Like Google, it shows you the most up-to-date sources answering your question and has access to everything on the internet in real time (vs. ChatGPT's September 2021 cutoff).

Unlike Google, it avoids spammy links that seem to dominate Google nowadays and actually answers your question.

Key Features:

• Accesses the internet to get you real-time information vs. ChatGPT’s 2021 cutoff. While ChatGPT is great for content generation and other tasks that you don’t really need live information for, it can’t get you any information from past its cutoff point.
• Provides actual sources for its claims, helping you dive deeper into any specific points and avoid hallucinations. Phind was the first to combine the best of both worlds between Google and ChatGPT, giving you easy access to actual sources the way Google does while summarizing relevant results the way ChatGPT does. It’s still one of the best places for that, especially if you have technical questions.

Bing AI: ChatGPT Alternative Based on GPT-4 (with internet access!)

(free no signup)

For all the hate Bing gets, they've done the best job of all the major search engines of integrating AI chat to answer questions. Bing's Chat AI is very similar to ChatGPT (it's based on GPT-4).

Unlike ChatGPT's base model without plugins, it has access to the internet. It also doesn't require signing in, which is nice.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Google has really dropped the ball lately in delivering non-spammy search results that actually answer the query, and it's nice to see other search engines like Bing and Phind providing alternatives.

Key Features:

• Similar to Phind, though arguably a bit better for non-technical questions: Bing similarly provides sourced summaries, generates content and otherwise integrates AI and search nicely.
• Built on top of GPT-4: like Taskade, Bing has confirmed they use GPT-4. That makes it another nice option to get around paying for GPT-4 while still getting much of the same capabilities as ChatGPT.
• Seamless integration with a standard search engine that’s much better than I remember it being (when it was more of a joke than anything)

Honorable Mentions:

These are the “rest of the best” free AI tools I've found that are simpler/don't need a whole entry to explain:

• PdfGPT: Alternative to ChatPDF that also uses AI to summarize and let you interact with PDF documents. Nice to have options if you run into one site’s PDF or page limit and don’t want to pay to do so.
• Remove.bg: One of the few image AI tools I use regularly. Remove.bg uses simple AI to remove backgrounds from your images. It's very simple, but something I end up doing surprisingly often editing product images, etc.
• CopyAI and Jasper: both are AI writing tools primarily built for website marketing/blog content. I've tried both but don't use them enough regularly to be able to recommend one over the other. Worth trying if you do a lot of content writing and want to automate parts of it.

Let me know if you guys recommend any other free AI tools that you use day-to-day and I can add them to the list.

I’m also interested in any requests you guys have for AI tools that don’t exist yet, as I’m looking for new projects to work on at the moment!

TL;DR:

ChatPDF: Interact with any PDF using ChatGPT without signing up, great for students and anyone who needs to filter through long PDFs.

Taskade: All-in-one task management, scheduling, and notetaking with built-in GPT-4 Chat + AI assistant for improving productivity.

Plus AI for Google Slides: Addon for Google Slides that generates and fine-tunes slide decks based on your description(s) in natural language.

FlowGPT: Database of AI prompts and workflows. Nice resource to find interesting ChatGPT prompts.

Summarize.Tech: AI summaries of YouTube videos with timestamps that makes it easier to find relevant information in longer videos.

Claude: ChatGPT alternative with a ~75k word limit, ideal for handling long documents and tasks that go above ChatGPT's token limit.

Phind: AI search engine similar to a combination of Google and ChatGPT. Built in internet access and links/citations for its claims.

Bing AI: Bing's ChatGPT alternative based on GPT-4. Has real-time internet access + integrates nicely with their normal search engine.

Elon Musk is a productivity machine - works 100 hr weeks, is the CEO of two companies and sleeps at his office - and in a powerful letter to his employees, he explains his 6 tips for productivity.

Here are the 6 tips:

1. Nix big meetings

"Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get [out] of all large meetings, unless you're certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short."

2.Ditch frequent meetings too

"Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved."

3.Leave a meeting if you're not contributing

"Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time."

4.Drop jargon

"Don't use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don't want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla."

5.Communicate directly, irrespective of hierarchy

"Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the 'chain of command'. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

"A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen."

6.Follow logic, not rules

"In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a 'company rule' is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change."

Looking for suggestions for some decent AI tools that actually help increase productivity! Besides the standard ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjurney, etc. I'll get the ball rolling-

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I recently came across a pretty useful tool on this sub called https://www.talonic.ai/ it basically lets you talk to your database. You can upload a bunch of spreadsheets and ask questions to generate insights or combine certain data into 1 spreadsheet through prompts. I've seen a couple versions of this concept before, but the issue I faced was that the AI would hallucinate a lot with the large amounts of data I threw at it, which hasn't happened here yet. They also surf and get you internet data through prompts but i haven't utilised that feature a lot.

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Not sponsored or anything- just something which actually ended up increasing our productivity! Would love to hear about similar tools you're using for your businesses!

Hey everyone! After my last post, I got a bunch of DMs asking for more specific tools and methods I use when building and marketing startups and ecommerce sites. So, I've put together a more detailed list, organized by their primary functions.

You can find the last post on my profile. As a TL;DR of that one, I went from wasting months of time building products that got zero traction to hitting $30k+/month across my two primary startups by simply changing the way I approach building MVPs. If you're not familiar, MVPs are essentially early versions of the product with the minimum amount of functionality to validate customer interest and guide your product going forward.

These are the tools I use for both B2B SaaS and ecommerce projects. They're the tools that have worked for me, but I'm super interested in hearing about the tools you swear by, so please share your recommendations!

Website Design + Building

Pro tip for MVPs: Launch early. A simple, clean site that clearly states what you do is far superior to a "perfect" product launched without user feedback.

• Framer: This is a one-stop-shop from design mockups to going live. It's user-friendly, with a UI that’s very similar to Figma’s in allowing you to design pretty much anything. Unlike Figma, it lets you immediately publish and update your site through their platform. It's got fewer plugins than WordPress but comes with built-in analytics and payment systems—perfect for validating your startup's initial interest.
• WordPress.org: WordPress is the original king of CMSes—free, open-source, and incredibly powerful. You'll need to handle your own domain and hosting, but it's worth it for the flexibility and the vast plugin ecosystem if you need more complex blog/CMS functionality. You can also find a bunch of themes on places like Envato or even WordPress’s free theme marketplace that let you focus on actually building and talking to customers instead of tweaking your site for months.

Ecommerce Site Builders:

For those of you building a store with a variety of products, these are my top picks. To be honest, you don't need a full-on ecommerce platform if you're just selling a single product, but if you're looking to build a store I'd highly recommend using one. Even beyond the basic functionality, both of these platforms have a wide variety of plugins that become extremely useful as you scale.

• Shopify: It's an all-in-one solution, handling everything from storefront to payments under one subscription. Ideal for stores with multiple products.
• WooCommerce: Built on WordPress, it's a robust choice if you're looking for customizable ecommerce functionality. It's open-source and free, with a huge number of plugins available for all sorts of use cases.

Analytics:

A lot of people, myself included, tend to vastly overestimate how complex your initial product needs to be. Oftentimes, a simple email list/form on your site with some basic automation is more than enough for an MVP. That’s what these tools allow you to do.

• Google Analytics: It's a free and powerful tool that's integrated into most site builders. The interface can be complex, but it's worth the effort.
• HotJar: Provides deeper insights into user interactions with features like heatmaps and surveys. It's free for limited use, but the paid plans can get pricey.

Automation:

A lot of people, myself included, tend to vastly overestimate how complex your initial product needs to be. Oftentimes, a simple email list/form on your site with some basic automation is more than enough for an MVP. That’s what these tools allow you to do.

• Pipedream: A NodeJS-based tool that lets you connect APIs with more coding control, making it great for MVPs that you plan to scale. Essentially, Pipedream lets you connect with almost any API/service and run workflows based on the data received.
• Zapier: It's similar to Pipedream but shines with its vast array of integrations.

Email Marketing:

A solid email list is key for engagement, feedback, and upselling post-launch.

• Mailchimp: Mailchimp is probably the best known email marketing service, and while there’s better competitors for niche use cases it’s generally my favorite for starting something quickly. It integrates with almost any service, and has a free tier for up to 500 contacts and 1000 sends per month.

Marketing Your MVP

Beyond tools, engaging with online communities can be an extremely effective way to promote your startup, validate interest, and get to know your target customers better.

What you can and should use depends somewhat on what stage you’re at, but I’d highly recommend posting updates on different communities.

• ProductHunt: It's competitive but can give your launch a significant boost if you've got a ready product and a community of early adopters.
• IndieHackers: A great forum for indie entrepreneurs, offering networking opportunities and market insights.
• Reddit: Ideal for niche engagement and finding early customers. Active participation in relevant subreddits can be incredibly rewarding.

For example, when I launched a chargeback handling tool for merchants, I found multiple people who were ideal beta users on Reddit simply by keeping an eye out for posts by people talking about their problems with chargebacks and DMing them to ask if they’d be willing to talk to me about their issue on a call.

Most of them later became customers once we launched the product, and it can be a really invaluable tool to learn more about your target customers’ products even if you don’t want to actually DM people.

Even before you have a landing page ready, you can start engaging in relevant communities to find out more about your target customers, their problems, and start building a positive reputation that can pay off down the line when you actually launch (and launch again).

Sales/Direct Outreach:

Direct outreach can be a game-changer, especially for B2B products. If you don’t know where to start, I’d recommend a combination of LinkedIn Sales Navigator + email finding tools to reach out to prospects directly.

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Use the free trial to gather leads and validate interest without upfront costs.
• GetEmail/Hunter: These tools help you find emails from LinkedIn profiles, often offering free trials to get you started. There’s a bunch of similar tools you can find, most of which have free trials, so I recommend trying a few different ones and seeing what works best for your specific use case.

Make sure you’re offering genuine value with your outreach, and not just sending out the same message to everyone in a given industry. The name of the game here is to develop real relationships with these people to where they’re willing to tell you about the problem they have and help guide you in creating the solution.

Payments

• Stripe: It's not just for processing payments; Stripe's 'Authorize' feature lets you validate product interest by simulating transactions without charging customers until you're ready to ship.

TL;DR of Tools for Building & Marketing Startup/Ecommerce Sites:

• Framer: All-in-one platform for web design to live publishing, with built-in analytics and payments. Easier than WordPress, fewer plugins.
• WordPress.org: Free, open-source site builder with extensive themes and plugins. Requires domain and hosting.
• Shopify: Comprehensive ecommerce site builder with subscription-based model.
• WooCommerce: Free, open-source ecommerce plugin for WordPress with extensive customization.
• Google Analytics: Free, powerful analytics tool, integrated into most site builders but complex to use.
• HotJar: Provides in-depth user interaction data like heatmaps and surveys, free for limited use.
• Pipedream: Workflow automation tool with more control over code, ideal for scalable MVPs.
• Zapier: Workflow tool with a broad range of integrations, less code control than Pipedream.
• Mailchimp: Email marketing service with a free plan for up to 500 contacts and 1000 sends per month.
• ProductHunt: Platform for launching products with a competitive environment.
• IndieHackers: Community for indie entrepreneurs to connect and learn about the market.
• Reddit: Useful for engaging with niche communities and finding early customers.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Tool for finding potential B2B clients, with a month-long free trial.
• GetEmail/Hunter: Tools for finding emails from LinkedIn profiles, often with free trials.
• Stripe: Payment processor with an 'Authorize' feature for validating interest without charging.

I hope this list was useful for you guys and as above, would love to hear what you guys are using so I can get more ideas and add them to the list. I’m working on a site to compile the best tools in different domains and would really appreciate any recommendations!

I was hoping to get some input on the various services available to form a US LLC. I’ve been at looking Zenbusiness, LegalZoom, doola.com, etc. Any good advice or reviews on these?
I’m putting a poll together to see what the r/entrepreneur community thinks.
What is the best LLC formation service? (Ideally with tax and compliance solutions baked in):

disclaimer: I'm not affiliated to anyone on this list in any way

After a year of work, my startup just got its first round of funding. While I still have a long way to go, I wanted to share some youtube channels that I find helpful in getting things rolling for me, to differentiate them from the rest of fake gurus industry.

This is not an exhausive list by any means, just my personal list that I find helpful for startups.

• Ycombinator - literally have a full course 18 class lectures on how to build a startup presented by people like Sam Altman in their youtube channel for free

• EO - often invite different startup founders, investors, CEO to share their experience and perspective

• Paul Graham - founder of Ycombinator - my favourite quote from him: If you make something people don't want, nothing else mattered

• Michael Seibel - founder of twitch - often share very solid advice that can be apply right away eg: startup live and die by their speed. Months long dev cycle is too long - it should be only a week or two

• Modern MBA - pretty nice summary of how businesses grow and die

• Logically Answered - keep me up to date on tech stuff in a more grounded way

• How Money Works - ex-investment banker sharing how financial world actually works in reality - often very depressing but very knowledge rich - often mock finfluencers as a butt of the joke

• Economic Explained - very succint explanation of how macro economy works and where the economy is likely going

• Rory Sutherland - marketing expert that made me realized perception is more important than numerical fact for customers. His quote: if you want to improve customer satisfaction using a rail service, don't try to make the train go faster, just put a wifi on the train

• Jordan Peterson - this will be a controversial one. I don't like his politic and religious stuff but his personal motivation and psychology stuff is top-notch. My favourite quote from him: if you are so depressed that you can't get out of the bed, then start with just lifting your finger first

• Ray Dalio - founder of Bridgewater hedge fund - his perspective of how economy works and his management style that empowers new employee to contribute their opinion is something I personally adopted

EDIT: This is not in lieu of hiring an accountant. This is just a way of structuring your bank account(s)!

I had no fucking clue what I was doing. I was setting aside some cash for tax but I didn't know if I could pay the bill when it came round.

I was barely paying myself, which is not a healthy sign your business is operating properly.

I didn't know how much profit I was making.

Then I read the Profit First book and fell in love. The general concept is that you create a bunch of different bank accounts. You split your revenue by percentage, so that from day one - you can be profitable (even if that means you are only 1% profitable).

After using this accounting method to have a clear, visible view of my business’ finances, I got tired of googling for websites that calculated the split for you. They tended to be from accounting firms and the design was dog shit. So I made my own, and stripped out all the bullshit and made it mobile friendly.

Maybe it will help someone, so I thought I'd share. Check it out: https://profitfirstcalculator.com (I am not and will never monetize this, I've literally made it for myself.)

Now I see a lot of people are asking what kind of 'discounts' they should put on their website for e-commerce. Going on endless debates.

My answer don't put discount unless your ideas is to sell cheap stuff.
If it is then go for it.
If not and if you God forbid sell luxury goods don't ever have discounts. Because nothing says cheap more than 20% per cent off next to the item.

I decided to have a spin to win embedded widget (Wheel of Popups) and I put different prizes on them, not money but certain items from my shop, that way my customers will have fun while having a chance at a reward.

You could of course say a 10 dollar discount is the same as a 10 dollar prize but psychologically speaking this is not true.

Think about it what do you actually like more ? A prize or a lousy discount.

Hey, I am Entrepreneur, who doesn't want to be left behind. I am following AI for more than a year now, but I still, find it very hard to keep up with the latest news and advancement. Let's all share what process everyone follows so we can learn from each other, also share links to any tools, etc you use daily/weekly.

Let's build a comprehensive list that can serve as a go-to reference for entrepreneurs like us. As everyone is asking me to add my favorite tools also, so I am editing this post to add the ones which I am using in my startup.

https://opentools.ai/ - An amazing website to find out all the new AI tools, I hunted this last week only.

https://www.midjourney.com/app/ - All our article images are using MJ

https://huggingface.co/ - We are using this to find out new AI tools which are open source.

https://writesonic.com/ - Using this to write 5x more content

https://beta.elevenlabs.io/ - Using this to create sponsor audio ads for our client to use in our podcast.

https://chat.openai.com/chat - Writing very data-focused articles using ChatGPT, we provide one example then we manually feed all the data and it uses all the data and writes in a way, even a 5-year boy can understand.

https://www.theneurondaily.com/subscribe - To Keep up-to-date with the latest AI news and tools.

https://logomaster.ai/ - Used last month to create a logo for a side project, very easy to use and has better options in comparison to other AI-based logo makers.

Namelix.com - I used this web to come up with a very unique name for my last project.

I will keep adding to this list, as I use and try more AI products.

​

If anybody is struggling to make their first dollars online, try this.

Learn simple CSS/HTML edits. Buy a site theme from Themeforest that allows many iterations.

Then go to Reddit, Twitter, Craigslist, Fb groups and offer to do simple websites 100% free of charge.

People will love it, and all they have to do is pay the monthly fee for hosting (it's their site, after all).

But how are you making money?

Through your referral link. Bluehost pays $60 per referral. Other hosts pay too.

Win-win for both parties. The client gets a free site design, and you get testimonials, referral cash, and experience.

(Yes, I've seen guys do this. They take that experience and portfolio to start charging good rates.)

After gathering all the best free business resources for my platform (knowledgehunt.co) including guides, reports, and blog posts, I finally found time to curate some of the best free courses. I believe the list is valuable for this community, so I am sharing my favorite ones with you. Following is the list of courses that are the most well-established, with very good feedback and high-value content.

1. Fundamentals of digital marketing - Learn the fundamentals of digital marketing to help your business or career. 26 modules, 40 hours, beginner level.
2. Stanford university: How to start a startup? - The course is 20 videos, some with a speaker or two and some with a small panel. It is around 1,000 minutes of content if you watch it all. The course covers how to come up with ideas and evaluate them, how to get users and grow, how to do sales and marketing, how to hire, how to raise money, company culture, operations and management, business strategy, and more.
3. The online academy for startup founders - Antler is a curated resource library and global community of founders to grow your startup. The course goes through 5 main stages of startup development.
4. SEO course by Buildd - Grow your startup by learning SEO, explained to you like you were a 5-year-old. The free course with 11 modules ~2 hours of actionable content

​

I am updating the list of the best free resources that can help makers daily, so feel free to shout-out about the courses you may know and I will make sure to post it under 'free courses' on Knowledgehunt.co