by Ben Lee

Introduction:

I struggled with what to do with this book for a long time. This book represents my character,
my business, my Sun Tzu strategies, and how I feel about app development.

Love me or hate me, Ive been in app development for over a decade (Im 29) and Ive seen
millions come and go. I dont think many writers out there have been on the receiving end of
the six-figure checks. And if they were, it wasnt for long.

I want to give you the tools and knowledge to do what you want regain independence,
manufacture your own Kool-Aid, or become an Open-Source evangelist. I cant control your
destiny. I can only share my experiences and tell you what the real world is like. No fluff.

Consider this an insiders guide to building a mobile app the right way: how to avoid burning
through your budget too fast, how recognize the right path when you come to a fork in the
road, and how to manage a digital product if its your first time.

Let me be clear: you still have to learn from experience. There is no other way.

But I want to help you learn from the right experiences and avoid making the same stupid
mistakes I did when I first started so you can make real progress right away. In the words of
Warren Buffett:

Its good to learn from your mistakes. Its better to learn from other peoples mistakes.

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Glossary
Ill use lingo in this book that may get confusing if youre just getting into the tech scene.
Heres a quick guide:

Agile Agile Development; a movement & set of practices for writing better software.

AR Augmented reality. This refers to putting overlays of digital elements onto a physical
world, like seeing a character in a room through your phones camera.

CMS Content management system. This refers to any platform that hosts, runs, or manag-
es content like images or video.

Dev short for development, meaning writing software.

Dev Team the team of coders or software engineers that write your app.

Dev Shop development agency or mobile app development company.

MVP Minimum viable product. There are many definitions of this, but in Agile develop-
ment, this usually refers to the absolute bare-minimum version of your app that you can use
to get it in front of users and start testing.

Non-Technical Founder This is you. The mother of the baby. The non-technical founder is
the one making it happen, owning the project and serving as the core decision maker for the app.

UI User interface. This refers to the design, functions, color schemes, branding, and graph-
ic layout of your app.

UX User experience. Closely related to UI, but this term refers more to the experience a
user has as they use the app.

VOD Video on demand. A program that lets users play videos you guessed it on demand.

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Chapter 1:
Dont Solve Every Problem

The biggest mistake I see new non-technical founders make is trying to be a Swiss Army knife.
They want to build the biggest, most feature-filled app they can: Facebook and Twitter and
Instagram and Amazon combined, plus it ties your shoes and finishes your homework for you.

Let me be clear: youll never succeed like this, not in the beginning anyways. The task is too
big to do well. Your app cannot, and should not, do everything. Focus solely on the core
function, the core problem youre solving, and do it flawlessly.

To do this, you need to find your niche, understand your customer, and hone your value
proposition until its razor sharp. You dont want to dilute your value offering and get lost in
the endless sea of the App Store. You need to understand what value youre providing, who
youre providing it to, and how to do it better than anyone else.

Before you get upset with me, this doesnt mean that you have to say goodbye to your big
feature list forever. If you succeed, youll have plenty of opportunities to expand the functions
and capabilities of your app. Be careful about what you put into it now.

Keep it lean. Focus on the core problem youre solving. Do it exceptionally well. Those are your
holy grail guidelines in the beginning: you need to get a working product. Fast. Thats the only
way youll learn, the only way youll grow, and the only way to succeed in app development.

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Chapter 2:
Dont Be a First-Timer, Even if Its Your First Time

If this is your first time as a non-tech founder of a mobile app, theres plenty you dont know
but that doesnt mean you have to let on about it. As they say, once you get to the end zone,
act like youve been there before.

And, even more importantly, prepare yourself as much as you can.

You dont have to be a software genius or even know how to code, but dont try to compensate
with buzzwords. Know the gaps in your knowledge and watch out for them, and if anyone
youre working with starts giving you the runaround by using fancy terminology, dont be
afraid to ask them to break it down in plain English.

You must be willing to learn, and youll do yourself a huge favor if you get familiar with the
basics of tech and app development. Start frequenting sites like Hacker News, R/Program-
ming (reddit.com/r/programming), Quora, even Github. Find words you dont understand
and learn their definitions. This information will prove invaluable later on.

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 - Quora and sites like it are an invaluable resource for teaching yourself anything you dont know.

You dont have to learn to code if you dont want to but the more you can understand
the process, speak the language, and see the big picture, the more power and leverage
youre giving yourself down the line.

This may be your first time, but you dont have to let it show. Do your homework and
educate yourself youll thank yourself for it later.

Take some time to learn the collaboration tools that most dev teams use. You dont need
to code as a non-technical founder, but you do need to learn to manage coders. Learn
Trello, Github, Slack, and anything else your team uses.

The less time you spend asking developers what theyre working on, the more effective
theyll be. Learning these tools gives you the ability to check in on your team in real time.

That makes you a better founder and a true member of the team buzzwords and
jargon do not.

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Chapter 3:
Whats All This Going to Cost?

How much does an app cost?

I've been asked this question every day for six, seven, eight years. Its not easy to answer.

Agencies are willing to give estimates because they're hungry for business they want to give
you a number so youll sign the agreement. But most of their estimates are flawed.

Thats because as a non-technical founder, you don't know what you want to build at the start
of a project. You have an idea, you have some specs and features, or even an RFP. But that is
nowhere near enough to give you an accurate estimate for building a software product.

I'm not here to tell you you can't build an app for 15, 10, even 5 grand, because I'm sure you
can, and I'm sure there are plenty of hungry service providers all over the world who are
willing to build whatever you want at any price. But will they build it right?
And is it going to work?

I have never seen an app succeed with less than a $100-150,000 budget. Not all of that goes
to development, but thats the range most apps need. When you first get in contact with an
agency, they dont have the information to give you an accurate estimate. Period.

Different vendors will lowball or highball you; that's the name of the game. They want your
business and they'll get it by any means necessary, whether it's going cheap or adding some
risk factor and padding. In either case, be wary of those estimates.

As an example, a friend of mine pitched us a development contract, and he showed me what

the other vendor provided. The other vendor provided a dollar estimate and even a break-
down of the hours they would be putting in all based off a three page PDF of this product
without knowing anything about what it does. Just taking a stab. They put a low range
estimate, a high range estimate, and then used the average function in an Excel spreadsheet
to create an average.

That's preposterous on so many levels. It makes me want to pull my hair out of my head that
there are still companies out there spending millions of dollars building software that way.

Its a broken system, and you need to be careful around it. Estimates are fraught. They vary
widely depending on the capabilities of the app, the features, the functions. Some apps are
built on a lean budget and achieve massive success, while plenty of huge corporations spend
millions on an app with no return.

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Apps can cost $10,000, apps can cost $100,000, apps can cost $1,000,000. The only way to
understand the real cost of the app is to have a fully fleshed-out roadmap that you create in
collaboration with a developer.

It's like asking how much a car costs. Until you figure out what car youll build, its engine, the
transmission and horsepower, seats, power windows, and all the specifics, theres no way to know.

Whats even more important than cost is process you can succeed on a rail-thin budget if you
have the right process. Build lean, focus on your core feature set first, and get it in front of users
fast. Test, learn, iterate, repeat. The average app runs somewhere between $50,000 and
$200,000 but with the right process and execution, thats money well spent.

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Chapter 4:
How to Raise Money for an App

Now you have a ballpark idea of what your app will cost.

How will you get that money?

For many entrepreneurs, even a paltry app budget is a major financial hurdle.

Heres the trick, though: you dont need to raise it all at once. Assuming youre not sitting on
hundreds of thousands just burning a hole through your wallet, you can raise the capital to
build your app in stages. And the first stage might be the most important: roadmapping.

Roadmapping is a pre-development engagement where you work with a team of experts to vet
your idea, prove it in the marketplace, and build out a detailed backlog of features before you
start writing code and laying down real money.

Its a short, low-cost, low-risk engagement focused on finding out if the app is worth building
before entering development. For a more in-depth explanation of roadmapping and why its
important, check out my interview with Hubstaff.

Dene Your Prepare For

Concept Development

Validate
Your Idea

Not all agencies offer roadmapping as a service. Find one that does. Ive seen a lot of digital
products succeed and fail, and roadmapping is the best framework for building an app that
succeeds in the long term. Our own roadmapping sessions have saved companies $50,000 in
an afternoon by honing in on the core value proposition and stripping away unnecessary
features and thats money that goes towards keeping the business in the black.

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In addition to properly vetting your app, roadmapping gives you the materials you need to
raise the real money for development. After a roadmapping session, you can say with convic-
tion that your app will succeed because youve done your homework: youve done the market
validation; you understand what you need to build and what it will cost; and you have a proto-
type you can put in front of users and investors.

But even raising capital for a roadmapping session can be tricky, as youll need a good $10 or
$20 grand.

For most people, friends and family money is the first step. This is money you raise from people
in your direct network, given because they believe in your product and in you personally.

Raising $20K from friends and family may seem like an impossible task, but its not as hard as
it sounds. If you believe in your product and can make the case for why itll generate a return,
you might be surprised by how much you can drum up from the people you already know.

Friends and family money really can work.

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 But beyond just those in your network and this is the part thats hardest to swallow you
need to contribute money from your own savings. This can be scary, but if you expect anyone
else to invest in your product, you must be willing to do the same. Investing your own money
sends a message to other potential investors, signaling not only that you believe this will
work, but that youre committed enough to put your own skin in the game.

Tapping these sources can give you the money for your initial roadmapping session. This
session is where you start to get a real understanding of your app and the market youre
serving. Youll come out of it either confident that youll succeed or with the determination
that this would be a bad business plan and you need to pivot.

If you decide to pursue the app, you can use your roadmapping materials to secure the next
phase of investment for full development. With a plan backed by proper user and market
research along with high-fidelity wireframes, you can put together a convincing case for why
your app will succeed and start pitching to investors for a development budget.

For an in-depth look at raising capital from professional investors, check out my interview
with Karl House, founder of FanBread.

https://vimeo.com/239871075/0a33d572f8

As always, never forget the virtues of building lean you may need $200K for your full product,
but if you can launch your v1.0 that just delivers bare bones functionality for $50K, then you only
need $50K to get to the next step.

You can get a lot farther with a lot less funding than you think. Look for ways to maximize return
and run lean at every opportunity, and always communicate that to potential investors. If people
see that youre stretching every dollar, theyll be happier to give you more dollars to stretch.

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Chapter 5:
What to Expect on App ROI

After they learn what it costs to build an app, most entrepreneurs start asking questions about
ROI. If youre going to spend this much money on making the app, what kind of a return will
you see?

If Im honest, this question signals to me that your mindset is wrong. If youre the founder
behind the app, this shouldnt just be about a return on an investment, especially if its your
first app.

Because heres the thing: you arent just building an app. Youre starting a business. And if
you want that business to succeed, you need to be thinking about more than just a lump sum
monetary return.

Launching an app isnt just a process of build quick, launch, cash the check, and move on. If
you want to achieve monetary success, you need to think about this as a long-term project.
Realize that youre building a sustainable business here, not a glorified lottery ticket.

Dont get me wrong you need to focus on profitability. Financial solvency is among the
foremost concerns for any entrepreneur. But you need to think of financial solvency as a
long-term process. You need to focus on long-term monetary stability and profitability, not
short-term investment returns. And that focus should come right at the beginning you
should be working out a monetization strategy before and during roadmapping, getting a
good picture of what thatll look like in terms of real dollars.

The ROI for an app can vary hugely depending on the specific monetization model and func-
tion. Enterprise apps may spend ungodly amounts on development and stay in the red for
years, but then generate massive revenues once they acquire enough customers.

Simple gaming apps might operate on a very lean development budget, make their money
back within the first two weeks, and see revenue grind to a standstill within two years take a
look at Mars Mars, which is a game put out by a Uruguayan game dev studio Ive worked with
in the past. That was their model: they reached ROI in 5 days and made the majority of their
profits in the first month or so. Thats not going to be everyones revenue model, but its a
valid one its all about finding the one that fits your app and your business.

ROI isnt a one-size-fits all variable hell, some of the biggest companies in the world have
no idea how to calculate their ROI. Your own ROI depends on your business model, and you
should forecast it based on customer research and your monetization model. The important
thing is to focus on that monetization model early on.

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 Seriously Ive worked with enormous companies that dont know how to calculate ROI on software.

I can tell you this much: if you plan to just scale the thing and figure out how to make money
off it later, your ROI will be very, very low.

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Chapter 6:
No, You Do Not Need Anyone to Sign an NDA.

Having conversations with potential investors and other stakeholders means you have to talk
about your app in some detail. That might feel scary to you it might feel like giving away the
recipe to your secret sauce.

Spoiler: its not.

Ive worked with or rather, avoided working with plenty of non-technical founders with a
mild case of paranoia. And hey, I get it: you care about this thing, you think you have a good
idea, and you dont want it stolen from you.

But Ive been in this business a long time, and you do not need everybody you work with to
sign an NDA. Not at first. Yes, once you get to conversations about specifics, detailed market
research, marketing strategy, business plan once youre in the nitty gritty, an NDA is
reasonable.

But at first, you need to have high-level conversations (high-level meaning general, an over-
view of the concept) without an NDA in place. If you dont, youre going to close so many
doors on yourself that your great idea will stay just that: an idea.

Practice your elevator pitch so you can articulate your vision in less than 2 minutes. And do
not be afraid to articulate that vision. Its the only reason anyone wants to work with you.

I've closed more than half a million dollars in business on deals without knowing specifics or
scope, without having NDAs signed or anything legal in place. NDAs can be valuable in
certain situations, but if youre just talking about an idea for an app, you dont need one.

Neon Roots has closed 6 figure deals using this exact language. Contrary to most peoples first intuition,
this kind of messaging doesnt push clients away it makes them curious.

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14
Chapter 7:
Theres Blood in Those Waters: Seeing the Sharks for What They Are

Once youre ready to find a dev team to build this thing, theres a whole new set of hurdles
to watch out for. It may be your first time, but you need to take control of the situation
wherever possible.

Dont get too chummy with the external vendors you work with. When you go see your
doctor, its common courtesy to talk about related topics: baseball games, movies, how the
familys doing, etc. Courtesy. But you wouldnt go to a party with the guy who does your root
canal, would you?

You need to draw the line with the people you contract. Anyone you work with who isnt in
your organization. Be cordial and polite, but never forget that these people are not your
friends. Theyll just take advantage if they do not respect you as an entrepreneur.

No matter how much you think they care about your success, think youve got the coolest
app theyve ever seen, or have your best interests at heart, dont for a second think they wont
milk you for everything youve got.

Any vendor, service provider, and especially development agency is out there to run a busi-
ness and to them, youre a big pile of money. Theyll do whatever they can to maximize their
return on your account, and trust me, their return does not equal your return. Theyre here to
make money and you know what makes a dev agency money?

Billable hours. Features. Scope creep.

Ive seen it happen with would-be entrepreneurs time and time again. They walk into a big
development agency and the rep leads them into a gorgeous conference room with glass walls,
a beautiful oak table, and fine leather seats. They get the whole spiel: this agency is the best of
the best, they build world-conquering apps every day, they know exactly what theyre doing
and of course, theyre in love with your idea. Its awesome. Best theyve ever seen.

Theyre ready to build you a mobile app thats primed to take the App Store by storm. Itll
have all the bells and whistles: social integration, user profiles, instant messaging, geoloca-
tion, you name it. This thing is gonna go number one. All you have to do is sign on the dotted
line and let them handle the rest.

Right.

Listen to me very carefully: if you ever get into this situation, every alarm bell in your head
should go off at full blast. These are shark-infested waters.

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 Ah, yes. Fully resourced. More like fully drained bank account.

And then development starts.

This stuff can get pricey. Fast.

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Now, at first, everything is fine. Things progress on schedule and on budget, the lead dev tells
you how psyched everyone is on the project, and youre getting ready to finish ahead of your
timeline. Like I said: at first, everything is fine.

But then ever so slowly, and ever so carefully your team starts telling you that in their
professional opinion (and they are professionals, mind you), your app isnt going to reach its
full potential in its current form. It needs more features. But if you just add those features,
itll be primed to blow up the App Store.

And you trust them, because its your first time and they know what theyre doing. The trick is
theyre not doing what you think theyre doing.

Extend the timeline down a couple sprints and suddenly youve blown through way more than
your original development budget, and as it stands, your app is a half-finished Goliath thats
too big to get off the ground. But the dev team aint gonna work for free.

Now youre not just screwed, youre uber screwed. Why? Because the problem isnt just that
the app failed its that theres nowhere to go from here. The wells run dry. The moneys
gone. All those hopes and dreams you pinned on this thing, well, thats all theyll ever be
hopes and dreams.

If this is your first time on the playground, this is exactly what you do NOT want to let happen
to you.

So how do you avoid the scope creep trap?

Always reminding ourselves

what we dont want to be.

As a first-timer, the best way to avoid this is starting small. You want to get this thing built
and functional as quickly and cheaply as possible, and to do that, you need an incessant focus
on your absolute core value proposition.

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Figure out what problem youre solving and build something that solves that problem
nothing more. No bells. No whistles. Just function & value. Thats it.

Codify this mindset and implement it into every aspect of your process. Use the tools available
to you to keep you focused and on track building only what you need to build.

My companies use Trello boards to keep us focused at any given time, were only building
whats in the work in progress (WIP) and Sprint lists. Everything else stays in the backlog.

To that end, its important to learn the tools your dev team will use. You dont have to be
technical, but as a non-technical founder, you have to be able to manage your technical people
on their terms.

I worked with Fede Romero, #1 Uruguayan game development studio Pomelo Games, to
create an e-course where we cover the same subject.

Since youre reading, heres free access to the feature creep lesson from the video course:

https://vimeo.com/224372782/42a3f715ce

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Romero understands that creating a good product starts with function, not with frills. Look
for a dev shop with the same mindset.

The minute they start trying to win you over with promises of it-does-everything apps and
skyscraper success, thats when your red flags start to go up. You need people who understand
Agile and understand that lean and fast is better than feature-rich and expensive.

Catch this stuff early on. Its the only way to protect yourself.

Look out for glass conference rooms and leather chairs. Be suspicious of anybody that prom-
ises you the world. And if they start drowning you in buzzwords and dropping micro,
macro, UX and MVP 50 times in 5 minutes, be wary.

Remember: you are building a business. There are no shortcuts. Itll take dedication, smarts,
and a helluva lot of hard work. Anybody that tells you otherwise is not somebody you want to
be in business with.

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Chapter 8:
Break Your Routine and Never Stop Innovating

You dont want to be Instagram.

Breaking the routine is extremely important as an entrepreneur, app or otherwise. It's vital to
the health and success of your product and to you as an individual.

I know what youre thinking routine? Entrepreneurs dont have routines! Plus, Id kill for
one if it meant I was making progress.

But routines are easy to fall into, especially for a self-directed entrepreneur. And unfortunate-
ly, its not just personally taxing: it can kill your creativity and innovation.

The paradox of being an entrepreneur is that after a while, we get stuck into too much of a
routine the exact reason we tried to get out of our 9-5 in the first place.

But its easy to fall into the trap of a routine, so you need to break that routine. Switch offices,
work out of a coworking spot, work from Starbucks on Tuesdays, take predictable time off to
read, or anything else that sounds appealing.

Go to the Farmers Market and ask everyone you see if they would use your product. Get in
touch with real human beings, face to face, and see what they say. You need to get that
outside opinion or youre going to start drinking your own Kool-Aid.

Outside of tactical business reasons, you need to take time off to stay sane. Theres no such
thing as a 4 hour work week, but you need to give yourself space to relax and unplug. It
makes you more creative, and as an entrepreneur, creativity and innovation are everything.

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I think the perfect medium is taking at least one full day off. Maybe a Monday or a Tuesday,
and if you really can't, just start with a half day where you isolate yourself. Try going on
airplane mode, no emails, no tweeting, no Facebook, and engaging with the real world out
there. Go surfing, go to the beach, go skateboarding, watch movies, go hiking unplug at
least once a day, and make space for at least a day of not working every week.

Paid time off is a sacred ritual at Neon Roots. Make it one of yours as well.

Physical offices are also important. At the end of the day it comes down to compatibility and
trust and the connection that you make with the people that can really help you and coming
from a background in hospitality I have to preach some points. If the toilets look like shit,
that's a pretty poor reflection on your brand. If your toilets are dirty your idea is probably
dirty and your execution will be even dirtier. Barrister is one company that offers solutions
like this. Non-commitment, short-term conference space.

The point of all this is to keep yourself fresh. Because even though its easy to question
assumptions and do strong, customer research-based entrepreneurship at the beginning,
eventually youll feel like you dont have to. Youll feel like you have the product and the
business figured out. Why worry about innovating new features when youve got something
that works?

Thats the most dangerous moment in your entrepreneurial journey. When you think youve
got everything figured out, thats when shit hits the fan.

Why? Youll start doing things because thats the way youve always done them. Youll stop
looking for new ideas, new solutions, new innovations. Youll stop talking to your customers.
Youll stop moving the product forward.

And before you know it, the winds of the market change. Users arent interested in your
feature set anymore. Some competitor pops up out of nowhere, right under your nose, and
steals away your user base before you have time to even check your metrics for the week. And
suddenly everything youve worked so hard to build vanishes in the time it takes to uninstall
your app.

Thats not how it has to be. For those who are bold, who have drive, and who are committed
to innovating, there are millions to be made in app development. This ebook has put you
closer to getting those millions, and these strategies and mindsets will give you a huge leg up
on your entrepreneurial journey.

But learning is not enough. To go out and get your piece of the pie, you must do. The only way
to truly understand and succeed in this crazy business of building digital products is to go
through those hellish experiences, grow a whole new crop of grey hairs, gain 20 pounds, and
have plenty of sleepless nights.

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 The other side of those sleepless nights

Unfortunately, those are the requirements. If thats not what you signed up for, then I suggest
you put this book down and start reading Glassdoor. But remember, youll have plenty of
money for Soul Cycle, a private trainer, and the best hair stylist to hide that grey mop when
you do make it.

The only question youll have to ask is whether it was all worth it.

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Resources
If this is your first time around, youd do well to do some research. Here are a few communi-
ties that can help you learn:

Reddit.com/r/programming: Community of developers and programmers.

Reddit.com/r/entrepreneurship: Community of entrepreneurs. Probably more useful than
r/programming.
Github.com: Version control tool and repository of open-source code. As a founder its not
going to be something you spend a lot of time on, but you should have a basic understanding
of how it works.
Quora: Like Reddit, but less wasted time. Thousands of questions, asked and answered by the
brightest minds on the web.

You may also be interested in the Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) I did on r/entrepreneurship
check that out here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/com-
ments/74nsw6/im_the_founder_of_an_agency_thats_created_250/

Books
Nothing, nothing, nothing will ever replace time spent reading books. Books are the only way
to get in-depth knowledge and actually set yourself apart.

Here are a few, to get you started:

- The Lean Startup

- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- The E-Myth Revisited
- Zero to One
- Make Your Mark
- Screw It, Lets Do It
- Big Data
- Freakonomics
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- ReWork
- 100 Years of Solitude
- Sprint (Googles guide to design sprints)
- The 4-Hour Work Week
- The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development

And I could go on, forever. The important thing is to always, always, always keep reading.
Read with purpose, read continuously. You must read in order to learn. You must learn in
order to grow.

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Productivity
I try to be careful how much time I spend on life hacks ultimately, they can only take you so
far. But there are some things Ive found that genuinely help me improve my workflow.

After all, any time you use the internet, youre entering a space where advertisers spend billions
trying to get you to waste time. Heres how I think about it:

"Social media is T.V.

You chose to be the actor."

When I heard this, it struck me how dead-on the analogy is. When you create content, you're
acting. When you create a group or a fan page, you're now the producer, too.

Whatever you do, don't only be the consumer. Thats watching T.V. all day on your couch.

A few strategies and tools I use to make sure Im managing time efficiently:

- Newsfeed Eradicator Extension that blocks out both FB & LI newsfeed:

- AdBlock (no more ads on the web)
- Block Site tdconsume "news"
- Remove Facebook from your phone, but keep Messenger ;)
- Remove LinkedIn from your phone until they come out with a separate app to
check your messages
- 1-Click-Timer to time tasks online
- Run engagement ads to your Facebook friends by exporting their emails after you connect
your Yahoo account to your FB profile. Now you'll stay top of mind even if you never post again :)
- Momentum for new tabs to remove distraction
- Sanebox automatically filters your email so you only deal with whats important

And some tools I use for productivity:

- Arbor is an internal tool that my companies use for creating and managing product backlogs. It
helps us avoid feature creep and focus on making the MVP first
- Feedback Emoji is another internal tool we use to do user testing and get feedback on web
content (in the universal language of emojis)
- Wunderlist for organizing tasks
- Loom lets you easily make & share video screen recordings, which is a savior if youre trying to
explain how to do something online
- Lightshot for Chrome for quick, simple screenshots
- Dropshare for file sharing
- Rebrand.ly for long URLs (trust me, you look a lot cooler when you use your domain instead of
bitly)
- Slack for team communication. Nothing beats it.
- Clearbit to learn from and make use of customer data
- Rapportive to supercharge your email

Now you can use the thousands of hours you've saved to write a few books, learn an instrument,
climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, or enjoy your weekend :) Or even better take that app concept youve
been dreaming of and make it real.

You have what you need. Now get out there and hustle.

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