Tools – The Starter Kit

HMRC webinars

calculator-calculation-insurance-finance-53621

Accounting tasks, taxes and compliance with financial reporting obligations can be very daunting, especially if like most startup founders and first-time freelancers, you’re not an accountant or have previous experience.

Fortunately for UK-based businesses, HMRC understands this and really strives to help you start off on the right foot. They have developed tons of materials for you to train in different aspects of tax and make sure you are complying with your obligations.

Some of the topics covered are self-assessment, being an employer, VAT, trading internationally and money laundering, and information comes in the form of webinars, videos, e-learning courses, toolkits and email alerts.

For more information and access to the range of HMRC training offers, head here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmrc-webinars-email-alerts-and-videos

Google’s advanced search operators

Google Search

A few days ago, whilst delivering one of our Start-up Essentials sessions on doing market research, I briefly mention that Google is your best friend for doing research, specially if you familiarise yourself with its advanced search operators.

Google itself has a great little basic guide on how to use them here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

Though my absolute favourite is this one by the Australian SEO company Supple, because is more of a quick, simple, visual reference library: https://supple.com.au/tools/google-advanced-search-operators/

Regardless of which one you use, Google search operators are incredibly useful when searching for very specific information or documents in a certain format that normal general searches would otherwise not rank as relevant enough to show up in search results.

Don’t be scare to give them a try, you never know what hidden information gem you might find!

Steve Blank’s Tools for Entrepreneurs

You might know Steve Blank as the author of “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and “The Startup Owners’ Manual”, both recommended reading for anyone thinking about starting their own business. But few of you might know that he is actually less into making tons of money out of his every thought and very much into sharing all kinds of info.

He has, therefore, put together a dedicated part of his website precisely for that purpose. It is basically a repository of links to absolutely everything related to things that entrepreneurs might need along their journey that quite frankly makes me wonder 2 things:

1. Is he trying to compete with Google as a search engine for entrepreneurs? and

2. Why do I even bother trying to create my own repo?

Anyway, visit him here: https://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/ but come back for more great other obscure resources that he hasn’t found out about (yet!)

Cheers!

Storytelling and UX prototyping resource by SAP

SAP has released an incredibly useful little tool to quickly create user experience prototypes, storyboards, pitching structures and pretty much anything else you can imagine that requires a bit of storytelling.

It is a kit that you can download for free and print yourself. It comes “pre-loaded” with different characters, objects and scenarios that you can mix and match to create your own story fast and collaboratively.

But don’t just believe me, see it in action for yourselves!

You can read more about it and download it for free here: https://experience.sap.com/designservices/approach/scenes

What are people searching for within…?

Yesterday I posted a link to Answer the Public, and today’s tool is quite similar but at the same time can be used for very different purposes.

It’s called Soovle and is another research tool that focuses exclusively on showing the Top 10 general searches that people do for a term.

The results come from multiple search engines, but all of them are only within certain websites, including Ebay, Netflix, The Weather Channel and Wikipedia.

So, it is very useful if you want to know what people search for, when looking for something. For example, if you are searching for a heater, you might go to ebay and search for used heaters, electric heaters, heaters from an specific brand, heaters that are white, heaters that go to a certain temperature or have certain features, etc, etc, etc!

Google wouldn’t necessarily know this kind of info, but Soovle helps you figure that out! Check it out at http://soovle.com/