DISQUS

Aanarav Sareen · 4 months ago

Although MailChimp is good, there are a LOT of email newsletter providers that deliver RSS. So, there are alternatives to MailChimp.

joshuawold · 4 months ago

I'd be interested in what you think of Atlassian's JIRA Studio which is a hosted dev suite (issue tracker, wiki, SVN repository, IDE connector, Agile PM tool Greenhopper, peer review). It is $125/month for 5 dev's and can expand as needed.

FanFeedr · 4 months ago

Joshua,

Jira is a very respected option, as is Basecamp, but the quasi-religious fervor around PivotalTracker is hard to top, along with its price point of zero.

Kind regards, Ty

nicolajnavne · 4 months ago

Great insights. Thanx. As a long time entrepreneur I would strongly recommend ZenDesk if you are looking for an easy to set up on-demand user support and help desk tool. Try it. You won't regret it.

FanFeedr · 4 months ago

ZenDesk should be added as a competitor with UserVoice. I don't have any experience with the software, so thank you for pointing it out.

Kind regards, Ty

FanFeedr · 4 months ago

Scott Rutherford, CTO at UserVoice, has better insight, as UV is actually *integrating* with ZenDesk, so there you have it.

Great products, both.

Kind regards, Ty

joshuasantos · 4 months ago

I would also highly recommend using Clarizen (www.clarizen.com) to manage the execution of the product itself and deployment of the great marketing tools mentioned above. The price is very reasonable for the functionality it provides and email-only users are free.

Also I'll second Google Docs, amazing tool. Great easy to use survey-capabilities and strong enough to replace MS Office for docs and spreadsheets.

Terence Pua · 4 months ago

What are your thoughts on mixpanel vs. chartbeat?

FanFeedr · 4 months ago

The core functionality is similar, but I think that Mixpanel does a better job of measuring conversion. Additionally, it appears that they are trending towards being a full replacement for GA, whereas ChartBeat is very much a companion to GA.
A long way of saying that I see them as competitive and serving slightly different markets.

nicolajnavne · 4 months ago

Sake good order I'd say that UserVoice is more of a competitor to e.g. GetSatisfaction. ZenDesk is less feedback and ratings in an open environment and more of a case management tool (tickets, escalation, assignments, etc.). /n

Sandro Pugliese · 4 months ago

Great piece and I already use most of these services :) I would add a file sharing service like Dropbox or Sugarsync to allow for easy file distribution between one's own computers and other users, and a more project management oriented service. I like Pivotal but if my memory serves me right, it's very feature focused; these days I have been trending towards Wizehive...

Joe Pieakrz · 4 months ago

What about tracking resources and time reported. www.TimeXchange.net is inexpensive and keeps your product development team on track.

cindyalvarez · 4 months ago

Mechanical Turk (for annoying little tasks)

Outsourced menial data processing on the super-cheap.

What it does: Save you from spending time parsing data, identifying images, getting simple opinions/ratings on lots of data.
What it costs: Set your own price - paying $0.05 - $0.20 per task gets plenty of takers.
Why I use it: Allows me to focus on more important things
Nits: Tasks do need to be very discrete and well-defined. Setup has some overhead (if you have only a single dataset to be cleaned up, it may not be worth setting up a task.)


OptimalSort (for developing information architecture that makes sense to your users)

Use this FIRST to create a better "first hypothesis" to validate.

What it does: Online tool that allows users to cluster your features or site sections into groups that make sense to them.
What it costs: Can do 10-person project for free - or $109 for 30-day sub
Why I use it: My mental model is not my users' mental model! With 10-20 people clustering, strong patterns for organization/navigation emerge that I KNOW will make sense to users.
Nits: You'll need to find the users yourself - and the tool doesn't have a "rate limiter" - so you may not want to send the URL around freely.


Craig's List (for finding people)

What it does: Post your ad, find users for your usability testing within hours.
What it costs: Free!
Why I use it: Immediate responses. There's some "flake factor" but surprisingly less than I would expect.
Nits: You can post to different cities (i.e. if you want user testing subjects from other locations), but you need to keep changing the ad or Craig's List will flag it as spam.

FanFeedr · 4 months ago

As always, Cindy posts well-considered and valuable feedback. Thank you also, @sandro and @joe for putting other valuable resources into the hopper.

Bryan Zmijewski · 4 months ago

As an avid user of our own product for developing web apps and websites, Notable (www.notableapp.com) is the easiest tool for product managers to provide feedback on websites.

It allows you to capture a web page directly from the browser and provide notes on the screenshot, code and copy.

Xemion · 4 months ago

For cross-browser testing, I HIGHLY recommend http://www.crossbrowsertesting.com. It supports a lot of different browsers and operating system, and unlike other services, you actually log in to the machines via VPN (or something similar) and control the browser which allows you to test secure pages and AJAX. I find it much more cost-effective than Litmus too because it charges by the minute. If you do a lot of testing though, Litmus might be cheaper.

Henri Vetter · 4 months ago

Another great one for user testing for those who are not Mac users is Loop11 (www.loop11.com). These guys let you conduct your own online, unmoderated user testing projects, which can also be run on your competitors websites as well. Well worth checking out.

John · 4 months ago

May I also suggest Intervals for issue tracking and time tracking. The feedback Intervals offers is crucial to product management.

bob · 1 month ago

there are many email marketing servies aside from mailChimp. I do like mailChimp, but i don't find it very intuitive and good tracking costs extra. Go for something like http://blingmailer.com where you just pay per campaign and have professional tracking to analyze your sendouts.

am a big fan of silverback for usability testing!!

addiction · 14 hours ago

Great piece and I already use most of these services :) I would add a file sharing service like Dropbox or Sugarsync