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How I Done This Says Thanks To The Open Source Community

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I Done This was built by thousands of developers, but we only know two of them.

The same goes for the majority of products popping up every day. Developers aren’t building software from scratch anymore. They’re mostly building on top of Open Source software—software whose source code is publicly available.

I Done This wouldn’t exist without this community, but we’ve never found a way to say thanks. GitHub doesn’t provide an address for thank you cards, and there certainly isn’t a “donate today” button on Stack Overflow. But thanks to a new platform called Open Collective, we finally have a way of giving back to that community.

Open Collective serves as a virtual but completely transparent bank for any sort of community— from Open Source, to Boy Scouts, to Art Collectors—to get funding. This means that the Open Source community finally has access to the resources it needs to grow and continue being the bedrock of the tech industry.

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At I Done This, we’re proud to be taking advantage of this awesome platform to finally support a community we’ve long known and loved.

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How to Use an Amazon Echo for Your Startup Office

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This week’s post is a guest article by Vinay Patankar, CEO and co-founder of Process Street.

If you’re running a startup, you can use every little bit of help you can get.

But to justify an administrative assistant or office manager, you’ll probably need to have raised a big seed round of over $1 million or have bootstrapped your company past 10 employees. Otherwise, that extra help getting stuff done is just a luxury you can’t quite afford yet.

Enter Alexa via the Amazon Echo. In the same way Alexa can help you and your family out around the home, it can also make your office and your startup just that little bit easier to manage, so that you can keep your sanity and focus on what’s important.

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To get the most out of Alexa, you’ll need to set her up specifically for the office. Here’s how.

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14 Learning Apps That Keep Your Mind Sharp

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Studies have shown that the average person only retains about 10% of what they read. In the Information Age, we have so many resources at our fingertips that our brain doesn’t get the practice it needs to stay sharp and retain information.

A few years ago, UCLA Professor of Psychiatry Gary Small found that spending a lot of time online actually rewires our brain. Because of all the skimming that we are forced to do, we replace deep, careful learning with hurried, shallow thinking.

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But all hope isn’t lost. Instead of using technology as a crutch to free us of having to do calculations or remember information, we can use it to improve our thinking and our capacity for learning. There are tons of activities and exercise that can be found in mobile apps that actually improve our cognitive functions.

Here are some iOS and Android learning apps that will get those brain muscles flexing.

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The 7 Best Podcasts For Entrepreneurs

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Many gigabytes of text were spilled out all over the web about 2015 being the ‘year of the podcast.’ It seems like there may have been something to that. The medium is exploding. Apple last year reported that podcast subscriptions on iTunes have surpassed the 1 billion mark. And more than 39 million Americans listen to podcasts monthly, according to Edison Research.

Looking to up your podcast intake and grow as an entrepreneur? Here are seven suggested podcasts.

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12 Tools for Growing Your SaaS Business

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Chances are, your SaaS business is built around a product that makes processes faster and more efficient. And thanks to companies like yours, many of the formerly time-consuming activities of business strategy have become faster and more efficient.

So why aren’t you using their tools to grow your own business?

From customer service to email analytics, these twelve tools will give you the competitive edge you need to really distinguish yourself from your competitors.

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How Noah Kagan Taught Me The Two Simplest Things About Planning Growth

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Every field has “that guy.” Everyone in the industry knows of them and their work. Many secretly try to emulate them — or flat out copy them. They are the person crushing it. They are the person your boss wishes they could have hired instead of you.

If you’re doing marketing for a startup company, that guy is Noah Kagan. Noah was employee #30 at Facebook and helped grow Mint.com into the personal finance juggernaut it is today. He is founder at AppSumo, which offers discounts on tools to grow businesses and websites. He’s built things you use every day.

And he probably has your email address.

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51 Free Tools To Start A Business

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Trying to start a business is never easy. Being an entrepreneur means sticking your neck — and wallet — on the line for a product you believe in. It won’t be cheap. There will be plenty of costs, some you’ve never expected. Thankfully, there are free tools to start a business available online.

We’ve compiled this list of free tools to start a business. Many of them we used here to help build iDoneThis. Others we wish had existed when we started.

Building a business will be one of the hardest things you ever do. But thankfully there are these free tools get you started building the business you’ve always dreamed of.

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How SimpleReach Learned Sales The Hard Way

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The founders at SimpleReach knew they were on to something. Everything seemed to be in place.

Great product, great team, great market.

There was just one problem.

“Like most B2B companies we just took the approach of ‘build it and they will come’. But that’s just not the case,” said Eric Lubow, CTO and Co-Founder at SimpleReach.

Or as their CEO Edward Kim put it on Twitter: “One of the biggest lessons I learned the hard way – great product is cost of entry, but sales determines whether you win or lose.”

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The Lemonade Stand Effect: Why Kids Love Being Entrepreneurs

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At my elementary school, there was one particular day of the year that every kid looked foreword to. Kids loved it, lost their freaking minds over it actually.

It was better than field day, better than snow days. One time we actually had a snow day on this day and everyone was furious.

It was called Junior Entrepreneur Day.

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Your Accomplishments, Now with Emojis

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We’re excited to present to you: the launch of emojis for iDoneThis! It’s a fun way to record your accomplishments and share with your team how you’re feeling.

To give it a try, just type a colon and then start typing a word, like :pizza: pizza.  If an autocomplete menu shows up, then we have it. Bread-and-butter emojis like smileys of different kinds work as well. smiley

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