Three Essential Tools That Help Me Run My Startup

Week 78 of Founding Typogram

Hi friends, I have been sharing my start-up journey of building a logo design tool in this newsletter. Today I want to share three helpful tools I use that help me run my start-up.

No.1 Notion 

Notion is like my second brain. I use it for my personal life and for Typogram’s product management. We created workspaces for product sprints, engineering knowledge, business, and content. I love that Notion allows both structured and unstructured data to be in the same place. A long time ago, we also had some product management for Typogram on Airtable. Ultimately, we realize Notion is better suited for us because Airtable doesn’t allow unstructured data.

No.2 Publii 

We use Publii for our blogs. It is simple to set up, and the bonus is Publii comes with a desktop app, allowing me to quickly create a blog and publish it to a static folder I can put anywhere, like a sub-folder of our main site. The desktop app itself is light and easy to use. I wrote extensively about our process of searching for the right blogging tool in In Pursuit of the Perfect Blog if you want to learn more.

No.3 ChatGPT

It’s likely not a surprise to see ChatGPT on this list, considering how much ChatGPT (and other similar AI tools) has been in the news. ChatGPT has been helpful for me in terms of programming. It saves me plenty of time: I no longer need to go to code libraries’ references page and dig through API documentation. For example, one of the libraries we use for Typogram is paper.js. However, it is time-consuming to dig through paper.js’ official documentation because it lacks search functionality. At one point, I even created my own, searchable version called paper-api.wentin.net. 

Now with ChatGPT, I just type my inquiry, and it returns code examples and easy-to-understand explanations. However, I need to be mindful when using it because sometimes ChatGPT returns non-existent methods and properties for code libraries. For example, when I ask them how to get the PaperScope of a paper.js Path object, it tells me to get it through path.scope, which doesn’t exist.

Hear from You 

What tools do you use for your day-to-day that you find extremely helpful? 

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See you next week! If you have friends who are interested in founding start-ups, please consider sharing my newsletter with them!