Bernard Huang

Recommended sales & marketing tools

Here's a list of tools that I use frequently when working on startup growth:

Content marketing & optimization

  • Clearscope

    Reverse engineer top performing content to discover winning content strategies that will grow your audience and search traffic.

Competitive analysis & research

  • KissTrends

    Analyze subreddits based on engagement and trends.

  • BuzzSumo

    Analyze content marketing based on social metrics. Other people's content that has already performed well provides insights.

  • Google Trends

    See how topics, brands, products, and industries are trending over time.

  • SimilarWeb

    Look at how your competitors are doing on the web. Lots of interesting data to see including # of unique sessions, top traffic channels, web traffic by geo, etc.

  • Wayback Machine

    View the evolution of how a website looked and functioned. Learn how established companies messaged their product or service and where design trends are moving.

  • Whois

    Get contact information for website owners from domain registration information. Sometimes unreliable because domains can be made private.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

  • Advanced search operators (eg. site:, date:)

    Perform queries that can show you how many pages a website has indexed ("site:"), the last time Google cached your page ("cache:"), and other goodies. Useful for learning how frequently Google crawls certain pages, how many of your pages Google has decided to index, and other things.

  • Keyword Planner

    Keyword monthly search volume data provided by Google. Data accuracy is questionable when comparing the data between Google Search Console and/or Adwords paid campaigns.

  • Keyword Tool

    Find a list of all the Google autocomplete phrases for keywords. An excellent way to discover how people are searching for things related keywords.

Sales

  • Clearbit Connect

    Find business email addresses given a company name. Somewhat reliable -- data feels out-of-date and sparse at times.

  • Neverbounce & BriteVerify

    Stop hard bounces with email list verification and list cleaning. Preventing hard bounces is necessary to keep your email deliverability and reputation in good standing.

  • ContactOut

    Reliably find anyone's personal email address given a LinkedIn profile.

  • Pipedrive

    Trello-like CRM with lots of integrations. A little old-school feeling but robust in functionality.

  • Reply

    Outreach email automation sequencer. Plug in a bunch of emails and easily sequence out touches by date and variation.