100 tools to create and grow your Web3 startup (NFT, DeFi, DApp, DAO…)
Developing a Web3 startup is far from easy. Many challenges and obstacles will stand in your way. In this entrepreneurial adventure, the tools you will use to create and develop your Web3 business will be crucial. If they are good, they will save you time, money and help you achieve your goals. If they are bad, they will waste your time, money, and energy.
My name is Julian, co-founder of Web3Island & The Secret Company. We have been developing several ambitious Web3 startups for 2 years (Mobula, StaySAFU, Safetin,). We went from 0 to 1M users with our crypto-scanner StaySAFU and attracted more than 50,000 active users on our decentralized data aggregator’s beta version Mobula.
We have gone through many stages: Idea, development, marketing, operation, etc. During all these phases, we used hundreds of different tools, and we took the habit of listing the tools that were the most useful to us. In this article, I share with you our list of the 100 best tools we have tested and approved to create & develop your Web3 startup.
⚠️ The article is regularly updated with new tools ⚠️
*Ctrl+F to find what you’re looking for :)
Launching or planning to launch your Web3 startup?
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If you want to get daily resources, strategies, and learnings on how to build your Web3 business, feel free to connect on Twitter (@JulianIvaldy)
PLAN OF THE ARTICLE:
- 🌟 Create your team & hire talents
- 🤝 Manage your team
- 🖼 Create beautiful graphic designs
- 👥 Create & engage with your community
- 📟 Build your Web3 offer/product:
- 🔒 Secure your Web3 product
- 🚀 Market your Web3 startup
- 🤝 Meet other Web3 founders
- 📋 Manage your accounting
🌟 Create your team & hire talents:
The beginning of most successful Web3 startups rarely starts with discovering a revolutionary idea that others don’t have, but rather with discovering other people, complementary to you, who have the same ambition to build a company. Creating your team, finding your co-founders, and hiring your first employees will be crucial for the success of your startup. Fortunately, some tools can help you in this process.
● Tr3butor: Discover your next epic challenge, a new gamified way to find work and top talent. Join Web3 Adventure, get opportunities.
● Ethlance: Ethlance is the first job market platform working completely on the Ethereum blockchain with 0% service fees.
● Web3Career: 23000+ Web3 jobs as a Blockchain Developer, Web3 Developer, Smart Contract Developer, and more.
● MeritVerse: The professional network for Web3.
● Freelancer: Find & hire the best freelancers, web developers & designers for less.
● UpWork: Upwork connects businesses with independent professionals and agencies around the globe.
● CryptoCurrencyJobs: The leading job board for blockchain jobs and cryptocurrency jobs.
● Remote3: Discover remote Web3 Jobs worldwide at companies working on blockchain, smart contracts, DeFi, NFT, crypto, etc. Connect and hire remote workers in the Web3 space.
● Web3Meetups: Compilation of the finest web3 meetups worldwide, right into one platform.
● LinkedIn: Build and communicate with your professional network.
● Web3 enthusiasts communities in Discord, Telegram, Facebook, etc: Few communities examples: Solidity Developers Community, The Arch, Epic Web3, etc.
Looking to hire? Discover +1000 Web3 Freelancers & Agencies (Verified & Rated): Open Web3 Expert Directory
🤝 Manage your team:
By developing a Web3 startup, in most cases, you will have the ability and willingness to market your offering worldwide (as there are no real geographical barriers). On the other hand, your team will probably be composed of people from all over the world and talents from several continents. In most cases, you will adopt a remote/hybrid work model.
You will have to structure the way you will interact with your teams, follow the progress, develop your company culture and above all… have fun :)
Here are some tools that may help you:
● Gather: Centered around fully customizable spaces, Gather makes spending time with your communities just as easy as real life.
● AltspaceVR: The industry-leading platform for live, virtual events, enabling creators, brands, and companies to quickly create memorable experiences that promote connection and community.
● Travala: Organize a trip with your team, everywhere, paying in crypto.
● Trello: Task and team management made easy.
● Asana: Project management tool.
● Wonder: A virtual workspace where teams collaborate side-by-side, from anywhere
● Slite: Remote team's decision-making and project management.
● Airtable: Workflow and team collaboration.
● Slack: Slack is a new way to communicate with your team. It’s faster, better. organized, and more secure than email.
● Discord: The easiest way to talk over voice, video, and text. Talk, chat, hang out, and stay close to your friends and communities.
I published an article on +50 Web3 Newsletters to follow if you want to educate yourself on the subject of Web3 (Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Investing, etc.): +50 Newsletters for Web3 Entrepreneurs & Crypto Enthusiasts
🖼 Create beautiful graphic designs:
Graphic design resources are very useful for bringing your ideas to life. Website mockup, post visual, brochure…. If you want to create digital graphic assets, there are a series of essential tools for you:
● Fraam3: Fraam3 is a great way to display and let’s shine your NFTs with a design layer.
● Mirror: Mirror’s robust publishing platform pushes the boundaries of writing online — whether it’s the next big white paper or a weekly community update.
● Pixabay: A stock photo free of right.
● GraphicRiver: Discover a huge collection of hand-reviewed graphic assets.
● Canva: A free online graphic design tool. Use it to create your social media posts, presentations, etc.
● AllCryptoWhitePapers: The Largest cryptocurrency Whitepaper Database!
● TinyWOW: Tools that solve your files problem.
● Veed: Make great video teasers & video ads without mastering iMovie or Adobe Premiere.
● Dribble: Product design inspirations.
● Spline: This is a 3D design tool for the web. It allows you to create 3D objects that are embeddable in a website and apps.
● InVideo: Video contents are insanely popular nowadays. People have stopped reading books and blogs.
● Clideo: All-in-one, easy-to-use online video tools.
● Abyssale: Automate Ads banner production.
● Remove: Automatically remove the background from an image.
● Coolors: Generate eyes-appealing color schemes for your website and app.
● Lordicon: Animated Icon for your assets.
● icons8: Icons and illustrations.
● GetAds: Don’t let shitty ads lower your conversions.
● Mmhmm: Make asynchronous video presentations of slides with a wow effect.
● Mockuuups Studio: The fastest way for designers and marketers to drag & drop visuals into 1800+ device mockups.
● Artgrid: A modern & high-quality video bank.
● StickPNG: A stock photo of images in .png (transparency background).
● SmartMockups: Create amazing mockups online.
● NFT-Generator: The most powerful no-code NFT tool trusted by the world’s largest NFT collection creators.
Surrounding yourself with the best freelancers & agencies is a major factor in the success of a Web3 project. Indeed, you can’t be the best everywhere. To give your project the best chance, it’s recommended to contact experts in each field. I published an article that might interest you: +1000 Web3 Freelancers & Agencies (Verified & Rated): Open Web3 Expert Directory
👥 Create & engage with your community:
I recommend you create your community as soon as possible to create a sense of belonging and co-creation among the community members. This sense of co-creation will strengthen the commitment of your community members and create a kind of army, super motivated to help you grow your project. However, growing a community by attracting new members and increasing the engagement of the community can be a pain. Fortunately for you, many tools allow you to grow your community without much difficulty while increasing the engagement of your group.
● Mobula Telegram & Discord bots: Gain members and engage your community passively with a self-rewarding bot based on the contribution of each community member. You can also send personalized push notifications to your community members directly via the bot.
I have several free lifetime accesses to Mobula bot. If you want to reserve your free access to the Mobula Bot (lifetime + white label), you can fill out this form: https://forms.gle/VNBqZapjNw6kx5vY6
● Crew3: Contribute to your favorite Web3 communities and earn tokens, NFTs, and other amazing rewards.
● Tweetdeck: Tweetdeck is a community management platform specifically for Twitter. It allows you to keep an eye on specific feeds, hashtags, lists, scheduled tweets, messages, and more.
● Tweetpic: Create beautiful twitter screenshots using TweetPic.tk. There are 10+ themes, 15 text styles, and different customization options for creating asthetic twitter screenshots.
● SweepWidget: Run engaging contests & giveaways.
● Buffer: Community management automation.
● MEE6: Configure moderation, leveling, Twitch alerts, and much more with the most easy-to-use dashboard.
● JuiceBox: Build communities around projects, fund them, and program their spending.
● Fiverr: Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelancers. You can find Discord moderators, developers who will create your community, etc.
If you want to know more about community building, I recommend this dedicated edition: Inside Web3 💎 | Creating a community in Web3
📟 Build your Web3 offer/product:
One of the most important parts of your entrepreneurial adventure will surely be the stage of building your offer/product. This step will take time because your offer will never really be finished and must be continuously improved, modernized, etc. Whether you are building an agency or a SaaS, the building stage of your offering consists in bringing your idea to life and making it accessible to your users.
● Whimsical: Wireframes, flowcharts, and user flow charts.
● Milanote: Visual design and wireframing.
● Figma: Collaborative product and interface design.
● Thirdweb: Another emerging platform is Thirdweb, which lets you easily interface DApps, create NFTs, and have a simple, no-code, user-friendly interface.
● Enzyme helps you discover, deploy, and manage smart contracts with ease.
● Supercluster Files is a decentralized file-sharing platform designed for DAOs and decentralized teams.
● Buildspace: An excellent place for Web3 beginners or developers who want to learn new skills. The platform offers tons of easy-to-learn weekend projects and a thriving community of builders who can support you.
● Moralis: One of the best Web3 infrastructure providers, allowing developers to easily interact with many Web3 services such as authentication, NFTs, on-chain data, and smart contracts.
● Alchemy: Alchemy is a true beast, one of the most giant unicorns in the blockchain infrastructure and Web3 space. With a tremendous valuation of 10 Billion dollars in 2022, Alchemy provides Web3 builders and companies a simple backend to the Ethereum blockchain development.
● Infura: Infura provides web3 infrastructure, similar to Alchemy. They offer top-quality Ethereum APIs and IPFS APIs, the backbone of Ethereum Dapps.
● Torus: Torus is a user-friendly, secure, and non-custodial key management system for DApps. A low-friction wallet allows you to log in with Facebook, Google, and other OAuth providers.
● Webflow: Create, collaborate on, and scale beautiful websites in a completely visual canvas
● Undraw.co: It’s a collection of open-source illustrations for websites and apps. Illustrations make websites attractive and aesthetics.
● Zapier: This is the favorite of most developers, SaaS Founders, and entrepreneurs. It’s an automation tool. Use it once, you will love it for sure.
● Hotjar: Heatmaps and analytics for your tool.
● PanelBear: Track users' activities to optimize your site for high conversion. Monitor your network requests, backend, load time, and everything
● Splitbee: This is an alternative to google analytics. Once I started using splitbee, I haven’t switched back to google analytics. It is easy to use and it provides advanced features for analytic
● Systeme.io: Create, automate and sell online with an all-in-one platform. Sales tunnel, autoresponder, member site.
🔒 Secure your Web3 product:
In case you decide to build a Web3 product with a blockchain component, you are subject to cyber-attacks and code vulnerabilities that can be very serious if financial flows are involved. To deal with this, any Web3 project must be sure of its code and technology before launching. Many tools are available to ensure no concerns in the code, and I highly recommend using them.
● MythX: Validate smart contract correctness
● Infura: Set and run Ethereum Node
● Waffle: Smart Contract Testing
● Remix: Remix IDE allows developing, deploying, and administering smart contracts for Ethereum-like blockchains
● StaySAFU: The SAFU Scanner allows you to evaluate in a matter of seconds the possibilities that have owners of a token to scam you through a study of its liquidity, smart-contract code, holders, and numerous other factors.
● Embark: all in one platform to build and deploy
● UseDapp.io: Framework for rapid Dapp development
● NFT.storage: Free, decentralized storage and bandwidth for NFTs on IPFS and Filecoin. It’s a long-term storage service designed for off-chain NFT data (like metadata, images, and other assets) for up to 31GiB in size per individual upload.
● Web3.storage: The easiest way to store data is on the decentralized web. Store your data using our simple API. It’s fast, open, and it’s free.
● Spheron: Decentralized web hosting, which supports storage on Arweave, Skynet, IPFS & Filecoin.
If you want to work with an agency to ensure the fiability of your tech, you can work with the agency Safetin and get an exclusive discount with the code #J40: Get free quote
🚀 Market your Web3 startup:
This is another important milestone in developing your Web3 startup, the marketing stage of your product. I recommend you market your product at the same time or even before the construction of your product to see if your offer really pleases customers. This is the concept of fake it until you make it.
● Mobula.fi: The decentralized data aggregator (token, NFT) that highlights you.
● ZooTools Panda: The easiest way to collect leads and build your audience. Create viral waitlists, social referrals, and more.
● Buffer: Community management automation.
● Emelia: Simplified handling, detailed and precise statistics, exclusive features.
● Lemlist: Personalize cold emails, automate follow-ups, and engage with leads across all channels. Lemlist is your sales automation and cold email software in one.
● Viral Loops: Viral and referral marketing.
● Collect.chat: Lead-making intelligent chatbots.
● Pipefy: Marketing and business workflow automation.
● Make: No-code marketing automation
● Superb Network: Cross-promotion tool for all Web3 games to get more users and solve the User Acquisition problem for crypto games.
You can find many free strategies that will help you get new organic users.
I talk about some of these strategies in this interview: Best Web3 Growth Hacking Strategies: From 0 to 1 million users (Crypto, NFT, DeFi, DApp, DAO)
🤝 Meet other Web3 founders:
A major aspect of Web3 is the establishment of collaborations with other Web3 project founders. The interoperable nature of blockchain makes partnering and collaborating essential from a technology perspective. On top of that, partnering is one of the easiest, cheapest, and most powerful strategies for getting the word out about your offering. There are several tools to help you network in Web3. I’m sharing them with you today.
● UpStreamApp Events: Attend crypto and Web3-focused events worldwide, meet new people, and learn about DAOs.
● Crypto Events [by Crypto Nomads Club]: Crypto Nomads Club is an alpha community for digital nomads and frequent travelers who meet at various crypto events worldwide.
● TheHiveIndex: Discover the best online communities
● Eventbrite: Eventbrite brings people together through live experiences. Discover events that match your passions or create your own events.
📋 Manage your accounting:
The character of Web3 is about decentralization and freedom but don’t forget that like any entrepreneur. You will have to follow the results of your startup, the inflow of money, and the outflow. In the case of a Web3 startup, you would probably manage your cash flow in crypto. Fortunately for you, there are tools to help you track your crypto accounts/wallet.
● Koinly:Get your tax returns in cryptocurrency in minutes.
● Cryptio: Bring certainty to counting crypto
● Coinpanda: Calculate your bitcoin and crypto taxes
● Crypto Weekly: List of public fundraising events in the crypto industry.
● Cryptoworth: Crypto Accounting Software for Busy Accountants
If you want more, check out my article on the top 10 secrets & learnings of the most successful Web3 entrepreneurs: Web3 Entrepreneurship: 10 Secrets from Successful Web3 Companies
Launching or planning to launch your Web3 startup?
Receive the weekly Web3 entrepreneurship newsletter: Inside Web3 💎
If you want to get daily resources, strategies, and learnings on how to build your Web3 business, feel free to connect on Twitter (@JulianIvaldy)
