Yesterday, I bought the Lean Startup Bundle for SXSW from AppSumo, and I have to say that it’s pretty awesome. I’ve had a great idea bouncing around for awhile, and with the resources I got from buying the Bundle, I think that I can make it happen. The bundle is pretty awesome: it’s packed with things like a $50 Twilio credit, a $108 Pivotal Tracker credit, The Lean Startup, a $37 credit to Postmark–that’s 25,000 emails!, a $600 credit to Geckoboard, a 3 month digital subscription to Hacker Monthly, a couple of eBooks, some online courses, and lifetime subscriptions to some pretty cool services. It’s something like a $6600 value for only $99, which is an amazing deal, no matter who you are.

I think with all of these new resources at my disposal, I will finally be able to get an awesome new idea I’ve been thinking about for awhile off of  the ground. Something that seriously irritates me is the fact that any sort of tool designed to manage multiple Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts, etc., looks like some sort of bland business control panel. TweetDeck, HootSuite, and all of the tools like that just aren’t fun to use. There are just a bunch of columns that keep everything sequestered into little, sterile areas.

I just don’t like that.

I want a way to manage multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages in a way that doesn’t look like some business solution; I want something that looks like a native app that can integrate everything in one nice, tidy place. All of my Twitter feeds should be mixed in with my friends’ Facebook status updates, and I should be able to post to one or the other seamlessly. There’s nothing like this on the market right now, and if you want something done right, you should do it yourself!

I think that the Lean Startup Bundle will give me everything that I need. Of course, no service is complete without a way to send and receive text updates. With Twilio’s $30 free trial and the $50 credit I have from the bundle, that should cover me for over 2500 text messages–more than enough to handle my beginning user base until some ad revenue starts coming in. Of course, if I’m going to collaborate with any of my developer friends, Pivotal Tracker will be perfect for me. Most team collaboration services cost a small fortune, but Pivotal Tracker is pretty inexpensive, and with the $108 credit, that should cover a team of 3 for a year. I think that will be plenty to get this site off of the ground.

All of the books, eBooks, and online courses will be a great help, too. I believe that you can never know to much about one subject, and all of these resources will help me fill my brain with a whole ton of good knowledge.

The uTest credit will be a lifesaver. There is nothing worse than building an app that works perfectly for you, but as soon as you gain a real user base, the whole thing crashes because it wasn’t able to scale up. uTest is pretty great to let me know if  my whole website is going to explode because more than 10 people access it at once. Nobody wants that.

Now, I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do with billing service credits like Chargify, but I think that they will work great for proprietary ad systems. I don’t really want to use Google AdSense because, well, it just looks bad. I think with a proprietary ad system, a billing system like Chargify will make my life so much easier.

Server Density will be super helpful, too. I think that making sure that a server is up and running properly at all times is one of the most important things for all web apps; no server, no service. It’s an absolute necessity.

Geckoboard will also be a great asset for my new service; I’ve only played around with it for a little bit, but I think that it would be extremely useful for monitoring pretty much everything.

I think buying the Lean Startup Bundle for SXSW from AppSumo was a great idea. I don’t really have a use for some of the services that are included, but three quarters of the services will be beyond helpful to me. There’s such a wide variety of services, and I don’t know how I survived without some of them before. I’m definitely going to be renewing with most of these services once my credits run out.