10 Essential Free Tools For Every Small Business Or Start Up
I have been involved with start ups now for 3 years and one thing is common across them all…you need to keep your costs down no matter what. Money is always tight and shelling it out on expensive tools or services is something that I have figured out that you should avoid at all costs. Luckily these days there are a bunch of tools online that you can access for free and the fact that you are a start up and don’t have to go through political wrangling to get new tools installed actually within your company gives you a massive advantage over bigger companies who are using outdated systems. These tools may appear obvious to people who are reading this and have a technical background but I have introduced these to some small business owners and to non technical people even the fact that they could access their work email at home or do their books online was a massive surprise. I use the following 10 tools on a daily basis and to be perfectly honest I would have no idea how our business would function without any of them…
Google Apps
If the list was made up of only one item then this would be it. I use Google apps across all the different domains we have and it really is the most incredible and helpful productivity tool you will find and my life really would be empty without it. Not only do I access all my email through the service but I also sync my calender to arrange all meetings with other people in the company and crucially all our documents that we work with on a daily basis are in there. The fact that these documents are “in the cloud” (stored online for you non techies) means that any of us can access them from any computer at any time. We edit documents collaboratively, build pitches together and interact with each other online often from different locations using tools like Skype (see below). If you take one thing from this list make sure that it is Google Docs.
Remember The Milk
There are lots of productivity and “to do list” tools out there but for the last 2 years this has been my favorite. Lots of techie people I work with have introduced me to more complicated systems but I love RTM for it’s pure simplicity and ease of use. It is basically an online list maker that you can add tags etc to and access from anywhere you can go online including their iPhone app (although I have to say the app is not that great). Color coding your lists by color in order of priority means every task you have to complete during the day is laid out in front of you in a simple and straight forward way to understand. The great tools are incredibly simple to use and do very little but do what they set out to do very well and that is the case with RTM.
Tweetdeck
You may or may not be using Twitter for your business and the discussion on it’s relevancy has already taken place in a previous post but if you are using it then Tweetdeck will be an invaluable tool for you. There are 10 tips here on how to use it and it is incredibly useful for not only engaging with your customers and monitoring what people are saying about your brand. If you take the time to set it up correctly with relevant searches, lists and groups then it will become a great time saving resource for you. The one word of caution that I would give is that it can be so good and so effective that it can become distracting and if you are using it for work you need to make sure that is the case and that you are not using it to socialize.
WordPress
I have been involved with the building of many sites and blogs for both myself and clients over the last few years and one thing that I have learned is that wherever possible use WordPress. For those of you not familiar with WordPress it is the software that is used behind many of the blogs online and is 100% free to use. The fact that it is highly customizable and that there are many people out there who can do it for you at a low cost means it is a great content management system for your websites and easy for non techies to pick up too. When thinking of WordPress try and get away from the thinking that it is only for blogs as it is a cheap and simple way of building many websites.
The world really is your oyster with this tool if you are a business owner or start up founder. Most serious business people around the world have an online profile on Linkedin and more and more people are joining it by the day. You’ll need to start out by adding as many of the actual people that you know as possible and once you have done that you can actively try to get business leads, find new clients and generally interact with the people that you need to be in touch with. It will take some initial work getting set up and finding the right contacts but once you are up and running you will usually be able to find the people you are looking for and if not you will have a connection who can make the introduction for you.
Skype
Along with Google apps at the top of the list this is the tool that has saved me the most money over the years. I don’t use it for all my calls but if I need to make pricey international calls or have a video conference with somebody then it is always Skype that I fire up first. The other use that I have for it is the chat function which I always have running in the background and will use to talk to people within our own team or 3rd parties that we are working with. It is a great way of sharing links and talking about work quickly without having to get in to a full blown conversation on the phone and I spend large portions of my day using it.
MailChimp
There are literally hundreds of mailing solutions out there but the one that has worked best for me over the last couple of years and that I use today for various sites is Mailchimp. The reason I like it so much is that it is very straightforward to use and you really need very limited technical knowledge to get it up and running. You can build and manage all your different lists from one central interface and it is free to use until you start to hit certain thresholds that require a premium fee but even with that it is still worth it.
Conversion University
Not so much a tool but more of a free training course from Google around their popular Google Analytics service. For the first year of using Google Analytics I was pretty much self taught and there was so much I was missing out on before I found this amazing training course that really changed my view on statistics and the power of being able to read the data put in front of you. This course and Google Analytics themselves are 100% free and although it may take you a couple of days to learn everything on it correctly the pay offs in the long term are amazing and it should be one of the first things that anybody with a business online does.
FreshBooks
Staying on top of your accounts when you are trying to build a really innovative product or service is a really tough thing to do and most people will enlist the help of an accountant. What I would suggest is that you teach yourself some of the basics and start using a system like Freshbooks and manage your accounts in partnership with your accountant. It is always good to be in control of the basics yourself and this tool has a super simple to use interface and after some initial setting up you will easily be able to issue invoices and manage all of your different payments across many different channels. Again this service is free to use on trial where you will get a great feel for it and if it is to your liking there are some small fees involved but the fees are tiny in comparison to your accountants fees.
Basecamp
This is a service that offers a free trial for a month and it is well worth trying out if you have many different people to manage and you look after a lot of projects online. It is mostly used by the development community but it’s tools and functions are very simple and straightforward and can be adapted to any business. It allows you to map out projects and follow the work that people are doing across different channels as well as collaborating, setting milestones and generally giving your company some overall direction. There is a bit of a learning curve but once set up and running your company will become far more streamlined and much more efficient.
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