When it comes to keeping costs down and making your startup work, you need these tools.
By Craig Falck for Africa Report
Photograph: © Mehmet Dilsiz | Dreamstime.com
Starting up a business is an uphill task, and it’s tricky too. Thankfully, there are loads of free tools for budding businesspeople to use when kick-starting their entrepreneurial careers. According to Inc.com, here are the 10 best tools for a startup on a tight budget…
1. Invoicing has never been as cheap and easy as with Freshbooks.com. Buy your account, set it up and you’ll be ready to start invoicing your clients in an instant. Best of all, it’s all online, so you can prepare and send invoices from any computer, anywhere and anytime.
2. Mailchimp.com is a free email marketing management site that allows you to compile and design newsletters, post them to your social networking accounts and keep track of the impact and result of your mailers. Add to it research and database management and you’ve got a personal publishing platform right on your computer.
3. Squareup.com is a site where you can purchase a credit card app for your smartphone as well as the small hardware add-on that basically turns your smartphone into a credit card-authorising machine.
4. Grasshopper.com is a virtual call centre that costs about US $10 per month. It provides users with toll-free numbers, unlimited extensions, multiple mailboxes, call transfers and a host of other facilities for next to nothing.
5. With tools like Animoto.com, video editing and production is as easy as cutting a pie. There are loads of templates that you simply drop your video files into, or you can create your own styles, add audio and images: your video clip is finished and ready to share with the world via YouTube and your social network accounts.
6. If you want to manage your office and objectives, Smartsheet.com is for you. As the tagline says, “Like a spreadsheet, only smarter”. While it certainly looks like a spreadsheet, there are loads of differences that allow you to fully customise the manner in which you control your office and keep on top of everything going on in it.
7. When it comes to your business cards, the world is your creative oyster. And Vistaprint.com is the place to start getting those arty juices flowing on everything from your business cards to pamphlets and other printed documents for your business.
8. Gliffy.com is the site to go to if you want to make the most amazing graphical presentations you can think of. If you can imagine it, Gliffy will help you design it. Throw in the word processor and you’ve got one of the most powerful (and easy to use) presentation tools we’ve seen.
9. Just about everything is online and digital these days, and thanks to sites like GoDaddy.com, setting up your digital presence has never been easier. They handle everything from domain registration to webhosting and more, making it easier and quicker for you to get onto the worldwide web than ever before.
10. Looking for a freelance employee? Check out Guru.com, where freelancers respond to jobs posted by businesses and people who need work done on an ad- hoc basis. It’s free and easy to use, and you’re almost guaranteed to find the creativity you’re looking for to complete that once-off job.
You don’t need a bank account full of money to start your business. In fact, you can get up and running on the tightest of budgets, if you know which tools are out there for you to use.
Source: http://www.inc.com/tom-searcy/start-up-on-a-budget-14-cheap-tools.html
