Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Starting your own company can be difficult and costly.  I have found through my experience and research there are a lot of useful free or cheap resources out there that can help.  Just thought the discussion should be started.

Like I know Vistaprint.com offers 250 free business cards and have a ton of other great marketing materials for cheap.  The business cards have a small vistaprint logo on the back but its a great start if your cash strapped and upgrading to a better quality and getting rid of their logo isnt really that expensive either. 

This site does seem to be a bit thin on bootstrap-oriented info, now that you mention it. Here are a few of the things that I`ve come across:

37Signals offers a slew of web-based business applications, all of them with a free, though limited, version. But depending what you need it might be just the ticket.

SuN`s "Daily Dashboard" is only $10/mo and has all kinds of accounting, sales tracking, and other very useful-looking features. I took this service for a trial run and would have used it in a second if I didn`t already have everything set up at 37Signals. Customer service was also very good.

Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) will hook you up with free mentoring, advising, and guidance. There are branches everywhere in the US.

FreeConference.com -- free conference calling. We`ve been using this with the early stage entrepreneur`s support group and it works great.

Google Website Optimizer -- free tool designed to help you test your website pages to figure out where your highest conversion rates rates happen, where you`re losing sales, etc.

—paula

The real thing about bootstrapping is knowing what things you should spend on and which you can save on. For example, I`m a bootstrapper but showing up with VistaPrint cards would be terrible for my image (or anyone`s, for that matter, in my opinion).

Save by taking public transportation, eating ramen and working out of your home ... but when you need to brand yourself, have some nice cards and wear a classy outfit.

I`ll second 37signals though ... love those guys. I use HighRise and Backpack.

Oh how could I forget...  the Open Office suite will save you from having to shell out for Microsoft Office suite. It`s open-source, that is, it`s free, and supposedly nicely compatible with Microsoft`s products: http://www.openoffice.org/product/

I haven`t used it extensively but I know several people who swear by it.

—paula

These days there are many free tools that you could use for your business. In my opinion most of these free tools are better than some of the paid ones.

For example, if you have something to sell, you may want to look into Oscommerce which offers an open-source online shop platform.

You can drive traffic to your store through free shopping comparison sites such as Google Shopping, TheFind, Shopwiki, Bing Shopping and many others.

Then of course there are CMS open-source programs that can work for any business. Wordpress and Joomla are definitely amongst my favorite ones to use.

Let's not forget social media -- Facebook, Google+, Twitter and many others.

 

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