Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

   Start up on a very tight budget. I am interested in creating sell sheets etc with, of course, a professional look. What is the best free or low cost program to use to design with that can be used by someone like me whom has no design experience. I can`t even figure how to use Microsoft Word to make stuff and everyone claims it to be easy! Any suggestions? Thank you.

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Our Goal Is Your Success!
Founder Girls with Goals

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Our Goal Is Your Success!
Founder Girls with Goals

Not a brochure per se, but single sheet info

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Leslie
Founder and President
Charmed Life Products LLC
Grill Charms™… The MUST HAVE grilling accessory that is revolutionizing the American Cook-out AND The perfect gift for any occasion!
Grill Charms
                                                                                                    

You`re talking about Adobe Acrobat, a way to format any type of document so that anyone else can "read it." That`s the Acrobat "Reader," which is free to the world.

Kathy`s talking about Adobe Photoshop, a fairly high-end graphics editing product. Adobe has some excellent products, but they`re expensive. Paint Shop Pro is less expensive, but also has a steep learning curve.

PowerPoint is probably the easiest of all programs to learn, and provides you with graphics and text capabilities. There are countless books around, even in the "PowerPoint for Dummies" series, along with plenty of others. You also can likely take a course (audit it) at your local community college and learn PowerPoint.

The advantage there is that you can manipulate text and graphics easily, and everyone pretty much has some version of the program. You can also print them as flyers or other 1-page document, including your sell-sheet.

The bigger issue is that although you may be bootstrapping, that doesn`t bestow knowledge. :-) The reason people bootstrap a business is because they have the skills on their own and take the risk, being able to do most of what they require on their own.

We do see a number of people here on Startup Nation who seem to think that bootstrapping means starting a business with no money and "somehow" knowing all the many things and skills necessary to build that business. Just as most small businesses fail for lack of monetary capital, so too, many businesses will fail for lack of skills (capital).

Your best bet would be to work out how many months it would take to learn something that would allow you to create your own sell sheet, then compare that with the few hours it would take for a professional. Look at your "salary," so to speak, and how much you would pay the professional.

Nobody should feel "dumb" reading a constructive analysis of their questions and problems. :-) As they say, "two heads are better than one," and in some instances, a whold bunch of heads is even better. (Not when it`s a corporate or governmental committee, though.)