So you’ve started your own business.
You’ve moved boxes around to create some (tight) office space in the basement. Your personal cell phone is also your business phone. Your family can barely keep their eyebrows down with questions. Your friends at dinner not-so-secretly think you’ve lost it.
Who’s got your back?
Lucky for your business, and the hundreds of thousands of other similarly bold endeavors out there, the Internet has finally caught up to your entrepreneurial spirit. And now there are dozens of excellent tools on the web designed specifically to help small businesses grow.
Here are seven innovations for your small business:1. Cloud-based document sharing. There are two distinct things in this category. One is that you can access your own documents across all your devices – phone, computer, and tablet. You’ll never have to use the dreaded phrase “Oh that’s on my computer at home” again.
Also, you might have some people related to your business with whom you need to collaborate. Instead of sending the designer an enormous email with a bunch of files for your new business cards, you can drag and drop the files into your cloud folder, share it with the designer – and boom – 21st-century collaboration. Dropbox and Box are my two favorite programs for sharing documents.
2. New-era financial services. Want to handle your entire expense report on your phone? No problem; try Expensify. How about comparison shopping for car insurance rates? Take a look at CoverHound. Want to give your employees choices for their holiday gifts? Check Abenity or Wantful. And there are several new ways for small companies to get financing online.
3. Mobile payments. Most of us have been there, wanting a coffee from the mom-and-pop kiosk; we reach into our pockets only to remember we have no cash. We express disappointment, remembering those smooth credit card swipes at Starbucks. But then you look at the woman behind the counter – aha! – she’s using a mobile payment device from Square and can actually receive payments on her phone. Cha-ching!
This innovation has been huge for small businesses around world, opening up small businesses to accept payments from any customer – whether outside in a farmer’s market, a festival, etc. And the whole set-up just takes a few minutes and is usually free to install.
4. Blogging software. Don’t let the word blog fool you; a lot of sites just run their whole operations on platforms like Wordpress and Blogger. They make building a site a whole lot easier with their templates and navigation bars. You could even hire someone to come in and spruce it up for you, or give the site the ability to accept payments – and it will still be significantly less expensive than building an entire site from the ground up.
5. Ticket sales and promotions sites. Twenty years after Eddie Vedder fought the good fight against Ticketmaster, the ticketing behemoths have finally met their match online. Much smaller and agile, Eventbrite and RegOnline can create and sell tickets at almost no expense. Your event could cost only $5 and these new platforms would be of service.
The next time your small business has an event like a happy hour, go to a ticketing site and send the invites out from there. That way you can collect money and get a head count at the same time.
6. Social media aggregation tools. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn – they’re all super fun to check in on. It’s no different for businesses – our marketing team has a blast on these sites. But one thing is for certain: you have to invest a lot of time in social media to see some returns.
HootSuite, Seesmic and TweetDeck bring all your social media profiles to the same web destination so you can monitor them at the same time. On most of them you can also keep an eye on keywords valuable to your businesses. So, for example, if you run a sporting good store you can see what’s trending on the “cheapest price for tennis balls,” and make sure yours are priced accordingly.
7. Email service providers. When your business is first starting out it’s really no problem to shoot out emails from your personal account, or a business account you can make in a few minutes on Gmail or Yahoo. But as your company begins to scale you’re likely to want more from your email service.
For instance, it’s nice to know data points like open (percentage of people who open your email) and click-through (percentage of people who click to the site from the email) rates. Also, your email list is almost certain to grow over time and you can only jam so many email addresses into the send field. MailChimp and SilverPop, both Atlanta companies, are good bets here.
In terms of emerging technology, this is a great time to be a small business owner. Every day there are new and exciting tools popping up to help small companies grow and streamline their operations. The only challenge is to sort through all the new offerings and finding the programs that work best for your business. Have fun with your digital toolbox.
Marc Gorlin is the co-founder and chairman of Kabbage, where small businesses get funding online.
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