Free tools to kick-start your new business
An entrepreneurial drive is a wonderful thing. You want to build something for yourself, be your own boss, have your life in your control. You go through your daily routine and one day, something mundane and obvious sparks an interesting thought in your mind. The words ring through your head, “This could be a great opportunity!” and that’s it, an ambition is born. Now to get this thing from idea to reality and rake in those profits, but… starting a business requires capital, it requires a financial investment. What if you don’t have the budget to spend on all the aspects of your new business? Not a problem! There are plenty of free to use tools available to help you run your business like a pro without picking your pocket.
Infrastructure and website hosting
Going with a cloud provider these days is easy, reliable and cheap. How cheap, you ask? Free cheap, that’s how cheap it is. Out of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Provider (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS has the largest free tier. It boasts every resource you’d need to set up an entire backend, staying well within the offered free tier. You can even host your website on an S3 bucket for free and use their email service. This should reduce your infrastructure and hosting costs to near zero.
Digital assets
Quality digital assets could cost you a few bucks here and there when you commission assets you might need for your project. Maybe some nice images to boost that website you’re now hosting for free.
Both the caption and the image boast the name Unsplash, surely they can’t both be wrong? Unsplash is a platform where royalty free, quality images are offered to be used for free. So you can decorate your website or your blog posts with good looking imagery that leave nothing to desire when it comes to visual quality.
How about music? Maybe you are looking for that perfect tune to capture the feeling your product or service is supposed to embed in your potentially huge client pool. Or y’know, your success has granted you an office building that’s 50 stories high and you want a budget option for the elevator music.
UppBeat is similar to Unsplash, in the sense that it provides royalty free content in the form of music! It has a huge library of free to use tunes and even an AI assisted playlist generator so you can craft the perfect array of melodies to suit your needs. And all of that for the low, low price of zero dollars.
Business management
The one thing you cannot escape when managing a business is, well, managing the business. You could do all of your customer/product/invoicing/subscription management by yourself in an Excel sheet or use 3 different platforms to manage all of those aspects, dishing out a few hundred bucks a month before even getting in your first customer. Or… you keep riding the free wave and use JustFlows!
JustFlows is an all-in-one business management solution with a very healthy free tier. You can send unlimited estimates and invoices, including payment links (with QR codes even). It provides customer management, product management and AI driven purchase invoice scanning. The kicker? The free tier is not a trial, it’s free forever. You can upgrade as need be and if you don’t need to, you don’t have to.
Closing arguments
Building and managing a business is time consuming, but if you use these free tools, at least it won’t have to be costly. Are you considering using any of these tools or are you already right now? I’d love to hear your opinions on them. Until further notice I bid you farewell and happy enterprising!
Note: This is the first article in a series on how to efficiently and effectively run your business. Follow JustFlows if you don’t want to miss the series!
