10 Free (or Cheap) Tools for Start-ups

Every start-up founder uses free or inexpensive online resources to get his or her company launched. Chadd Bennett of RetroRazor, a Seattle-based company that sells old-fashioned safety razors, provided us with a list of the tools he found to be the most helpful. First up, he recommends a CRM application. “Until recently, we used a Google spreadsheet to keep track of the retailers buying our razors,” Bennett says. “But we just started using a program called Zoho CRM. I chose it because up to three people on each account can use it for free. Plus, it’s established enough that I don’t think it’s going to disappear. We only use it for our retail clients, not for individual customers, because we have hundreds of them and it would take too long to enter their information into the database.”

“Dropbox is a virtual hard drive, but it doesn’t just store your files; it syncs them as well,” Bennett says. “I use it to send files to my video producer. After he edits the video, he saves it to Dropbox and the new version is automatically saved on my computer. Dropbox is free for the first two gigabytes. Now that we’re doing a lot of video editing I’m going up to the paid version, which is 50 gigabytes for $99 a year.”

“I’m all about redundancy so my files are backed up in multiple places, on Dropbox and on Mozy,” the razor-company owner says. “Mozy is free for up to two gigabytes of storage, which is plenty for regular documents. I use the commercial version, which costs $4.95 a month for unlimited backup.”

“PortableApps is a package of free software, which you can download onto a flash drive,” Bennett says. “It includes a lot of popular programs, such as Open Office and Audacity, a sound-editing program that I use a lot. You don’t need to install this software on the computer you’re using; just plug in a Flash drive and run it. This way, I know that I have my software programs with me at all times, so I’ll never be in a situation where I don’t have access to the application that I need.”

“oDesk is a great place to find remote employees, like virtual assistants,” the Seattle-based entrepreneur says. “I have a virtual assistant in the Philippines who takes care of any small tasks I don’t have time for. And in the past few weeks I’ve hired an entire team, including a video editor, a technical writer, and a guy who will manage our social media, like our Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts. This weekend we’re having our first team meeting over video chat.”

“Now that I’ve found Dropbox, I don’t use Google Docs as much as I used to. But I still use it for spreadsheets,” Bennett says. “Recently, for example, I asked my virtual assistant to do some research and find all the swim coaches in the U.S., because swimmers shave their bodies so I thought this could be a good market for us. I set up a template for her to use on Google Docs. It took her a few days to finish the list but, meanwhile, I could see her progress, and I started making calls while she was still compiling contacts.”

“We use Mailchimp to keep in touch with our individual customers by sending out a monthly e-mail,” Bennett says. “We looked at a lot of the other tools out there, like Constant Contact. But MailChimp made more sense for us because of the way it structures its pricing. You can send six e-mails a month, to up to 100 people each, for free. But we tried that and we almost got put on a spam blacklist. So we bought a block of e-mails instead; you can get them for as little as a half a penny apiece.”

“I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Workweek, and I’ve realized it’s much more efficient and much cheaper to outsource the hell out of things,” the entrepreneur says. “Initially, my wife and I did all of our packing and shipping from the house. Then we became an Amazon merchant, and sales doubled. So we signed up with Fulfillment by Amazon. We own the inventory, but it’s stored in an Amazon warehouse. That means our product is eligible for free SuperSaver shipping, and Amazon does all the work to ship it out. We pay by the square foot of warehouse space we use, plus a monthly fee. Fortunately, our product–razors–doesn’t take up much space, plus, this has saved us hours upon hours of work each week.”

“I’ve been using Skype for more than three years,” Bennett says. “It’s beautiful–I can make unlimited calls within the U.S. and Canada for about $36 a year. It saves me on cell-phone minutes, as long as I’m sitting next to a computer, and I probably use it 50 or 100 times a day. It’s also fantastic for international calls. It costs me three cents a minute to talk to my suppliers in China. Plus, it syncs with Outlook, so when I add someone to my Outlook contacts, the information is immediately uploaded to Skype.”

“This is my favorite service provider of all,” the entrepreneur says. “Whatever packaging is not handled by Amazon, we do at the Northwest Center (nwcenter.org), a group that provides work opportunities for learning- and developmentally-disabled adults in Seattle. It costs the same amount as a regular piecework shop, but it is a non-profit. Many cities have a similar program.” –Hannah Clark Steiman