Essential tools for the online bootstrapper

Posted in: Bootstrapping Tools

This is our first list of tools we believe every bootstrapper should have in their toolbox. If you are an online business owner or a freelance designer / developer you will enjoy these tools. You can also get a lot out of these tools for offline tasks as well. I am sure we are leaving out a lot of links, but thats what the bootstrapping tools category is for, all of the new tools we find along the way.

Slim Timer - This tool is great to time your daily activities, jobs, ect. You do not have to take the stress of writing down times yourself on paper, and then figuring how many minutes and hours you worked, it does it all for you. You can print your job once completed, or you can export it to excel. Best of all, (for any bootstrapper, this is the best piece of news) it is 100% FREE! We use this for all of our jobs, weather it is designing, development, writing on this blog, or any other tasks we are working on. This is a great tool.

SimplyBill - This is a great invoicing tool for any business owner who needs to send out invoices, but does not want to spend the time making your spreadsheet look “pretty”. SimplyBill does this for you. The cost is minimal ($5.00 - $15.00 per month depending on package) The interface is very easy to use, and it takes out the time and hassle of creating them yourself.

BackPack - WOW. If I was without this tool, I do not know what I would do. This website is great, and best of all, FREE! (there are pay plans available also, but the free plan has worked out very well for me). If you need to keep track of tasks, to-do lists, messages, files and a calendar that can send reminders to your email or cell. If you need to be more organized, this is the tool for you. A+ from us!

HighRise - This is another project from 37signals that exceeds all of our expectations. If you need to keep track of who you talk to, what you said, and what to do next, HighRise is the product for you. I personally use this tool daily for all of my clients, and any business contacts I meet along the way. The Free plan offers you no file storage, and only 250 contacts but if you are on a small scale, this is perfect to test it out, start using it, and once you get to the point of growing your contact list larger, you can upgrade (paid accounts are $12.00 per month for 500 contacts all the way up to $149.00 for 50,000 contacts and 50GB of file space and CampFire for free.

My New Company - This is the place to go if you want to form an LLC or Corp. If all of the forms are overwhelming and you would rather use an easy interface, and quick signup process, then My New Company is the place for you to go. This website helped us out a lot when forming a few LLC’s recently. The price is also very low compared to other companies doing the same thing.

Wordpress - This is by far the best Content Management System for any website to be built on. I would recommend other tools like wordpress, but this is #1 on any CMS list for us. Bootstrapping Blog is built on wordpress as well as 90% of all other websites we run. With the setup being as simple as it is, the admin panel being so easy and straight forward, not to mention the 1,000,000’s of free templates out there, wordpress is by far the best CMS for anyone wanting to setup a website and not deal with the hassles of HTML coding.

eFax - Need to fax out a lot of documents every month but would rather not go through the hassle of a new phone line, a new fax machine, and all of the other headaches that go along with it? eFax is your website to visit then. We love this place. A free 30 day trial gives you the advantage to find out how useful it really is with the hands on approach. Sending faxes and receiving them through email. How great is that? The cost after the 30 day trial is $18.00 (AUD) per month plus $0.14 per page sent. The simplicity of this website is great; add @efaxsend.com to the end of the number you are sending to, attach the file you want to send, and it sends to their fax machine. Any faxes sent to the number eFax provides you with goes straight to your email as well.

We will be providing more detailed reviews of products and tools in the future as well, but for the first post in the bootstrapping tools category, we wanted to touch base with a little bit of everything. If you have any tools you think we should cover, feel free to drop a comment and let us know about them.

 

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5 Responses to “Essential tools for the online bootstrapper”

• TDL

  October 30th, 2007 at 9:57 pm

  I run a small Technology consulting company and one essential i could not live without is a service called GotVMail. It is a virtual PBX system that does about a million things. It give a larger presence, allows for virtual offices to exist, the ability to send/receive calls on any type of phone line (mobile, land, VoIP). It will also forward voicemails and faxes to any email as a file.

  Here is a link to them:
  
  

  And here is a like to some other preferred solutions i use for my business:
  http://www.the-digital-life.com/business-services/preferred-solutions/

• Aditya Gholap

  May 18th, 2008 at 4:42 am

  This list that you have outlined is quite incomplete if someone has a human intensive business. I also noticed that you put some stress on free tools. While thats GREAT - i think its important to keep in mind that certain free tools are not as feature heavy and they dont do the job too well. For example you have noted Slim Timer. Slim Timer may be great for noting down times etc. it is not really a Project Management Tool (which is what online bootstrappers should have). This is because online bootstrappers may be working in virtual environments where you are assigning tasks etc. and need to track milestones and work on multiple projects where you need to have real time project management. I’ve been using Deskaway and it works FANTASTIC for me. Its cheap ($100 for the year for a reasonably good edition so i think it works for someone bootstrapping!). I also think that if someone is an online bootstrapper working with loads of customers, he or she needs a CRM tool as well. CRM tools are a dime a dozen. In my opinion Zoho has a great CRM tool (www.zoho.com). They also have a good CRM tool. Think you should update this list to include PM tools such as DEskaway and CRM tools as well. I think this list would be more comprehensive then! It will fit most online business needs

• Greg

  June 23rd, 2008 at 11:31 am

  Fanurio http://www.fanuriotimetracking.com helps with the less appealing aspects of freelancing like keeping track of time and invoicing. It’s a useful application, with a user-friendly interface.

• Mike Smith

  June 23rd, 2008 at 12:25 pm

  Thanks for the link Greg, and thanks for commenting on the site. I hope you enjoy the articles I post here.

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