Free (Or Almost) Hacks For Your Startup Stocking
According to the Harvard Business Review launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech startup, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: Nearly 75% of all startups fail.
But recently an important countervailing force has emerged, one that can make the process of starting a company less risky. It’s a methodology called the “lean startup,” and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. While the lean startup movement hasn’t yet gone mainstream, we thought we’d offer a few hacks to help you with yours.
Graphic Design
Canva
Easily create beautiful design and documents with this user-friendly drag-and-drop free tool. Canva features hundreds of templates for brochures, social media headings, advertisements, etc.
https://canva.com/
Infrastructure and Software
Avast Free Antivirus
Lightweight and intuitive protection powered by a community over 400 million strong.
This is next-gen cybersecurity for all.
https://www.avast.com/
Cloudflare
Cloudflare provides a content delivery network, DDoS mitigation, Internet security services and distributed domain name server services, sitting between the visitor and the Cloudflare user’s hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites. The free account is a great place to start and will certainly speed up your site.
https://www.cloudflare.com/
Foxit Reader
Foxit Reader is a multilingual freemium PDF tool that can create, view, edit, digitally sign, and print PDF files.
https://www.foxitsoftware.com/
Freelance Services
Fiverr
Fiverr offers freelance services for the lean entrepreneur. Whether you’re looking for logo design, video and animation services, or programming/tech talent this site is a great place to start. Most gigs start at $5 but don’t be a scrooge – tip for a job well done.
https://www.fiverr.com/
Fundraising
When fundraising it is important to perform due diligence on potential investors as some “potential investors” utilize such sites to impersonate prominent businessmen with the intent to defraud.
Dealstream (Formerly MergerNetwork)
Dealstream is a social network for business professionals. If you are looking to buy a business, increase your customer base or raise capital, this site is a great option and it’s free.
https://dealstream.com/
Finroad
Finroad is a great place to post and access financial deals. The site offers a secured dealing system with access to exclusive deals. It’s free to set-up your own dealing room but interested parties pay a small fee to access your opportunity or offering documents.
http://finroad.com/
Launchpads
Greater Sacramento
Most startups are drawn to Silicon Valley due to the abundance of technical talent and venture capital. However, both residential and commercial real estate prices have skyrocketed in recent years. If you’re looking for a budget-friendly locale, consider Sacramento – the city is only 45 minutes away from San Francisco by train and there is a vibrant startup scene there. And if you’re not yet ready to make a permanent move consider I/O Labs or Urban Hive, two of the city’s co-working spaces.
https://www.selectsacramento.com/
Marketing & PR
PRLog
PR Log offers free press release and press room hosting, free distribution to search engines and discounted press release distribution to news websites and journalists.
https://www.prlog.org/
Mailchimp
Whether you need to sell your products, share some big news, or tell a story, Mailchimp’s campaign builder makes it easy to create email campaigns that best suit your message. The free account option is adequate for most and there are dozens of templates to choose from.
https://mailchimp.com/
Office
LibreOffice
An alternative to Microsoft Office, LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software, and is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. LibreOffice is free and open source software, originally based on OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice), and is the most actively developed OpenOffice.org successor project.
https://www.libreoffice.org/
Photo Editing, Etc.
Greenshot
Greenshot is a light-weight screenshot software tool for Windows which allows users to create screenshots of a selected region, window or fullscreen. Users can even capture complete (scrolling) web pages from Internet Explorer and export the screenshot in various ways: save to file, send to printer, copy to clipboard, attach to e-mail, send to Office programs or upload to photo sites like Flickr or Picasa, and others.
http://getgreenshot.org/
Pixlr Editor
A robust browser photo editor for all your editing needs. With Pixlr Editor you have full control over your images including layers and effects. The free edition is adequate for most users.
https://pixlr.com/
PicMonkey
Everything you need to make your ideas come to life – photo editing, collage making, graphic design. The free version is robust.
https://www.picmonkey.com/
Unsplash
Unsplash features beautiful, free photos gifted by some of the world’s most generous community of photographers. Crediting isn’t required, but is appreciated and allows photographers to gain exposure.
https://unsplash.com/
Happy Holidays (and hacking)!