Once you’ve decided to enter the courageous and frightening world of the Start-up, and you’ve surrounded yourself with the right team, you need to know what technologies exist to streamline your collaboration. Working online with your team-members is crucial because today’s entrepreneur is typically balancing family, friends and a day job that’s paying the bills for tomorrow’s dreams. There isn’t a lot of time to meet face-to-face so having technologies that enable online ideation can make a huge difference in your start-up’s maturity. Special thanks to @peterthomas for helping with this post.

So, what technologies exist that can really help your start-up?

Free stuff

37 Signals — 37 signals is almost like Siebel for startups with applications like project management, CRM/Contact Management, chat and a document repository. It is rated highly and perfect for small businesses.

TracTickets — With Trac you can create tickets, assign tasks, and monitor accountability.

Wikis — There are plenty of free wiki services on the Web (Wetpaint and pbwiki to name a few). This should be one of the first pieces of software you start collaborating with. You can start building all the intellectual properties of your business from mission statements, ideas to methods and procedures.

Free Web Conferencing — Try googling “Free Web Conferencing” and you’ll see a plethora of options. Our team recently tried Vyew and, while not incredibly intuitive, we were able to figure out how to share desktops and the ability to do it while talking on our phones made for one of our best meetings to date. When you can’t meet face to face, conferencing over the Web really is the next best thing.

Blogs — having an internal blog that you can password protect is great for carrying the ideation and brainstorming online. Blogspot and Wordpress are easy references for you to set one up.

Prototyping– at creator.zoho.com you can prototype a database application. While you’re there, check out the rest of zoho.com offerings. For html forms, check out wufoo.com

Google Apps — having a gmail account allows for you to use blogger, calendar, google reader but also a place to collaborate with documents too. Don’t have Microsoft Office, Neo or Open office products? Use Google documents and collaborate to your hearts content.

Cheap stuff

Answering Service — services like OneBox allow a small business to set up a 1-800 number, a personalized answering service and to have voicemails translated to email. Services like this can be found for around fifty dollars a month.

Virtual Office — being able to provide a professional address and being able to invite clients to an office setting can set you apart and create an atmosphere of respectability. Leveraging existing office sharing services means having access to a conference room and office space. Depending on where you live, this service can range from 200 – 700 dollars a month.

Amazon Web Services — Amazon provides a scalable platform for building a new application. Pay for only the bandwidth and server capacity you’re using at the time. If you reach a point that dedicated hosting becomes more attractive or you want more control, consider rackspace.

Other reading:

What am I missing?

Posted: 24 Nov, 2008 | [6] Comments
Categories: lightthread By: Banky.