What online tools do you need to start a small business?

As a sole trader, or as owner of a modern small or micro business you’ll want to be getting the most possible out of online technologies.

The overarching strategy

I think it’s important, especially in the early days, to not spend too much time deliberating over what to use for the various areas you need to cover. Ultimately, your products and services are what differentiates you. Even if you are a technology business, you are probably not in the business of competing with the providers of the tools listed below; these are not areas where you need to do something radically different. So, I think you can afford to take a ’safety in numbers’ approach and follow the crowd in terms of using tried and tested solutions.

Sure, as your business grows, you may want something a little more sophisticated. But remember, the need for that in any given area will move at different speeds. i.e, perhaps you outgrow your website package before your email marketing one?

In following the crowd you have to accept that you’ll be making some trade-offs. Not all of the solutions listed below will do everything you want. But they will do most. So my advice is to make do with those as a solution until the pain becomes unbearable. Remember, growing pains are a good sign in an evolving business, because it at least shows you are moving in the right direction.

It may well be that when you upgrade from one of the solutions below to something more advanced that there isn’t always an easy route. That needn’t always be an issue, and the extent to which it is will depend on the length of time you use any solution and the point at which you make a change. For example, some changes might be easier to make at the start of your financial year. In making trade-offs you generally end up inheriting something called technical debt. Wikipedia defines technical debt as the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing a limited solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. Like all debt, technical debt needs to be repaid. Like many debts, it’s unavoidable, but it can have advantages if managed correctly. Some debts are easier to repay than others.

My suggestion is that you start with the tools below. That you find out more about them. That you think about how long you use them for. That you think about living with the trade-offs and managing the technical debt you’ll inherit. I believe you should have really good reasons if you don’t use these tools. If that’s the case, then fine. That’s the point at which you may want to engage someone like me to help advise you of what to do next. And if you use the following, and sense that it’s time to make a change, again, you may need some external help on that too. But by that point you’ll have a decent set of learns as to what worked well and what didn’t.

A website

Can you get away with just a Facebook page? If all of your customers are on Facebook maybe this is all you need? (You could apply the same logic to LinkedIn as well). There are even ways you can point your own domain name to either of these. Or you could have a free site using something like GitHub Pages to have a one page website which links people to your Facebook page.

If you feel you need your own site, take a look at Wix, Squarespace or Wordpress.com (don’t confuse the latter with Wordpress.org). In the order I’ve listed them these increase in power, flexibility, but also ease of use becomes slightly harder. These are all one stop shop solutions with a low cost monthly fee and although you might want to engage a designer to help you make your site stand out, in theory you can get something up and running on your own, regardless of how good your technical or design skills are.

An ecommerce website

If you’ve gone either of the routes above (Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress) then commerce plug-ins are available — like WooCommerce for Wordpress.

If the business is all about the online store, try Shopify. This is a similar type subscription product to the ones previously described, but focussed on building an online store. Most of all I’ve suggested so far have free trials — so you can give each a run out and see how they compare.

In the same way that Facebook might be all you need for a website if Facebook is where your customers are, you can apply the same logic to ebay, Amazon or Etsy and set up shop there. This is potentially quicker to do than building your own store from scratch, and therefore more cost-effective initially. However, there are quite high on-going fees which will eat into your margins — and while you’ll have easier access to a larger pool of customers, it’ll be harder to stand out from the crowd.

You can sell via Facebook and Instagram as well, with this special feature allowing you to click on an image (posts featuring a shopping bag)where the link is taking you to the shop (either your dedicated store or Etsy for instance).

A blog

Wordpress’ legacy is as a blogging platform. It’s exceptional at this. So if you are using Wordpress for your site anyway it’s easy to have your blog here too. Blogging is a great way of being able to use content marketing to attract traffic from search and social and deep link it into your site, but of course that requires additional skills to attract and build your audience. If, however, the audience you are trying to reach is on LinkedIn or Medium, then writing articles on either of these might be a better option. Additionally on Medium you can set up your own publication. Even out your content behind the paywall and earn from it. It all comes down to who you are writing for and what the overall purpose of writing the content is.

A social media presence

Maybe if your primary online presence is already your LinkedIn company page or your Facebook page then you’re set already. If not, think about where your potential customers are. If you set up a presence on every social network you’ll never maintain them all. So pick two to start with and go from there. In the first instance you’ll most likely limit yourself to choosing between Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Personally, I think for a lot of small businesses a CRM is just one other thing to manage in an environment where you’ll already have customer data in a variety of places anyway. I’ve rarely seen CRMs work well until businesses are of a size where they have dedicated sales team tracking leads and managing pipeline.

In the early days you are likely to have other sources of truth for customer data. Your contacts app on your desktop/phone. Or maybe it’s your email marketing list. It’s likely initially these will suffice. That said, Insightly and Zoho are cost-effective solutions you can look at if you do want to evaluate something.

Web marketing

If communicating with customers and leads regularly by email marketing plays a part in your business, start off by looking at Mailchimp or dotmailer.

The rest of web marketing really comes down to a time and/or money trade off, depending on the extent to which you pay for your presence to buy either higher positioning on a search results page or a wider audience on social networks.

Content marketing I have covered partially in blogging, although in general, my view is that all web marketing is content marketing, for which it is key to have a solid content strategy. Both Hubspot and Google run some free certified courses on inbound and web marketing which will help you think about how you start to put one of these together.

Bookkeeping (inc Payroll and VAT)

Xero, Quickbooks and Crunch are worth looking at. While Crunch will provide you accountancy services alongside the software, many accountancy firms will act as resellers for Xero and Quickbooks and be able to support you in your use of these, ultimately bringing down the costs of using an accountant if you regularly keep your books up to date. (To do that, set aside about a day’s dedicated time a month.)

Office tools

It’s a toss up between Microsoft Office 365 and Google Suite. Both work well across all major desktop and mobile operating systems and both have plans which provide you with business email, which you can manage under your own domain name.

The word processed, spreadsheet or presentation documents you create with either can all stored in each provider’s cloud, which opens up three key advantages.

1. You can share the documents with others and work on them collaboratively, without having to worry about who has which version. For me this part works far better on Google Suite than on Office 365.
2. Because you can access them from anywhere on any device, if opens up a lot of flexibility to you as a worker as well. Chances are I worked on this blog post on my phone on a train journey into work at some point.
3. Especially useful on phones I find, you can voice type as well into documents. I always find this quite handy if I want to do a quick brain dump after a meeting. Blog posts that I want to sound quite conversational will often be ones that I’ve done by voice typing.

Project Management

Trello is a good tool for managing projects. You can also use it to manage sales progress as well. Other tools like Basecamp are available, but they have a slightly more bloated feature set. Trello does the basics well.

An app

Most people who tell me they need an app I can generally show that they don’t, at least not until they’ve proved their idea works, as pretty much everything they need to do can be achieved as a simple mobile optimised website, without having to worry about managing App Store submissions and promotion.

Also you’ll encourage more trial of your product or service if you don’t make it initially dependant on having to download an app. It’ll be easier to promote too.

Automation and integration

The more you can automate, or integrate together the more seamless your workflows will be and the more seamless your customer journeys. However you can do neither of these without having all the building blocks in place, so I wouldn’t think about either until you have. Until then you can learn more about what you need to automate and string together by being the human glue and bot in that exercise.

Understanding it all

If you’ve built a website, at a minimum set it up to use Google Analytics and Google Search Console (making sure that your use of either is covered in your privacy policy)

Digital decisions are never a walk in the park, so please get in touch and let me help you find the right way through the technical landscape.