Everyone knows building a company isn’t easy – or cheap. As a cash strapped startup I wanted to share a few of the programs I took advantage of to keep our costs low while we build out our business. Thank you to these companies who remember what its like to be a startup and letting us use their services until we can afford to pay for them.
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Microsoft BizSpark
This program gets you Office 365 – including email, the Office Stack and a whole bunch of other stuff for free. Even Google now charges for business email – yet Microsoft is supporting startups when they need it most – by providing the infrastructure to get the business up and running and remain productive.
Tracking clients and storing contacting information is critical. Why not start with the best CRM solution on the market. Salesforce has a unique program for startups to take advantage of their platform without having to pay the enterprise price.
If you use Excel you have to get this utility. This company has automated some of the most difficult tasks in Excel. I love this add on to Excel.
Zen Desk provides easy to use support desk software and a super easy way to set up a knowledge desk and knowledge articles. They support startups by offering a year for free if you are part of several startup groups.
OneNote
We use to use Evernote but with new advances from Microsoft and OneNote we moved to OneNote and can still access all our notes from anywhere across anydevice. We have also set up team notebooks shared in our Sharepoint site so anyone can search for information.
We run our website using WordPress. Its free. There is a huge community that supports it and provides free plugin’s.
There are a ton of free deals, accelerators and contests listed on this site. In fact, we entered a contest from here and won $250,000. Not to mention there is a deal for almost anytime of product out there.
There are a lot more tools we use for free. I’ll continue to add to this list.