5 Tools Every Entrepreneur Should Know About

In the era of information technologies running business has become less routine and more efficient. Modern market provides us with an extensive list of online tools that help manage almost all business processes starting from collaboration and ending with bookkeeping. Among this variety there are some unquestionable leaders like Basecamp in project management, Quickbooks in accounting, Google Analytics in web analytics and Salesforce in CRM*. While the quality of these well-known services is undoubted, some companies still may find their cost unaffordable or functionality limited. That’s why below we’ve gathered a collection of online solutions that can’t boast ubiquitous popularity like their mature analogs but offer a competitive number of features and decent pricing plans.

*Based on the survey and great infographics by Jennifer Van Grove published on Mashable.comhttp://mashable.com/2011/07/26/startup-toolsAdvertisement

Project Management & Collaboration

TeamLab integrates a number of online tools that allows colleagues to organize business tasks, coordinate teamwork and track work results. Along with project management features, this platform also offers a rich collaboration toolset: forums, blogs, chat and multichat, events, bookmarks. The TeamLab significant distinction from other similar systems is a tangible emphasis on document management. The “Documents” module enables users not only to save and share files in the TeamLab corporate system but edit as well. There are two editing options available: either to run built-in Open Office application or launch web browser editor.  Overall, TeamLab is a complete fully-featured system that stands out in the row of project management platforms due to an easy-to-use interface, wider collaboration and docs functionality.

Pricing plans:

Free – 93% of options available, no users/time/projects limits

$49 monthly – 100% of options available

Accounting

LessAccounting lets you keep track of corporate finances in a smart and simple way. You can organize expenses in several sections, e.g. by project, income type or any other category. The service also gives an opportunity to setup recurring invoices, mark them paid or add notes. Any sample from the fine collection of customizable templates may be turned into a corporate sales proposal or invoice. LessAccounting pays special attention to experienced online users who have already maintained databases in other web resources. Automatic importer from Gmail, Basecamp, Highrise and Quickbooks makes migration completely stressless and quick. All the potential clients are promised to get special attention and care: the service team guarantees every company to help import and setup all their data completely for free.

Pricing plans:

$30 monthly – unlimited transactions, members and support

Web Analytics

Piwik is a real time web analytics solution providing a similar toolset like Google Web Analytics. You get full information about your website visitors, their navigation track and top content pages. You are able to set goals and keywords, track conversion rate as well. Unlike its eminent competitor, Piwik is downloadable and open source software that is installed on your server and this way keeps your data extremely safe. Another difference from Google tool is the program customizable interface: you can put the widgets in the order you’d like with the “drag&drop” option, choose the most necessary features and delete the rarely used ones. On the whole, Piwik is a decent alternative to Google Web Analytics for those who prefer in-house solutions and respect open source policy.

Pricing plans: Completely free

Social Media Analytics

Although social media marketing is an evident necessity, there are still few systems that allow for maintaining professional monitoring and analysis of virtual community. Except for Google Alerts,Social Mention presents the most thorough and full toolset for social media analytics. It aggregates the content of social networks and blogs, video and image sharing platforms, forums, questions&answers services. It also defines your brand reputation counting the frequency of brand mentioning and estimates the audience attitude calculating the “sentiment” ratio – the number of positive, neutral and negative mentions. To keep track of “social buzz” you can choose either to use the automated alerts system to be personally notified by email or insert the Social Mention widget showing every new mention in real time right in a website.

Pricing plans:

Completely free

CRM

LandslideCRM is a fully-featured CRM system designed both for small and large businesses. It offers account&contact management, activity&tasks management and can be easily accessed from any device that supports Internet connection. There’s a number of additional options worth saying about. You are able to develop forecasts and reports, share documents and presentations, and organize live meetings powered by GoToMeeting web conferencing technology. The system also has a few add-ons that include Salesforce, Quickbooks, Gmail plug-ins and many more. The listed set of functionality is quite enough to satisfy requirements of average user.

Pricing plans:

Free 30-day trial

$29 monthly – the standard set available for one user

Slava Akhmechet 57 startup lessons

13 Aug 2013

There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path.

People

1. If you can’t get to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, something’s wrong. (You can choose not to be profitable, but it must be your choice, not something forced on you by the market).
2. Split the stock between the founding team evenly.
3. Always have a vesting schedule.
4. Make most decisions by consensus, but have a single CEO whose decisions are final. Make it clear from day one.
5. Your authority as CEO is earned. You start with a non-zero baseline. It grows if you have victories and dwindles if you don’t. Don’t try to use authority you didn’t earn.
6. Morale is very real and self-perpetuating. If you work too long without victories, your investors, employees, family, and you yourself will lose faith. Work like hell not to get yourself into this position.
7. Pick the initial team very carefully. Everyone should be pleasant to work with, have at least one skill relevant to the business they’re spectacular at, be extremely effective and pragmatic. Everyone should have product sense and a shared vision for the product and the company.
8. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Pick a small set of non-negotiable rules that matter to you most and enforce them ruthlessly.
9. Fire people that are difficult, unproductive, unreliable, have no product sense, or aren’t pragmatic. Do it quickly.
10. Some friction is good. Too much friction is deadly. Fire people that cause too much friction. Good job + bad behavior == you’re fired.

Fundraising

11. If you have to give away more than 15% of the company at any given fundraising round, your company didn’t germinate correctly. It’s salvageable but not ideal.
12. If you haven’t earned people’s respect yet, fundraising on traction is an order of magnitude easier than fundraising on a story. If you have to raise on a story but don’t have the reputation, something’s wrong.
13. Treat your fundraising pitch as a minimum viable product. Get it out, then iterate after every meeting.
14. Most investor advice is very good for optimizing and scaling a working business. Listen to it.
15. Most investor advice isn’t very good for building a magical product. Nobody can help you build a magical product — that’s your job.
16. Don’t fall in love with the fundraising process. Get it done and move on.

Markets

17. The best products don’t get built in a vacuum. They win because they reach the top of a field over all other products designed to fill the same niche. Find your field and be the best. If there is no field, something’s wrong.
18. Work on a problem that has an immediately useful solution, but has enormous potential for growth. If it doesn’t augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way, it’s not worth doing. For example, Google touches billions of lives by filling a very concrete space in people’s daily routine. It changes the way people behave and perceive their immediate physical surroundings. Shoot for building a product of this magnitude.
19. Starting with the right idea matters. Empirically, you can only pivot so far.
20. Assume the market is efficient and valuable ideas will be discovered by multiple teams nearly instantaneously.
21. Pick new ideas because they’ve been made possible by other social or technological change. Get on the train as early as possible, but make sure the technology is there to make the product be enough better that it matters.
22. If there is an old idea that didn’t work before and there is no social or technological change that can plausibly make it work now, assume it will fail. (That’s the efficient market hypothesis again. If an idea could have been brought to fruition, it would have been. It’s only worth trying again if something changed.)
23. Educating a market that doesn’t want your product is a losing battle. Stick to your ideals and vision, but respect trends. If you believe the world needs iambic pentameter poetry, sell hip hop, not sonnets.

Products

24. Product sense is everything. Learn it as quickly as you can. Being good at engineering has nothing to do with being good at product management.
25. Don’t build something that already exists. Customers won’t buy it just because it’s yours.
26. Make sure you know why users will have no choice but to switch to your product, and why they won’t be able to switch back. Don’t trust yourself — test your assumptions as much as possible.
27. Ask two questions for every product feature. Will people buy because of this feature? Will people not buy because of lack of this feature? No amount of the latter will make up for lack of the former. Don’t build features if the answer to both questions is “no”.
28. Build a product people want to buy in spite of rough edges, not because there are no rough edges. The former is pleasant and highly paid, the latter is unpleasant and takes forever.
29. Beware of chicken and egg products. Make sure your product provides immediate utility.
30. Learn the difference between people who might buy your product and people who are just commenting. Pay obsessive attention to the former. Ignore the latter.

Marketing

31. Product comes first. If people love your product, the tiniest announcements will get attention. If people don’t love your product, no amount of marketing effort will help.
32. Try to have marketing built into the product. If possible, have the YouTube effect (your users can frequently send people a link to something interesting on your platform), and Facebook effect (if your users are on the product, their friends will need to get on the product too).
33. Watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi, then do marketing that way. Pick a small set of tasks, do them consistently, and get better every day.
34. Reevaluate effectiveness on a regular basis. Cut things that don’t work, double down on things that do.
35. Don’t guess. Measure.
36. Market to your users. Getting attention from people who won’t buy your product is a waste of time and money.
37. Don’t say things if your competitors can’t say the opposite. For example, your competitors can’t say their product is slow, so saying yours is fast is sloppy marketing. On the other hand, your competitors can say their software is for Python programmers, so saying yours is for Ruby programmers is good marketing. Apple can get away with breaking this rule, you can’t.
38. Don’t use supercilious tone towards your users or competitors. It won’t help sell the product and will destroy good will.
39. Don’t be dismissive of criticism. Instead, use it to improve your product. Your most vocal critics will often turn into your biggest champions if you take their criticism seriously.

Sales

40. Sales fix everything. You can screw up everything else and get through it if your product sells well.
41. Product comes first. Selling a product everyone wants is easy and rewarding. Selling a product no one wants is an unpleasant game of numbers.
42. Be relentless about working the game of numbers while the product is between the two extremes above. Even if you don’t sell anything, you’ll learn invaluable lessons.
43. Qualify ruthlessly. Spending time with a user who’s unlikely to buy is equivalent to doing no work at all.
44. Inbound is easier than outbound. If possible, build the product in a way where customers reach out to you and ask to pay.

Development

45. Development speed is everything.
46. Minimize complexity. The simpler the product, the more likely you are to actually ship it, and the more likely you are to fix problems quickly.
47. Pick implementations that give 80% of the benefit with 20% of the work.
48. Use off the shelf components whenever possible.
49. Use development sprints. Make sure your sprints aren’t longer than one or two weeks.
50. Beware of long projects. If you can’t fit it into a sprint, don’t build it.
51. Beware of long rewrites. If you can’t fit it into a sprint, don’t do it.
52. If you must do something that doesn’t fit into a sprint, put as much structure and peer review around it as possible.
53. Working on the wrong thing for a month is equivalent to not showing up to work for a month at all.

Company administration

54. Don’t waste time picking office buildings, accountants, bookkeepers, janitors, furniture, hosted tools, payroll companies, etc. Make sure it’s good enough and move on.
55. Take the time to find a good, inexpensive lawyer. It will make a difference.

Personal well-being

56. Do everything you can not to attach your self esteem to your startup (you’ll fail, but try anyway). Do the best you can every day, then step back. Work in such a way that when the dust settles you can be proud of the choices you’ve made, regardless of the outcome.
57. Every once in a while, get away. Go hiking, visit family in another city, go dancing, play chess, tennis, anything. It will make you more effective and make the people around you happier.

Is Your Web Site Valid? Top 20 Tools to Test Your Web Site

Most of us believe that when we get our web site built that all we need to do it launch it. Sure, it looks beautiful, you got great content and you are optimized for search engines but have you tested it thoroughly?

Over the course of building web sites these last 15 years (yeah, I know. long time.) the concept of testing has grown in more importance with the need to view web pages across multiple browsers and multiple device types. While they all say they adhere to web standards, they usually have issues that cause errors to happen if there is no proper QA and testing.

Now I know that many of you are building your online business and the terms like HTML and CSS are foreign and you are not here to add web designer to your resume. However, these tools are critical so as your audience builds and people come to your site they don’t get errors and never come back.

Top 20 Tools to Test Your Web Site

Below is a list of 20 online tools that enables you to test your web site. We got the original list from here. We went to all these sites and ran tests on them. Some sites don’t add value, some were software for purchase and some just didn’t work. This got us to the list of 20 sites you see below. If your site is already launched, run the tests to see if your designer needs to make changes. If you haven’t launched your web site yet, my recommendation is to go to each of these sites and run the necessary tests and if you are the designer, this should help you produce an error free site that your client loves. It is separated into Validation Tools, Accessibility, Performance and Cross Browser Testing.

Validation Tools

1- MarkUp Validator
All documents that are in HTML,XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc format go through their markup validation through this check. The validator look up for any code that is not complying the rules set by W3C and report it to the user.

2- CSS Validator
Enter the URL of the page you want to check. The validator will show you the existing errors in HTML with CSS or in CSS only, depending on your wish.

3- Links Validator
Type the address of the page or website you would like to run test for. This helps you to check the anchors or links of web pages.

4- RSS Feed Validator
This is a service to check the syntax of the Atoms or RSS feeds.

5- MobileOK Checker
Check the level of mobile friendliness of your website or a particular web page.

Accessibility

6- Accessibility-Checker
This is an accessibility checker and it checks the conformance of the web pages according to the accessibility standards.

7- Access Color
This checks the color contrast and brightness for the website and makes sure that the people with visual impairment also access the website with same ease.

8- WebAIM Wave
Instead of generating reports on errors it shows you the error spots on your webpage.

9- Section 508 Web Accessibility Checker
Find out if your website is following section 508 standard or not.

10- aDesigner
A help for web designers to ensure that even visually impaired can access their design without any glitch.

11- ColorDoctor
A color simulating software that displays content according to the color characteristics.

12- Colour Blindness Simulator
See the difference in the display of colors to your users affected with color blindness.

13- Colour Contrast Analyser
Use W3C Colour Contrast algorithm and check the contrast between colors.

Performance

14- Pingdom Tools
Check and monitor your network, server and website using Pingdom AB.

15- YSlow
Check and see the reason of slow speed of your website.

16- Web Page Analyzer
Analyze the page size, download time , page speed and many other things of your website.

Cross-Browser Testing

17- Browsershots
Check the appearance of your website in different browsers and in different resolutions.

18- Browsercamp
Test your website design in Mac OS X browsers.

19- Xenocode Browser Sandbox
A good resource to check the browser compatibility in IE6/7, Safari, Chrome etc.

20- NetRenderer
An online tool to show you the appearance of your website on IE 6/7/5.5

Any Tools We Missed? Leave a Comment.

So are there any tools we overlooked? Please leave a comment below and let us and other readers know.

Google+

Find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for more posts like this!

More Sharing ServicesShare

Brought to you by Network Solutions®, a Web.com® service.

Why Now Is A Great Time To Be A Young Entrepreneur

Have you ever thought about starting your own company?  Do you have a great idea that could be the next Twitter? Perhaps it’s time you turned your dreams into reality. 

More and more, young 20-somethings are not only starting their own businesses, but they are also achieving enormous success doing so. Take recent startups like Her Campus, Rent the Runway, and LearnVest: all three lucrative businesses that were founded by women in their early twenties.

The major pros of being an entrepreneur. You’re not tied to another person’s desk, schedule, or priorities.  You can do what you love, do it your way, and have as unconventional a life and calendar as you choose.  And your future—and earning potential—is wide open when you are your own boss.  So whether you want to run a clothing boutique, own a marketing firm, or found the next social network, here are five reasons why now is the time to do it, from four young professionals who have taken the plunge:

1. Employment is Scarce

In today’s economy, college graduates are finding fewer entry-level career options.  Starting a business used to be considered high-risk but now, with diminishing alternatives, it doesn’t look so bad.  Members of Generation Y were raised thinking that they could pursue their passions as a career, but today’s job market often leaves young professionals taking “whatever they can find.” Many are finding that the best—or only—way to do what they love is to venture out on their own.

2. The Trend is Growing

“In the past six to 12 months, it became really sexy to be a start-up.  It’s a global phenomenon,” says start-up expert Sarah Prevette, founder of entrepreneur networking site Sprouter.  She attributes the culture shift to the explosive success of recent start-up founders (hello, Mark Zuckerburg!) and their direct impact on society.

The shift is important because, as the trend has grown, so have the resources.  Young entrepreneurs today are much more positioned for success than their predecessors. Platforms such as Sprouter, Under 30 CEO, and Young Entrepreneur provide ways for young business owners to connect, seek advice, and find valuable resources.

3. Entry is Easier

In past generations, businesses needed a brick-and-mortar address.  Now “the barrier to entry, especially for web technology, is really low, probably the lowest it’s ever been,” says Prevette.  “You can start a business for under $100 in this day and age,” says Maren Kate, founder of Escaping the 9 to 5. “Just grab a URL, brainstorm a business idea and throw up a website.”

4. Inexperience is Good

Conventional wisdom may state that only experienced professionals should start a company, but youth has advantages when you’re opening a business.  Twenty-somethings who have grown up in the age of social  media have a fresh perspective on today’s business landscape and are less likely to be influenced by how things have been done in the past.

You’re also allowed to ask more questions when you’re young.  “One of the greatest things about starting right after college and being so young was that I was so open to asking people questions,” says Morgan First, a two-time entrepreneur who founded her first company at 21.  “I now realize that that’s how everyone succeeds: being able to ask advice from experts and to not think you can do everything yourself.”

5. Risk is Relative

Most young people don’t have start-up capital or savings on which to fall back.  On the other hand, if you don’t have a mortgage, investments, or a family, you have much less to lose than someone twenty years your senior. “My tolerance for risk is much different than somebody who is paying a mortgage and trying to put kids through school,” says Prevette. Nicole Myden, who founded a public relations firm at age 25, shares that sense of adventure: “While having more of a savings cushion or waiting until I was married would have been helpful, I was ready to take on the world, so I figured, let’s go for it!”’

Prevette advises aspiring entrepreneurs to, in Nike terms, just do it.  “If you have an idea—you’ve found a problem that you don’t see anyone else solving—do it.  Running a business is probably the most horrifying, sleep-wrecking thing you could ever do, but it’s also the most rewarding.”

Want to learn more? Meet our panel of CEOs here.

The author, Adrian Granzella Larssen, is a contributing writer for Pretty Young Professional. Adrian can be followed on Twitter @adriangranzella

Business plan guides & templates

Free business plan and guide

• business.gov.au Business Plan Template (Word, 0.24MB)

A free business plan template covering all aspects of your business. The template also includes interactive startup costing, balance sheet, profit and loss, cash flow, and break-even analysis spreadsheets.

• business.gov.au Business Plan Guide (Word, 0.08MB)

A complete guide to the business.gov.au Business Plan Template above. The guide covers information and advice on how to get started on your business plan with explanations for each section of the business plan template.

• MyBizPlan app

A business planning app to provide you with a template for success, available now to download for Android™ and iPad.

Helpful business planning tools

• Planning your business 
  Tips before you start writing a business plan.
• How to write a business plan 
  Free online tutorial on how to draw up your plan so you identify its likely readers and meet their needs.
• Easy Plan business planning template 
  A low cost business plan template with interactive spreadsheets to help you prepare cashflow forecasts and annual budgets.
• Business planning (PDF, 0.05MB) 
  Information sheet on the principles of planning.
• Writing a business plan 
  A guide to use when preparing your business plan.
• Planning your business success (PDF, 1.53MB) 
  Focuses on what a business plan is, the benefits of planning and how to prepare a plan.
• Business planning 
  Information on planning for your business and an interactive business plan template.
• Business planning guide (PDF, 0.29MB) 
  This guide covers why you need a business plan and what should be included.
• Think. Plan. Grow. 
  A low cost CD-ROM with business planning tools and templates.

Apple, the Apple logo, iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

Android and Google Play are trademarks of Google Inc.

The Top 10 Entrepreneur Teenagers Who Made Millions

It seems a lot more people are joining the growing list of teenage millionaires nowadays. In fact, these young millionaires made their first million dollars before reaching the age of 20. This goes to show that age really is just a number and that anything is possible.

Below is a list of those who made their first million during their teenage years, how they made it and a figure of their current net worth.

10 Teenage Entrepreneur Millionaires

Adam Hildreth

In 1999, at only fourteen years old, Adam Hildreth together with his six friends launched the famous English social networking site Dubit. Dubit became one of the most popular websites in 2004. By 2005, Dubit had a net worth of more than 3.7 million dollars. Adam later founded Crisp thinking, which developed software that protected people from online predators, online harassment and spamming. He is ranked 23 in the top 100 richest young people in the UK according to the 2011 Sunday times rich list.

Adam Hildreth is estimated to have a net worth of 38 million dollars.

Sean Belnick

When he was only 14 years old, Sean Belnick created bizchair.com, an internet retailer for all types of furniture. Sean Belnick began with an initial investment of 500 dollars and ran his business operaions from his bedroom. In 2004, he moved into his first warehouse and by 2009, he had more than 702,000 square feet of warehouse space from the initial 40,00 square feet. In 2010, bizchair had sales of more than 58 million dollars.

Sean Belnick’s net worth is reported to be 42 million dollars

Fraser Doherty

Fraser Doherty is the CEO of Super Jam. This Scottish young star was taught jam making by his grandmother when he was 14 years old. He started producing jam and selling it in the neighbourhood. He left school at the age of 16 to fully concentrate on super jam. In 2007, he began supplying super jam to 184 Waitrose stores. Nowadays Fraser Doherty currently supplies to all major UK stores and had sales of over 1.2 million dollars in 2011.

Fraser Doherty is worth 2 million dollars.

Cameron Johnson

In 1994, at only nine years of age, Cameron Johnson began making money by selling invitation cards. By eleven years old he had saved up enough money to form his company, Cheers and Tears. Cameron then participated in several ventures including creating EZ mail, an email forwarding software, surfingprice.com, an online advertising company. By fifteen years old, he was receiving monthly cheques of up to 400,000 dollars.

Cameron Johnson’s net worth is currently 3.2 million.

Ashley Qualls

Ashley Qualls is an America entrepreneur who made her first million at the age of seventeen. She did this by taking an 8 dollar loan from her mother and creating a website,whateverlife.com in 2004.The website focused on providing HTML tutorials for young people and providing free My space layouts.

Ashley Qualls is valued to have a net worth of 8 million dollars.

Chris Phillips

Chris Phillips made his first million when he was only 17 years old through dot5hosting. This website was used to register domain names, supply hosting space and hosting several e-commerce sites. By the time he was 19 years old, this British teenager was making over 10 million dollars annually.

Dot5hosting currently has a net worth of 2 million dollars.

Juliette Brindak

Juliette made her millions after launching the website Miss O and Friends when she was still only 10 years old. The site, which targets mostly teenage girls, is filled with celebrity gossip, games, quizzes and lots of feature articles. She has also launched a line of Miss O and friends books.

Juliette Brindak is currently the CEO and editor of her site and book line and has a networth of 15 Millions Dollars.

Catherine and David Cook

At only fifteen and seventeen years respectively, Catherine and David Cook came up with the social networking site, My Yearbook in 2005. The site has over 5 million users and has survived the Facebook domination.

My Yearbook has a net worth of over 20 million dollars whereas this brother and sister duo have a combined net worth of 10 million dollars.

Tyler Dikman

When the internet was still picking up, Tyler Dikman who was only 15 years old founded Cooltronics in the year 2000. Cooltronics’ main purpose was to provide lessons to computer and internet users on how to get rid of computer viruses and how to upgrade your home PC. Subscriptions and advertising brought in the dollars for this lucky little man.

Tyler Dikman is currently valued to be worth 3.7 million dollars.

Farrah Gray

Farrah Gray started selling body lotion at the age of 6. At 13 years old he founded Farr-Out Food which in a period of one year had received food orders of over 1.5 million dollars making him a millionaire at 14.

Farrah Gray is the youngest person to have a Wall Street office and is estimated to be worth 20 million dollars.

Article By Jesse Hopkins | Addicted2Success.com

- See more at: http://addicted2success.com/success-advice/the-top-10-entrepreneur-teenagers-who-made-millions/#sthash.AKAD4Abs.dpuf