Don't let a bad forecast get you down, start a business for free!

Challenge this week: create a tech stack to run the business fo’ free. Total transparency, some things do have charges, just not until a sale is made, so it’s free until you make money.

First let’s sketch out what we will need, the scope of what we will manage on a freemium model.

• 1-5 people - Let’s predict we are able to scale to a couple of employees or contractors before we need to upgrade

• This system could work whether you’re all in an office together or remote

• We will plan to manage leads, projects, team communication, marketing, a little brand cohesiveness, accounting, and build our internet real estate.

CRM

Very few businesses wouldn’t benefit from a CRM. Staying on top of leads, and their data for analyzing conversation rates, locations, follow-ups etc. Exclusionary businesses are likely very transactional (fast food). At this time, I would opt for the free tier of Hubspot; it’s simple but easy enough to use with 1 of 5 free zaps from Zapier to connect to other systems if needed. It’s dominate enough that it works with just about everything and will scale nicely. Depending on business and volumes, you may outgrow the free tier quickly. Hard to say.

It also comes with a free landing-page, that you can use to collect leads, which may help considering we are doing this all for free and therefore don’t have a budget yet for a website.

If you are screening leads for product market fit, I would skip using Hubspot’s native form and instead use a typeform so that you can present one question at a time (shorter forms convert better and other form tips). The free version gives you 10 free a month, which means you could run out quickly, but if you making sales.. then you know to upgrade, if not change the method of intake.

Landing Pages/ Website

On that note, I would start building an ecosystem with a Facebook page for hours and social connections and start building a blog on WordPress, which offers good SEO that can be boosted with a free Yoast SEO plugin. When you upgrade to paid hosting and add a custom domain, be sure to tell google you moved and where to.

With all this in place, we are able to collect and track leads, build some SEO, or at least start marketing where people can digitally find us.

Marketing

Which leads us to how are the people finding us?? Word of mouth. You are going to tell literally everyone you know. And then tell them again in person when you see them. And probably again by email a little while later and they will definitely see it on your social media.

Plus, you’ll make a dedicated social media on the right platform for your target customer and ask everyone to share it. Because friends help friends. At least once, don’t wear them out though.

If someone isn’t aware of what you got going on, you’re not doing it right.

Then, Canva has our back for making a quick and dirty brand. Don’t make this complicated, a ridiculous number of brands use Helvetica for their brand font. Other popular fonts are Slab Serif, Garamond, Bodoni, and Didot. Start simple, get some customers and then evolve. It’s more organic, you will be able to tailor your brand to your market, to start, keep it two 2 fonts, 2 colors, and a shape.

Store/Products/Payments

This is all well and dandy… but what if we have products we need to get out? And how are we getting paid??

There are so many great options now that a quick search or two and you will find many ways to get products listed for free. Gumroad, Stan, Weebly, and Lemon Squeezy, just to name a few.

I think I would be starting on Lemon Squeezy because I think it will come across as the most professional, even without a custom domain, and can handle digital, subscription, and e-commerce product types.

If you just need a payment processor, Square, Stripe, PayPal, or Venmo are also options.

Management

Right, so, now we are marketing, collecting leads, building SEO, making products, and collecting payments… how in the af are we managing this zoo?

This part is probably the most tricky because lots of software in this space will give a single seat for free but charge for multiple. This means as a solopreneur, you’re golden: Trello, Notion, Taskade, Airtable, Confluence; lots of productivity software has free tiers for one.

But there are some gems out there, which have limited versions and work for teams… Asana and Slack. They scale well together, and like Hubspot, they are market dominators. They can also be shared with people so that clients can see progress.

Accounting

Last but not least… counting the dollars in and dollars out. Arguably the most crucial part of the whole matrix— are we making money?

This has to be my secret fetish. I should have gone into accounting, honestly. Nothing gets me like paying with accounting software (I'm such a geek), but here we are.

My new favorite toy is Gnucash. It’s free, full-suite accounting software. It’s clunky, ugly, and looks like accounting software should. This thing took me straight back to 1999 and icq (uh oh!) iykyk.

You can have multiple “companies.” It works for personal or professional use, and you can manage customers, vendors, P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, and even cool graphs—all free.

If I had a wish list, it would include keyboard shortcuts, the ability to pin reports, and the ability to find things with fewer clicks… But it’s free so, like I’ll take my lumps. You know?

Funnily enough, it’s probably still one of my all-time favorite accounting programs. Turns out, simple is best.

There are times when a dupe will do, and then there are times when you should just go all in on the version that simply works.

Hopefully, you have people (or the internet) to do some research, get some context, and make the proper selection for your circumstances.

The number of variables to consider is what differentiates the winners. How does one guy do something seemingly out of thin air and others cannot?

Judgement.

Decision-making, knowing when to move fast, or stop and consider. Knowing what things need money and which need time, then changing when the situation changes.

Judgment and timing make winners. Like recognizing when cheap will end up being expensive— or not.

When you cannot solve your problems with money (or any other constraint), suddenly, you need creativity.

Even with free apps… how you use them, connect them, and integrate them is specific (read: valuable) knowledge.

The process of building systems, managing customers, communications, marketing, employees, vendors, and whoever else you work with is what running a business is. There is no “one” way.

Every business may operate to common results (sales, revenue, profit, EBITDA, etc.), but how they get those results, derive the data, ensure data integrity, timeliness, and thoroughness… well, that is the magic.

And if everyone could do it…