FLOSS would be a life saver if only could figure out a @#$% business plan.
It is an amazing time we live in for a person who wants to start their own business. Your technical infrastructure costs have damn near plummeted to zero cost in many regards. Here is what I mean:
- Web presence can be done using Squarespace. It is all point and click, drag and drop to get a decent website.
- Phone Service is even more amazing. Between Skype and Google Voice you can have a phone setup that rivals many medium sized businesses. Then add into this that cellular service has gotten damn cheap and friggin amazing.
- Mobile connectivity is broken out from Phone Service since you no longer need to use your cell phone just for calling. Now that smartphones communicate to the web and have a shit ton of processing power you really can be out of the office and still handling business. Take Sprint’s Evo. Its more powerful then some laptops from a few years ago. And oh wait, you usually don’t do any actual processing on the phone itself instead you use its data connectivity to interface with a host of remote servers.
- Free or pay as you go internet services. Back up you documents to the cloud. Use the cloud for heavy duty computations. Not only do you not have to pay the infrastructure cost for this but you can ramp up or down how much you use these services as your budget allows.
- Open source collabrative software. Git, subversion, Drupal, wikipedia, eGroupware, etc, etc…
- Free office tools. Openoffice, googledocs,KOffice, etc, etc…
- Free operating systems for your hardware. Ubuntu, Android, etc, etc… (And yes Ubuntu is easy enough for anyone to use and install.)
- Free Customer Relation Management software to track your customer interactions.
Literally for a minimal cost you can get a professional grade infrastructure in place for your business. And what kills me about this is I can’t think of a side business to start for the life of me. Here I sit with a college degree, a familarity with technology that would allow me to lower my startup cost and a wife that would help me find the time to do this. And not one damn idea comes to mind. Note that all those things can be used for ANY type of small business. Not just tech related.
Hell, our landscaper who is fixing up our backyard could lower her operating cost by implementing some of them. She lives off of her phone calling and interacting with customers and then writes down notes on whatever piece of paper is handy. This has caused a bit of delay on two occasions. (Both times were understandable.) But with a little training she could be keying in conversation recaps into some free CRM software to track customer conversations. Could be using one of the free office suites to save money. Could use her iphone to snap before and after pictures of our yard and then use one of the many photo sharing sites to display them to potential customers. On and on I could go.
And I wish I was in her shoes. I wish I had a viable business that I was running. But not a damn idea has come to me in the past two years that I have been actively pondering it. The best I had was opening up a sandwich wrap place that also sells smoothies. The location would need to be near enough for the Wal-mart lunch crowd and for the afternoon soccer mom crowd with their kids. But the upfront cost are just too much for me to risk. The other one was a suite of tools for Churches to use. Hosted website, custom smartphone app/mobile interface for communications, automated desktop publishing to the website for announcements, a/v infrastructure for a daily homily to be broadcast, webcam integration for day care facilities, etc, etc… All of these are existing components that just need to be tied together. Turns out that has been done. @#$%@!!!
Aargh!!! My kingdom for a business plan muse.