Finally getting serious about turning your hobby into a side business? Dozens of free and cheap do-it-yourself tools make setting up a professional virtual storefront easy.
Photo by intenteffect.
Now that you've paid your income taxes, you want to turn your nights and weekends into an extra income stream (and business expenditures into tax deductions). With the recession in full swing and pink slips getting handed out at the job, now's a great time to take the leap and set up shop on your own. Whether you're selling t-shirts, building the next great webapp, or contracting your brilliance out to clients, several handy tools can offer small biz services you need for free or cheap. Let's take a look.
Get Physical
You may be running your side business out of your home, but you can still get yourself a separate business address without actually leasing an office. Rent a private mailbox somewhere near your home for your business correspondence. While a PMB won't be free, it's pretty cheap. Mine costs over $300 a year, just about a buck a day. This separate address gives you the ability to publish your business address without worrying that some nut is going to show up on your front lawn, or that you'll have to change your business AND personal address if you move across town. If you've got a day job and won't be home to answer the doorbell when FedEx shows up, or you have to ship packages often, your private mailbox will really come in handy. I've got one at a local Mailboxes, Etc, and "my guy" there helps me ship material, make copies, send faxes—and when I'm on vacation, I know he's there signing for incoming packages, and calling me when I've got a priority overnight envelope waiting.
Just like you'll publish your business address on your cards and web site, you'll also want a separate phone number for your side or small business. I was lucky enough to get in early on a free (but invite-only) Google Voice number that lets you set up custom greetings for customers and forward business calls to my cell phone during business hours. Many voice over IP services offer similar features that let you set up filters to separate business and personal calls so your customers don't get your personal voicemail greeting.
In the age of email, faxing is a pretty antiquated way to exchange documents. Still, if a customer wants to fax you something, use a free-to-cheap service like eFax to get faxes digitally to your email inbox. Photo by turtlemom4bacon.
Make Your One Essential Hire: An Accountant
Most side businesses want to avoid hiring a lawyer unless absolutely necessary because, well, attorneys are expensive. However, out of the gate, you at least want to have a good accountant. Especially when you're first getting started, an accountant can answer questions like "Should I found an LLC or an S-Corp?" and help you figure out how your business will affect your taxes. In some areas (like here in San Diego), there's a yearly city tax for running a business and a local business registry (which I had no idea existed when I moved here). Your accountant will be able to answer finance-related questions and help you deal with all those annoying details of just getting set up.
Establish Your Business Presence Online (and Off)
Now that you've got yourself a name, address, phone number, and accountant, it's time to get down to business. Consult with your accountant about what type of business you should found (or if you should just stick to a sole proprietorship) and get to filing the paperwork. Tools like previously mentioned MyCorporation can help you found your company; otherwise a good accountant can help you do the paperwork as well. Make sure you talk over what you need and how the business entity will affect your finances before you make your move.
These days no business is in business until it's got a web site. Register your company's domain name using a reliable registrar (and that business address you set up). After their awful Super Bowl ad I got tired of popular registrar GoDaddy's annoying upsells and low-class marketing and switched over to NameCheap; I've also had a good experience using Dotster. If you're going to spring for web hosting, your host may offer domain registration as well. (Adam and I both like DreamHost.) However, if your company's web site is a straight-up brochure or simple blog, there are many ways to host your business domain name with free apps.
You may also want to claim your business name on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and unlike domain registration, that's free. Twitter's a super-easy way to distribute short bits of news about your business, and on Facebook you can easily set up a business page for connecting with your customers and letting them know what you're offering.
Distribute Your Goods
While what you need to distribute goods and services depends on what you're selling, there are more specialist services to set up your storefront than eBay. If you've got t-shirts or mugs you want CafePress, self-publishing your book you want Lulu, selling your crafts you want Etsy. Even if your business involves recommending things like books and movies, you'll want to set up an Amazon Associate account to earn referral payments. (Got a storefront somewhere I didn't mention above? Post it in the comments.)
Wrangle Your Paperwork
Paperwork like contracts, invoices, taxes, business cards, and bills are an inevitable reality of running a business, but there are a few ways to reduce the occurrence of dead trees in your venture. In lieu of faxing or filing in manila envelopes, I'm still in love with my ScanSnap document scanner for turning receipts and contracts into PDFs instantly. For invoicing clients, the excellent Blinksale is an inexpensive and easy way to track what's gone out and what's coming in. (Plus their invoices look a lot better than that Microsoft Word template you've been using.) Freelancers tracking billable hours should check out Harvest for time-tracking and invoicing capabilities as well. Finally, for nifty custom business cards, check out Moo.com's offering.
Manage Your Customers
Finally, once your business is up and running you want easy ways to stay in touch with and help out your customers. At Lifehacker we use Get Satisfaction to manage reader troubles and bug reports; here's our support forum there. For a more tech-savvy audience, a regular mailing list at Google Groups can suffice; that's what I'm using to communicate with users of my Better Firefox extensions. To track client leads and manage your customer contact list, check out 37 Signals' Highrise.
More from the Twitter Front Line
As far as small business owners go, I'm pretty green, so this morning I asked my more experienced Twitter followers what must-have app or service helps run their side or small business. Here's a sampling of what I heard back:
@daftviking: "Freshbooks is one of my must-have svcs (I'm just a nerd, not good with accounting)" (Editor: Several others mentioned Freshbooks for accounting as well)
@mthology: "I know there's Skype and Google Voice, but I've been using Gizmo5 to provide a business phone # as well as VM sent to my email."
@lesterg: "Lately Google Docs used as project status sites for clients. Clients can access from anywhere."
@jlewsader: "must-have app or service help run your side/small biz? Google Voice and Zoho
Adobe PDF Writer. I use it to sign contracts. Faxing offends my sensibilities"
@howtogeek: "Must have small biz app? Basecamp and Gmail Apps"
@jojm: "Our small "virtual" software company relies on IRC , Email, Skype, and Google Docs - in that order - for communication."
@sethclifford: "Couldn't function without Basecamp. Didn't have it until recently, and absolutely loving it for organizing, communication."
@smartgoat: "We've started using Mechanical Turk for data entry on one of our sites. It's been a huge time saver."
@stevenpaulr: "evernote and google calendar. That's pretty much my entire scheduling/billing system right there."
What apps run your small business depends a whole lot on what your need. What must-have apps run your side or small business? Share the love by posting them up in the comments.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's founding editor, loves running a small biz on great apps. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday (except today, because it's Friday) on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.