Do you want to start a business? Yes? That’s not incredibly surprising. At the end of the day, unless you are working for yourself, someone is making money off you. This not only suppresses your full potential but also most probably dampens your paycheck. Of course, working for someone may be the safer option, not everyone is a born entrepreneur. However, that should not stop you from taking some things into consideration. There are a lot of things that a startup business could use, which are entirely free, that you might not have thought of.
Online presence
Once you have an idea of what you would like to do, what does any sort of startup business need? Exposure, no matter the business, large or small, established or starting up, exposure is needed. Advertising may not come cheap but there are many ways which will only cost you some of your precious time rather than cutting into your already limited budget. Social media presence in this day and age is very important, it is not only a way to reach out to your customers but also a tool of building a positive image for yourself as an establishment. Let’s take Twitter as an example, being an excellent platform for businesses to post updates on their latest going-ons to their followers. Twitter allows for a nice balance of formality and informality which might be hard to achieve on different platforms where they tend to be a bit more verbose. Twitter keeps it short and sweet with their character limits, making the platform somewhat more concise than most others. Keeping your main posts usually corporate and topical but being a bit more informal and social in the responses is a great way of building up some personality for the company. PR is important if you are trying to leave a good impression on your target audience. Attempt some more humorous posts now and then, even if it might seem out of character at first, someone is bound to tell their friends about “corporate business posting something silly”, or even link it somewhere else. Not to mention the platform’s in-built features, in this case retweeting. After all, social media is all about sharing.
Free hardware
Let’s not kid ourselves, all businesses which actually make an attempt of staying relevant use technology to some extent. Computers are so ingrained into society that trying to fully function without one might seem like an alien concept to some of the younger generations. The thing about technology is, it is not free. Be it computers, other hardware such as printers or scanners or even fax machines, they all cost money. Fortunately for you, phones are such a common items that companies are willing to provide them for free. Issa Asad, a well-known entrepreneur, does more than provide fantastical ways in which you can get free cellular service, he also is the CEO of Q Link Wireless, a company which provides free monthly calling and texting alongside an actual free cell phone. A very useful tool to possess when running a business. Alongside some basic PCs which are very possible to find for insanely low prices when sold as “refurbished”, but this article is about free assets for your startup, not cheap ones, so let us continue. Free PCs and other peripherals such as printers can often be found for free on sites such as Gumtree and Craigslist, the only cost is going to pick them up. They might not be state of the art PCs but for the usual office scenario, chances are you will not need anything more than what they have to offer to take care of emails, some word documents and the occasional spreadsheet.
