

Reduce Your Business Costs With Free Stuff - qhoxie
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/biz/reduce-your-business-costs-with-free-stuff

======
sant0sk1
This is high quality advice, which is refreshing to see in today's blog
economy.

I learned a few things, and the fact that I'm already leveraging some of these
tools made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside =]

------
sokoloff
I have to disagree with some of the thinking here. In my view, TIME is your
most valuable resource, and anything that isn't a core competency you want to
get out with as little investment of time as possible.

TWO DAYS of hacking spent (squandered?) building your own phone system?
Really? Unless you have significant staff, how can that be remotely a
reasonable return vs just using cell phones?

Many of the other suggestions are good ones, but don't get caught in the trap
of "Just because I can do XXX which will save $Y, that I obviously should." If
your core competency has something to do with phones, by all means hack away
on your phone system.

~~~
dabeeeenster
Hi,

I am the author of the article.

I agree that time is valuable, but if you charge yourself out at, say, £600 a
day, and you save 4 grand building a phone switch in 2 days, it's an easy
decision to make. It wasn't time squandered. I save money every time I need to
make a change to the phone list, as I dont have to call out an engineer.

If you are a 2 person company, then there's obviously no point. We built our
phone switch when we moved into our own offices and hired employee number 5,
which I think was about the right time to do it.

------
eru
At last, an article on saving that seems to be actually useful.

------
ciscoriordan
Useful, but they didn't include Google Apps. No need to deal with an SMTP
server, and it's $50/year or free with ads. It's a lot easier to sync
calendars and documents across a team if everyone is using Google Apps.

~~~
mikeryan
I think you're mainly referring to using Google for Mail (as opposed to
running and SMTP server). Actually that's what I'm going to refer to - its the
one argument I have, using Google for mail gives you POP/IMAP and a great web
interface, as well as robust architecture, all built in for cheap/free
-definitely worth it. (Note you can just point your mail to google via DNS and
still control your domain).

------
pibefision
Time is more valuable than anything.

Google Apps = better than any other email solution and free.

Also, please, if your smallbiz cannot aford a Campfire account, come one, what
kind of business are you doing? IRC is not for everybody.

~~~
jamesbritt
" IRC is not for everybody."

What are the down sides to using IRC?

------
okeumeni
Great article, I just bookmarked it, I think every startuper should do the
same. I spend a great deal of my time on how to implement cost effective
solutions, this is a great complement to my goal of running a startup that
build great products for less.

I have witnessed firsthand how money shortage can ruin startup with great
ideas; it’s not pretty.

------
cbrinker
Wow! That article was fantastic! My best bud worked for Asterisk for a while,
so I knew how to get cheap VoIP. Just order that switching line from the
telco.

I didn't even know there was an OSS alternative to VMware/MS Server! Again,
great stuff!

I bookmarked this page and I'm forwarding it to my partners as I write this.

------
aaronjerling
Good article with quite a list of 'free things'. Surprised it missed putting
Skype on your mobile (cell phone) - especially useful for international
collaborations.

------
there
if irc isn't your thing, just install a jabber daemon on that unix server that
is now doing your mail/spam filtering/cacti/etc. add the conferencing
component to it and you'll have real-time group chat just like irc that works
in adium/ichat.

