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10 Early Stage Tools Every Bootstrapping Entrepreneur Needs

10 Early Stage Tools Every Bootstrapping Entrepreneur Needs

by | Apr 26, 2018 | Startups

As a bootstrapping entrepreneur, you might not have the money of a venture-backed startup, but you still need to compete with them and match their pace.

It’s not uncommon for a first-time founder to build out a prototype while holding a day job and fund it with personal savings; however, just because you’re bootstrapping that doesn’t mean you need to be cheap – you just need to be smart about how you use your resources to get the most value for your dollars.

To help you get started, I’ve compiled a list of affordable tools I used when bootstrapping two of my own businesses.

Startup Formation

Ideally, you’ll be able to test and validate your ideas before forming a company, but if your project takes off quickly, you’ll have to tackle the legal side of it sooner than later. If you have multiple co-founders, and if building your minimum viable product (MVP) demands significant resources, it might make sense to address your basic legal needs early on.

1. LegalZoom to Form Your Company

Law firms are expensive – LegalZoom isn’t. You might first need to consult a lawyer (or the internet) to educate yourself, but once you know what you need, you can file forms at LegalZoom for a fraction of the cost of hiring a law firm.

LegalZoom offers quick, top-quality legal services and documents at budget prices. From incorporating your business to filing trademarks and other legal forms, they’re a useful resource for every bootstrapping entrepreneur.

Make sure that when you incorporate your startup, you pay close attention to what decisions are permanent (like the location of your company), and what can be changed later (like the name of your company). A bad decision here can come back to haunt you down the line. For example, if you plan to raise funds in the future, you might be better off incorporating in Delaware, a place many venture capitalists will find appealing, and not in New York or California.

2. UpCounsel to Structure Your Legal Agreements

Another tool you might want to check out in this stage is UpCounsel – think of it like Elance but for legal projects. It has a great library of free agreement templates and legal documents that you can download and customize to fit your business needs.

You can also hire an attorney through the platform and have custom legal agreements created to fit your exact specifications for a reasonable fee. Whether it’s your website’s terms of service or privacy policy, or key legal documents such as founder agreements or non-disclosure agreements, UpCounsel has it all. You’ll unlock the best savings when you hire an attorney that specializes in your particular need (for example, custom terms of service or privacy policy documents), not when you hire one for a variety of needs.

Day-to-day Operations

Once your business is formed and you get down to work, these two tools will make your daily activities a lot easier.

3. Trello for Task Management

There are many applications out there to help you manage tasks and collaborate with your team, but I’m a fan of Trello. This simple and easy-to-use suite tool helps you keep all of your team’s tasks organized in custom columns you can use to indicate task progress. Trello’s free plan is an amazing value.

If you are building a technology product and your team is small, say just you and a developer, consider indulging your developer should they request to track work in Git. It’s simple to do and it works; plus, it will make your developer happy.

4. GoDaddy Bookkeeping to Organize Your Books

GoDaddy Bookkeeping (formerly known as Outright) makes bookkeeping simple. It organizes all of your finances in one place without requiring hours of data entry or tracking down receipts.

Accounting is important, but it can be a hassle. You don’t want to waste your valuable runway time worrying about getting the books sorted out. The trick is to do it right from the start by creating a business checking account and obtaining a business credit card for ALL of your business expenses, and then letting the software do the rest.

Simply tag and categorize your expenses throughout the year, and when tax season comes around, all you’ll need to do is take the profit and loss statements to your accountant to file the taxes. Bookkeeping doesn’t have to be hard.

Building Your MVP

The real work starts when you build your MVP. The following are essential for validating your idea or even launching your product.

5. WordPress for Website Hosting

When you’re building your MVP, you need to act fast. Many startups forget this when it comes to their website, and they instead overbuild, scale prematurely and waste too much time perfecting it for an idea that hasn’t yet been validated.

Don’t make this mistake. Use the tool that gets the job done with minimal effort: WordPress. With it, you can easily create your coming soon page and your first content pages. It isn’t just for blogs – you can configure it to power all of your content or marketing pages in addition to a blog, which is exactly what we’ve done at BigMailer.io using the premium Divi theme from Elegant Themes. There’s a good reason WordPress powers more than 25% of the websites on the internet – it’s inexpensive, easy-to-use and just works.

6. 99Designs for Basic Designs

Designing your logos and other visuals doesn’t need to be expensive. 99Designs offers fantastic full-range design services at affordable prices. From free logo templates to $99 logos to complete website designs for under $1000, it’s got all of your basic design needs covered.

So long as you have a solid idea about what you’re looking for and are able to provide clear instructions for it, you’ll be pleased with the outcome.

7. Stripe or PayPal to Collect Payments

Gone are the days of needing heavy development to implement a checkout solution. With Stripe, you can simply drop a piece of JavaScript code into your web application and configure all of your business logic on the Stripe website without needing a developer to manage application settings (product price points, discounts, etc.).

Once Stripe has been set up, you can use financial analytics tools to pull and present data from it in a way that’s easy to analyze and track. For subscription-only startups I highly recommend ProfitWell. It’s much more startup friendly than its competitors but it comes with limitations – you can’t track non-subscription revenue and for that I recommend a more robust ChartMogul with a generous free tier for businesses with less than $10k MRR. 

PayPal is a widely recognized and trusted payment option used by some well-established brands (like AppSumo) and can help you increase conversion rates for some audiences. When you’re still testing your MVP – especially if your product is business-to-consumer (B2C) or targets international customers – consider adding a “Checkout with PayPal” button to your test pricing page. On my last B2C business, we AB tested checkout pages with and without PayPal as a payment option, and the version with PayPal produced 10% more in sales.

Getting Traction

Once you’ve got that MVP up and running, it’s time to get some customers.

8. Google Analytics to Track and Learn

Building a startup is all about fast learning, and Google Analytics is the perfect tool to help you do it. You NEED to track how well you’re doing, and this tool lets you do it for free. Just drop a small piece of code onto your site, and you’ll get powerful tracking, data, analysis and enterprise quality reporting.

Make sure you define the conversion goals (sign-ups, registrations, payment page views) that will help you see how well your MVP is performing. Start collecting this data early on so you can accurately track whether each change you make brings you closer to success. Check out this guide for a closer look at conversion tracking.

In the early stages, you might not have enough traffic yet to be statistically significant. If this is the case, look for qualitative data (e.g., customer feedback), not quantitative data, to drive decisions until your data set grows big enough to be useful.

9. Google AdWords to Drive Traffic

Now, it’s time to get prospects to visit your site. If they don’t come on their own, you can use Google AdWords to drive traffic to your MVP.

For as little as $10 dollars a day, you could drive enough traffic to your website to help you quickly validate your idea. Better still, Google AdWords usually offers a free $100-150 ad spend bonus for new accounts – just sign up and wait for a promotional email.

Driving traffic with Google AdWords is one of the easiest ways to get your MVP in front of your target audience, so don’t overlook it.

10. Email Collection and Email Marketing

Once you have your website up, make sure to begin collecting email addresses immediately, even if all you have is a landing page and no product. 

As you begin to receive emails from early adopters and beta testers, be sure you keep in touch with them by providing updates and usage tips. Talking with prospective customers is one of the most powerful ways to get the crucial feedback you need to improve your product. Every email you send is a chance to ask about features, functionality and what your audience really cares about.

If you plan to spend a long time building out your MVP in private beta, consider an email marketing platform with a good free tier so you don’t pay just for storing your contacts or sending minimal emails with no positive return on investment.

Many email providers offer free tiers, but keep an eye on your growth rate and future cost, and consider taking advantage of product pricing that scales well.

Try Them Out

So there you have it. These are the tools that brought me success when bootstrapping two of my own businesses, and I hope they help improve the chances of success for your startup as well. They’re effective and affordable, which is great for any bootstrapping entrepreneur.

Good luck and happy bootstrapping!

BigMailer Adds Transactional Email Support

BigMailer Adds Transactional Email Support

by | Mar 12, 2018 | Announcements

Whew… we were a little behind the timeline we committed to on our product roadmap, but support for transactional emails is now live!. You can now add and manage your transactional emails, in addition to marketing (bulk) and automation campaigns (aka drip or email sequences) in BigMailer, included in all plans at no additional cost.

Using SendGrid for your transactional emails now? Here is a SendGrid vs. BigMailer comparison.

How to use BigMailer transactional email campaigns:

  1. Use BigMailer for standalone transactional emails triggered within your application and store/manage your transactional email templates on BigMailer platform – this allows marketers to tweak CTA and content of those emails without getting developers involved.
  2. Use your defined transactional emails as triggers in automated/drip sequences.
  3. Automatically feed your transactional email contacts into appropriate lists for use in your marketing/bulk campaign. This is a benefit of managing your transactional and marketing/bulk emails on the same platform.

EXAMPLE USE. Say you have an email collection form on your blog or site to get users to subscribe to your newsletter that goes into a list named “Newsletter Signup”. Once you setup a transactional email contacts to go into your “Regi” list or possibly “Paid Customers” you can segment your marketing campaigns based on those lists.

How to setup transactional email with BigMailer:

  1. Click on your username in site header (top right cornet), then select “Account” in the dropdown.
  2. Select “API” tab in the page navigation, you will see your API key 
  3. Select “Campaigns” in the site header navigation, then go to “Transactional” tab and click “Create Campaign button” 
  4. Define all the fields for a campaign, save.
  5. Refer to API documentation to add email triggers to your application.

We will be expanding our APIs and documentation in the coming weeks and months, but if there is some feature you are looking for please don’t hesitate to reach out.

BigMailer adds Drip Email Campaigns

BigMailer adds Drip Email Campaigns

by | Jan 31, 2018 | Announcements

The wait is over! You can now add and manage your marketing automation campaigns (aka drip or email sequences) in BigMailer, included in all plans at no additional cost.

Examples of Automated Email (Drip) Campaigns

What kind of emails can you add? Below is a list of examples for an e-commerce site or a membership-based online product. If the customer signed up for a newsletter you can simply tell them what to expect, e.g. how often you send updates and a promise to keep content valuable and interesting, or send them a survey on what topics interest them or who they are.

1. Welcome Email (Account/Regi Confirmation).

Condition for trigger: Email is added to a list (1st email in your sequence).

This one is a must for email marketers. This is your opportunity to re-engage the user but also tell them about major features they can explore, highlight next steps for taking advantage of their new account, or point them to articles on product usage tips.

2. Got Questions? Can we help you?

Condition for trigger: 1-7 days after welcome email (step 2 in a sequence).

Use this email to offer helpful content or remind user how to get assistance with any issues they might be having, also to highlight methods for support (chat, email, phone).

3. Ready to subscribe/upgrade? / Special Offer

Condition for trigger: 3-30 days after Step 1 or Step 2 + not in your subscriber list (you should have a list for your paid subscribers).

This is your sale email and a chance to convert your prospects or users on free accounts into paid customers. It’s common to see a discount offer in this type of email (10-20% forever or off first 1-3 months), as an incentive to upgrade during a fixed timeframe (today only or in the next X days), but you can simply remind the user about all the benefits of a paid product and highlight its value to the user. Remember, great products save their users either time or money or both.

Checkout BigMailer product roadmap to see what other features we are working on and help us decide on what we should move up the list.

Happy Automation!

 

Why You Should Use BigMailer as Your Email Marketing Software

Why You Should Use BigMailer as Your Email Marketing Software

by | Aug 18, 2017 | Announcements

With so companies offering email marketing solutions these days, it can be difficult deciding which one will provide you with the most complete service at the best value.

What makes BigMailer an excellent choice? To begin with, we offer a startup-friendly free tier (<5,000 contacts free), affordable pricing that’s friendly for scaling up ($1 per 1,000 contacts) and agency friendly built-in brand and user management. But wait! There’s so much more.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the features that we think makes BigMailer an attractive option for many businesses.

1. One Platform for Bulk, Automated and Transactional Emails

Using different providers for your bulk (MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, AWeber) and transactional (SendGrid, MailGun) campaigns is so 2009. Not only are you paying more for different providers to engage with the same list, you’re making more work for yourself by managing and syncing bounce and unsubscribe data and analyzing subscriber engagement. That, and your transactional emails shouldn’t be managed in the software or website code by developers – they should be a part of your integrated marketing efforts.

BigMailer allows you to manage all of your email campaign types on a single platform, which means that you have only one price point and your engagement data is centralized. By having a unified view of how customers engage with your brand, you can easily initiate email sequences based on transactional email activity. A good example of this is when a user creates a member account or starts a free trial on a website. The back-end triggers a welcome email with next steps and usage tips and an email sequence you’ve defined is then initiated based on the transactional email.

2. Opt-in Interest Management

Most market leaders don’t offer the option to manage multiple, interest-based unsubscribe pages, and those that do (Campaign Monitor and AWeber, for example) price it as a multiplier of their typical rate and the number of opt-in interests you want to manage. Pricey! On BigMailer, you can use as many interests for your opt-in management as you want, at no additional cost.

What does a BigMailer unsubscribe page look like with multiple interests? Below is a screenshot of a client’s subscription preferences page.

Example: unsubscribe page with preferences format

Why is this important? Instead of opting out of all communications from your brand, interest-based unsubscribe pages allow your customers to unsubscribe only from the emails they don’t want to receive and keep receiving those that they do.

3. Unlimited Custom Sender Configuration

With BigMailer, you can configure an unlimited number of custom senders (e.g., sales@your-brand.com, support@your-brand.com). When your customers receive an email sent via BigMailer, assuming you’ve configured things correctly, they’ll only see the from email address in the header and nothing else that points to your provider.

Email header with custom sender

Email header with custom sender

This can make you as the sender appear more authentic and improve your email deliverability. It also makes any future migrations headache-free because the sender signature is the same.

Header of an email sent via a third-party provider

4. Campaign Segmentation Based on Engagement

While these next two features are offered by some providers, you’ll pay much more to use their platforms. BigMailer offers these features on all plans and is 50-500% less expensive (depending on your list size) than the market leaders.

BigMailer allows you to segment your target audience based on campaign engagement, location and any of the fields in your customer lists (e.g., date joined or member role).

BigMailer segmenting actions – opened, clicked, was sent, not open, did not click, not sent

5. Automatic Geo-location Data Collection

BigMailer automatically collects geo-location data when your contacts perform these actions:

  • Sign up through a BigMailer form
  • Click on any of the links in your campaigns

Since a customer’s IP address is considered personally identifiable information (PII), BigMailer does NOT store it. Instead, we convert it to non-PII data points that we can store, like a customer’s city, state, ZIP code and country. You can then use this data to effectively target your campaigns.

6. No Compliance Departments, No Customers Turned Away

Traditionally, email service providers manage their own servers and infrastructure, which entails monitoring and managing the reputation of a shared server pool. This approach is not only very expensive, but also results in customers being turned away if their lists are determined to be of lower than target quality.

BigMailer uses Amazon servers to send emails while providing an interface to manage campaigns and analyze performance data. This approach is less expensive and allows us to pass the savings on to the consumer. We also require that our customers connect their own Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) accounts to BigMailer. We do this so that others using the platform are never affected by anyone’s bad lists or behavior. This means we have no need for a compliance department to police our customers, freeing up resources that allow us to focus our efforts entirely on making the best email marketing platform available.

7. Two Template Editor Options: Drag and Drop and Classic

While drag and drop email template editors are now largely considered to be standard, not all low-cost platforms (like MailGun) offer them. In fact, many platforms only provide an option for using drag and drop or custom template management, not both.

At BigMailer, we give you both at no extra cost, and our two template editors allow for use of unlimited image hosting. The classic editor allows you to load and edit existing branded templates, either using a simple editor or by changing the HTML code of the template directly. The drag and drop editor allows you to quickly build beautiful mobile-optimized templates. Additionally, you can choose to store and share some templates at the account level, which can then be shared between brands.

drag and drop email template editor

Still not convinced BigMailer is the best choice for your business? There are a bunch of other cool features – built-in brand management, unlimited users with permission levels, list suppression (opt-out data from any campaigns you may have done with your partners/affiliates/vendors), automated pause of campaign with high bounce rate – that we’d be thrilled to discuss with you in greater detail via live chat.

Are there other features you’d like to see in BigMailer? Request them in comments section or via live chat. We appreciate any feedback you have for us.

How to Manage Lists in BigMailer

How to Manage Lists in BigMailer

by | Jan 31, 2017 | Help

BigMailer Lists can be used in a variety of ways, depending on your business needs. You can have unlimited lists at no extra cost in BigMailer – pricing is based on the number of unique contacts stored for a given brand. 

Lists Based on Email Collection Sources

If you are collecting emails from a variety of sources, for example sign up forms on your website’s homepage/articles, member registrations, opt-in on a partner page, or signups during offline events, it might be helpful to define your Lists to reflect your collection sources. You could go very granular (separate blog signups from say homepage or blog) or you could rollup some sources into major groups (on-site, off-site).

BigMailer Lists

Example: Lists for collection sources

This will help you see and understand your engagement stats for each of your lists and get to insights into which collection source may be bringing low-quality or high-quality leads.

Lists as Main Customer Segments

While you can segment your campaigns on any of your data points, it maybe beneficial to define lists based on most commonly used criteria like Members vs. Paid Customers, or segment your customers based on product/service they purchased so you can see engagement stats across those major segments on the main Lists view. Using your main segmenting criteria to define your lists can also help you streamline your campaign setup workflow and lower risk of mistakes (sending an email to a larger than intended audience).

For example, you can have Lists with overlapping records for:

  1. Newsletter signups from the website that is updated via a form on your website
  2. Paying customers that get added via API call when a transaction happens on your website

When you create a bulk campaign, you could choose to include your List for newsletter subscribers, but exclude the List of your paying customers, if you want to send non-paying customers a special offer.

Lists as Both, Sources and Segments

You could actually combine the two methods described above, it just may add some steps to your initial setup for email collection. Just make sure to name your lists in a way that prevents confusion as to what they are and represent, and something that everyone on your team will know how to use.

Lists as Tags for Automation Campaigns

BigMailer Lists are actually implemented in the way many platforms use tags – single record for an email address with a list of Lists they are on stored as a part of the same record.

If you wanted to tag users with their interests, based on the pages they visit or actions performed on your web site you could simply define a List for each interest and then trigger an API call to add your user into the appropriate lists. You could then setup Automation campaigns based on a new email being added to the list, like a product or service recommendation, while still segmenting your target audience on things like non-engagement with your recent campaigns.