There are tons of lists telling you all your alternatives for everything you need to be doing in your business. I’m a developer, so the focus will be on that alternative, but if you’re a designer you should still be able to adopt the ideas here. So let’s cut to the chase and look at what tools you might need:
- Development environment: Being a “Web Entrepreneur”™ in my book implies that you’re either a designer or developer, targeting the web. No matter what, you need either Adobe Creative Suite or some development environment. I’m using Eclipse with various plug-ins. If possible, both is probably the best – being able to cross over between the two worlds is priceless (to you – for your customer it’s your decision
). - Communications: You cannot (as you probably know) do business without proper communications. Get your own domain name, and have a e-mail account. Set it up in Thunderbird, with your choise of plug-ins. Get a business phone – a prepaid cell, if needed. That way – you can leave your work at work.
- Issue tracker or project manager: No matter what kind of work you’re doing, you are going to need some tool to keep track. My weapon of choise: FogBugz. There are many others, though, and it often boils down to personal preferences.
- A good workspace: Don’t underestimate the efficiency improvements of having a good place to work. If you enjoy visiting coffe shops – cool, bring your laptop with you. But you still want to have a good HQ, where you can sit for hours and forget all about the time.
- Source code control: Designers, sorry – you probably have some similar tools. But developers know what I’m talking about. You need a place to commit your code when you’re doing changes. It’s called backup. Even if you’re a one-man-shop, this is still good to keep track of changes, and to be able to go back when something goes wrong. Apple’s Time Machine is a Mac Source control, if you’d like. My suggestion: This is your backup database – of course not placed at your home server. Personal preference: SVN, but there are plenty of others.
- Budget and Accounting: Yeah, it’s not all that fun, but you’re going to need a simple budget. Set up what you expect to make in revenue, and how you expect to spend that money. If you’re planning to spend more than you need, make sure you know how you are going to cover that loss. During the year, make sure to keep track of how you are doing compared to your target .
- A friends list: Keep a list of friends of your business. Send them regular e-mails, but make sure you ask for their permission before sending anything to them. This doesn’t have to be just possible customers. Get all kinds of people on your list. Vendors, parents, siblings, family, friends, some competitors maybe – all of which could be send your email or web address to potential customers.
- Marketing: That is, marketing in the broadest sense. You might end up just using your friends list. You might order up some business cards, and try to hand them out at conferences. A website must be somewhat mandatory for webpreneurs. But, you need to tell people about your business to make money. It might sound obvious, but at least for programmers we enjoy sitting in a dark basement with Dr. Pepper or Coca Cola besides the screen and code until we fall asleep on the keyboard. Hint: No good.
- Routines: I don’t really care what you say. You’re going to have bugs, customers, emails to answer, phone calls to return, prospect to follow up on and more, and you need to have some sort of structure to take care of this. It doesn’t really matter what kind of system you have – as long as you get things done in a timely fashion. The simplest way is to keep a running list, and go through it once a day. It means you get the advantages of batch processing, and you don’t have to keep people waiting.