Every start-up founder uses free or inexpensive online resources to get his or her company launched. Chadd Bennett of RetroRazor, a Seattle-based company that sells old-fashioned safety razors, provided us with a list of the tools he found to be the most helpful. First up, he recommends a CRM application. “Until recently, we used a Google spreadsheet to keep track of the retailers buying our razors,” Bennett says. “But we just started using a program called Zoho CRM. I chose it because up to three people on each account can use it for free. Plus, it’s established enough that I don’t think it’s going to disappear. We only use it for our retail clients, not for individual customers, because we have hundreds of them and it would take too long to enter their information into the database.”
“Dropbox is a virtual hard drive, but it doesn’t just store your files; it syncs them as well,” Bennett says. “I use it to send files to my video producer. After he edits the video, he saves it to Dropbox and the new version is automatically saved on my computer. Dropbox is free for the first two gigabytes. Now that we’re doing a lot of video editing I’m going up to the paid version, which is 50 gigabytes for $99 a year.”
