A few minutes ago concluded the longest and perhaps greatest tennis match in history. John Isner from the United States and Nicolas Mahut from France just finished an 11 hour marathon at Wimbledon. This match was played over 3 days. The final set was won by Isner 70 – 68. For those not familiar with tennis, that’s 70 games to 68 games. The match broke every record imaginable.
What stands out more than anything for me is the mental and physical commitment and perseverance of these 2 men. Either of them could have given up at anytime, but they were playing to win. I think all of us can take lessons from this in our business lives.
When you are involved in a small business, startup or any venture, things frequently look dire. Will I make the next payroll? Can I afford to subscribe to that mailing service? Will any customers buy what I’m selling? Will a competitor put me out of business? Is this really a good idea for marketing? All of us have these questions, but we need to stay the course and move ahead. If you have a good idea for a business, product or marketing campaign, stick to it and execute. That makes all the difference in the world.
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This is the last in a series of articles on starting up a business using SaaS applications for little or no cost; although I may revisit this at a later date.
In my last post I talked about creating a website. That was the last piece needed as a hub for business and to drive sales and interest. Now I want to summarize what I learned and the results of using SaaS applications to run our business.
Major Applications
These are the 4 major areas that I focused on for our business. The goals were to practice what we preach, since we focus on SaaS applications in our consulting work. Since our business is mobile and geographically dispersed, we needed web-based applications that we could access from anywhere and on different devices. I wanted to see what SaaS applications we could use for little to no money. Turns out that there are a lot of options and what we chose makes sense for our business. Don’t worry about everything, just pick something that works for you. See my previous posts for details. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the fourth in a series of articles on starting up a business using SaaS applications for little or no cost.
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This is the third in a series of articles on starting up a business using SaaS applications for little to no cost.
Collaborating & Sharing
In my last post I talked about email and using a telephone, which are pretty basic things in any business. We all know that businesses run on documents and if I can’t share them with my colleagues, business partners and customers, business will break down. I define documents very broadly; they are containers of information that communicate something to humans. By that definition presentations, spreadsheets, videos and photographs are all documents. I don’t intend to discuss the broad topic of what defines a document here, but I just want to broaden the thinking beyond Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer, iWork Pages or your favorite word processing software. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the second in a series of articles on starting up a business using SaaS applications for little to no cost.
eMail
Now that we got a time and billing system, we needed a communication platform. That makes it sound like something very complicated and fancy, but I’m only referring to email and phone. We had a few goals for email:
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A few minutes ago concluded the longest and perhaps greatest tennis match in history. John Isner from the United States and Nicolas Mahut from France just finished an 11 hour marathon at Wimbledon. This match was played over 3 days. The final set was won by Isner 70 – 68. For those not familiar with tennis, that’s 70 games to 68 games. The match broke every record imaginable.
