GUIDES TO GETTING STARTED
- Entrepreneur Magazine’s Startup Kits (entrepreneur.com/toolkit)
There are kits for everything from starting a restaurant to a consulting firm, complete with articles, guides, marketing tips, and more.
- eHow’s Introduction to Entrepreneurship
(http://www.ehow.com/topic_3173_introduction-entrepreneurship.html)
They have hundreds of thousands of great articles, including a strong set of guides and resources for how to open a business, how to incorporate, raising money, and bookkeeping.
- About.com’s Starting a Business Hub
(http://entrepreneurs.about.com/od/gettingstarted/Starting_a_Business.htm)
They’ve curated some of their best content for starting a business, including checklists, a small business startup kit, and detailed articles on naming and calculating the cost of your startup.
- Library of Congress’ Entrepreneur’s Reference Guide
(http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/guide/guide2/)
The Library of Congress also lists a lot of other great books that are updated yearly. It covers practically every topic related to starting a small business.
IDEA INSPIRATIONS
- Vator.tv (www.vator.tv)
This is a place where entrepreneurs can upload short video pitches about their startup. You can also follow industry news and specific companies.
- Alltop Startups (startups.alltop.com)
They have a great list of blogs and news websites dedicated to the subject.
WEB APPS FOR STARTUPS
- Evernote (evernote.com)
Evernote helps you remember everything. It collects information in front of the computer screen or on-the-go.
- Zoho (zoho.com)
It is a suite of online collaboration tools. It includes email, spreadsheets, wiki, chat, customer relationship management, and web conferencing.
- PBWorks (pbworks.com)
It is a wiki, a collaboration tool, document manager, and project management tool.
- FreshBooks (freshbooks.com)
One of the best to use to track invoices, teams, and payments.
SOCIAL MEDIA FOR STARTUP SUCCESS
- Plaxo (plaxo.com)
This acts as a digital address book that efficiently organizes everyone you meet. It integrates with Outllook, Thunderbird, and the Mac OS X Address Book to make importing contacts a snap.
- LinkedIn (linkedin.com)
It is the world’s most popular business social network. Its business features, especially those connecting you to friends of friends, are unmatched, and with over 50 million users, it is a social media tool you need to be using constantly.
RAISING MONEY
- Introduction to Venture Capital
(http://www.slideshare.net/pricew/introduction-to-venture-capital)
If you’re clueless about how venture capital works (most people are), this short presentation by Will Price, former venture capitalist and the current CEO of Widgetbox, explains all of the basics.
- The Funded (thefunded.com)
This entrepreneurship community is focused on helping you raise money by giving you ratings and inside details of the practices of countless venture capital and angel investor funds. The information, once you’re in, is invaluable to choosing the firm that will help propel your business to the next level.
- How to Fund a Startup
(http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html)
This guide by Y Combinator co-founder and early-stage investor Paul Graham is shockingly detailed on the different ways to raise money, the disadvantages of each approach, how venture capital firms operate, and the reality of bringing investors into your company.
SOCIAL COMMUNITIES FOR STARTUPS
- StartupNation (startupnation.com)
This startup community network has extensive and active forums, useful knowledge hubs, community groups, and plenty more.
- Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com)
With Hacker News, users add relevant and interesting stories on the topics of programming and startup entrepreneurship and consistently hold thought-provoking discussions. It’s an incredible place for insight and advice on startups.
- Young Entrepreneur (youngentrepreneur.com)
Focused around discussion forums, Young Entrepreneur is a great place to ask any startup question on your mind or just to read the over hundreds of thousands of posts made over the years on the site.
- PartnerUp (partnerup.com)
This is a community that really focuses on one thing: helping you find business partners. PartnerUp is a community ideal for finding and networking with people that will shore up your weaknesses and help you answer those nagging questions about the partnership side of business.