A while back, our CEO Andreas wrote a nice guest blog post over at The Huffington Post entitled “Small Business Money-Saver: Video, Voice Services That Are Free (Or Very Cheap)“. In the post, Andreas broke down the best voice and video solutions that small to medium sized businesses can use instead of regular (expensive) enterprise solutions.

In this post, we will continue on the same paved path and look at other areas of a business where smart, price efficient web apps can make a big difference in the balance sheet.

Voice and Video: Rebtel and Skype

One thing a bootstrapped startup company seldom has the luxury to do is travel to world on business trips. Thankfully, there are cheaper solutions than getting on a plane, and they’re spelled Skype for video conferencing and Rebtel for cheap international calling from any phone. The latest version of Skype for PC even comes equipped with support for multi-way video, a killer enterprise feature which is free and has recently also been made available for Mac.

Rebtel provides an international calling service that works from any phone, ranging from land lines to the iPhone 4. As opposed to most other VoIP  services, Rebtel uses local numbers to connect your international business calls. If you have local minutes included in your monthly plan from your carrier, you can use Rebtel to talk internationally free of cost.

Replaces: Cisco Unified Videoconferencing and expensive international call rates charged by your carrier

Design: 99designs

Hiring a freelance designer as a consultant or a creative agency to address your aesthetic needs of email CRM, website, stationery and blog theme needs can be an expensive mistake to make.

99designs is site widely considered as the premiere resource for crowd-sourced graphic design. Currently, they have just shy of 100,000 registered designers and connect them with small businesses who need all kinds of design projects done. All you have to do is write brief on what you want to have done, decide how much you are willing to pay and then launch a design contest to which the creatives can submit their proposals.

Replaces: Pricey design consultants and creative agencies

Development: Freelancer and eLance

Development can be an equally as difficult financial hurdle to overcome for an aspiring entrepreneur as design work. If you lack the code writing skills needed to create your first working prototype to show potential venture backers and don’t have a code savvy friend, crowd-sourcing is where you want to go.

Fortunately, there are services such as Freelancer and eLance that provide with all the hacking competence you will ever need. To take one of the two, Freelancer has a network of 2.1 million professionals in a variety of fields and according to themselves, the average cost for a project is just below $200. Even if all your credit cards a maxed out, you will always be able to afford a crowd-sourced solution to your development problem.

Replaces: Hiring expensive (and much sought after) developers

CMS: Wordpress

With the advent of WordPress, commonly known as the largest blog platform in the world, Content Management Systems no longer have to cost you an arm and a leg.
Initially considered a platform for blogging, WordPress has in recent years started to emerge as a popular CMS. Examples of notable companies and media outlets using WordPress for that very purpose range from Spotify to The Wallstreet Journal.

New plugins that offer additional functionality are constantly being developed and made available for free together with the approximately 5000 free templates you can pick and choose from. If you’re not happy with what you find, just head over to 99designs and have someone make one for you for next to nothing.

Replaces: Bitrix Site Manager and all other CMS solutions that cost a fortune

Invoicing: Invoice Machine

Invoice Machine is a powerful, yet simple online-based invoicing tool that lets you create very visually appealing and fully customizable invoices. It’s got multi-language support, making it simple for you to invoice domestic as well as international clients. If you’re a freelancer, Invoice Machine has got a nifty PayPal integration that automatically updates the status of the invoice when it’s been paid. The service also boasts an API, which allows you to hook up your own application with “The Machine’s” functionality. If that wasn’t enough, the guys behind the company are Swedish.

Replaces: Physical accountants and conventional enterprise billing solutions

Office Suite: Google Docs

In recent years, more and more tools that traditionally have been perceived as desktop applications have made their way to the cloud. That has in-turn opened up a completely new range of possibilities for collaborating on projects in real-time, as well as allow you convenient access to your work documents regardless if you’re on your friend’s laptop or your own Smartphone.

Google Docs is probably the best and most well known app of this kind, and boasts a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form and data storage service of up to 1 GB. For free.

Replaces: Microsoft Word Business license

Advisory: Quora

A common occurrence amongst startup companies is to tie people to your company in capacity of various advisory postions. These people’s wisdom and guidance can be indispensable to companies in their infancy, as strategic decisions made in the early stages can of course be crucial for the future. As startups tend not to have very strong liquidity, people accepting these advisory positions are usually compensated with equity. A stake in your business. If you, like many other budding entrepreneurs out there, are reluctant to give away company shares, there is an option, and it’s spelled Quora.

At first glance, Quora might look like your average Q&A site, but if you look deeper you will discover that the real value of the site is in the people who have use it. The majority of Quora users are located in Silicon Valley followed by New York City and predominantly consist of entrepreneurs, creatives, venture capitalists and developers with rock star status, that consistently reply very candidly to questions from their peers.

Claiming that Quora (at least in its current iteration) can replace every traditional advisory position might be pushing it. But, saying that it his the potential of replacing some is definitely not a stretch. Also, it’s completely free.

Replaces: People with advisory positions that you pay with company equity

By: alexander drewniak Tags: 99designs, elance, freelancer, google docs, invoice machine, Links, quora, skype, wordpress