In establishing JumpLearn, I’ve learned quite a few things. I know that I have a lot more to learn, but here are a couple things that I thought might be helpful to other entrepreneurs.
1. A business email address = credibility. No one will take you seriously if you’re sending emails from your Gmail or Yahoo account. Getting a domain name is relatively inexpensive (~$10/year) and adding on email capabilities adds on about $10/year. But the credibility you get from sending out emails with a professional-sounding domain name is worth a lot more than 20 bucks.
I used DomainsInSeconds.com, but there are many other sites out there that do the same things. The most popular is probably GoDaddy.com.
2. If you don’t have a website, you don’t have a business. Well, at least that's as far as many potential customers and partners are concerned. If you bought a domain name in order to get an email address for your company, then you’re all set. Now you just have to build a webpage. Even if you have absolutely no background in HTML or web design, there are free services that will let you start with a template that already looks pretty good. Then you can just drag and drop content to create your site. WordPress.com is quite popular, especially for bloggers, but I found that it was difficult to create a professional-looking business website by myself. I really liked Weebly.com. It was simple to use and I had the first version of the site up in a couple hours. I did get some input from a friend who’s a graphic designer and I spent several more hours making it look a little less like the generic templates. But being able to just get a preliminary version up is a significant step in starting a business. Down the road, you will probably want to invest in hiring a web designer, but when you’re just starting it’s nice to have some sort of web presence.
What suggestions do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
1. A business email address = credibility. No one will take you seriously if you’re sending emails from your Gmail or Yahoo account. Getting a domain name is relatively inexpensive (~$10/year) and adding on email capabilities adds on about $10/year. But the credibility you get from sending out emails with a professional-sounding domain name is worth a lot more than 20 bucks.
I used DomainsInSeconds.com, but there are many other sites out there that do the same things. The most popular is probably GoDaddy.com.
2. If you don’t have a website, you don’t have a business. Well, at least that's as far as many potential customers and partners are concerned. If you bought a domain name in order to get an email address for your company, then you’re all set. Now you just have to build a webpage. Even if you have absolutely no background in HTML or web design, there are free services that will let you start with a template that already looks pretty good. Then you can just drag and drop content to create your site. WordPress.com is quite popular, especially for bloggers, but I found that it was difficult to create a professional-looking business website by myself. I really liked Weebly.com. It was simple to use and I had the first version of the site up in a couple hours. I did get some input from a friend who’s a graphic designer and I spent several more hours making it look a little less like the generic templates. But being able to just get a preliminary version up is a significant step in starting a business. Down the road, you will probably want to invest in hiring a web designer, but when you’re just starting it’s nice to have some sort of web presence.
What suggestions do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
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