Have you just started a new business and have no idea what tools are out there to use? Well, many people have asked the same thing and these last few years have brought us some great hosted web applications that serve various purposes like invoicing, accounting, project management, lead generation, email marketing, etc. The only problem is that these applications were usually built by different companies and didn’t talk to each other. This slowly was solved by those companies opening up their API (programming interface) so other applications could integrate. For example, you add a client to a project management system and track time there, it would be great to pull in the client info, project data and import the time data for billing and generating an invoice. You get the picture.
Still there was a problem with so many applications, some integration and no real place to find them. Well five companies founded an coalition called “The Small Business Web” and here are the founding members:
- Michelle Riggen-Ransom of BatchBlue Software
- Sunir Shah of FreshBooks
- Ben Chestnut of Mailchimp
- Sonny Byrd of Shoeboxed
- Paul O’Brien of Outright
Here is what they mission is straight from their web site:
The Small Business Web is a movement to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses. While there are many products available for small business owners on the Web, the approach we’re taking is to use each others APIs to provide a high-level of integration between these applications and create a more seamless experience for our customers.
Pretty cool.
They launched last year at SXSW and now there are like 30 other companies in this coalition. So if you are looking for good low cost applications to power your business and that will integrate with one another in some fashion making your life easier, you can find more info about the small business web and all the companies that are part of it at http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com/
In future posts we will profile the companies in the small business web and talk about how they can help your new business, how they integrate and how that helps you.
