While some business find migrating to the cloud a cinch, others are struggling with it. And yet another set—startups—are born every day, in the cloud, and they’re maturing in the cloud.
Starting a business, because so many basic administrative services about running a business is hosted and accessible via web browsers, is so much easier these days. Startups used to start in the garage. Now they literally start online—among minds, funded with credit cards.
All you really need is an idea and a laptop—if even that. College students have an advantage; they have all of that IT at their disposal: the college network for internet access; the computer lab for computing resources, proprietary and commercial software development tools, as well as open source tools of course—sometimes even access to super-computers for startups that attempt to do big things in science and research.
And so, while enterprises and businesses from yesteryear struggle with what outsourcing operations to the cloud actually means longer term, startups are just doing it, because they don’t know of anything else: they were born and raised in the cloud.
Here are a number of cloud services that can help you get going, in terms of starting and booting up your business:
LegalZoom: incorporate your business in any state in the U.S. Send them the requirements, and for a few hundred dollars, you’ve got a legal entity under which you can hire employees, pay taxes, qualify for government incentives, etc.
Stamps.com: often times, those legal documents, they’re required to pass through the U.S. Postal Service, in order to be considered legit. Set up a Stamps.com account, and not only can you print official USPS postage directly onto documents and envelopes, but you can download plug-ins for popular office productivity suites, such as Microsoft Office, and incorporate postage directly onto various types of documents, labels, etc.
Quickbooksonline: store your accounting in the cloud. Why not? It’d be a huge loss for you to lose your company’s books just ‘cause an airliner misplaced your luggage where your laptop and only copy of your accounting was saved. Store it online, but also, grant your CPA access online as well. Create special user accounts for CPAs, employees, etc.
oDesk, Elance and other job sites: don’t have a CPA? Find one online! There are a ton of job sites out there, but many actually officiate contract signing, working agreements that are legally binding in the States, Canada, Europe, etc, such as oDesk (which is headquartered in the California), and Elance. oDesk and Elance are more than classified sites; they administer contracts and agreements between the parties, and settle disagreements as well, on top of facilitating payments between parties. Hire software engineers and other talents through these sites as well, to help see your new business idea through to fruition.
And then there’s all of the obvious stuff, like using Google Apps for productivity and collaboration, Skype for meetings and interviews with people you work with but have never personally met, and Dropbox for Teams for sharing networked resources in a way that is super familiar to the Windows operating system.
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