If you are a tech entrepreneur, you would know how difficult it is to get funding with just an idea! Most investors look for a minimum viable product (MVP) with some traction before they consider giving you their money. In this post, we look at how you can do it almost for free.
In this piece, we’ll cover online services that help you launch a product. Therefore, we have intentionally ignored labor costs involved in the development of a product. Developer costs are largely variable and depend on the kind of product being developed. This is also often the work of the co-founders, who work for equity rather than money.
Let’s take a look at some of the services that’ll help you launch your tech product.
GitHub provides a set of tools for students under the GitHub Education Pack, some of which I will include in the discussion below. To register, you need to connect your college email ID with your GitHub account and apply. Approval usually takes a few days.
Domain Name
To build your tech product, you first need a domain. Although you can run on just an IP address if you are an app developer, it is generally advised to register your domain name as soon as you name your application.
Domain names can come in at around $10 a year, unless a discount is going on. Registrars like GoDaddy may also provide the first year for a cheaper price. The GitHub Education Pack provides a .me domain name free of cost from NameCheap for one year.
Business Email
Although there are many options out there for setting up your business email, one really great (ad-free) option is Zoho Email. Under the free plan, it provides you the option of setting up emails for one domain, gives you up to 25 email IDs and 5 GB of storage space per user. What’s even better is that by referring friends to Zoho Email, you can expand to 25 more users.
You may find it useful to set up forwarding from your business email ID to your personal email ID (such as Gmail). If you are on Gmail, you can also enable your account to send emails as your business email ID, essentially removing the need to login to your business email ID separately.
Static Website
Once you have purchased a domain name and set up your business email, you need to tell potential users about this great product or app that you are building. At this stage, you essentially need a static website with a countdown timer that gives users a glimpse of the awesomeness ahead.
GitHub Pages lets you host static pages on their platform for free! All you need to do is put your HTML code in a repository and push it to GitHub on a branch named gh-pages . Further, you can even set up your custom domain to point to this website by following these instructions.
Beta Access Campaign
One problem with just a static site is that people often forget about it after some time. You may get them interested by offering them a chance to test your beta product (which may be available in some time, but isn’t quite ready yet). Prefinery is a service that allows you sign up users who are interested in your product. You can also set up referral campaigns to give users with more referrals early access using this service.
You can set it up for free, and view up to 200 users who’ve signed up for your product. If you cross that limit, Prefinery continues registrations, and you can view all the sign ups by choosing a higher plan if necessary.
Private Repository Hosting
Once you start developing your application, you may need to put the source code on the cloud to enable collaboration between the developers working on the project.
GitHub’s free account only allows public repositories, but the Student Pack includes a GitHub micro account worth $7/month, which allows you to have up to five private repositories while you are a student.
Alternately, services like BitBucket and GitLab allow you to create private repositories and collaborate with a distributed team.
Continue reading %How to Launch Your Next Tech Product for Free (Almost!)%
by Shaumik Daityari via SitePoint
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