I’ve been looking for web services to use at plasq for certain tasks. Thought I should share as they will be handy for other small business’.

Lining up meetings

• diarised.com


• meetwithapproval.com


• doodle.ch


• timeanddate.com meeting planner – We have often used this the last year. Am yet to try the others.

Sending out mailing lists

• newsberry.com


• campaignmonitor.com – Great! we use this, as do twitter and apple for example.


• letterpop.com


• primomailer.com


• zookoda.com

Surveys

• wufoo.com – Does much more than just surveys though


• surveymonkey.com – Needs some design help, but seems feature-full and reliable

Free or inexpensive stock photos and art

• imageafter.com


• sxc.hu


• iStockphoto.com


• Flickr.com – Creative commons

If you have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

There was a article The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need on digg a few months back for more.

Update: Some tools here for small biz

There are some good lessons to take from Richard’s story of the death of a Web 2.0 company: Actual lessons from Kiko

Paul Graham thinks you’re screwed if Google comes into your space. I don’t agree. Neither does David at 37Signals. You will need to differentiate and play harder and smarter though. Just do it better. Google isn’t a ‘god’.

As Richard says in his post it wasn’t Google that killed them anyway.

Since all this, Kiko was put on eBay and sold for $258,100. Not too shabby.

My takeaways:

• Have a good plan on how to get customers outside the techosphere if that is your goal.


• If you are aiming for critical mass usership, you will need old school marketing, unless you can manage something incredibly viral. Tech blogs and news sites are great, but the techosphere is the consumer of these, not teens, managers and ‘office types’.


• There is a bubble. Be careful.


• Team burnout can kill a product.


• Fast release cycles are good and all, but you need to make a good impression first up. People are fickle, especially geek experimenters.. they are onto the next fun thing and won’t give you a second chance.