Does the Internet make it easier or harder to start a business?
May 12th, 2009 by Michael Giuffrida
When I first started my business, I was always looking for ideas from other people about how they…well…ran their business. In 1997 when I started ForeSite, the Internet wasn’t quite what it is today and finding templates on things like business plans, cash flow models, legal documents, proposal templates etc. were few and far between. In comes 2009 and there is so much stuff out there, you don’t know where to start. Go ahead, type “business plan template” into Google and see what you get (444,000 results in case you don’t want to bother). Now Google does a pretty good job of trying to get you quality results, but some are articles, others are blogs, others are people trying to get you to click through thinking you are getting a template but you really have to buy something. It can get pretty tiresome.
Luckily, there are new services that help filter out the good from the better. For example, Docjax.com is a site that will only return links to actual documents. If you decide you only want Word documents, you can filter for only those. Now when you start clicking through, you know that you will get back a document that you could begin to modify to suit your needs. If you are fairly specific, you might even find exactly what you want on the first page (try: “small business farm template” for example). You still get 1059 results, but right at the top are some pretty relevant documents. Have some fun and download to your heart’s content. Most of the results you’ll get will be free!
Tags: business plan template, cash flow template, document search on Internet, Internet search