Keeping Records

Tracking your business ideas in a system can be a really fantastic way to help your ideas mature. Having documented them, you are not able to criticize your own ideas. That’s something you can’t do accurately when they’re in your head. Additionally, now you can share them with someone else for a (hopefully) objective analysis. That’s my favorite part. I regularly bounce my mediocre ideas off my dad, brothers, and friends so I can get outside input. Naturally, I’m not buying my product or service, so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I think it’s valuable.

I use SugarCRM for my business-idea tracker. Why? Because it’s a business and anything I try to develop has the end-goal of making money. It’s the perfect system for tracking the idea, tasks, meetings, contacts, etc.

There are no services yet offering SugarCRM for free – I think it’s a huge business opportunity. Advertising and affiliate sales could drive the revenue. If you built a sales & marketing content portal around it with forums-based community/chat functionality you’d have a really great business hub.  I’m going to try to do that with PipeLime.

Until then, you can set up an account on a system that equivalently equipped of functionality (for us small users). It’s called FreeCRM. The same concepts apply and you can still download your personal data if you want to move to another service – it’s worth the try (I did).