I was having another typical discussion with my buddy, Rich, where we were bemoaning all the obstacles preventing us from making progress with our online business quest. But probably the biggest one is that we have just too many ideas. And it doesn’t make it any easier that whenever you get on the web and start doing anything you are immediately presented with a million other new things that look pretty darn interesting too.

Rich has so many projects going on and so much knowledge about online marketing tools that whenever I talk to him my head starts to spin. So we started talking about about the need to have a way of getting organized that:

  1. Would allow us to keep all our information stored in a central location
  2. That we could each update on our own time
  3. That was easy to customize for our specific purposes

I could develop a system like this from scratch using PHP, but I’ve done that and I know how much time that takes. So we went looking for something that already exists. We looked at basecamp which is a really decent project management/collaboration tool. But we needed a structured list of all the logins (for example) and this just didn’t cut it. In other words, we needed a database program. I thought about Intuit’s QuickBase which does allow you to create your own database driven applications online, but they are now charging for it, and Rich and I are loath to spend money since we’re not making much money right now.

So as we were talking, Rich did a search on something I said and BLAMMO! He found just what we were looking for!

It’s called ZoHo. It’s a beautiful suite of Web2.0 applications, including word, spreadsheets, presentation, collaboration, project management, etc. The one we started using was Creator, which allows you to create an online we application with incredible ease. So we built an application within about an hour and started inputing our data right away. Getting all our data in there is going to take longer. But it’s a beautiful application and it’s completely free (at least for the moment). Maybe by the time they start charging for it we’ll be making a bunch of money and it won’t matter!

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