Hey guys, welcome to episode three of leaving the letter podcast. Over the last like 25 weeks or whatever, of writing the newsletter that's a companion to this podcast you can check that out at DustinHogiecom. We've mostly been writing about mindset stuff, so just like how to start thinking like an entrepreneur, and that's what the main focus has been. We've done some stuff where we're covering like basic security and things like that, and today. What we're going to do, though, is actually the next two weeks, and then the third week we're going to have a really cool guest. I'm excited about that. Today and next week, we're going to cover like what is the software stack look like for a small business and what should you be doing?

It's really hard to find the right software. If you go searching for a domain, you want to build a website or have your own email, or anything like that. It's such a pain in the butt, and oftentimes what happens is you get if you either don't make a choice because there's way too many and it seems seems really expensive, or everything you need isn't covered, or you don't even know what you need. We're going to walk through that, but the other thing that happens is, a lot of times, you end up just buying the first thing you happen across or whatever name looks familiar, and then, as you grow, you end up having to jump through all these hoops trying to try it like, or you just you can't get past certain roadblocks until you like break something on purpose so you can move to a different platform. And so, uh, through my years as an entrepreneur and being kind of a uh like a broken minded software tester, uh, I really like making sure things are actually going to work and researching them before I use them and testing them before I use them, and so I'm everything I'm recommending here is stuff that can start with you at like, just solo on your own, but can grow with you infinitely. And so, like there is no, there's no like, at least as of right now, there's no huge cost to upgrading like any major crazy expensive cost that are going to come if you need to add more employees or users down the road, but they are built to add users so you can manage them. That's really important. Most of them offer some way of migrating to a different service if you want to, and are very cost effective, especially for starting out, and so all of those things taken into account matter, and so we're going to dig into that today. We're going to go into it a little bit further next week with some more like specialized stuff, but this is just like general.

How do you get your name out there and it's your name and that's what we want to do. We want to get you. Like. The ways that people would contact you are going to be through phone and email. That's most of your communication is going to happen that way, and I see a lot of times people use, like, a Gmail or Yahoo account for their business email. So, for example, I have no idea if this business really exists, it's just an example. But if you have, like you know, virginia Fitness dudes or something like that, if you have Virginia fitness dudes one at gmailcom or yahoocom, that looks terrible and you can solve that for like literally less than $6 a month. It isn't expensive and it looks so much better and there's a ton of other benefits to come with that. So we're going to dig in that today.

By the way, guys, my name is Dustin Hogate, I run the leaving theder podcast and the newsletter, and my whole goal is that I want to take up the anyone who comes up behind me as an entrepreneur and you're looking to go down a path that I've been down. I want to teach you the show you the roadmap of how I got where I am and teach you a lot of the lessons that I've learned along the way, so you don't have to fall into the same pits that I have, and so that's my only goal with this. I do run another company. I've just launched a new company called Ferrum Red that does do consulting on this too, so I'm going to teach you everything that I know as best I can through this podcast and newsletter, totally free. Expect nothing of you, but if you are looking for help, like deploying different software services, if you need help with copywriting and email marketing, those are things that we do at Ferrum Red. So if that's something you're interested in, you can shoot me an email to dusty at ferrumredcom.

Okay, let's dig into the first one. The base first thing you should do is own your own domain, and so if you haven't started your business yet, then you should do a domain search, and here's a couple tips. I'll give you One buy it through Cloudflare. Buy your domain through Cloudflare. It's going to be linked down below. I've got an article that goes with this. You can read along with that too if you want.

But if you buy your domain through Cloudflare, they don't charge any extra fees and what you'll find is, if you a couple of things, if you go search, let's say, on GoDaddy, which is probably the largest name in domain hosting, godaddy charges insane fees and they'll do really crappy things. Like you'll go search for a domain and like you probably have to like change the name a few times and stuff like that to figure out what's going to work, and then they will buy it and try to resell it back to you the next day when you want to go buy it for like triple the cost and it's. It's really sickening practice they have. It's well known. Everybody who buys domains knows about it. It's a horrible thing. Uh, I just don't use godaddy. They also make it almost impossible to leave their platform. So if you ever want anything else you can't leave, don't use GoDaddy. Please don't use GoDaddy.

Buy your domain through Cloudflare. There's a link down below. You go to dashcloudflarecom slash sign up and you can just sign up with an account. It doesn't cost anything. Buy your domain through them. They charge no fees. It's going to be probably less than $10 a month to get your domain, or $10 a year sorry, to get your domain, so less than $1 a month, and they will cover everything for you. So highly, highly recommend just set up a Cloudflare account, buy your domain from them. That's step one.

And the benefits of Cloudflare, like I said, there's no registration fees. It's really easy to manage, like super easy to manage. It's easy to migrate to another service. They don't lock you in. They do free domain hosting. So there's no like reoccurring fees or anything like that, and it integrates with the other services I'm going to mention later, where you don't have to know what I'm even talking about when I say DNS. You don't have to know what that means. It's really simple. But for both the website hosting and email hosting, document management, all that stuff that I'm going to mention later, there's literally a one click install where they say you know, do you want to redirect to Cloudflare? You go to Cloudflare, they create all the entries for you and you're done. That's it. You just like push a button, follow the instructions, do nothing else. It's awesome.

So I know that you didn't get into business, probably to learn about these things, and it's stuff you should know and you should learn over time. But this is where I would start and this will give you infinite ability to grow and it's really really simple. So buy your domain through Cloudflare, don't use anything else. And the other tip that I'll give is, if you are starting a business, do a domain search first. Just do it on Cloudflare, don't do it on GoDaddy, and make sure that the name you're looking to choose is not a name that's already in use, because it's really a bummer to have to pick some really long domain name that is super hard to spell and people get it wrong and then it's hard to email you. You don't want that. So you want to have like a concise, short name, something that's really easy to spell when you're picking your business name and you want to make sure the domain is available.

The other thing I'll add to that is, if you're looking to start your business, I would do two things. I would search on the search the trademark, make sure that there isn't somebody that trademark the name you're looking to use in the industry you're looking to use it in, and you can use that at USPTOgov. You can do a domain or you can do a name search there, a trademark search there and they'll come up with anything that's related to the name that you're looking at and then what industry they're in, because you won't be able to trademark it and potentially it could be in violation of someone else's trademark if you try to use their name in the same industry. So definitely do a search on that. And then the other thing is I would go to your state's website wherever you would go to buy your business license from your state and do a business search there and make sure that they're same thing that you. Someone with your with that name is not already doing business, uh, in the same industry as you, in the same state as you, because that can have a conflict too. Uh, it's actually in most States it's not allowed to have the same name, same industry, same state. So it's a couple of other things to think about and, like I mentioned earlier, I'm going to have links for this stuff down below, or it'll all be just linked to one article that'll be posted and you can view it there. Okay, so now you own your domain. So how do you get an email with, like, your business name instead of Gmail or Yahoo, your business name instead of Gmail or Yahoo, and that's actually.

This is actually going to cover several things. It's going to cover your email that you can add new users to, so if you hire new people, you can just add them as a user. You can manage them completely. You can revoke access completely and you can also manage virtual meetings, cloud storage, chat, that's like Slack, calendar, documents, sheets, whatever and for that I would use Google Workspace. Google Workspace makes it so stinking easy to manage all of that. It's so simple and it's complex enough that as your organization grows and you go from you know one to you know let's just hope as big as you want it to get you get 10 people down the road.

It's super easy to add new users, to completely manage users, restrict access to specific files or types or emails or things like that, um, and then create like workflows, like you can really dig into and do some crazy stuff, but you don't have to do anything. It's super simple to set up and, like I said, it pairs with Cloudflare, with your domain that, if you use, cloudflare, is the domain provider for getting access to your email super quickly. So it's literally like a one click install. It's really awesome and it starts at like $6 a month for their business starter plan, which is, if it's just you, that's what I would start with. I think it gets you like 30 gigabytes of cloud storage, which is plenty for like documents and pictures and stuff you're going to use for business. Gets you, you know, big virtual meetings plus like the chat and calendar and stuff like that.

So Google Workspace and that'll get you your email or as many emails and accounts as you want. But in there it's really easy to use. It's very familiar because it's all just a Google account but you manage it instead of Google managing it. And so let's say, like, for example, ferrum Red, my new company, I use Google Workspace for that and so I've got dusty at ferrumredcom. If I hire a new employee, then I'll say, like Derek at pharamredcom or Vaughn at pharamredcom, I can just add new users and I can just manage them and all they do is they just sign into a Google account that's managed by your organization and so you can add them, revoke them, share access within the organization and documents and files and things like that. It works great and for like almost all businesses, unless you have some other use case, it's absolutely the way that I would go.

Okay, so the other one is going to be managing security, and probably the most important point here is and I wrote about this and it's also going to be linked in the article below, so an article within an article explaining why it's important but especially when you're starting out I know you didn't get into this because you wanted to do the detail stuff on the back end of business, but I'm telling you, you've got to understand the back end stuff because this is the stuff that matters and stuff that really kills businesses. Once you finally start making progress and you start making money and things start working and it's not so stressful anymore, it's going to become a burden trying to deal with these things down the road and it's a much bigger burden than just sucking it up and dealing with it. Now. Managing passwords is really important, and so what I would want to see you do, and what I hope everyone will do especially with a business, it's even more important than personal is to use a password manager. So all different accounts that you end up creating for your business, you can create like separate logins with separate passwords, like unique, strong passwords which a password generator will make for you, and then it will also like auto fill them for you. So the only thing that you need to remember is one strong password to sign in, and that's it. You don't need anything else, because everything else is protected by that and you can sign into all them. That's it. You don't need anything else, because everything else is protected by that and you can sign into all them.

The other thing is, you can manage access. So, let's say, you're going to have, you know, 2030, 40 different online accounts. You're gonna have a lot of them, or credit cards, or you know bank logins and things like that, and when, especially once, you have new employees or you work with an accountant or something like that, they're going to need those credentials at some point. Somebody is, and so what a password manager lets you do is one it securely manages them. It gets you, um, it helps you by creating strong, unique passwords for every individual account, uh, which is really important, uh. And then what it also does is it makes you can share with other people. So, like, if you hire new people, you can give them access to certain things, but not everything, and then you can also revoke their access if they leave, because the worst thing to do is you put all your stuff in a spreadsheet. Everybody's got a copy on their phone.

You end up, you know, hiring Joe Blow off the street. Three weeks later, you know, find out he's a crack addict and you know he needs to get fired. And he, you know, find out he's a crack addict and you know he needs to get fired. And he, you know, dumps your passwords or logs into your accounts and steals your money. There's a lot of things that can happen. So just you don't have to deal with that. And the best way to not deal with it is just don't give everyone the passwords for everything and don't make it the same password for everything.

Make them unique, make them strong and share them as needed with whoever needs them, and for that I would use Bitwarden and bitwardencom. You can sign up on their website. They're a fantastic resource for that. They have browser extensions so they autofill everything. They'll unlock with Face ID on your iPhone or fingerprint ID on your Mac or anything like that, so it's really seamless to use and just use that as your password manager for all your business stuff. Highly recommend it. It's also pretty cheap. It's like $4 per user per month, all right.

So the last thing is unless you have another specific need. Like you're doing e-commerce or something like that, if you're just like a service-based business or you just sell a couple of products or you're just a local company, then you're going to want a website and a website. You know, we'll probably cover this more later It'd be good to kind of give a very good overview of, like, how would you lay out a website and what information should you have on it? But you want to have a contact form. Should you have on it? But you want to have a contact form.

If you do want to be able to contact people with updates on what you're doing and stuff like that, having an email list is really important. It's pretty much the only way you can directly target a lot of people, and so the way that I think about like an email list or contact list and emails is and this is how I would look at anything where you can talk to a lot of people at one time is that you have a really high leverage way of communicating for free. So if people can sign up for, say, a newsletter and you actually send a newsletter, then there's no reason to not do that and there's no reason to not collect those emails and have a way of contacting the people that want to hear from you. And really we can talk about newsletter stuff later too, but I think if you truly will send a newsletter, it's a really good way of staying in front of people that want to hear from you and it's a free way of contacting those people. There's nothing better than not having to pay for new customers and then having an email list those people. There's nothing better than not having to pay for new customers and so, and then having an email list and having that in an email like marketing software is a great thing about that is that it's a really high leverage action where you don't have to contact one person individually or BCC a bunch of people, which happens I don't want to see you do that.

You can do all that a whole lot easier and you can do it through an email marketing platform, and so what I'm going to recommend for the next one is unless you have some other specific need is MailerLite. So MailerLite is a super simple, very easy to use, very cost-effective email marketing platform that also will like manage and host your website for you, and there's really no additional cost to that. And so your new fancy domain, your new fancy emails and stuff like that you just made. Um, you can use that to send emails as yourself in mass to lots of people and collect their emails on your website. Uh, collect, uh, uh, contact forms. So you can, just, you know, set up a their emails on your website.

Collect contact forms. You can, you know, set up a contact form on your website and get contact details from people or let them ask questions about a product, and on your website they have really nice templates. So if you don't know how to build a website, you really can just take one of the templates they have, pop in your existing domain, which kind of one click installs from Cloudflare and it makes it so you can just display who you are, where you're located, how to contact you. Like I said, the two ways people are going to communicate the most and I highly recommend keeping it to these two ways is by email and by phone, and so you need a way that people can contact you both of those ways and then just learn about who you are, what you offer and what you're doing on your website. And MailerLite, for really, really low cost, gives you a way of collecting emails from people, collecting contact forms and running a website. So all of that in one place at one time, and it's awesome.

So, and I've got a little bit of a breakdown on how that works. But if you guys want more individual, like a super good breakdown, how do you do these exact things? That is coming. That is coming and probably over the next couple of months we're just going to focus on here's exactly the steps you would take once you have the software. How do you deploy it? That's what we're going to talk about, because to me it doesn't do a lot of good to talk about the thought side if you don't know how to practically implement it.

And the hardships of starting a business is this stuff. And so this is part one of a small business software stack, and if you guys enjoy this, subscribe, share it with your friends. I don't expect anything of you but, like I said, if you're interested in and you want help deploying these things or want kind of a help with custom recommendations, stuff like that, that is what we do at Ferrum Red, so you can shoot me an email, dusty at ferrumredcom, we can chat about it. I will apologize at the end of this. I should have said this at the beginning, but I'm just getting over being crazy sick, so my voice is probably kind of screwed, but I hope this was.