6 Companies every entrepreneur can be thankful for

With the stress of Thanksgiving planning and cooking finally being over; I took the time to think about businesses that have made my life as a freelancer easier, with either their products or blogs and I hope sharing them can make yours as well!

Hubspot 
Hubspot is a marketing software company based out of Cambridge, MA.  With 3 different levels of their software, they can work seamlessly with any size company. What makes them so awesome is their commitment to their customers. They don’t just build an awesome product; they provide training and support via their passionate inbound marketers. Outside of their normal trainings, they offer hubspot.tv, webinars, an awesome blog full of top tips, quarterly meetups and their inbound marketing university. Hubspot offers a free 30 day trial of their software – why not test it out today and see why they are worth bragging over!


Grasshopper 

Another Massachusetts company, Grasshopper is a company that offers virtual phone systems geared towards entrepreneurs.  Some of Grasshopper’s features include: 800 numbers, call forwarding, call screening, unlimited extensions, email to voicemail, onhold music.  What you can be thankful for is their low monthly price and their commitment to entrepreneurs. Point in case, Co-fouder Siamak Taghaddos is a Founding supporter of National Entrepreneurs' Day.  Also worth checking out is Grasshopper's blog, which is a great resource for entrepreneurs.


BizLaunch 

Canada’s, BizLaunch provides training and education to entrepreneurs. BizLaunch is excellent resource proving plenty of webinars, excellent advice and tools such as business plans, break even analysis reports, balance sheets and plenty more. The best part about BizLaunch is that all of their resources are free! Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or you’re just starting out and don’t know where to begin, BizLaunch has the resources for you.


Eventbrite 

As an entrepreneur, you want to get name out there as much as possible, and that means networking and throwing your own events. Eventbrite is a website that you can place your own events in their database and search for events going.  What’s great about Eventbright is the search feature, you can search in your local area, date of event, price (from free to expensive), category and you can further narrow down the events to which town they are in. Most of the networking events I go to, I have found on Eventbright.  If you’re thiking about hosting an event, you can take secure payments through Eventbright via their own processing system, pay-pal, authorize.net or Google checkout. 



Salesforce 

The ultimate CRM Cloud software, Salesforce offers a variety of SaaS and PaaS solutions to help you reach out to your customers and analyze your customer’s behavoirs. Salesforce not only offers sales and marketing data software, it also offers great products and apps such as chatter, radian6, force.com, database.com and Heroku.  Like Hubspot, Salesforce pricing ranges per how big your business is and salesforce also offers free trials.


Bonnie Gibson

Ok ok, I know this part is a bit of a stretch/shameless plug! However, I enjoy offering marketing advice and sharing knowledge of print/web design, content writing and SEO via my blog and twitter. Feel free to find me on linkedin, twitter or google+ and follow me. If you need some marketing advice, I offer a free marketing consultation, just drop me an email.

Enjoy the rest of your Holiday Season and 6 cheers to the companies mentioned above!