SMALL BUSINESS ROADMAP

🌱 I'M STARTING A BUSINESS

→ Pick Your Business Idea
SBA — Plan Your Business — Great for researching an idea, market, competition and startup costs.
SCORE — Great for free guidance and mentoring from experienced business professionals.

→🔎 Research Your Market & Customer

Research your potential customers, competitors and market demand before investing heavily in your business idea.  

• U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) — Great for learning how to research your market, identify potential customers and analyze competitors.
• Google Trends — Great for exploring what people are searching for and comparing interest in products, topics and business ideas over time.
• Semrush — Great for researching competitors, keywords, search demand and online market opportunities.

→ Choose Your Business Name
SBA — Launch Your Business — Great for understanding business names, DBAs, entity names, domains and trademarks.

→ Register Your Business
SBA — Launch Your Business — Great starting point for understanding federal, state and local registration requirements.

→ Set Up Business Finances
SBA — Plan Your Business — Great for startup costs, business credit and funding basics.
QuickBooks — Great for bookkeeping, expenses, invoices and basic business financial management.

→ Create Your Brand Basics
Canva — Great for logos, brand colors, fonts, social graphics and brand kits.
Adobe Express — Great for logos and branded marketing materials.

→ Build a Simple Website or Shop
Shopify — Great for businesses primarily selling products online.
Wix — Great for beginner-friendly business websites and online stores.
Squarespace — Great for polished websites, services, portfolios and online stores.

→ List Your First Product or Service
Shopify — Great for selling through your own online store.
Etsy — Great for handmade, creative and many digital products.
eBay — Great for resale, collectibles and a wide range of physical products.

→ Set Up One Social Platform
Facebook — Great for pages, groups, local businesses and community building.
Instagram — Great for visual products, brands and short-form content.
Pinterest — Great for visual discovery and sending long-term traffic to products and websites.

→ Get Your First Sale
SBA — Marketing & Sales — Great for learning the fundamentals of attracting customers and making sales.
Shopify — Great for practical e-commerce selling and marketing resources.

💰 I HAVE A BUSINESS BUT NEED SALES

This one is very important. A huge number of people visiting your directory won't need help starting a company—they'll already have one but aren't getting enough customers.

→ Fix Your Pricing
SBA — Plan Your Business — Great for understanding costs, break-even points and revenue targets.
Shopify — Great for practical product-pricing guidance for sellers.

→ Improve Product Photos & Descriptions
Canva — Great for improving and designing product images.
Adobe Express — Great for editing product photos and marketing graphics.
ChatGPT — Great for drafting product descriptions, benefits, titles and marketing copy.

→ Optimize Your Product Pages
Shopify — Great for e-commerce product-page guidance and tools.
Semrush — Great for keywords, SEO and improving search visibility.

→ Strengthen Your Offer
SCORE — Great for free mentoring on sales, marketing, pricing and business strategy.
HubSpot — Great for sales and marketing education, CRM and customer acquisition tools.

→ Start Collecting Emails
Mailchimp — Great for beginner-friendly email lists, newsletters and automations.
Kit — Great for creators and small businesses building an audience.
Klaviyo — Great for e-commerce email and SMS marketing.

Building an email list early is particularly useful because it gives the business a direct way to reach interested customers rather than depending entirely on social algorithms.

→ Post Consistently on One Platform
Buffer — Great for simple social-media scheduling.
Metricool — Great for scheduling and analyzing social content.
Canva — Great for creating the actual social-media content.

→ Ask for Reviews
Google Business Profile — Great for collecting and displaying Google reviews for eligible businesses.
Trustpilot — Great for collecting customer reviews and building online trust.

→ Run Your First Promotion
Canva — Great for creating promotional graphics and advertisements.
Mailchimp — Great for sending promotions to your email subscribers.
Meta for Business — Great for Facebook and Instagram business marketing and advertising.

📈 I'M READY TO SCALE

This should be the third stage—not something beginners feel they must do immediately.

→ Track Your Key Numbers
Google Analytics — Great for understanding website traffic and customer behavior.
QuickBooks — Great for tracking business income, expenses and financial performance.
Shopify — Great for tracking online-store sales and commerce analytics.

→ Build Systems & SOPs
Notion — Great for organizing SOPs, processes and company knowledge.
ClickUp — Great for documenting workflows and managing recurring business processes.

→ Automate Repetitive Tasks
Zapier — Great for connecting business apps and automating routine work.
Make — Great for visual multi-step automation.
n8n — Great for customizable and more technical automation.

→ Add New Products or Bundles
Shopify — Great for expanding an e-commerce product catalog and creating offers.
Canva — Great for designing digital products, packaging and bundle graphics.

→ Grow Repeat Customers
Klaviyo — Great for e-commerce retention, email and SMS marketing.
Mailchimp — Great for newsletters, promotions and customer follow-up.
HubSpot — Great for managing customer relationships and marketing.

→ Expand to a New Sales Channel
Shopify — Great for building your own e-commerce channel.
Etsy — Great for reaching shoppers looking for creative, handmade and digital products.
eBay — Great for expanding physical-product and resale businesses.

→ Invest in Paid Ads
Google Ads — Great for reaching people actively searching for products and services.
Meta for Business — Great for Facebook and Instagram advertising.
Pinterest Business — Great for advertising visually driven products and content.

→ Outsource or Delegate
Upwork — Great for hiring freelancers across marketing, design, administration, technology and other specialties.
Fiverr — Great for purchasing clearly defined freelance services and smaller projects.
LinkedIn — Great for professional networking and finding specialized talent.

Upwork, for example, currently lets businesses post jobs or search for freelancers, review candidates, interview them, hire, and manage work and payments through the platform.