Running a startup is hard and its even harder if you’re doing it on a shoestring budget. The founders usually end up managing all aspects of the business, whether they have the skills or not, while trying to build a brand that touches people . But thanks to the web, you can now stop being that jack-of-all-trades and master the skills you need to grow.

I’ve carefully handpicked  6 online courses to master some of the key skills especially needed to run a web startup. The classes are offered by some of the best in the industry such as Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuck and the likes. At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch, for less than $10 a month you can get some great education on fundraising, marketing, social media and all the other skills needed to build a brand online that’s primed for success.

We are living in interesting times, it was never this easy to gain access to knowledge and experts, so go ahead and take full advantage of these great times we live in.

Minimum Viable Product: Launch Your Startup Idea for Less than 1k

This class on Skillshare is taught by the CEO and co-founder of Skillshare. Take this class to understand how you can quickly validate your business idea before you go full on with planning and execution. This approach will help you save a lot of time and effort. The class focuses on building a minimum viable product and testing it to gain early feedback to optimize your idea for success.

Succeeding on Kickstarter

A lot of social entrepreneurs are turning to crowdfunding these days to get their ideas off the crowd. If you are looking to crowdfund your idea, this class is for you. Taught by Joel Malone who himself has raised funds on Kickstarter and based on the experience and data collected from over 50,000 projects, this class will thoroughly prep you to run a successful crowdfunding campaign. The class covers campaign planning, marketing, what to do each day once the clock starts ticking and more. Also insight from over 40 interviews with project creators (that have raised a combined total of over $8,000,000) has been included.

The Modern Marketing Workshop

Taught by the famous author and marketing expert Seth Godin, the class teaches modern day marketing tactics. The class is for anyone as Seth puts, who needs to teach people who they are and what they do. It’s a powerful, hands-on course with a lot of supplemental material.

This course has the power to transform the way you and your organization spread your ideas, engage with customers and most of all, think about what you make and why – Seth Godin

Context is Key: Social Media Strategy in a Noisy Online World

This class is taught by the social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk. I recently read his bookJab Jab Jab, The Right Hook and it really opened my eyes on how to effectively use social media. I was thrilled to discover Gary’s class on Skillshare, its a great opportunity to learn from the expert himself. The class will prep you on how to get most results from your social media marketing and on creating platform specific high quality shareable content.

Love Photo Apps: Make Awesome Images Using iPhone Photo Apps

Visual storytelling is gaining prominence like never before. Its a fact, people are attracted to and are more likely to respond to visual content. This class will be great to help you develop high quality visual content. All you need is your phone and few apps. In this class Nicole Siscaretti teaches how you can turn your iPhone into your own personal graphic design studio. From photo editing, to adding text on photos, creating collages and more this class is great for entrepreneurs who’ll like to leverage visuals to attract and grow their customer base. Which is anyone who has a website, a blog or doing social media marketing.

Getting Started With Google Analytics

This class in great for anyone with a website and would like to use data to grow. Google Analytics, the service offered by Google to measure website traffic, sources, conversions and many other things is a very powerful tool. The data generated can be used in so many different ways to strategically grow your business. Many people use the tool but few know how to use it to the fullest. This class on Udemy is a detailed, step by step class on how to get started with Google Analytics, which reports to track, how to interpret data and convert it into actionable items. A must for anyone doing business on the web.

Let me know if you end up taking any of these classes and about your expereince. I plan to sign-up for Skillshare to take some of these classes myself.