Beg, borrow, steal.

If you’ve ever spoken to a business school professor, they’ll tell you that’s the mentality every early stage founder needs to take to make it.

While the SaaS revolution has made it easy to try products for a short period of time, cash strapped entrepreneurs find themselves with difficult walls to get around at the end of the 30 day trial. While you could always sign up for a new email account and sign up for a new trial, that becomes pretty unwieldy fast.

Fortunately, if you’re using Gmail there’s a simple work-around that makes generating new email addresses a snap, while still being able to manage mail in one inbox.

A hidden Gmail feature called email extensions allows you to append a small tag onto your normal email address, creating a NEW email address that routes to your normal Inbox.

Say, for instance, I need to get a document signed using Docusign and I have previously used a free trial, and that my normal email address is cooluser@gmail.com. When I navigate to the site, I can select sign up for a new account. When I enter my email address I can add a “+” after my mail email handle, followed by any string of text.

For instance, I could use cooluser+docu1@gmail.com. This will produce a UNIQUE email that will allow me to get a new Docusign account, but the email confirmation will route to my normal email address, bypassing the need to set up a new email account. If in another 45days I need anouther account I can create cooluser+docu2@gmail.com and recreate the process to infinity.

This super power extends far beyond free trials. You can use email extensions to create simple sort functions to keep yourself organized.

Signing up for something you know will spam you? Add a “+spam” extension then create a Gmail rule to route it to the right place.