

How to start a business with no money - Danmatt
http://launchlab.co.uk/article/Fund-your-business/Bootstrapping-your-way-to-success/894

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patio11
I started with $60 back in the day. That imposes a certain discipline on you,
which has good and bad influences on your thinking.

Good: "I need revenue to buy the stuff I think I need to make more revenue. I
guess I'll have to make something people want and sell it to them."

Possibly good: "Well, I can't afford web design, but I'll stretch this OSS
template about as far as it will go until I have enough money to pay for a
redesign."

Not good: "I don't have $50 to spend on icons right now so instead I'll waste
several hours embarrassing myself in Paint.NET and ultimately come up with
something which is ugly, converts poorly, and distracted me from tasks where I
actually add value."

Speaking of which: open source. Its not just for software anymore. You have to
dig through a lot of junk to get them, but there are OSS designs which are
far, far better than what you'll come up with (resident designers excepted). I
recommend Styleshout for that Web 2.0 look, and oswd.org (and a whole lot of
needle-in-haystack searching) for finding a good template for anything else.

Also: Wordpress (free) + $4 a month hosting + writing skill (I hope you've got
it) = cheapest marketing you will ever accomplish, and some of the most
effective, too.

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ph0rque
Thanks for the styleshout reference... very helpful.

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pxlpshr
I bootstrapped our mobile software company simply because I knew we would turn
a profit within the first month of sales (which we did, 3-5x ramen
profitability :)).

The problem, however, was that most people just aren't built for startups. So
while I kept things extremely fair — everyone was on a 50/50 profit share,
myself included, after operational expenses were paid (less than 4%) — that
just wasn't enough to keep people motivated to reach the 2-3 year end goal.

To be fair, I think it was less about motivation and more about income and
lifestyle. But again, most people just aren't prepared/designed for startup
life which in this case would have required they code in the evening hours
after their full time job was over. Ha!

Startups are difficult, getting traction is difficult (the juice), and I would
say that assembling a skilled team is equally challenging and will
significantly impact chances of success/survival — never settle with your
team. The challenge with building a team is that startups will change people,
especially virgin startup-ers who've never experienced the workload.
Burnout/frustration in combination with low pay and kool-aid stock options
will destroy a team in a year or two if they're not prepared.

All that being said, this month I've decided to take a drastic turn and
attempt to raise a small amount of money to make a few full-time hires. The
good news is, I proved myself as a young entrepreneur and we may secure a
really awesome lead investor that could do a lot more for us than just give us
money.

I definitely recommend bootstrapping, it helps you set realistic priorities
based on severely limited resources (prepares you for when times are rough),
and helps you find the holes where investors can provide value besides just
$$.

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tezza
Work 3 days per week for someone else.

This relies on you being a trusted and valued worker for the firm who allows
you to work 3 days. So work hard at your job and the management will likely be
okay with you asking.

That's what I did for a couple of startups.

Having a work-day or two available for work-time meetings with customers and
lawyers / suppliers makes a large difference. People treat you more seriously
when you are able to make a daytime meeting.

Careful calendar managament can give the impression of a full fledged
business.

Until of course you need to support customers, and suddenly they need support
at all sort of inconvenient times. Nothings perfect!!

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medianama
I am doing this - working 2 days/week for my previous employer and it works
really well... eases out the initial cashflow problem.

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davidw
My problem is that it continues to have no money!

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mahmud
Dadsys? I just looked at your site and you're all over the map, way too
diverse, almost unfocused.

I don't know about the rest of the mobile applications, but the two things I
can think of monetizing are SqueezeBooks and LangPop:

SqueezeBooks: how about SqueezeNews? Give me a customized, highly focused and
well combed summary of a certain industry and I will subscribe. I'm in online
advertising; I should come to your site, select my category and be given a
long list of highly specialized sub-categories. I choose the ones I want and
you aggregate all related news, monitor websites, mailinglists, google trends.
Summarize articles for me, with a combination of automatic summarization +
some human editing, and I should be able to submit my own feeds. Something
like this, "executive intelligence review"; if you just pick one industry, you
should be able to get a good chunk of the executive crowd, a highly coveted
readership. Just pick ONE industry that you're passionate about and go for it.
You can even review startups for potential VCs, give them the raw deal.
TechCrunch and other sites are verbose and annoying because that's how they
make their money. You will make your money by being succinct and brutally
honest.

LangPop: Programming language comparisons are stupid. Everyone has a few
favorite ones and a few he uses for "work". How about you review frameworks
and libraries? This looks like more work than it's worth, but you can
outsource the work to specialist programmers/columnists, each in his own
domain of expertise, and do it on an ad-revenue sharing basis.

When you have the right traffic, talk to me about delivering the advertising
:-)

Regards.

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davidw
> Dedsys? I just looked at your site and you're all over the map, way too
> diverse, almost unfocused.

Fair enough - I actually make my money through consulting, so what you see
there is mostly this: try something, see how it goes, and then just let it sit
there, or keep pushing it, iterating, depending. So far, nothing seems to have
really stuck, but I don't let that deter me, I keep trying different things.

"SqueezeNews" doesn't sound like a bad idea, but I'm not sure it's my thing.

> Programming language comparisons are stupid.

But it's actually a very popular site, and the #1 in its category. And it
doesn't take a great deal of effort to improve and maintain, so I do. And
comparisons aren't really 'stupid' - these things matter to people.

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sachmanb
another instance of upvoting an uninteresting article due to the comments
within hacker news being worth reading

