

Building a startup for $5k? Really? - turoczy
http://startupgeek.org/2009/05/02/building-a-startup-for-5k-really/
Portland's David Abramowski provides some insight on how he's working to keep his startup costs low.
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vaksel

       The last place we had to spend money before we could launch our very first version was on legal advice.  
       Terms of use, privacy policies and refund policies all needed to be reviewed by a expert.
    

You most likely don't even need that, just copy paste stuff from other
websites

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lionheart
IANAL, but I believe that those policies are copyrighted by the respective
websites. This means its illegal to just copy and paste them.

I've known people that have gotten sued for large sums because they just
copied and pasted those kinds of things.

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anotherjesse
Automattic (Wordpress) put their documents under a creative commons license:

    
    
      TOS: http://en.wordpress.com/tos/
      Privacy Policy: http://automattic.com/privacy/
    

And everyone seems to use the same DMCA document, but I'm not sure who created
it:

    
    
      http://secondlife.com/corporate/dmca.php
    

IANAL either, but I've used these on userscripts.org

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abyssknight
You know, I think you can do it for far less. The key is human assets and
time. Legal copy you can acquire for free, or if a founder is a lawyer
everyone wins. Marketing is free, provided you're willing to do it. Hosting is
really all you have to pay for, and that starts at a paltry $20/month at
SliceHost or lower on shared hosting. What is it that costs so much?

Sure, rent, food and everything isn't free but my day job covers that. I guess
a good designer might cost you some cash, but even that doesn't amount to $5k
if you do some leg work yourself (i.e. sketches, html breakdown).

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iamcalledrob
I think it's very possible – if you have another source of income to pay for
rent, computers, food etc..

My development has going strong with no extra investment on my part, other
than time.

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rs
True, the post does say that $5k went directly to "design, hosting & legal"
which didn't include the development costs (time, etc) of the 4 founders.

Yeah, it's $5k that was spent, but surely the development of the product
itself has to be accounted for.

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GrandMasterBirt
Its funny because that is the total budget of my project. :) It can be done, I
just have to survive on instant noodles for only a few more years!

