
What Could You Build with Just $10,000? - replicatorblog
https://medium.com/@foundercollective/what-could-you-build-with-just-10-000-67e91f65dd4b
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fairpx
I started [http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro) \- ui design firm for
startups, for less than $100. Before we had a website, we were profitable and
quickly grew to $10k/mo in a few weeks. like mentioned in the article,
cashflow is key here. It allows you to reinvest earned money and keep growing.
Startups shouldnt raise IMHO before reaching product market fit. Ive made that
mistake in the past myself. Having a lot of VC money in your bank that you can
burn through while looking for a business model sounds fun, but isn't.

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askaboutit
How do you feel about the budget players in your space, which have practically
grown to apparently $50,000 monthly revenue, but have missed client files,
gotten plenty of negative reviews on producthunt and churned out designs
nothing like what they state on their site. Manypixels.co

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fairpx
Many of those I know very well because the founders contacted me with
questions before launching a cheaper competitor. In all honesty I don't think
about them at all. Our goal isn't to build a $1B company and have this
complete monopoly position. The opposite is true. We deliberately stay small,
work only with a few companies and basically do work that we really really
love. The reason all the great companies have big in-house design teams is
that design is about more than cheaply moving pixels from one person to the
other. Because we go deep with each startup, we learn a lot about everything
what works and what doesn't. In other words, we learn about how our design
decisions impact business. How they increase conversion, profits, etc. And so
this deeper level of involvement allows us to use that knowledge and expertise
with the next startup. For many startups, just having something that looks ok
is enough, and for those, the cheaper competitors are the way to go. For
others who want to build a great product for their customers.. those who care
about details and using design to grow their business, those are the only
companies we work with.

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askaboutit
Great reply. The pro version looks great for serious startups or agencies. Our
personal experience with manypixels ended in a refund. So I just wanted to get
your take on the cheaper end.

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fairpx
Love to learn what you used it for and what went wrong.

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Edd314159
Sure, these businesses were all built on $10K of capital. But what about time?
How many months or years could have been spent working while building the
business? That could put a lot of these businesses into six-figure territory
when you factor in opportunity cost.

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kosei
This is usually the big issue I've seen/experienced: funding $10k isn't as
hard as 2-3 people deciding to quit their jobs and take no income for 1-2
years.

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replicatorblog
In many of these cases the founders were drawing salaries relatively early in
the company's lifecycle. A couple had substantial early revenue so it wasn't
much of a hardship.

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TooSmugToFail
For this kind of budget, we've regularly built works-like-looks-like
prototypes of fairly complex consumer hardware devices.

For example, we built World's best FPV video goggles for roughly this budget
(with custom optics design _and_ prototyping). That's our internal project,
though.

After building a prototype, you would typically need another 2x to 3x that for
tooling (if plastics are involved) and some working capital to manufacture the
first volume run of 100 - 1000 units.

Hardware is rather expensive.

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drelihan
Ok - first thought I had was a big model castle made out of pennies

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sunstone
That's ambitious. My first thought was a stack of $1000 bills an eighth of an
inch high :D

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13of40
My first thought was a medium sized shed, maybe with a cement floor.

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e12e
But what color would it be?

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ateesdalejr
Red of course.

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alex_young
It's a little disingenuous to suggest that most of theses companies were built
with 10k though right? Maybe it took 10k to prove a market, but surely there
was lots of funding following that.

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replicatorblog
Not necessarily. I know the founder of ButcherBox and he managed to get to
tens of millions of revenue in pure bootstrap fashion. The PaintNite guys got
to $25M in revenue before taking on $13M in VC. Shutterstock got to IPO
without taking any capital. It's not easy, but it was more common than I
expected!

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tyingq
Back when Google was easier to game with SEO it was pretty common to bootstrap
nothing into a few thousand a month.

One common pattern was finding popular sites where you could find bugs that
allowed you to post links in comments with a css style that made them not look
like links. PageRank loved it.

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buf
I built Casting Call Club
([https://castingcall.club](https://castingcall.club)) with $0, and only 1000s
of hours of my time. No matter what you pay (time or money or lost
opportunities), the price is always significant.

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whytaka
> RXBar... focused on sales first and “branding” second.

> The distinctive, no BS packaging

The author is very confused about what 'branding' means.

EDIT: I'm an idiot.

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replicatorblog
Author here, not sure how this comes off as confused? In the linked article,
the founder of RXBar talks about how the brand positioning emerged from the
sales process. By going account to account they refined the company's core
story—the focus on ingredients—which came to dominate the visual touchpoints.

~~~
whytaka
I'd completely misread it and came to a snap judgment. My apologies.

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goatherders
You can build most any software application with $0 invested and be cash flow
positive before writing a line of code. There are lots of people (myself
incljded) that take an idea to potential customers, turn them into actual
customers and then get to work. For B2B it is not hard to say "I will solve
this problem for x dollars per month. That will make you y more or save you y
dollars per month. Sign here and I will provide the solution in # weeks." And
that works just fine.

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pmuk
We started my current business which now does around $5M p.a revenue with
$3000 in 2005. It's definitely doable!

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himom
A working engine and less rusting bodywork for my VW van house. Oh seriously?
Then something that uses almost all SaaS and has marginally-zero unit cost
like a self-improvement videos site.

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Fomite
A compelling pilot study of hospital-associated infection transmission in a
developing world hospital.

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stuaxo
Spout / Syphon equivilent for Linux.

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mgarfias
A 600hp ls3

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mlevental
show me

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mgarfias
$6200 for an LS3 on eBay. Pull the heads and send them to advanced induction
for their porting services. $1100 for that, then a matching cam from them.

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mlevental
oh i'm dumb just the block. for some reason i was imagining 10k for a car with
an ls3.

