La Vida Startup

Startups are being more bootstrapped as Hardware as a Service (HaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) has a bigger and bigger influence. It is easier today to carve out a market niche today than it ever has been before. Forget millions; think in terms of thousands and a lot of hard work and time. The entire infrastructure you need is going at bargain basement prices, meaning more people are able to take into account that startups are easy in terms of dollars, but still hard in terms of time, commitment, and getting the word out.

This time, the cost of everything from laptops to programmers is lower and no one is splashing for fancy office space, so starting up a company is cheaper, said Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO Conference, a new-technology showcase.

“The Aeron chair is out, the Starbucks latte is in,” Shipley said. “If your team includes some engineers, you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got an Internet connection, you code like hell and see what you can come up with,” she said. “It costs your time, it costs a lot of sleepless nights.” Source: Yahoo News

While things go minimalist, there are ways of stretching dollars, doing your startup part time, and doing what you need to do to bring money in, while building your dream. There are so many low cost avenues to starting a business, that the entire franchise pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the name is ending up looking almost obsolete.

What makes this interesting is that startups are so cheap to start, is that a startup can almost be considered a cottage industry. You do not need an office, you need a laptop, you do not need fancy chairs, you need the sofa, and everything can be centered on the house. Moreover, if you are fortunate to be a telecommuter, as long as you put in 8 hours a day on your paying job, there is nothing that does not say you cannot and most likely are working on something nearer and dearer to your heart.

Usually you can at least find some coder or engineer to help you set up your idea. The proliferation of open source software is also something that is well worth considering. Do you really need a fully custom solution, or can you refit something from the open source community. The total custom solution might be able to be sidestepped if there is a good enough, or customizable solution from the open source community.

The real cost effectiveness in bootstrapping is to work out what you can do with minimal dollars and how that supports what you are good at. If you are a great sales person, but a poor coder, find something open source that works, and start blogging about sales, no coding experience required. There are lots of way to save money, lots of ways to extend dollars on bootstrapping, and the good part of boot strapping is what you build it totally yours, not a VC’s or someone else’s creation.