5 Simple Ways To Save Money In Initial Days Of Startup

Finally one fine night, I decided that this is the right time to go for my childhood dream of becoming entrepreneur. I consulted my ever supporting wife and she said go for it! There it was, I clicked on submit resignation button and took the first step towards my dream. People say first step is always difficult but I think it is second step which is more difficult and important.

I had been working in IT sector for over 11 years and worked with multiple global clients and in multiple countries. I knew, what processes/tools are required to develop and deliver perfect IT solution but these things are served readymade to you when you work in MNC or big company. I wanted to follow same processes at my startup but for a cost which I can afford or even better - for FREE!!

I am listing some pointers which might help other startup in initial days. I am still learning\exploring, so any feedback and suggestions is welcome!!

1. Get Yourself Online 

The first and foremost thing required when start any business is your online presence. There are obvious social platform you want to be on. I will cover that in later blogs in details. But to give you definite identity, you need your own business website.

We could have developed and deployed our own website but when I did trade-off, at least in initial phase, using build your own website (CMS) portal seemed to have edge and cost benefit (mainly because you have finite portfolio). 

There are almost all the top services offering free website with catch that you won't be able to use your own custom domain. You will have to pay min $10 per month to use these advance features. I did some research and explored many portals like WIX, godaddy, squarespace and finally zeroed down on strikingly.com. It is basic one page website builder with some cool UI. The best thing about strikingly is that they are offering referrer program where each referrer sign-in will give you one month of Pro plan for FREE. So just send invite 12 of your best buddies and when they sign up, have 1 year of free Pro subscription.  Cool!! 

Check out our website www.gunadhyasoft.com build using strikingly.com Pro plan. 

We needed basic website for first few month during which we can build our portfolio and also work on content of our business website. So if your needs are similar (minimal :)) and you want to be online within a day (like us) and that too for FREE. I can suggest strikingly.com as the best choice and it can be FREE for a year!!

UPDATE: Post 1 years we have developed our website and hosted on shared server. But strikingly server purpose for initial year, we continue few months for paid version and then designed and developed our own website. Never the less, it is not a bad option and specially for free Pro subscription for somebody who is just starting.

2. Code Repository - Source Control 

Next step for us was, to start working on our idea. It is crucial to source (version/revision) control your code effectively and also you need safe code repository for backup in case your laptop fries down. We explored idea of creating code repository on LAN Server but we didn't have dedicated server and we obviously weren't ready to pay that hefty amount for servers. Also, another area of concern was to be able to access code from anywhere over the internet.

Assembla offers free private code repository for SVN, GIT and Perforce. You get 1GB of disk space and you can create unlimited repositories. Only catch - it allows only one user for free plan.

You can explore free option here : https://www.assembla.com/repositores.

The best part is you don't need additional resource to manage hardware/software and also maintenance cost is almost nil. For a smaller team, this works well and once you have cash inflow and team size grows then you can go for purchasing/leasing dedicated server or for a paid plan with service provide like Assembla.

UPDATE:Recently Assembla team asked to upgrade or shut down the service, so we moved to Helix Teamhub (perforce.com/try-helix-teamhub).

3. Project deployment - Finding perfect platform

We developed our first web app and wanted to make it available on Internet. We did explore lots of option like shared/dedicated server with service providers like GoDaddy, Platform as a Service (PaaS) service provided by Google, Amazon.

But as we wanted to test market first and then make investment on infrastructure, we found Amazon's 

AWS Free Tier offering from AWS portal

AWS as most suited for our requirement. AWS offers bunch of services free for a year on signing up. You get micro instance (750hrs/month) and 5 GB storage which is more than enough for a small to medium web app. We deployed our app using Amazon EC2 and it is running smoothly with no downtime (at all) till date. Another advantage over other service provider.

Google is also offering $300 towards credit for 2 month to try out their service but number of services provided by Amazon AWS are more in number and on top of it 1 year of FREE tier makes Amazon obvious choice for platform at least in initial phase.

Our web app is up and live and you can visit www.allaboutmeeting.com. You can find mind more information regarding AWS Free Tier @ aws.amazon.com/free.

Cloud is future, so unless you have capability and your application is very data sensitive (not that cloud services are insecure, but still!!) PaaS services becomes natural choice for  deploying applications. Services are modelled as pay for use and overall maintenance cost is way too less and uptime is way too more compare to dedicated platform.

UPDATE: After 12 month we continued with paid version and moved to small instance instead of micro.

4. Project Collaboration and Documentation Management

There are loads of online tools available for project collaboration and documentation management, but to effectively use most of them you will have to at least move to basic paid plan. In project collaboration, most important task for us was effective defect management and task management during project  implementation phase. The simplest (and Free ;)) way I could find is to use google sheet and Docs effectively and creatively. 

Before we moved to Gmail for business service, our team was using personal gmail ids for communication. So we all had access to these apps provided by google. We used google sheet to plan out task and track ownership and progress of each task. Our QA team created online sheet with defects and we tracked progress of defects using these sheets. All the installation guides/technical documentation was created online and most importantly multiple team members can work on same document simultaneously and remotely as well. 

Saving here was two fold, we haven't yet purchased office software (lots of saving here!! but with clients on board we are planning to :() and we don't have to pay for project collaboration tool. In initial days this can work like charm.

5. This Might Help As Well

• Use of social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp for initial recruitment can save you some  subscription money for recruitment sites/ consulting firm.
• Rent desktop/laptops/furniture instead of purchasing in initial days, as they say 98% startup fail within a year. (Oh dear! we have only completed 5 months)
• Sharing workspace helps to save some money as well and you are in company with other entrepreneur for moral and general support.

Not that, we have made it to that top (not yet ;)) and listed are not the key to success. But, some of this research consumed a lot of my time during initial phase. I would be happy, if any new startup/entrepreneur can benefit from this post. Do let me know your feedback!!

All the best!!