If you are an entrepreneur and are bootstrapping, then you are probably going to watch every penny you spend. Here's how I kept my costs low when I founded StoryTruck . At the very early stage I only cared about these two.
1. Infrastructure Costs
What do you think? Are there other ways of shrinking costs?
1. Infrastructure Costs
- I used my home as a office space and avoided renting an office space. This alone saved hundreds of dollars.
- If you are building a web based product, look for hosting services. Although Amazon's EC2 is the default choice of entrepreneurs, if you look around, you'll notice that there are cheaper and equally reliable services. I chose to go with My Hosting's VPS solution for a fixed monthly cost.
- You'll need a good reliable source repository and bug tracking system. I chose SourceRepo because it was the cheapest. After a year, I can say it was the cheapest and it is reliable!
2. Development Costs
The next biggest cost is your development cost. If you are a developer yourself, then you can probably get away with this. But I found that I needed some help so that I could spend my time on other things. I addressed it as follows.
- Choose your programming language and platform wisely: I chose Php over .Net because I could find more Php programmers and at cheaper rates.
- I also found that hosting a Php site was far cheaper than hosting a .Net solution in terms of the hosting cost.
