I discovered an interesting article on Mashable that discusses 7 different tips for bootstrapping your own business and I figured many of you might be interested in reading. I think most of our ventures in the initial stages would be planning on bootstrapping so I felt it was pretty relevant for the whole class.
Tip #1: Test the market - Before you spend any money on pursuing your venture go out and ask potential consumers how much they would pay for your product/service. This will help validate your model and justify spending the time and money to build your company. Additionally it will help determine which functionality you need immediately, versus what can wait.
Tip #2: Efficiency - To bootstrap, you need to be as efficient as possible. Do small and inexpensive marketing tests until you find the medium that produces the best results. When designing your website, add the most important functionality in order to get a product to the market.
Tip #3: Keep the team small - Large team's drain cash flow quicker than any other expense in your budget. Until you have a positive cash flow, only hire people you absolutely need. Give current team members multiple job functions, and offer stock option incentives instead of cash.
Tip #4: Interns - For your startup, interns provide free or inexpensive labor that leads to quicker profitability.
Tip #5: Marketing - Try outsourcing your press releases, this can be done by contacting reporters on your own. Do an internal audit and think of stories and outlets that are related to your project and come up with a simple pitch for a story idea. The article recommends the use of MediaSync to get a reporter’s email address and contact information. Reporters are always interested in hearing from the CEO of a company.
Tip #6: Outsourcing - Web design and programming can easily be outsourced and can be much cheaper and save you time. Elance and Freelancer are two good sites to outsource work to. On these sites you can either post your project and have people bid on it, or you can search through the talent and contact potential candidates directly.
Tip #7: Social Networks - Using Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets are a great to connect and interact with your customers. Both are free networks that you can use to promote your business to a broad audience. Additionally, become an expert in your field of business and blog on your own website or on others, this will build a community around your brand and keep customers coming back.
Link
Categories:
Infobits