As a follow on to my post on bootstrapping, I thought I’d share some of the ways I keep costs down.
- Website Hosting – Unless you’re building something really big and complex, you don’t need your own server and/or collocation. Even if you are, it’s cheaper to prototype your application with something like PHP/MySQL that flat out start building with J2EE/Oracle. If you have the funding, fine. Go for it. But if you want to start small and on the cheap you can get a decent hosting package for $80/year. Check out GoDaddy, that’s who hosts this blog and the rest of my micro-sites.
- Email Hosting — One of the best cheap services that offers a ton of value for email hosting that I’ve found is FuseMail. While you can use your own domain with Gmail, I found that having the ability to use FuseMail for my DNS as well as multiple domains for email was a really powerful combination. The services costs $0.99 per mailbox per month with a ten mailbox minimum and 1GB of shared storage. Additional mailboxes and 1GB increments of storage can be had for $0.99 each. FuseMail has a nice web mail client, calendar, spam and virus filtering. You can even customize your web mail using your logo and colors and it looks really professional.
- Avoid costly software – Now, I admit I use MS Office. Until there is a true replacement for Outlook, I will continue to plunk down my hard earned coin (for Outlook alone). However, there are lots of great alternatives such as OpenOffice.org, Google Docs. For email there’s Thunderbird or even Gmail . Need Photoshop? No you don’t. Try the GIMP. Need team collaboration and are ready to use SharePoint? Forget it. Try BaseCampHQ. Need to access your PC from anywhere? Ditch GoToMyPC and try TightVNC. Need to print documents or images as PDF’s. Guess what? You don’t need Adobe Acrobat. Instead, check out PDFCreator.
- Incorporate on the cheap. Use Corporate.com to incorporate. If you’re fairly comfortable choosing your entity type and don’t have a lot of partners or shareholders initially, this Corporate.com is a really inexpensive way to formalize your business.
I’ll keep adding to this list as things come to mind. When you startup cheaply, you build discipline that will help you operate efficiently in the long run. When I finally did have a big budget, I was still of the mindset that I was broke — even though I could get whatever gadget, software or service I needed.
How do you keep your startup costs down?
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