Startup series: Building the business on a shoestring budget

By Shefaly Yogendra A startup, while it works to make revenue with its product or service, incurs essential costs. A shoestring budget calls for resourcefulness and creativity in building the business. An earlier column discussed building the MVP on a small to vanishing budget. The Tl;Dr for this column is as follows: You pay for some things, you do not pay for some things; you should take your time to understand which is which. The advice applies whether you are bootstrapping or playing with someone else’s, i.e. an investor’s or a VC’s, money. How to know which is which? There is a thumb rule for that too. For all startup related decisions, ask yourself: “Is this expense helping me advance our startup’s objectives?” If the answer is “yes” then go for it, provided the cash in your bank account allows for it. If the answer is “no”, just stop and reconsider. If you fear this will take all the joy out of your life, there is a third possibility: repurpose some of your treats and desirable experiences such that they serve both your startup and to enhance your personal joy. Founders, rightly or wrongly, are not often able to separate work and non-work in ways others can. The approaches that work often address this peculiarity of the founders’ existence. Some call it leveraging, I call it maximising several of your life’s purposes in one go. But since life is less than black and white, this week we have some tips, gathered from the trenches, which will hopefully give you a spur to more creative ideas. Some of these tips may not be new to the more experienced founder. First off, we cannot manage what we do not understand or measure. The very first thing to measure and track is your weekly spend. Tracking gives us data, and data can help us make smarter choices in many instances. I once asked a founder, with a professed love of a specific drink at Starbucks, to estimate how much money is spent on Starbucks annually. The number was eye-watering. She then chose a two-pronged strategy and now makes her coffee at home using ground coffee and a cafetière, and holds work meetings in Starbucks so can occasionally treat herself, while writing off the expense as a legitimate business expense (check business expense rules in your country with your accountant before applying this blindly). Second, get creative, and discover “free” or “freemium”. Identify the business costs that you can keep low. Do you really need that co-working office space, or can you work from your home or shed in early days? Communication costs can be reduced to quite low with generous free minutes on mobile plans but it may be wise to keep them for making those calls, where you cannot use Skype or WhatsApp-to-Whatsapp calling. Identity the business-critical stuff you cannot afford to lose and make backups. Some of the best established project management tools such as Asana and Basecamp get you started with a free account, sometimes with limited features and you can then upgrade to a paid plan for additional features and more projects. New tools come along with free offerings, but be alert to their data export policies in case they go bust and you need to move to a different platform. Did I say make backups? Third, manage your costs of training, learning and staying up to date with stuff essential to your business. Most publications these days tweet out their best pieces. The web gives access to a lot of materials on software skills to business news. This column series is a good example of such materials. Find libraries, ask friends to give you their subscription copies once they are done. Fourth, in doing all this, do not be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Do not scrimp on coming across as a professional, whether it is how you dress when you meet a potential customer, advisor or financier, or whether you turn up on time. I can see some of you rolling your eyes at this. Perfectly fine, if you feel comfortable turning up to meetings with a customer, while not showered, wearing clothes that smell, and late! Remember in the early days, founders are always selling. Choose the impression you want people to take away. Finally, get a grip on tax rules for business expenses. Ask your accountant. Write off every single legitimate expense. This should not be hard if you have paid attention to the point at the beginning. Getting a grip on what you are spending is essential to staying within a shoestring budget. In the next column, I will address a question I hear very often, my advice on the issue, and the reasons for it. The author is a decision-making specialist, and advises founders and CEOs on technology, risk, branding and talent. She can be found on Twitter: @Shefaly. This is the seventh part in a series ( ( first,   second,   third,    fourth,   fifth  and sixth ) on the startup ecosystem.