It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex custom development project, usually costing a million dollars or more. Now you can do it for free, or a few hundred dollars, with one of the many web building tools available, like Shopify or Weebly. A programmer can build a new smartphone app for a few thousand dollars.
With the appearance of do-it-yourself services on the Internet, entrepreneur curriculums at every university, and a wealth of new books on the subject, the need for expensive consultants and business advisors has also been mitigated. Almost anyone can start a company today on a shoestring budget, following these cost-cutting recommendations:
- Establish a solid legal structure for your business. Setting up the business as an LLC or C-corporation can now be done online with low registration fees and minimal risk. The same is true for filing patents, registering trademarks, and filing copyrights. Required legal fees now average $5K or less, compared with $20K or more as a minimum.
- Work out of your home, and keep your own books. You can now skip the mandatory office space rental, with secretary and bookkeeping staff, or outsourcing. With a little help from a friend, you can handle expenses, revenue, and payroll, with QuickBooks or a similar package. These steps alone can reduce your monthly burn rate by at least $10K.
- Use the cloud and subscriptions for computing technology. Gone are the days of required $50K computer servers onsite, with big software license fees up-front. Servers needed expensive IT consultants for setup and maintenance, and required excessive power and cooling. With Google, you get all the storage you need in the cloud for free.
- Social media facilitates marketing and sales. For startups, social media and color printers have essentially replaced the need for external public relations and marketing services. You can optimize your website and spread your marketing messages across the world through the Internet. Savings here can easily reach another $10K per month.
- Minimize investment in prototypes and tooling. With do-it-yourself makerspaces such as TinkerMill, you can avoid expensive prototyping iterations. You can now get tooling and products built very quickly either in the US or in China, with delayed payment options. The need to build a new million-dollar factory for each new product is gone.
- Use freelance and work-at-home to reduce payroll. As an old rule-of-thumb, startups realized that employees cost double the salaries paid, to cover office costs, health-care benefits, and workers compensation. Today, productivity is way up, you can do most anything yourself, and you can outsource to contractors with more skill and less cost.
Of course, not all new businesses can benefit from all these recommendations, so think carefully about what you can do, and what you can’t. For example, if you have no technical background, you probably can’t create or sell an enterprise software product for a low price, even today. Maybe you should start with an online e-commerce site, based on your favorite hobby expertise.
My point is that one or more entrepreneurial opportunities are now within the financial reach of almost everyone. You don’t need to count on the old myth that all you need is a new idea on the back of a napkin, and investors will throw money at you. It never happened in any time frame I can remember, and it definitely won’t happen today.
If you can’t afford today to start the business of your dreams, even with all the suggestions here, the growing number of startups is still a positive for you, since you might be able to join another entrepreneur as a co-founder, or simply work for another startup to build up your skills, experience, customer savvy, and resources.
But don’t wait too long if you want to stay ahead of the curve. I see a historic shift taking place toward the entrepreneurial lifestyle, and away from the corporate job cubicle environment. People are using the new cost equations brought about by the Internet and social media to do what they love, and love what they do. Isn’t it time that you joined the movement?
Martin Zwilling
