Bootstrapper Handbook for Startups

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Creative way to Bootstrap

September 25, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Bootstrapping is often associated with pain and sacrifice. You need to compromise a lot of things to bootstrap your business. We should put in our mind that bootstrapping is not always pain and sacrifices. It is indeed difficult to start a business from the scratch. You will really need to shell out money for your initial expenses to get your business up and running. Oftentimes, it is a struggle to provide the initial capital you needed.

You can actually raise enough money to cover all of your start up and operating expenses in a creative way. You can seek out for available creative business financing solutions for your bootstrapped business. You might want to consider Surplus Auction. To start a business with less financing, you don’t need to have brand new business equipments. Settle your business with surplus equipment with your tight capital. Surplus auctions offer a good startup to the creative-bootstrap entrepreneur. Some basic examples of equipments in surplus auction that you can use for your business are the following:

-Computers & Printers

-Industrial Machinery

-Office Equipment

-Office Supplies

-Medical, Dental & Veterinary Equipment

-Telecommunications Equipment

If you will buy it brand new, it is really a big struggle. If you desire to save money for your start up expenses, then this might be the best bootstrap financing option for you. This is once again an opportunity for you to start business even if you have little money, poor credit or don’t own a home. Be creative and bootstrap your way to start up business success.

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8 Steps to running your business on (mostly) free apps

December 24, 2008 · 2 Comments

Thanks to Bruce Judson for this another bootstrapping tips.

1) Establish a bias towards software-as-a service.
Find free online applications (such as Weebly or ImageShack) that you rent on a monthly basis. Software should only be adopted in extreme situations. By adopting capabilities that reside on the Web, you eliminate the headaches associated with software maintenance. You also get the benefit of ongoing upgrades.

2) Identify the services you need; assume free or low-cost versions are available.
(See sample list below). Low-cost services should form the baseline for your ultimate choices. Then, any higher-cost service you identify needs to demonstrate the value of a premium price through some combination of factors including: better features, greater reliability, superior support, or greater ease of use. (In my experience, many premium-priced products do not).

3) Never commission custom software.
Custom code limits your flexibility by locking you into the offerings of a specific vendor for a lengthy period of time. You’ll pay for upgrades, and also lose the opportunity to try new low-cost Web services that come to market.

One way of thinking about this issue is to look at the costs of sophisticated services over time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if a particular feature costs $50,000 to $250,000 today, a year from now it may well be available as a Web-based service that can be rented for less than $40 per month, and two years from now it may be one feature in a service package that rents for less than $25.00 per month.

4) Live by my 60% rule.
If a particular service meets 60% of your needs today it is what you should use. It’s good enough. As Web-based services are constantly enhancing their offerings, within a few months it will likely meet 80% of your needs, or even include valuable features that you had not imagined.

You must also accept that in a 60% world some potential customers will get away. But the appropriate question to ask is: How much revenue can I add to our business by filling in the gaps in a 60% solution? The answer is likely to be very small. Moreover, it’s my experience that businesses that invest in finding infrastructure services that are perfect, as opposed to good enough, rarely achieve profitability. They spend too much time looking for “perfect capabilities” outside their core offering, tend to over-spend on these capabilities, and thus, lack the flexibility of their competitors.

5) Focus on how a service works, not the brand-name provider who sells it.
In a large number of cases, sophisticated service platforms may be designed for one purpose, but can be implemented to provide a variety of purposes that are valuable to the needs of your enterprise. Think creatively about how a service may be extended and integrated into your infrastructure, and you will find many valuable uses for it.

6) Automate as much as possible.
There may be aspects of your business, particularly in your core offering, that require human intervention. However, you want to build a low-cost infrastructure that automates everything else. Once you need to put people power against any part of your infrastructure, you have lost the ability to easily scale the business.

7) Always have a backup ready.
The long-term reliability of any Web service should always be on your mind. I counsel companies to have a replacement for all services identified at the time they decide what services to use. Also include an estimate of the time it would take to replace a specific service, and an ongoing means of ensuring any valuable data or records accumulated by any of your services are transferred to you..

8 ) Learn html.
You or someone you trust must be educated in simple html. Sure, many Web businesses have in-house capabilities that eliminate this issue. However, I have seen too many start-ups founders from outside the Internet industry become totally at the mercy of outside vendors. For the lack of some easily obtained knowledge, they lose the ability to make the majority of the responsible judgments and tradeoffs advocated above.

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Bootstrapping Tips from Noobpreneur.Com

December 10, 2008 · 1 Comment

First of all, I would like to know what does Noobpreneur means? Anyone of you who knew it please share it in my comments section.

Okay, so let’s get back into the topic — bootstrapping tips. Over at Noobpreneur.Com,  it’s giving us tips on How to Bootstrap Your Way Past Recession — that’s the title of the article.  Well, it’s worth quoting the bulleted list of their bootstrapping tips. Here it is:

Bootsrapping tips

I learn from my fellow entrepreneurs on how to bootstrap your way to thrive in today’s recession – From what I learn, there are several similarities in bootstrapping methods among them; To name a few:

  • They purchase everything on business credit cards – this way, they reap point rewards that can be redeemed with various rewards, such as traveling the world – this is effective as long as they pay their bills on due date to avoid late fees or other fees incurred.
  • They do balance transfer – they ‘reshuffle’ their business credit cards, and transfer the balance – or aggregate some, to the most attractive credit card issuers offers possible.
  • They always think, “Substitute, substitute, substitute” – i.e. if printing their own business card is cheaper, they’ll do it for sure.
  • Their motto, “Save the money, save the world” – free advertisements, free classifieds, consignment, dropshipping, viral marketing, etc. are their keywords.
  • They choose NOT to hire employees, if they feel hiring ones will not add to their business’ revenue significantly.
  • They outsource – avoiding the headache and costs of having their own employees, they outsource and sub-contract non-critical business operations to a third party.
  • They use the recession as their marketing tool. i.e. one of my colleagues use emotional or paranoia marketing to get customers in without costing a lot to attract them – one pitch example: “Don’t invest in today’s lackluster stock market that has bankrupted investors – invest in gold with us”

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Welcome to the Bootstrapper Handbook for Startups!

August 13, 2008 · 1 Comment

Welcome to my blog! I actually got this bootstrap term in my software development experience. In programming, it is a technique for loading the first few instructions of a computer program into active memory and then using them to bring in the rest of the program. Oh well, I knew you might be wondering why I came up with this title. Simply because in general terms, the process of bootstrapping  is one well known re sampling method for estimating which will help me and you-my readers in our business start up. Thus, every discoveries that I will learn from different business enthusiast will be documented here. Basically will turn out to be my and your handbook. A handbook for our success!

Once again, Welcome to the Bootstrapper Handbook for Startups!

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