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.
