Startup Tips to reduce the investment Cost

How to bootstrap a tech company with almost zero cash

‘The best things in life come for free’ - this statement literally held good for our startup Deducely. When the entire ecosystem was in a frenzy to raise cash and prepare for the ‘Nuclear Winter’, We decided to rebel deviate from the norm. Though we had to endure innumerable small failures , in the end bootstrapping has made us into a cockroach that can thrive in the ‘Nuclear Winter’.

It was a cold evening in late 2015 and I had come down to my hometown - Madurai to meet my parents. I was a bit nervous, but somehow I mustered up courage and went to my mom and said “Mom, I am going to quit my job and startup”. My mother was bewildered on hearing these words. She did not want me to quit my plush job at Freshdesk; A job people would literally kill for! My mother could have somehow tolerated the part where I wanted to quit my job , but she was definitely not open to the idea of starting up! India is a very risk averse country and all the decisions should be approved by the elders of the family, in my case it was my grandparents. I had to face a mini court hearing of sorts!

I was summoned by my family for a hearing(rather just an intervention!) and the answers that I gave just aggravated the paranoia that was already prevalent! Arranged marriages are the norm in India and my overly possessive grandparents were concerend that they wouldn’t be able to find a suitable bride for me in the future if I didn’t have a corporate job. Somehow I managed to pitch the idea of starting up and get it approved.

The next part was dealing with societal pressure. A lot of people around felt that a 22 year old , with zero business experience, could never sustain a business. People thought I was crazy and starting up in a frenzy! To be honest it was absolutely true, and I just went for it and took the plunge.

We never had much cash and we never planned to raise capital as it was not our area of strength, instead we chose to concentrate on our potential customers. To be totally honest, lack of cash wasn’t as terrifying as we imagined it to be. When people have money they tend to solve the problems by throwing money at it, since we did not have money, we had to do everything by ourselves and in the process we have picked up innumerable new skills like wire-framing, product design, copy writing etc…

Some time passed by, and we got the Alpha of our product ready. We had a system in place that would help B2B sales teams to know more about their leads and discover more leads. Somehow the word went out and we were thronged by around 20 VCs. Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that VCs would reach out to us and express interest. It was a moment of great pride for us, still we chose to stick to our core principle of being bootstrapped as we wanted provide our undivided attention to our customers.

Without burning cash, Deducely has found product market fit, we currently have a platform that generates leads for sales teams! We are not from the Valley, still we not only managed to build an impressive product but also convinced people outside our geography to open up their wallets.

After 10 months of enduring failure we tasted success and there has been no looking back ever since!

We are Deducely, We are Bootstrappers, expect us!

Here is a distilled version on how we used the ‘Lack of cash’ to our advantage.

1. We wanted to incorporate Deducely in the US, so that we’d be able to collect subscription payments(subscription payments aren’t allowed in India) but the cost to enter the US entering the US banking economy was prohibitively high. It would have cost us around $4000(For this kind of money you could buy two brand new cars here in India), just to setup the company in the US! But all I had was $700 of my savings for the entire company’s operational expenditure. Luck favoured Deducely and we stumbled upon Stripe Atlas via product hunt on launch day! So Stripe incorporated us in the US for free and topped it up with $15,000 in AWS server credits to run our business, plus almost zero paperwork while incorporating via Stripe Atlas was a pleasurable experience. Deducely was able to see the light of the day only because of Stripe Atlas, and we are forever indebted to Patrick and his team for nurturing Deducely. You can read my experience with Stripe Atlas here.
2. Microsoft Bizspark is a program that grants $27K worth server credits to tech startups over a period of 3 years, there was once a time when we were incurring close to $100/month in server charges and for a cash starved bootstrapped company this expense is humongous. These credits came in handy grated us peace of mind.
3. Do not spend $10 a month on hosting your site’s landing page,instead use Github pages or Gitlab pages to host your static site for free.
4. Paying for SSL certificates are a thing of the past, do not waste hundreds of dollars on mere SSL certificate, use Let’s Encrypt. An SSL certificate makes your website more secure and instills confidence in your customers
5. We use Gitlab cloud to version control our code, we get unlimited repositories , unlimited users , an automatic CI tool, a Kanban board, and a tonne of other premium features — absolutely free!
6. Use Zoho Email to host your emails. Stop using yourcompany@gmail.com and get yourName@yourcompany.com ! Be more professional — free for 10 users!
7. You definitely need live chat for your website, do not pay monthly per user fees! Use Freshchat or tawk.to instead.
8. For sending transactional emails like password reset email and user activation emails , do not pay a hefty monthly fee! Sparkpost offers 100,000 free emails a month!
9. Marketing Automation software is absolutely necessary for every startup to send newsletters, to make important announcements etc…. And marketing automation software tend to burn a significant hole in out pockets. Use Mautic for free!
10. The most important tool for any business is a CRM, Use Hubspot CRM or Freshsales for 0$.
11. Concentrate on organic marketing channels like writing relevant blogposts, engaging with the community etc… instead of splurging cash on marketing.
12. Do not fret about not having enough cash, it is a good opportunity to find innovative ways to solve problems.

Reference Link :

https://medium.com/started-on-stripe-atlas/how-to-bootstrap-a-tech-company-with-almost-zero-cash-13f4862ac114