21 Tips On How To Build A Cheap Startup

At the second Swiss StartupCamp (see my coverage here and here), Dorian Selz and Toni Birrer held a presentation with the title “21 Tips On How To Build A Cheap Startup”. And if you know or have ever heard of Toni and Dorian you know, these guys have something to tell and you better listen. The same was true this time again. No wonder the room was fully packed with current startupers, coming startup founders and some general interested people. Their 21 rules are actually quiet simple, but also a good resource to take care if you launch your own startup.

I will outline the most important points in my opinion (and as a developer, not primarily as a business guy).

Rule 3 Get a business person into the team. This rule goes with Rule 4 “Get a professional bookkeeper”. If you are a techie, you don’t really want to worry about to much business or finance. Dorian also mentioned, that a bookkeeper is really, really important. The bad tax guy can always wait around to corner and have a few surprises for you. And also your investors want to see numbers and crunch them. At the end, your business is sold based on numbers, less on lines of code or design patterns.

Rule 7 Atlassian Starter License, this should make your techie happy. Even if it sounds stupid to have to track all bugs, requests and so forth, this is a really important issue. And of course this is not only valid for startups but also for bigger corporations.

Rule 12 Do online backups! First of all, do backups and backup everything.

Rule 13 Use free stuff. Don’t run your own email server (use Google Apps), don’t run your own webserver (use Metanet). Don’t spend time and money on such things. And the others do this well and it is their core business, not yours.

Rule 20 80% of success is showing up! Attend free events (eg. WebTuesday, WebMonday, BarCamp, StartupCamp …). Present your idea, product, team. Host an event at your offices. If you do not talk about your product, others won’t either!

Of course there are many other rules and points to take care off. Toni has collected all relevant links in a collection on memonic. As soon as the presentation is available online, I will link to it.

Update 15th February: Toni and Dorian put the slides as PDF and the talk as a MP3 file online. Thanks guys!