How to bootstrap a Startup with less than $10k. Meet Tipsandtrip.

http://www.thestartup.eu/2010/06/how-to-bootstrap-a-startup-with-less-than-10k-meet-tipsandtrip/

by stefanobernardi • 16 years ago

54 36 16 years ago

thestartup.eu

magno5• 16 years ago

Here to answer any question you have on tipsandtrip :)

bond• 16 years ago

How do you make money? What's the business model?

magno5• 16 years ago

We will try first to build a community/traffic and then will look for revenues. Revenues will be adv based (display, affiliation with travel sites).

Concours• 16 years ago

any revenues numbers? how was it, working with remote teams?

magno5• 16 years ago

No revenues at the moment. Working with remote teams is fine if you use the right tools (redmine, svn for example) and if you try to avoid working with people on the other part of the ocean. We worked with people in Argentina, Japan, India, Ukraine and Russia. The last two are at the moment the countries where we find the highest programming skills.

fabiodebe• 16 years ago

Great example of what Guy Kawasaki (and many others to be fair) have been preaching for quite some time now. If you have a web-based idea there's really no excuse not to give it a shot. Related to this great post I also suggest 1) the StartupTools wiki (started by the awesome guys at Songkick) http://startuptools.pbwiki.com/ and 2) a post I read last night about how to hire a programmer to make your idea happen (http://sivers.org/how2hire).

I agree that this app is going to face fierce competition from well funded companies, but the accomplishment so far is great so congrats and best of luck!

stefanobernardi3• 16 years ago

Derek's post is one of the best to date about hiring programmers for short projects or outsourcing purposes. I still believe the best way to hire tech talent is to develop relationships as you'll have to trust the guy with your product and IP. Meet people at ruby-python-whatever user groups, find people you could comfortably live with and then try to work together on something.

magno5• 16 years ago

@fabio, yes, exactly what we did. We gave it a shot and wanted also to test the many different services available to crowdsource workforce.

nroach• 16 years ago

Great job of getting to MVP on the cheap! But it seems like a budget of $10K or so would only work for relatively simple apps. Doing something like Dropbox, 280Atlas, or FlightCaster (probably) would take significantly more money.

Any suggestions for how you'd proceed if you knew up front that you were facing a much longer development cycle?

stefanobernardi3• 16 years ago

I'm not the founder, but IMHO such a project can not be developed on your spare time. I guess the process that Marco used can be replicated for simple freemium saas web apps and mobile applications.

280North and Dropbox are developing brand new and break-trough technology; they need a full team of experienced hackers, loads of money and a grand vision to realize that.

Of course the payoff is different..

saikat2• 16 years ago

280North at least develops all their technology in-house (and it's only 3 hackers). I bet most of their costs are living expenses for the founders.

keefe• 16 years ago

learn to write code competently or partner with a competent engineer

magno5• 16 years ago

You are right, tipsandtrip is a relatively simple project (web + api + iphone) but I think that a similar process can be used also on larger project to build a MVP that can be launched and shown to investors. Better to have something working to show than a couple dozen of slides ;-)

brianmwang2• 16 years ago

One of the things that always bothers me about the "How to build and launch a product with <$X" articles is the fact that they almost always talk about the costs of outsourcing design/development but almost never talk about the actual costs of living for founders. You know what I'd love to see? Articles about how a couple of scrappy founders cut their living costs to the bone, keep the majority of development in-house (assuming there's a tech founder), and outsource when needed. All of this while trying to get to launch/MVP before the founders' savings run out or need to concentrate on consulting for a while to pay the bills.

starkfist• 16 years ago

In Italy, the answer is "we still live at home with our parents."

In San Francisco, the answer was usually "my parents still pay my rent."

ahoyhere9• 16 years ago

Why wait for articles to be written? Why not do it yourself?

We built http://letsfreckle.com for "free" -- did all the work ourselves, while consulting.

If you're really passionate, you'll find a way. Sure, it would have been nice to have foregone the "while consulting" part, and done nothing but focus on our product all day long... but nobody was handing us a free lunch. So we did it, the way we could do it, without any particular hardship except being tired and annoyed.

EDIT: fixed tense. Living in a non-English-speaking country is wreaking havoc with my grammar.

pclark2• 16 years ago

is http://letsfreckle.com your full time career now?

stefanobernardi3• 16 years ago

Wow, congrats. It's a really cool product and the UI is amazing. Till what point did you work on it part time and when did you decide to take it full time (I'm assuming you did given the polish of the app).

brianmwang2• 16 years ago

Asking "why wait for articles" is like saying why use tutorials or guides for anything at all? Why not just learn it all by doing it yourself? Besides, I think there's a bit of a strawman here. I'm not saying I'd like to avoid consulting to pay the bills.

There is a lot of value in learning from other people's experiences. Spencer Fry has a fantastic article on the topic of bootstrapping in general(http://spencerfry.com/how-to-bootstrap) but I'd really love to see somebody get down to the nitty gritty financial details of dollars in vs. dollars out - the holy crap, how are we going to pay rent in 2 months? stuff - in the stages of a startup that hasn't yet reached ramen profitability.

pclark2• 16 years ago

since when is the milestone for bootstrapping "launch"? I thought it was always profitability?

daveungerer• 16 years ago

Wait a second... we'll have to find a new word for the concept currently known as bootstrapping, because articles like these make the word completely meaningless.

Bootstrapping means creating a self-sustaining business. At a minimum, this means you have revenue to cover your running costs. You can only say "bootstrap with less than $10K" if that 10K gives your business enough revenue to cover its running costs. Yet this is what one of the founders has to say in another comment here on HN: We will try first to build a community/traffic and then will look for revenues.

I guess it's not the founders' fault that the article was written this way. But once they've spent a lot of time and money on actually building their community/traffic + the inevitable further development costs, and they start making some revenue, we'll know how much it cost them to bootstrap the business.

Some great tips for getting an MVP together though.

saikat2• 16 years ago

Yeah, according to the metric used by this article, I've been bootstrapping my startup for under $1k over the past 8 months. And I don't find what I'm doing to be all that incredible.

ahoyhere9• 16 years ago

I think this is part of the misconception that many Europeans have about "the way startups work." Even if they read everything that's published, the "Hey, this new thing just launched!" and "This Social Network for Dogs is a STARTUP!" fluff outnumbers the "Yeah, we busted ass and charged real money" meat 10:1.

Naturally, what's more common is what sticks in their minds.

As an American in Vienna, I find this kind of cargo-culting everywhere.

gametheory• 16 years ago

sounds very much like the misconceptions of much of those in Silicon Valley

ahk• 16 years ago

Newbie question: the thing that always puzzles me is where these folks get their data from (in this case the list of restaurants with details). Anybody know how one can go about getting their hands on stuff like that? Is it all available for free on some site I just haven't heard of yet?

kasted• 16 years ago

so, how does this free app plan to make profit?

How to bootstrap a Startup with less than $10k. Meet Tipsandtrip.

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