Bootstrap your business – online
Posted by DavidM in Online Business | 29 March 2006
Before Christmas I met Greg Gianforte at the launch of his book “Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and grow a successful company with almost no money”.
Greg built Right Now Technologies from scratch to revenue of $87m in 2005. I spent time talking to his wife and got of a feel for how they had grown from nothing with limited funds.
One key point was that by the time Right Now went public, Greg still owned a large proportion of the company because by bootstrapping rather than involving venture capitalists, he had retained control.
The conversation was timely as we were in the process of setting up Real Life News and the theme sat well with our approach. And being an online business, we have found a huge range of free or low cost online services that help us run our business better. Below are some examples:
The legal stuff
We set up as a company and incorporated it online with UKcorporator. This wasn’t free but cost little more than buying the required documents and paying for a notary’s countersignature. All additional documentation (except where a signature is required) can be done using Companies House’ web service (for UK companies).
Team talking
All communications between Martin and I and the writers of the blogs are either through email (free from our personal ISPs) or via a special area of the Real Life News website. We all work from home so there are no office costs.
We use Dropsend to share non-sensitive documentation. This is simple and free.
Site tools
We invested more than the minimum in the design and build of the site to ensure it was low-maintenance (and therefore lower-cost) going forward.
We use Google Analytics to measure site performance and are looking at Performancing Metrics – both of which are free.
Phpadsnew is open source software that enables us to manage our advertising space, including scheduling, ad criteria and performance measurement.
Our main sources of income initially are Google and Amazon promo boxes which of course are free to set-up and add.
Commercials
Our banking is electronic so all income from advertisers, payments to suppliers and writers’ share of income is by electronic transfer.
We are set up on Ebay and Paypal, both of which only incur a cost when we sell something. Paypal also takes away many of the headaches of credit card payments, etc.
Marketing
Aside from working to get links on other football blogs and websites, we’ve promoted the site by getting added to the key search engines and directories. We have implemented Google Sitemap to aid search results, are on Technorati, NewsNow, etc. and every new post on RLN pings all the major feed readers. We also contacted the administrators of all the relevant Yahoo and MSN forums, issued press releases and told everyone we know that we had launched.
Much of this will be obvious to many of you and there are many other tools and services free online that we haven’t explored yet. But when I look at the list above, it’s staggering how much we do as an online business that is quicker, easier and cheaper than running a traditional off-line business.
Cheers
DavidM