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Ask IH: Is it possible to bootstrap a business with no money?
By
Nelson
April 13, 2018
How do you launch and bootstrap a business with little to no funds ? Is that even possible?
We launched an over $1m in sales business for under $100.
Domain (namecheap) - $7.
Hosting (Vultr) - $10.
SSL (letsencrypt) - free.
Bitcoin payment processor (CryptoWoo) - $40. (GoUrl is free, but they take a cut.)
Sendgrid - $19.
Wordpress and various plugins - free.
Some others have mentioned AWS' free tier which is totally valid. We just had an IH interview this past week and you can check it out here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/cryptoprofitbot-com
So to recap, it is absolutely possible to bootstrap on little or no money and I now work full time on my new, profitable, company. 🙌
Hi this is kind of unrelated, but I thought that namecheap and letsencrypt don't work together. I saw that namecheap had a paid service for SSL and figured they didn't want to integrate with a free service.
Just wondering how you managed to make it work with the two as I'd love to start using letsencrypt but all my domains are over at namecheap.
Congrats on your successful business!
Hey thanks.
Yah, namecheap offers their ssl for a price. I had to manually do the letsencrypt setup myself. This is on a hosted vultr server, so I have only made it work on vps setups where I have shell access.
I don't think namecheap allows you to drop a signed cert in their hosting plans. Maybe....? I have a plan that's $7/mo with no shell access, so I haven't tried.
Yes. I bootstrapped geocode.xyz with $1 for the domain name and a free AWS t.micro instance.
Wow ! $1 to a whopping $3k MRR. That's great.
Where do you get these $1 domains ?
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Tl;tr: Yes.
Not only it is possible, but I'd argue it could easily turn an advantage.
SaaS has been largely commoditized. With the rise of Cloud providers like AWS and GCP you might not even need to pay a single $ for your first year of activity.
It'll inevitably push you to build not only something people want, something they're willing to pay for.
Im just starting, so it's not much but I made about $10,000 last year with $0 start-up costs. I didn't even have any expenses until 3 months in, after I had already earned a few thousand dollars. Then it came time to buy a domain and launch a website at a whopping $30.
what area?
I operate a resume writing agency. It's a service based business that started out with me doing everything for the first few months until I had a groove.
Not quite the same as some of the saas businesses usually talked about on IH, but I'm excited about it's prospects!
How did you get your first paying customers with no domain name ?
I run a resume writing agency.
I wrote an advertisement post that I threw up on 5 or 6 different subreddits. It was fairly long-form and explained that I understood the emotional dilemma that the service I was offering solved, why I'm qualified to do this, and introduced a bit of scarcity in my availability along with my pricing.
I also wrote a guide on how to excel at their goal with my tools in my Evernote, and linked to it in my ad to further solidify the impression that I'm a subject matter expert, and offer a bit of a takeaway for those not interested in paying - as reddit appreciates.
Response was overwhelming.
By the second week I had about 6 times the amount of work I could handle and had to hire out a bunch.
I've never spent a single dime of my family income on my business. Clients pay up-front, and my team is paid after they're done.
Professionally I work in design, development, and marketing, so I have the skill set needed to launch until it comes to hosting/domain. That said - I don't value my time at $0, but I think your initial question was more about "Is it possible not to spend money?" rather than "Is it possible to keep costs at $0?"
I have started with 9$ for domain and 3$/month VPS server, and I had 100$/month revenue (It was a very small project)
2 years ago xyz domains were at $0.99. Even now there are various promotions - for eg geocoder.site is $0.99 on Namecheap.
Starting a business with zero funds is tricky - but possible. You'll need to utilise what resources you currently have, for example:
Computer & Internet access? Make websites or apps!
Tools or power tools? Fix things for people!
Language skills? Copy writing, proof reading!
None of the above? Baby sitting / Dog walking!
Here at lumen-digital.com, we make mobile apps - and we started with a £300 Mac Mini from Ebay, and an Apple Developer account £70/year.
We worked in our spare time and earnt enough money from our Apps to give up our full time jobs after 12 months.
It's now 10 years later, and we work with some of the biggest companies on the planet :)
The only limit is how hard your prepared to work, and how determined you are.
I am a huge advocate of starting your own business, there is nothing stopping you - commit yourself, and go for it!!
My launch budget was about $60. Every dollar after that came from a customer.
To my eternal amusement, I spent $17 of it faxing a contract to a payment processor to be allowed to charge credit cards over the Internet. These days, thankfully, there are better options. cough
Shared my stack here. Keeping burn rate below a dollar https://medium.com/@shreekumars/how-we-launched-a-start-up-part-2-e2c83ff4de99
Yes, I run starterstory.com for about $15/month - that does not include some general purpose things I pay for (like Boomerang, Adobe, etc).
With no money not possible. With little maybe depending on how you define little most of these can support a founder or two (atlassian) while bootstrapping.
of course it is.
domain / hosting are your only costs bro!
you can literally make hundreds of thousands selling something with just two costs. Domain and Hosting. There's literally hundreds if not thousands of examples. Look at nomadlist.com
Well it really isn't a business until you make money so you have money.
But if the question is can you make money starting with no money? Yes.
Find something that you know how to do, or could learn how to do. Tell people you can do it for $X. Do it for them collect payment.
Examples copywriting, ad creation, blog post image creation etc.
The IH community has an endless amount of bootstrapped success stories!
Here's my story/interview on IH:
https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-web-marketing-tool-for-real-estate-agents-to-100k-mo-cf121861b8
It costs minimum $400 to form an LLC in my state. Are you all running businesses under your own names/DBAs?
Thank you all for your replies. I partially wrote this out of frustration as I am hustling to my revenue goals pretty much to no avail. I am running pretty low on funds and finding difficult to bootstrap my products. Anyway, your messages bring me comfort and support for what's next. Thanks to this wonderful community !🙌🏻
My e-commerce store cost me nothing to setup
All the businesses I launched, I did them with 0 money, only investing time and I've only started spending money once they started to generate it, so the projects invest in themselves.
I'm a developer and designer so I can bootstrap anything without spending a cent (well without counting domain name and maybe hosting)
It's probably wise to expect to pay a small amount of money, but it can and has been done many times.
Yes. Hustle, unique opportunities, perfect timing, partnerships/friendships, bartering, free tools, more hustle, growth hacker mindset.
My first business I bootstrapped with $20 for a domain, and $15 logo and after three months of 4 hours a week I had $55 monthly recurring revenue and paid back my investment and more
Who'd you contact for the logo?
This comment was deleted a month ago