You have a $1000 budget to kick-start your project - how do you spend it?
Starting a project is cheaper than ever. And in some cases it can be done for free (at least for an MVP). But if you had a budget of $1000 to kick-start your business / project, what would you spend it on?
Anything from software subscriptions, to freelancers, marketing, and anything else you can think of. Uncommon / unusual products and services would be interesting to hear about.
I thought this might be a fun thought-experiment to see how people would approach this based on their ideas, skills, and experiences. And maybe it will help others better spend their budget on the most high impact things.
If I'm the developer (not a hired one) then I will first built and test my system properly without taking anything for me from $1000.
Later I will split $1000 into half. I'm going to invest $500 in content and another $500 in testing ads.
I will do a little bit of research on topic related to my product and competitor and compile a list of articles. I will hire an affordable writer and pay him to write 15-20 articles and post it within 1 or 2 weeks. Later I will reach out to blogs related to my product and request them to link my blog post if they like. This way I will build authority site which will rank better.
I will split another $500 into multiple parts and run ads on multiple Ad network like Facebook, Twitter or Google Ads for $30 or $40 on each network. By running these test campaigns I will find out which Ad network and audience is suitable for my product and generating sales. Later I will invest remaining $380 into that one network which is performing better.
Totally agree with you, marketing is as imprtant as adding features to your startup.
There are so many no-code tools I would build the site using if id didn't have any experience.
There are free tiers available for hosting sites (netlify/render/vercel) so I wouldn't spend much unless I have huge traffic.
I will spend less on content around $200-300 and $700-800 on the marketing.
Probably in coffee or tea Dave...
But in reality, I would spend part on n the copy....
Hosting and testing over the course of several months would probably eat that budget. It also really depends on the product you’re making. But, with AWS Lambda and inexpensive hosting from Digital Ocean, it’s a lot cheaper to make a digital product than a physical business.
Really, the key is keeping your living expenses low too. Avoid software subscriptions if you can.
I can definitely build a product for free (domain being the only expense) but I can't market it for free.
In fact, marketing is so much not my forte, that maybe it is possible for a skilled marketing person to do free marketing the same way that I can do free dev, but I just don't know how.
Given $1000 I'd pay them to someone to get me the first x paying customers. From there I'll be able to invest income into more marketing.
Very interested to hear more thoughts...
It would depend on your product/service and your customers.
But, here is what I have done as a nocode indiehacker is creating my MVP building the brand presence online for 1 year. After some validation using free tools (Carrd/Mailchimp/Gmail), I started adding Hosting/Email/other software you might need, and will not be far from 1,000$.
Curious to see what people reply too! Personally, I think maybe the PPC campaign to validate the MVP?