How to start a business with no money

How to start a business with no money
launchlab.co.uk

The problem, however, was that most people just aren't built for startups. So while I kept things extremely fair — everyone was on a 50/50 profit share, myself included, after operational expenses were paid (less than 4%) — that just wasn't enough to keep people motivated to reach the 2-3 year end goal.

To be fair, I think it was less about motivation and more about income and lifestyle. But again, most people just aren't prepared/designed for startup life which in this case would have required they code in the evening hours after their full time job was over. Ha!

Startups are difficult, getting traction is difficult (the juice), and I would say that assembling a skilled team is equally challenging and will significantly impact chances of success/survival — never settle with your team. The challenge with building a team is that startups will change people, especially virgin startup-ers who've never experienced the workload. Burnout/frustration in combination with low pay and kool-aid stock options will destroy a team in a year or two if they're not prepared.

All that being said, this month I've decided to take a drastic turn and attempt to raise a small amount of money to make a few full-time hires. The good news is, I proved myself as a young entrepreneur and we may secure a really awesome lead investor that could do a lot more for us than just give us money.

I definitely recommend bootstrapping, it helps you set realistic priorities based on severely limited resources (prepares you for when times are rough), and helps you find the holes where investors can provide value besides just $$.

I don't know about the rest of the mobile applications, but the two things I can think of monetizing are SqueezeBooks and LangPop:

SqueezeBooks: how about SqueezeNews? Give me a customized, highly focused and well combed summary of a certain industry and I will subscribe. I'm in online advertising; I should come to your site, select my category and be given a long list of highly specialized sub-categories. I choose the ones I want and you aggregate all related news, monitor websites, mailinglists, google trends. Summarize articles for me, with a combination of automatic summarization + some human editing, and I should be able to submit my own feeds. Something like this, "executive intelligence review"; if you just pick one industry, you should be able to get a good chunk of the executive crowd, a highly coveted readership. Just pick ONE industry that you're passionate about and go for it. You can even review startups for potential VCs, give them the raw deal. TechCrunch and other sites are verbose and annoying because that's how they make their money. You will make your money by being succinct and brutally honest.

LangPop: Programming language comparisons are stupid. Everyone has a few favorite ones and a few he uses for "work". How about you review frameworks and libraries? This looks like more work than it's worth, but you can outsource the work to specialist programmers/columnists, each in his own domain of expertise, and do it on an ad-revenue sharing basis.

When you have the right traffic, talk to me about delivering the advertising :-)

Regards.

Fair enough - I actually make my money through consulting, so what you see there is mostly this: try something, see how it goes, and then just let it sit there, or keep pushing it, iterating, depending. So far, nothing seems to have really stuck, but I don't let that deter me, I keep trying different things.

"SqueezeNews" doesn't sound like a bad idea, but I'm not sure it's my thing.

> Programming language comparisons are stupid.

But it's actually a very popular site, and the #1 in its category. And it doesn't take a great deal of effort to improve and maintain, so I do. And comparisons aren't really 'stupid' - these things matter to people.