Software adventures of a bootstrapped startup - introduction
Advensure's story of the various softwares and tech stack we, as a bootstrapped startup, use to set our processes, keeping the cost below Rs. 5000.
Advensure is a bootstrapped startup. Naturally, keeping costs low has been a conscious objective for us from the day we started working on our company. In the period of progressing our company and our product forward, we have learned and discovered a lot of things, either by research or by making mistakes.
Love them puns!
For all the brave souls out there working on ideas and products, building companies and startups, the biggest point of focus, in my opinion, has to be the processes and structures one creates. The focus in the first few months of creating a company, creating process defines the backbone of the company that you will create in due course.
We are a little over a year old and we launched our product about 9 months back. One would think that we would have our processes and structures in place but we make changes to it to optimize time, as recently as 2 weeks back, and with at least 10-12 iterations over the 9 month period.
Being cheap on this part is something I am particularly proud of. By doing this, we have been able to devote our resources towards getting and retaining a brilliant team that does wonders for our company.
We collectively spend a little over Rs. 5000/month (70 USD) for our entire third party applications that we use, and we use a LOT of such applications.
Having said this, it has been quite a time-consuming task finding better and cheaper (read free) options and then changing from our current service provider to the next one. Our initial research for the best products to use, while we were starting off lasted a month since we wanted to create a firm foundation from the get-go. Since then, I personally must have spent a good 300+ hours finding better solutions and integrating them into our workflow. While it took us time to find the best possible options, I think, through our wisdom (read stupidity), we might be able to help someone and reduce the time they take to set up their systems.
With that, I will be starting a series of blogs with the focus of presenting our processes and workflows around the services we use at next to no cost!
Keep in mind, there is no way that this would be a one-size-fits-all scenario, so I would always recommend some trial and error but I hope to provide the starting resources and to show-off our mentality of being frugal (read cheap) and yet making things work.
P.S. I do hope to start paying the apps and services they use someday as that is what they deserve, but untill the time someone gives us some money, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to everyone involved at the companies that we list down, for creating something that solves our everyday problems at a bootstrapped startup!
To start with, here’s a list of some top level resources to check out. This is a collection of some of the general platform and services we use.
91Springboard:
Being a bootstrapped startup with the uncertainty of the future always hanging over our heads, finding a place where we could work out of, without straining our wallet, was always a challenge, especially in a city like Mumbai. Since we didn’t have a garage to work out of, we had to check out a coworking space, after having tried working out of my place and my father’s office.
91Springboard, a national co-working spaces company was the one we turned to. Their rental packages are some of the cheapest in the country and the network and community that they have created around their spaces across the country have also gotten us quite a lot of business development options. Our team’s productivity shot by at least 3 times after moving into 91Springboard because you are surrounded by such energy with every 3rd person working on his/her own startup.
I would definitely recommend a coworking space to work out of, especially in the early days of your company.
Startup Resources:
This is a website for you to check out all the services and apps available across the net, for any kind of work that you might have. Their listing is quite extensive and is the best place to start whenever you are looking for any 3rd party applications.
F6s:
This, all things considered, is the best website I can recommend. F6s caters to startups and aims to help founders in every stage of their company. It helps you connect with other founders, share stories and experiences and possibly grow together, across all boundaries. While they offer recruitment options, fund directories, and other such facilities, their Golden Nugget is the “Benefits” Section. Before you consider any app or service, go to F6s and check out their Benefits database. They have such amazing deals from various service providers and if there are some applications you are considering only because they are free and are letting go of some that would work the best for you - check out F6s before you take the decision. They have aggregated 300+ benefits across all sectors for you to avail - Free of Cost!
Please do send in your feedback and let me know what you think. I'll have my next post on Productivity Tools up in the coming days.
About Advensure: We are a marketplace for Adventure Sports. We make it simple for users to discover and book adventure sport activities.
View Advensure and please give us your feedback (and some money).
