Bible for Early-Stage Startups

There are a number of posts for entrepreneurial success. All these posts instead of helping budding entrepreneurs are focused on their story and don't tell us a story which can groom your ideas. We become so confused that we may even find it irritating.

I have been working in software products for around one decade: B2B and B2C apps; premium apps and enterprise products; software where lawyers have to be engaged for each sale and many more. The common thing that I have come across in all these instances is the question “How to start company”, “How to setup payment”, “How to run company in bootstrapped mode” etc You can continue reading this if this sounds like the desired information and help for you. Here now we will go through my very guide to answer each question.

In this first session we will address what early-stage startups need to spend money on. And in the next session we will continue by discussing how different software can help us in meeting our needs of early-stage startups. We will finish our series by talking about the areas where the entrepreneurs want to spend money regardless of there being little, or even negative, ROI.

Early- Stage Startup :

These are various basic features of an early-stage startup.

Growth: A startup is designed to grow fast

Problem-solving: A startup is committing to solve a harder type problem than ordinary businesses do.

Disruptive idea: Committing to search for disruptive ideas.

Prior relationship: All paying customers had a prior personal relationship with a member of the company.

WHERE THE MONEY SHOULD BE SPENT BY EARLY-STAGE STARTUPS?

There are various areas where entrepreneurs can spend their money. If you are bootstrapped or seed funded these are best tools available in various areas:

Accounting

It is very important to have a handle on the finance, It’s necessary for every startup regardless of their size. The best option for this is sign up for Quickbooks and link your company bank account to it. This is a very affordable and accurate way.

Payroll

For payroll and health benefits you should go for something like Workzippy, they perform all the work very efficiently including the generation of tax forms at the end of the year. Even if you are paying only 3 people you should never do the payroll on your own.

Payment processing

Payu or Paytm is the way to go, if you are accepting credit cards. The quality of Payu documentation and support will far outweigh the cash saved through lower fees you may be able to get from other products.

Tax Management

Taxzippy is good option as its free to use, it helps you file your individual taxes along with business return at very low cost.

Repository Management System

Bitbucket is the Git solution for professional teams. Collaborate on code with inline comments and pull requests

Blogs

Just use WordPress. You can find several blogs template and it's easy to use. At the early stage you should not experiment and just choose wordpress as it is the best and at the same time cheap as well.

SSL certificates

For SSL certificates go with LetsEncrypt, they provide free SSL certificate. It involves a lot of efforts to get it working. Get a $9.99 SSL cert that works on very domian and your site will look like https:www.[yourname].com

Application Hosting

For running your applications you can opt for heroku it’s free for every low usage, but it gets expensive real fast. AWS is also a good option which offers you one year free trial which will solve the purpose for your first year.

Content delivery network (CDN)

CDN is not only for big companies, when it comes to improving the experience having a CDN can be a huge boon. S3 can greatly speed up your application’s performance.

Database:

Your database is going to be probably the most expensive part of your infrastructure. But you should go for the best one for this purpose. AWS offer 1 year free trial on MySQL and which will solve the purpose for your first year.

PR:

Last but not least, sites like Yourstory, TechCrunch are best. Yourstory is leading tech blog which have millions of daily visitors.