I started with $60 back in the day. That imposes a certain discipline on you, which has good and bad influences on your thinking.
Good: "I need revenue to buy the stuff I think I need to make more revenue. I guess I'll have to make something people want and sell it to them."
Possibly good: "Well, I can't afford web design, but I'll stretch this OSS template about as far as it will go until I have enough money to pay for a redesign."
Not good: "I don't have $50 to spend on icons right now so instead I'll waste several hours embarrassing myself in Paint.NET and ultimately come up with something which is ugly, converts poorly, and distracted me from tasks where I actually add value."
Speaking of which: open source. Its not just for software anymore. You have to dig through a lot of junk to get them, but there are OSS designs which are far, far better than what you'll come up with (resident designers excepted). I recommend Styleshout for that Web 2.0 look, and oswd.org (and a whole lot of needle-in-haystack searching) for finding a good template for anything else.
Also: Wordpress (free) + $4 a month hosting + writing skill (I hope you've got it) = cheapest marketing you will ever accomplish, and some of the most effective, too.
I bootstrapped our mobile software company simply because I knew we would turn a profit within the first month of sales (which we did, 3-5x ramen profitability :)).
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 $$.
This relies on you being a trusted and valued worker for the firm who allows you to work 3 days. So work hard at your job and the management will likely be okay with you asking.
That's what I did for a couple of startups.
Having a work-day or two available for work-time meetings with customers and lawyers / suppliers makes a large difference. People treat you more seriously when you are able to make a daytime meeting.
Careful calendar managament can give the impression of a full fledged business.
Until of course you need to support customers, and suddenly they need support at all sort of inconvenient times. Nothings perfect!!
yeah. this is what I'm doing. I'm fortunate in that I have enough experience to command a pretty good rate, and I can demand corp-to-corp payment. With this, I turn around and hire inexperienced, cheap, but pretty good SysAdmins to handle customers while I'm with my client.
But yeah, 3 days a week is immensely better than working 5 days a week for someone else, then trying to get something done on the weekends.
Dadsys? I just looked at your site and you're all over the map, way too diverse, almost unfocused.
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 :-)
> Dedsys? I just looked at your site and you're all over the map, way too diverse, almost unfocused.
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.
Good: "I need revenue to buy the stuff I think I need to make more revenue. I guess I'll have to make something people want and sell it to them."
Possibly good: "Well, I can't afford web design, but I'll stretch this OSS template about as far as it will go until I have enough money to pay for a redesign."
Not good: "I don't have $50 to spend on icons right now so instead I'll waste several hours embarrassing myself in Paint.NET and ultimately come up with something which is ugly, converts poorly, and distracted me from tasks where I actually add value."
Speaking of which: open source. Its not just for software anymore. You have to dig through a lot of junk to get them, but there are OSS designs which are far, far better than what you'll come up with (resident designers excepted). I recommend Styleshout for that Web 2.0 look, and oswd.org (and a whole lot of needle-in-haystack searching) for finding a good template for anything else.
Also: Wordpress (free) + $4 a month hosting + writing skill (I hope you've got it) = cheapest marketing you will ever accomplish, and some of the most effective, too.