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What Could You Build with Just $10,000?
- alex_young 9y agoIt's a little disingenuous to suggest that most of theses companies were built with 10k though right? Maybe it took 10k to prove a market, but surely there was lots of funding following that.
- replicatorblog 9y agoNot necessarily. I know the founder of ButcherBox and he managed to get to tens of millions of revenue in pure bootstrap fashion. The PaintNite guys got to $25M in revenue before taking on $13M in VC. Shutterstock got to IPO without taking any capital. It's not easy, but it was more common than I expected!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- drelihan 9y agoOk - first thought I had was a big model castle made out of pennies
- sunstone 9y agoThat's ambitious. My first thought was a stack of $1000 bills an eighth of an inch high :D
- 13of40 9y agoMy first thought was a medium sized shed, maybe with a cement floor.
- e12e 9y agoBut what color would it be?
- ateesdalejr 9y agoRed of course.
- webmaven 9y agoThe shed will be used to store bicycles, yes?
- mgarfias 9y agoA 600hp ls3
- buf 9y agoI built Casting Call Club (https://castingcall.club https://castingcall.club) with $0, and only 1000s of hours of my time. No matter what you pay (time or money or lost opportunities), the price is always significant.
- fairpx 9y agoI started http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro - ui design firm for startups, for less than $100. Before we had a website, we were profitable and quickly grew to $10k/mo in a few weeks. like mentioned in the article, cashflow is key here. It allows you to reinvest earned money and keep growing. Startups shouldnt raise IMHO before reaching product market fit. Ive made that mistake in the past myself. Having a lot of VC money in your bank that you can burn through while looking for a business model sounds fun, but isn't.
- whytaka 9y agoI'm very curious about how this company is managed. It's an interesting way to structure your offer. Simple with as little commitment as possible. What happens when there are projects that compete for your designers' time?
- fairpx 9y agoEvery time that problem occurs, we hire new people. The model basically funds its own growth, so when scaling issues rattle the system, we can hire people with the cashflow that's already there.
- askaboutit 9y agoHow do you feel about the budget players in your space, which have practically grown to apparently $50,000 monthly revenue, but have missed client files, gotten plenty of negative reviews on producthunt and churned out designs nothing like what they state on their site. Manypixels.co
- fairpx 9y agoMany of those I know very well because the founders contacted me with questions before launching a cheaper competitor. In all honesty I don't think about them at all. Our goal isn't to build a $1B company and have this complete monopoly position. The opposite is true. We deliberately stay small, work only with a few companies and basically do work that we really really love. The reason all the great companies have big in-house design teams is that design is about more than cheaply moving pixels from one person to the other. Because we go deep with each startup, we learn a lot about everything what works and what doesn't. In other words, we learn about how our design decisions impact business. How they increase conversion, profits, etc. And so this deeper level of involvement allows us to use that knowledge and expertise with the next startup. For many startups, just having something that looks ok is enough, and for those, the cheaper competitors are the way to go. For others who want to build a great product for their customers.. those who care about details and using design to grow their business, those are the only companies we work with.
- pmuk 9y agoWe started my current business which now does around $5M p.a revenue with $3000 in 2005. It's definitely doable!
- tyingq 9y agoBack when Google was easier to game with SEO it was pretty common to bootstrap nothing into a few thousand a month. One common pattern was finding popular sites where you could find bugs that allowed you to post links in comments with a css style that made them not look like links. PageRank loved it.
- Fomite 9y agoA compelling pilot study of hospital-associated infection transmission in a developing world hospital.
- Edd314159 9y agoSure, these businesses were all built on $10K of capital. But what about time? How many months or years could have been spent working while building the business? That could put a lot of these businesses into six-figure territory when you factor in opportunity cost.
- kosei 9y agoThis is usually the big issue I've seen/experienced: funding $10k isn't as hard as 2-3 people deciding to quit their jobs and take no income for 1-2 years.
- replicatorblog 9y agoIn many of these cases the founders were drawing salaries relatively early in the company's lifecycle. A couple had substantial early revenue so it wasn't much of a hardship.
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- whytaka 9y ago> RXBar... focused on sales first and “branding” second. > The distinctive, no BS packaging The author is very confused about what 'branding' means. EDIT: I'm an idiot.
- replicatorblog 9y agoAuthor here, not sure how this comes off as confused? In the linked article, the founder of RXBar talks about how the brand positioning emerged from the sales process. By going account to account they refined the company's core story—the focus on ingredients—which came to dominate the visual touchpoints.
- whytaka 9y agoI'd completely misread it and came to a snap judgment. My apologies.
- TooSmugToFail 9y agoFor this kind of budget, we've regularly built works-like-looks-like prototypes of fairly complex consumer hardware devices. For example, we built World's best FPV video goggles for roughly this budget (with custom optics design and prototyping). That's our internal project, though. After building a prototype, you would typically need another 2x to 3x that for tooling (if plastics are involved) and some working capital to manufacture the first volume run of 100 - 1000 units. Hardware is rather expensive.
- lightedman 9y agoA multi-million dollar medical marijuana farm.
- stuaxo 9y agoSpout / Syphon equivilent for Linux.
- goatherders 9y agoYou can build most any software application with $0 invested and be cash flow positive before writing a line of code. There are lots of people (myself incljded) that take an idea to potential customers, turn them into actual customers and then get to work. For B2B it is not hard to say "I will solve this problem for x dollars per month. That will make you y more or save you y dollars per month. Sign here and I will provide the solution in # weeks." And that works just fine.
- himom 9y agoA working engine and less rusting bodywork for my VW van house. Oh seriously? Then something that uses almost all SaaS and has marginally-zero unit cost like a self-improvement videos site.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]