I know people who were running commercial sites from an average PC in a spare bedroom over ADSL in the early 2000s. A bit graphic design, a bit of PHP, a bit o

I know people who were running commercial sites from an average PC in a spare bedroom over ADSL in the early 2000s. A bit graphic design, a bit of PHP, a bit of email management, MySQL, a "pay now" page imported from a payment provider, and they were making good money for a minimal startup cost. All the code written by one or two people, often some external help with the graphics, and sometimes the business concept was someone else's idea. Obviously the services weren't scalable, they didn't have hundreds of millions of users, and they didn't operate globally. But they didn't need to. And that's still true of many startups today. A few of them sold up for large sums.