There's nothing wrong with being ambitious and only having 5k startup capital, it's just that these don't seem enough to serve the target market you're aiming a

There's nothing wrong with being ambitious and only having 5k startup capital, it's just that these don't seem enough to serve the target market you're aiming at. I would describe 'Big data' to mean the size at which traditional database technology stops being useful in your project. It's usually when the volume of the data is large. I recently worked on a low end big data project. They had 4 very large, traditional database servers and the workload wasn't suited to that kind of server. They rearchitected, spent a bunch of money and moved to a 20 node hadoop cluster (each node was small - perhaps a few $k each). Because the workload suited hadoop they are now able to scale up easily and to great advantage. Note that I describe that project as low end. 20 nodes is small in the big data world. So when you say "I think it's possible to get a foot in the door with 5k", I think that perhaps you don't know enough about your market to make that statement. Don't do anything further on this project until you've fully validated your business plan. There are some good ideas on how to do that in the other comments here.