Quebec Valley

I recently read Guy Kawasaki’s article regarding his own project and was intrigued and amused about it. He paid slightly over $12,000 and thought it was a bargain. I guess it is depending on where you sit. For me, 12k is a lot of money and to be honest, I would not invest that much money in any project where the success rate is very high.

Would I invest that much money in a booming housing market? Sure. In a crashing market? No. In an uncertain market? Well you get the idea. To believe in your project is one thing, to invest in something which might crash and burn is another thing. Even if it’s your own project and you hope/think/wish it won’t crash, you must invest wisely. If you don’t, then you have trouble juggling with risks and you are then gambling, not investing. Was Guy gambling or investing? Nobody will really know. I guess he gambled his money but that’s my own opinion.

Since I don’t have $12,000 for my startup (donations are welcomed!) I want to see if I can start my online business on a less than frugal budget. 1000 bucks. Is this possible? I think so. Call it the Trading spaces of startups or whatever you want, I think it is feasible.

Of course, I have to set some rules in order to attain this goal:

Minimize outsourcing, Minimize legal costs, Go with cheap alternatives.

My current balance is 220$ which includes my domain name and hosting fees for one year. My domain name ate 10% (100$) of my budget as I wanted a nice name, not some Jedi/Star Wars name or something too long to remember. I also didn’t want to copy everyone else by skipping some letters, err.. I mean, vowels (pun intended). Thus I now have $780 left to finish my startup.

What’s next? I already started to work on the site itself. Will I finish? Probably not. Why? Because I suck at Photoshop and I hate to do that. If there is something where I have no skills, it’s art. My 6 years old daughter can do better. So what will I do? I still don’t know but it looks like I will need to outsource this if I don’t want to have a text-only site. So I thought about asking students. They sometimes volunteer in order to “build” their resume before job hunting. By the way, if this is your case, I beg you to email me! :)

Since everything is hosted, I don’t need to worry about servers, load balancing, support and so on. Not at least until I actually start making money.

So what if this really works? What if I can start an online business on 1000 bucks? Well I guess I could start 11 more and hope some of them will succeed. I don’t need ideas, just more time…