May

16

Moving Right Along

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Although I don’t own my own company yet, progress is being made. Right now I am doing a ton of networking and evaluating the opportunities that are available to me. I can’t stress enough how important networking and self-promotion have been. The majority of opportunities that are available to me right now were a result of networking.

Regarding self-promotion, I would highly recommend purchasing the domain of your full name. For example, I bought http://www.aaronforgue.com and have turned it into a simple website that says a little about myself and provides my contact information and resume. I have had numerous people contact me after visiting the webpage, and I always make sure to send it along to new prospects; for example: “… and by the way, if you are interested in finding out more about my skillset and past work, check out aaronforgue.com…”. Definitely worth the price of the domain and hosting.

May

7

Keep Things Lean

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My business partner and I have no money available for starting a company. Yet we are going to do it anyway. When we originally sat down and worked out the numbers, we needed around $200,000 in order to start things up. This included equipment, office space, website hosting, employee salaries, etc.

A week’s worth of desperate searching for $200,000 made us re-evaluate our situation. Do we really need five employees, or could we run the company between the two of us. Is an office really necessary, or would my basement serve us just as well? Do we really need $400/month co-located web servers, or would cheapy virtual hosting suffice (Thinkstick.com is hosted for $9/month). Suddenly our dreams were within reach.

By examining the core model of our business, we realized that it wasn’t necessary to have all of the infrastructure in place right away. We decided to start small. By starting small, getting the business up and running became much less of a challenge, and also shifted our focus from finding startup capital to starting up the business.

With our new approach, only around $4,000 was needed for equipment. That is 1/50 of our original needs!

Keep things lean.