Week three of setting out on a solo mission to revenue has come and gone, and as promised in this episode we're going to cover exactly how I'm bootstrapping a business from scratch. If you're not familiar with the term, bootstrapping is used to describe the process of building a business without using outside investments . No lobster dinners, no investor meetings, and no presentations about overly-confident forecasts.
In practical terms, this means spending little to no money on as many things as possible, and creating a business model around steadily growing revenue , rather than building something huge (and likely expensive) in secret and then 'launching' it, among many other models.
To set the scene and to share why I'm taking this approach at all, it's probably helpful to know that I'm not a millionaire. I do however have a particular interest in personal finance, so have been on top of everything from Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) , Self Invested Pension Plans (SIPPs) , and other techniques to get the most bang for each buck I've ever earned. Even with a savings rate of >60% it's not yet been enough to retire comfortably in any western country. However, I am able to not work for 12-24 months which gives me the opportunity to explore other options*. One of those options is building my own business.
Having time is one thing, but why not take external investments and build from there? This answer comes back to the first episode in this series, which is that as soon as you take money from anyone, they will probably want a say in what you're doing and how you're doing it. So the question then becomes, do you want to build something bigger with someone else , or do you want to build something smaller for yourself - the answer for me personally is the latter (nothing against the former though).
Now for the moment of truth; what are the essential costs, and what are the bits you can really save on when you're starting out. The answer so far for me comes in two parts. There are things which you legally have to do if you're starting a business, this includes things like registering with companies house, creating a business bank account, keeping records, and things like that. To start a business in the UK cost me £50 (to Companies House ), and to register a business address in the UK cost me an additional £64.80 through an address service ( of which there are many options ). Other things I would consider essential for the type of company I'd like to build are the website ( ojsgroup.net ) which I paid £27.33 for 3 years, plus hosting which I'm paying £1.20/month ( also many options available ). The business bank account I went with is free.
Short note: I have been looking into more tax efficient setups, for example non-resident corporations in Gibraltar as the UK tax system leaves a lot to be desired, but I'll do a full episode on offshore options in the future if I do take that route.
So we're in for £143.33 to enjoy a basic legal existence , plus an ongoing £1.20/month to have an online presence. The missing thing here is that as a computer scientist I can have a reasonable go at things like web design**, some light infrastructure setup, and that kind of thing, which might set you back an additional £50-£5,000 if you go with Fiverr or an independent web design consultant.
The second part is the other things which your business needs in order to generate any revenue . If you're a baker this is your oven, and if you're a computer scientist this is your servers, laptop, and other tech. I've chosen to rent virtual private servers (computers in the sky) to start things off, as I don't have a long term physical address to use. That said, renting is very cheap . I have one small server which costs an additional £1.20/month, and a slightly bigger one which costs £3.60/month. The small one is where my business website and email live, and the bigger one is the first of what will become a globally distributed fleet of data processing hosts. My other tech includes an old laptop (purchased in 2018 so counting as free), a mouse, and a keyboard (also both old, but lets say £30 total).
All in all, that's a whopping £178.13 all in to get a tech company off the ground, plus £6/month in infrastructure costs ongoing (although this will inevitably rise). The only bit missing is the software to start getting things done on these shiny new machines.
If you're not familiar, the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement is a collection of talented engineers, companies, and other organisations working to build software whose source code is freely available. This software isn't always free to use for businesses, but in many cases it is, or there are free versions which provide core capabilities without cost. When it comes to bootstrapping a business (and avoiding spyware, but that's another story), FOSS is a massive help. All it takes is knowing what to search for, how to make use of these things, and I've found you can find pretty much everything you might pay several thousand pounds a month for as an upcoming tech company.
Now for some software. If you're not technical some of these might not mean much, but I'll describe them in a way that hopefully matches something you're familiar with. These choices may be out of date if you're reading this in the future, but this is how I'm starting out;
Starting with emails, I use Docker Mailserver to send and receive emails (from the servers), with Betterbird instead of Outlook to read them on my laptop (plus calendar, address book etc). To host the website I use Apache HTTP Server so that when you go to ojsgroup.net you actually get a webpage and not a blank screen. For my internal documentation I use Sphinx to turn my notes into a collection of webpages I can view locally, and the website ojsgroup.net is just an HTML file and some custom PHP for any dynamic pages. For my laptop operating system I use Arch Linux (yes) instead of Windows, and for editing files I use vim rather than Microsoft Word/VS Code/Pycharm/etc. When it comes to spreadsheets I'll be using LibreOffice (as little as possible, spreadsheets are very dull). Powerpoint presentations are banned permanently, along with all Microsoft products. For video calls/meetings I use whatever my counterparty uses, and if I'm organising it'll probably be a WhatsApp/regular call.
For tech on the servers themselves I'm using the latest stable versions of Python/PHP, uv for package/environment management, and MySQL and PostgreSQL for data storage. For LLMs I'm using Perplexity and ChatGPT (website versions), and many other small tools like tmux for terminal multiplexing, xorg / i3 for window management, markmap for project planning, quickref for quick refreshers on syntax, ruff for code linting, and many more.
The grand total for all of the software above is £0 , with an extra £0/month ongoing. So when you hear of billion dollar corporations 'doing more with less', please feel free to reference this episode as being able to do it for free. Jokes aside I wanted this to be a showcase that you don't need millions to get started , and in the enterprise software world there are lots of predatory models (free for X months/users, free but no exporting data, etc), but avoiding them is easy if you have ownership of your processes and are open to free and open source software.
I want to end here as this is the longest episode so far already, but next week I promise I'll cover what I'm doing during the week, and some of the interesting discussions I've been having along the way. I hope this was useful and as always let me know if you'd like to know more about anything above.
If you haven't already, please tell a stranger on the tube about this newsletter and how they too can build infrastructure on a shoestring, I'm sure it'll spark a truly memorable conversation. While you've got them you could also mention OJS Group - an exciting new tech startup with huge upside potential. Until next week...
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
PS: We're almost at 50 subscribers which is great, looking forward to the first annual subscriber meetup in Monaco sometime soon 😉.
*I appreciate that in the current economy this is a position of extreme privilege - if you'd like any of the resources or tools I've used along the way then please get in touch and I'd be happy to help.
*Please also note that I'm not a VC investor and don't plan to be any time soon.
**Yes Harry, I am a full stack developer now
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