5 Perfect ‘Spare-Time’ Online Businesses - Entrepreneur.com

5 Perfect ‘Spare-Time’ Online Businesses - Entrepreneur.com

WorldLight Media can help you get started in each of these businesses. The cost? Starting at $5 per month!

Find out how by email us. info@worldlightmedia.com

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Want to know how to design? Learn The Basics.

Want to know how to design? Learn The Basics.
Want to know how to design? Learn The Basics.

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How to save money running a startup 17 really good tips

Check out this article on some wise ways to save, and invest, when launching a tech startup. Here’s a taste…

I’ve got a bunch of tips on how to do this for business. Among them:

1. Buy Macintosh computers, save money on an IT department
2. Buy second monitors for everyone, they will save at least 30 minutes a day, which is 100 hours a year… which is at least $2,000 a year…. which is $6,000 over three years. A second monitor cost $300-500 depending on which one you get. That means you’re getting 10-20x return on your investment… and you’ve got a happy team member.
3. Buy everyone lunch four days a week and establish a no-meetings policy. Going out for food or ording in takes at least 20-60 minutes more than walking up to the buffet and eating. If you do meetings over lunch you also save that time. So, 30 minutes a day across say four days a week is two hours a week… which is 100 hours a year. You get the idea.
4. Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs. Tables are a complete rip off. We buy stainless steel restaurant tables that are $100 and $600 Areon chairs. Total cost per workstation? $700. Compare that to buying a $500-$1,500 cube/designer workstation. The chair is the only thing that matters… invest in it.
5. Don’t buy a phone system. No one will use it. No one at Mahalo has a desk phone except the admin folks. Everyone else is on IRC, chat, and their cell phone. Everyone has a cell phone, folks would rather get calls on it, and 99% of communication is NOT on the phone. Savings? At least $500 a year per person… 50 people over three years? $75-100k
6. Rent out your extra space. Many folks have extra space in their office. If you rent 5-10 desks for $500 each you can cut your burn $2,500 to $5,000 a month, or $30-60,000 a year. That’s big money.
7. Outsource accounting and HR—such a no brainer.
8. Don’t buy everyone Microsoft Office–it’s too much money. Put Office on three or four common computers and use Google Docs.
9. Use Google hosted email. $50 or free per user…. how can you beat that?!?! Why screw with an exchange server!?!?
10. Buy your hardest working folks computers for home. If you have folks who are willing to work an extra hour a day a week you should get them a computer for home. Once you get to three hours of work a week from home you’re at 150 hours a year and that’s a no brainer. Invest in equipment *if* the person is a workaholic.
11. Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it–go work at the post office or stabucks if you’re not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.
12. Get an expensive, automatic espresso machine at the office. Going to starbucks twice a day cost $4 each time, but more importantly it costs 20 minutes. Buy a $3-5,000 Jura industrial, get the good beans, and supply the coffee room with soy, low fat, etc. 50 people making one trip a day is 20 hours of wasted time for the company, and $150 in coffee costs for the employees. Makes no sense.
13. Stock the fridge with sodas—same drill as above.
14. Allow folks to work off hours. Commuting sucks and is a waste of time for everyone. Let folks start at 6am or 11am and you’ll cut their commute in half (at least in LA).
15. Go to each of your vendors every 6-9 months and ask for 10-30% off. If half of them say yes you’ll save 5-15% on fixed costs. People will give you a discount if they think they are going to lose the business.
16. Don’t waste money on recruiters. Get inside of linkedin and Facebook and start looking for people–it works better anyway.
17. Really think about if you need that $15,000 a month PR firm. Perhaps you can get a PR consultant to work on 2-3 projects a year for $10-15k each and save 75%. More PR firms are wasted half the year while you build up your product anyway.

    {I’m going to add a couple more of mine as I remember them }

18. Outsource to middle America: There are tons of brilliant people living between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York who don’t live in a $4,000 one bedroom apartment and pay $8 to dry clean a shirt–hire them!

I think this is good information and it makes sense. If you are going to be successful, you’ve got to do all the right things right. I’ve worked at start-ups that splurge on fancy conference tables and state of the art phone systems, thinking those things are the core elements of your company.

I’ve also worked at companies that are stocked full of lazy workers… especially back before the dot-bomb days in 98-00. The ‘culture’ was so focused on ping-pong tables and trips to starbucks that nobody did anything (boy, those days were fun though!). I remember thinking, “This industry is so fat! It can’t sustain this level of productivity forever.” The same week that my start-up collapsed, I read an article in the Seattle Times that said 90,000 high-tech workers were now unemployed. I competed with those 90,000 people on every job I applied for over the next year and a half before I finally had to take a job in another industry. It took me several years to get back up after that.

But “all things work together for the Good of those who love God”, right? So here I am, owning my own business, learning from the past and working toward a better future.

How to save money running a startup 17 really good tips

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There’s plenty of reason to be optimistic

When you first start your web design business, it’s usually because you’ve got your first client.  Someone you know, or someone who knows someone you know, found out that you could design a website and so you agreed to do it for “less than what that other guy wants to charge! Jeez, he’s ripping you off!”  You will probably look back on your first site years from now and laugh in shame at how bad you were at the beginning. Not to worry! The guy who paid you got exactly what he paid for. If he wanted, or rather, needed a better website, he would have paid more for it. This is good news for you, because it allows you to get into a wonderful business that helps other businesses become more successful, and if you work hard, you can enjoy a fair amount of success yourself.

With millions of websites being developed, there’s room for hundreds of thousands of web designers. The more experienced you are, the better you’ll serve your clients, and the more you can charge them. But first thing’s first, you’ve got to put in the time. There are no shortcuts in business and there’s no such thing as luck. The harder you work, the “luckier” you’ll get.

Remember, knowledge is power in our society, and therefore you must invest in yourself by acquiring (and continuously sharpening) skills. The web technologies available today are truly exciting! AJAX and the whole web 2.0 movement is actually interesting, even, dare I say, fun to learn.

More to come!

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Starting your web design business

So, you’ve decided to start your own web design business, huh? First of all, congratulations!  Secondly, get ready to work hard, because nothing in life will succeed unless you’re willing to work hard for it.

When I first started WorldLight Media,  I remember working harder than I’ve ever worked at any other job I’d had.  Longer hours every day, six or seven days a week; I literally ate, slept, and breathed web design. But there was something different that kept me going day after day, month after month: Passion. I actually LOVED what I was doing, and therefore I could work for hours on end without wearing down.

After two years of going at it full time, not much has changed in terms of how hard I work. Only now am I getting the revelation of “working smarter, not harder”. I used to think that was a license to be lazy in exchange for knowledge. Now I know that I can never be lazy, because it only leads to failure. However, I am working smarter, so that my hard work doesn’t just add increases to the value of my company, it MULTIPLIES exponentially, so that my hard work pays off with greater and greater returns.

There’s one resource that I can recommend that can be truly beneficial: Tailored Podcast - Brendon Sinclairs Business Mix

I’ve started listening to these podcasts several times a week, and each one changes the way I do business. I first heard of Brendon Sinclair by reading articles on Sitepoint.com, which incidentally is another invaluable resource for any level of web designer.

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