What startups are really cheap to implement?

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The ones that are not ambitious. If are willing to walk dogs, you can quickly ramp up from first paying customer to having more work than you can do yourself, but not enough to be able to meet the expectations of an employee to take the load off.

People always think that making apps or websites is cheaper than it is. What they don’t realize is the time value of money. It is very very difficult to build a software product that makes money, whether you’re selling the software product directly as a software vendor, or as a service / SaaS.

If you’re poised to plow as much time as is needed to get something like that off the ground, then you can get there with very little capital expenditure. But you have to really want it because you’re going to be at it for awhile.

What makes it easier is understanding your market. This is what most people just don’t get. People buy products and services. Understand them and why they buy, and you can devise marketing channels for easy-to-provide goods and services that require very little out of pocket expense to be effective. A great resource in this regard is Ross Trittipo.

But this all requires work, a lot of it. Until you understand a market niche and the mechanics of serving that niche, you have a lot of learning to do.

This is true even if you have capital burning a hole in your pocket. In fact, capital can even make success less likely, because the natural human tendency is to spend less time learning and more time doing, and spending money on things feels like doing.

If you’re smart and motivated, you can get into just about any sector without spending hardly anything. If you’re not, then $10MM won’t be enough.