Surprising Ways Your Startup Can Slash Running Costs
If you run a tech startup, then saving money is an essential activity. To help you cut back a little, we have come up with a few ideas to help you. Read on to find out what they are.
Use Virtual Assistants
When you are just starting out, there are a lot of tasks you will need to do. Unfortunately, all of them will be necessary but some of them will take a long time. Given that everybody is aware of the phrase ‘time is money’, are you the best person to be doing those tasks?
The chances are that your time could be spent more productively in other areas of the business. Let’s say that you are a developer who would typically charge fifty-odd pounds an hour. Should you be doing data entry tasks to build up your marketing database? No, you shouldn’t!
With this in mind, you should think about outsourcing your essential tasks to a virtual assistant. They will take far less time than you will to complete them, and give you everything you need. That will free up your own time to invest in the right areas, like developing your product or finding buyers.
Outsource
While a virtual assistant is handy for the odd menial task, for more specialist areas you should consider outsourcing. Finding services that can help you build your website or find new markets can help you reduce your costs.
The reason? Because they will get the job done quicker than you will, and you won’t have to go through the expense and time of hiring your own teams. Let’s say you are doing a full campaign across a whole host of marketing channels, like display ads, Facebook, and some content marketing thrown in. To do that would yourself would means you would have to hire three experts. Choosing the right online marketing company can get it all done for you in one easy payment.
It’s not just things like marketing you can outsource, either. If you do a lot of printing, you could use a company like Managed Print Services to help you maximise your spend on paper and ink, as well as reducing your environmental footprint. If you have already launched your product, you could also think about outsourcing your customer service to a call centre.
Open Source Software
There is a lot of open source software out there that you can use to avoid the hefty costs and monthly fees of traditional software.
Let’s say you have an account with Photoshop, for example, which you use to create and edit images for your website. That’s a good chunk of money for a business to be spending each month when there is no need. Using open source services like GIMP and Inkscape can give you the same sort of tools as you get in Photoshop, and will cost nothing.
Have a look at all the software and services that you pay for on a monthly basis. Depending on what your business is, it could come to an eye-watering total. If so, just look for open source alternatives on your favourite search engine. There are options to almost any software going. They might not give you all the functions and features, but they will help you save money to invest in more profitable areas.
As you can see, a little wise investment in the right places can see you reduce your start-up’s running costs. Of course, you should always weigh up the costs of using other services against your own time, or against hiring staff. But in most cases, it will prove far cheaper.
