The new trend is founding a company, and this for as little money as possible. As great as the call for independence and self-determination is, lots of people under-estimate the costs which arise while founding a company.

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Especially if one works full-time as a founder right away, one needs reserve funds, because even if one generates turnover, one doesn’t necessarily make profits. Therefore lacking income and costs must be covered. To keep the costs as low as possible, one can take some factors into one’s own hands.

1. Friends

Certainly everybody knows somebody, who possibly knows somebody, who knows somebody … you get the idea. Your friends most certainly want to support you with your endeavour and help with words and deeds. No matter if the design of the logo, the colours the homepage or other essential basics for your newly founded company are concerned, your friends can be your first focal points for encouragement and ideas. Maybe this way a web designer or programmer can be found, for whom a favour counts more than payment. To show your gratitude, you can invite everybody for a festive dinner or give a thank-you party for all your supporters.

2. Outsourcing

If you run out of friends or the friends run out of abilities, you can search for professional service providers. In this regard, there are more and more platforms which grant good and safe access to experts for projects. This has the advantage that only one contract exists for a particular service and you don’t have to commit yourself for a longer period of time. You don’t need to assign a salaried position just to receive a homepage. We have used this concept ourselves and thus saved 60 %. costs, which may be invested into marketing or the acquisition of customers.

3. Salary

Even if it’s difficult: Pay yourself as little salary as possible, the first couple of months you might have to do entirely without payment. Especially when you work full-time and possibly might have to pay your first employees a salary, you should calculate your expenses very carefully. Self-employed working part-time are much better off because they receive an additional income from their employment. However, this way one only has half of the time to speed up the growth of one’s own little company.

4. Location

With the choice of your location you can considerably reduce your costs as well. Most likely the first office will be within your own home, as it is the cheapest and most simple way and naturally offers itself as a choice immediately. However, as soon as the foundation is laid, you should look out for office space. Luckily you can decide alone where you want to position yourself. You should consider, however, where the costs of living are most favourable: in a smaller city you have to pay less for the same space than in a big one. As far as the choice of large cities is concerned, Berlin is – for instance – cheaper than Munich or Hamburg. The size of the office itself has significance too: it should be large enough to offer enough space for the first employees you will have, but not be too big either because you don’t know how fast the company will grow.

5. Furnishing

It doesn’t always have to be designer furniture: IKEA or other cheap furniture stores carry good and cheap office chairs, desks, racks and other useful office utensils. When it comes to the choice of a PC, you can rely on cheaper models than the established brands. Often the discounters have special offers with good computers for sale. As far as the choice of software or an operating system is concerned, you can rely on open-source programs and don’t have to purchase expensive licenses. Almost all license-free programs are available as freeware in the Internet by now, for instance Open office, Linux and PhotoFiltre.

6. Making phone calls

Making phone calls is probably one of the main activities of a founder – apart from writing E-mails and other Internet activities. When it comes to talking with customers, acquisition or organisation, somehow everything has to be arranged. Especially calls abroad are very cost-intensive. Mostly, one can resort to cheap flat rates, Skype for instance offers country flat rates. Thus you are able to phone countries abroad for very reasonable prices. In general, you should get hold of many different offers and compare them before reaching a decision, cause often you have to sign up for 24 months with one company.

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