FP Blog: An ultra-lightweight tech prediction for 2012

With all kinds of startup tools being offered for free on the Web, tech entrepreneurs no longer need a huge investment of cash to launch a company.

December 28th, 2011 - Toronto - Republished in part from the Financial Post.

‘Tis the season for reflecting, planning and finding new ways to grow our technology companies in the year to come. It’s also a good time to look into our industry-focused crystal balls to make entrepreneurial predictions for the year ahead.

Here’s ours for 2012: this will be the year the ultra-lean tech startup goes mainstream.

What defines a firm as ultra-lean? It’s a tech company that goes beyond merely employing lean operating principles. It develops technology on a tiny budget — perhaps with the help of a tech incubator — but relies largely on the acumen, innovation and vision of its founders to get off the ground. Ultra-lean tech entrepreneurs take bootstrapping to a new level using every free or low-cost tool at their disposal to get their product to market. They may still require seed funding of $100,000 or more to launch, but to an ultra-lean entrepreneur, the traditional $1-million-plus startup capital requirement is a foreign concept.

Although it was hardly in vogue at the time, this was largely the strategy that allowed us to launch Filemobile five years ago. We were completely self-financed and wholeheartedly embraced the ultra-lean ideal. That started by keeping our overhead low using a wide range of tactics, which we still employ today. For example, we became early adopters of low-cost, Web-based business tools as they came online. We signed up for cost-effective Voice over Internet Protocol services to minimize phone bills, tapped Basecamp as a low-cost tool to collaborate on projects and, recently, signed up for cost-effective cloud services, which allowed us to increase much-needed database processing power and back-up our systems without incurring hefty hardware upgrade costs.

Cost-effective tools and tactics aside, running ultra-lean has become a part of our culture and has helped us minimize overhead to this day. Now, many Canadian tech firms are being founded and operated by design on the same principles that helped us grow.

To read the full article go to Financial Post.com.

Permalink | 193 views | no comments

Comments

The captcha you entered is invalid

Your comments