Startup Tips: How to save money and increase productivity

The two serial entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington have shared a few wonderful tips on how to save money as well as increase productivity for startups.

Though I don’t necessarily agree with all of the points made (for e.g. buy mac computers), but nevertheless, here is a summary of few very very relevant stuffs:

[Money Saving Tips]

• Don’t buy a phone system. No one will use it – instead reimburse mobile bills (saves tax)
• Don’t buy everyone Microsoft Office–it’s too much money. Put Office on three or four common computers and use Google Apps.
• Don’t waste money on recruiters. Use our job board 🙂
• Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs.

[Productivity Tips]

• Fire people who don’t love their work.
• Buy your hardest working folks computers for home (better still, give them a laptop).
• 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.
• Outsource accounting and HR—such a no brainer
• Get an expensive, automatic espresso machine at the office.
• Allow folks to work off hours (as well as from home). Commuting sucks and is a waste of time for everyone.

Well, most of the Indian startups that I know run on Google Apps and rely heavily on freebies, i.e. –

• OSS (LAMP), CMS tools (Joomla/Drupal) for development.
• Skype for communication.
• Meeting with vendors/prospective partners at CCDs (Cafe Coffee Day) instead of posh restaurants.

Few points I’d like to make:

• Start a blog – an active one and try to get close to the community. If you do a good job, you will never need a PR firm.
• Use events like Barcamps to meet prospective customers/employees, and of course to (shamelessly) promote your product (in a subtle manner)
• Never ever hire a HR person or advertise in any newspaper (for e.g. ToI Ascent etc).

Few debatable topics:

• Incubation center?
• Outsourcing the dev part to third-party?

What else would you like to add?

Read TC and Calacanis post

tags: indian startups, pic credit