Most people who want to start their own business don’t have a ton of money laying around and it’s probably one the most common questions I get emailed about: How can I get started without a lot of cash?

Well I’ve put together a list below of the best ideas I’ve heard and personally used. I hope you find it useful!

The three basic strategies to starting a business without much money are:

• Delay the normal “business starting” activities like incorporating, hiring, renting office or retail space, etc until AFTER your business has started earning money. This is known as bootstrapping.
• Doing everything yourself and spending your personal time instead of hiring an expert. (Takes longer but costs less.)
• Using some neat tricks and little known deals below.

Start With The Easy Stuff: Eliminate Expenses

1. Don’t rent an office! - work from home. Or better yet work from the best free office with locations everywhere: Starbucks. If you need to meet with a client and are worried about seeming small time without an office, don’t be. Just meet them at a restaurant for a lunch meeting. This is what people with the nicest offices do anyway.

2. Don’t hire any employees! - do it all yourself until you have some $ coming in the door.

3. Don’t hire lawyers, technical people, graphic designers, or assistants (see below)

Legal Stuff and Incorporating

4. Get a free lawyer and legal advice from the mentors at Score.org

5. Find a website with a similar legal document and modify it to your needs

6. An LLC is probably the best business structure, but don’t worry about incorporating until you’re earning money, just do a sole proprietorship, you can always incorporate later (you can get it setup with the IRS in just a few minutes by calling them at 800-829-4933)

7. Learn how to do your own financial statements for your business in Excel instead of hiring a CPA or bookkeeper (again you can do this after you’re making money)

8. Take a Quickbooks class at your local community college

Make a website for your business

9. Don’t pay a premium for a top end domain name, there are plenty of good ones left

10. Test out your ideas by writing to a blog, you’ll get feedback on what people like and don’t like

11. Get a free business website at www.wordpress.com. It won’t be your own domain (it will be something like yourbusiness.wordpress.com) but…

12. When you’re ready to have your own domain, get a hosting plan (new domain included) at 1and1 for $4.99/month, and install wordpress on your own server (instructions)

13. Get a professional website design for free with a wordpress theme that you can install with a few clicks (no programming knowledge needed)
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Hey Folks,

Well the website has launched and you can go check it out here CollegeStudentTutors.com

I’m going to show you a few more cool features that went into it, the results of some user testing, and what the next steps are to get my first sale.

Making a UI to Input “Availability”
One of the things I knew from running an existing tutoring business is how hard it was to match people’s availability. If I was going to automate the matching process I had to spend some serious time thinking about it.

There is both availability in terms of time and location. Plus the added challenge of being compensated for driving time, which some tutors want.

The simplest solution is just to make a generic text field where people can write in anything they want for their availability. This is not the best answer, because you will get an inconsistent look to the site and your customers are then forced to understand and compare all sorts of different things that sort of mean the same thing. Its also unclear from this how detailed people should get.

Here is an example of generic inputs you can get from a text field which all mean pretty much the same thing:

“I am available Monday Wednesday and Friday after 3PM and Tuesday and Thursday After 5PM”
“WEEKDAYS AFTER 4″
“Mon/Wed/Fri afternoons Tues/Thurs after 5″
“MWF after three o’clock I am availabe and T/TH in the evening”

This just deals with time, not driving or compensation, plus you get the problem of spelling errors, etc. It makes the site less usable.

Another option is to put in a full blown calendar system sort of like Outlook or Google Calendar which allows people to mark blocks of time. This is a lot of code and testing, and more importantly its probably overkill for such simple scheduling needs.

In the end I found something that worked for me, and it wasn’t overly complicated.

Time
For scheduling I made two drop down menus. The first drop down shows days, and the second shows time. The choices force the results to be consistent and gives them some flexibility in how detailed they want to get. It also doesn’t let them get TOO detailed. This is good and intentional.

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I’ve been working like mad man lately on this new business website, and its coming along really nicely.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is “how can you build trust on a website?”

People have an inherent distrust of any service they see online, due to the number of the scams out there, and just shoddy companies.

Online is very different than the real world. In the real world when we meet someone we can get a “gut feeling” about them (ever heard that 93% of communication is non-verbal?) based on their body language, tone, rate of speaking etc. We make instant snap judgments whether we know it or not about whether we like and trust someone or something.

But in the online world, we are blind. We have nothing to go on except some words on a page, and human beings weren’t built to trust based on such limited information.

So here are some ideas I came up with to help built trust with prospective customers on yours website:

1. Show that other people trust you

It’s human nature to look and see how other people are acting (and copy it) any time we aren’t sure how to act. This is hard wired into us by nature. You see everyone else in your gang of primitive humans running away from something scary in the woods, well you better start running too. Those who didn’t, never lived long enough to become our ancestors.

So what does this mean online? If you can prove that other people trust you, it will give you instant credibility. Typically people do this with testimonials, but another great way is to let customers write reviews (Amazon is the king of this by the way). In my case, I’m letting customers write reviews of the tutors they used.

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Hey Folks,

I’ve been hard at work on a new business idea which I’ll be unveiling here over the next few weeks to you on this blog as I track the launch, new features, marketing efforts, and of course the results.

I am following my own philosophy that I teach: when you come across a new business idea, find the cheapest and fastest way to test it and just get SOMETHING out there which people can see and give you feedback on. This is far better than what most people do which is either (1) have a great idea and think about it so long you never take any action on it or (2) spend way too much time and money on something that eventually turns out to not work. If this doesn’t work, I’m going to find out quickly and have lost very little other than my time.

Total investment to launch this business:
$102.00 - 12 months of web hosting
$8.88 - one domain name
About 80 hours of my time.

The Idea
As many of you know I’ve owned a tutoring business for 4 years now. The way it works currently is that people fill out the form on my website requesting a tutor, then someone like myself or someone who works for me calls them back and sets them up with a tutor. Typically, 3-4 phone calls and emails are involved with each new person who signs up from the time they first sign up to the time they are matched with a tutor and earning money.

One of the harder parts about growing the business is finding good people to match students with tutors. People who will approach it with as much enthusiasm as I do (hard to find, since to them it is a job and to me its my own business). And I can’t just do it all on my own, because that is being “self-employed”, not a true “business owner” who can disappear and the company continues to grow.

So anyway, a friend of mine came up with the idea. Yes you read that right, I didn’t even come up with this idea myself, remember that one of the keys to coming up with great business ideas is just to be around other people who have good ideas. (In case you’re wondering, we structured an agreement so that he’ll be compensated if it works.)

The idea is to let people browse tutor profiles on the website and pick their own tutors. All the tutors are college students at prestigious universities. Clients can view lots of information to help them make a decision (the tutor’s major, GPA, feedback and reviews from other clients, picture, resume, location, etc).

Instead of taking a percentage of each hour of tutoring, which is what I do now, this would be more hands off approach and we’d only charge a flat fee to contact tutors since they’d be doing much of it on their own.

The beauty of this idea is that is scales well (something I talk about in Breaking Free extensively). In other words, the amount of time required on my part to match 10 tutors vs. 10,000 tutors with this model is practically the same because the whole thing is automated through the website. So even though I’d make less per hour of tutoring, it could reach a much wider audience.

Sketching Out Ideas

So I couldn’t sleep one night and decided to sketch out how this website might look. You should ALWAYS design on paper. Designing a website in Photoshop or by coding it as you go is a sure fire way to get a terrible looking site. Here are some early sketches. You can see how things progressed and changed a little bit along the way.

Also, my theory on make good webpages (especially when in the product launch phase here when you just want to get something done quickly and “good enough”) is to find a design you like on another page, and tailor it to your own needs. Don’t copy it outright, but pretty close is fine. No need to reinvent the wheel early on. Can you tell which site I borrowed liberally from? :)

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This is a follow up to my previous article on How To Analyze A Killer Real Estate Deal, where I show you an actual property I looked at and purchased. The property is now fixed up and rented out so I thought I’d take a moment to show you how it turned out!

Fixing it up! Before and After Pics

The house got new paint inside and out, carpet, air conditioner, microwave, dishwasher, light fixtures, doors, landscaping, and a few other cosmetic things.

Here you can see the new AC, the old one was rather beat up!

Here you can see the new microwave and dishwasher in the kitchen. Overhead lights have been fixed, cabinets painted, etc.

White paint on the outside and raising the tree line improves the curb appeal.

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Here’s a question from a reader…

Hey Brian, quick question for you. Where are you getting your health insurance from? And how much is it running you?

Thanks,
D.W.

Hey D.W.,

It turns out that finding inexpensive health care is easier than you might think, even if you aren’t working for a big company. I personally use Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas and it runs me $68/month (I can’t remember my deductible exactly but it’s a little higher than average, I hardly ever get sick).

That’s not to say that Blue Cross Blue Shield is right for you though. I found them through eHealthInsurance.com and the entire process was relatively painless. They made it easy to compare vendors, and I’d recommend them to anyone selecting their own health coverage (self-employed or not).

A lot of people talk about free health insurance as a reason to work for a big company, but the argument never really made sense to me. For one thing, it’s not really free (it’s coming out of your paycheck in one way or another). But more importantly, getting “free” health coverage is hardly a reason to decide what to do with 1/3 of your life. It’s sort of like buying a car because it comes with a free oil change. You can probably afford to get a good oil change regardless, so why wouldn’t you buy a car based on what’s really important to you?

Are you self-employed? What has been your experience with health insurance?

A few days ago I told you about a trick I use to get more learning done every day: I listen to audio books while I’m driving around town, exercising, and traveling. And it allows me to finish a book per week that I wouldn’t otherwise have time to read.

Then I told you about a trick I use to get more reading done: speed reading and speed comprehension. Yes it is real, and I was able to double my reading rate in one month. Anyone can do the same, in fact you may be able to do even better!

Well today I’m going to tell you about the third and final way I get more learning done every day. Like the previous two tips, this one happens AUTOMATICALLY. In other words, I don’t have to take any additional time out of my day to get the benefit. It is built into my life so that it happens no matter what, which is the real power.

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Here is a great video that was posted on Guy Kawasaki’s blog which reinforces my main message:

• I don’t believe in business plans
• You probably don’t need venture capital
• Just get started with something, and grow from there
• If it doesn’t work out, you’ve lost nothing, and learned a valuable lesson
• Your next try will be that much more likely to succeed

It’s a discussion panel with 5 entrepreneurs who bootstrapped.

Markus Frind, the founder of PlentyOfFish.com is my new hero (James Hong of Hot or Not is a close second). Marcus spends about two hours a day in his underwear managing a free dating website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee, and he only has one server. And by the way, he makes $5-6 million/year with Google ads.

Check out the video here.

In Breaking Free I list seven great business ideas that can be started for under $100, and blogging is one of them. I intend to put my money where my mouth is and demonstrate that live in front of you, quickly turning this into a profitable website.

So I’ve decided to do a little marketing challenge to help build traffic. Each day for the next 30 days, I will complete at least 3 tasks to market this website. My goal is to build traffic, get more subscribers, and sell books….but more importantly it is to prove that anyone can make a profitable website with a little dedication.

This challenge is in the spirit of Steve Pavlina’s 30 days to success and Journey Page. It also follows with the idea of making goals measurable and timely (having a deadline) which great authors have been talking about for years.

Each day I’ll post about what was done. How much can be accomplished in a month? We shall see.

There is absolutely no shortage of tasks to work from. For starters, I’ll be doing some SEO, taking some ideas from Problogger, this ebook on traffic building, and many others sources. Suggestions are always welcome.

The first day of the challenge will be today, Saturday the 16th of June, 2007. The challenge will end the 16th of July, 2007. Let the games begin!

I recently gave a talk at the Double Tree Hotel in Houston, TX about starting a business with little or no risk.

Here are a few clips for you to checkout:

The Top Five FREE Ways To Market Your Business

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