How I Started My First Business For Less Than $50

The internet is the great equalizer when it comes to business. As I write this, college kids with hardly a dime to their name are starting companies that will change the way the world works. Meanwhile big traditional businesses with billions of dollars continue to struggle to turn a profit online. There have never been so many young millionaires and billionaires in the history of mankind and we have the internet to thank for that.

With that said you don’t have to be the next Mark Zuckerberg to kill it online. I started my business in college, at the time I had around $400 in my bank account, I didn’t have a secret savings account or a bunch of money put away for me that I could invest. I needed most of the $400 to pay for rent and food but I still managed to start my first business as a poor college kid with very little money to my name.

I had a few hundred ideas spinning around in my head at the time (ok maybe it was more like 4 or 5) but I figured that regardless of what I ended up doing I would need to pay for two things, a few domain names @ around $8 each, and web hosting. I decided to go with shared web hosting which is extremely cheap (as in $10 a month for a package that allows you to have unlimited sites), the disadvantage to shared hosting is the lack of direct control over the server and the fact that you are sharing the server and severs resources with other sites, however when you are bootstrapping it you need to start small.

These two things were enough to get me off the ground. I did all of the web development and design work myself for my first few sites myself, and just taught myself as I went – which is really the best way to learn. I then reinvested the first few hundred dollars I made from these sites into registering an actual company with the state, which costs around $300 if you use an online service like MyCorporation (it actually varies by state).

From that point forward I had a positive cashflow and would just reinvest any extra money into expanding the company. Eventually I hired a writer to produce content for the site. Before I knew it one writer turned into a team of 20 writers and the shared hosting that I started with turned into multiple dedicated servers handling millions of visitors a month.

When I look back what really amazes me is that I managed to start all of this for under $50. Now compare this to what it costs to start a brick and mortar store – where you have to pay rent, utilities and potentially inventory. This requires a minimum investment of 50 – 100k where as an online business can be started for $20 or $30. This was simply a bargin that I couldn’t refuse and it turned out to be the best decision of my life.