Spending $0 On Your Startup Should Not Be a Badge Of Honor

I am sure you have seen people talking about their successes all while bragging about having spent $0 on it. Startups and products with no marketing spend and free tools only. A lot of the time these people are finding genuine success which is fantastic, but I still find it odd that they propose such a glaring mistake as a pro of their process.

Here are some quick examples I found of this phenomenon (with no ill will to the authors!):

How I Built a Company With $0 Ad Spend

7 days postlaunch - $0 spent, 380 unique visitors, 4 subscribers

How to Grow Your Startup on a $0 Marketing Budget

You Are Wasting Time

Honestly, this is all it comes down to. Creating a startup is all about moving as fast as you possibly can.

Speed Is The One Advantage Startups Have

There are plenty of manual tasks that you can not offload while starting or running a startup so it seems silly to also try and do all of the things that you definitely could delegate just to save a few bucks.

If you think that blog content is a good avenue for you. You could spend hours upon hours writing. Or, you could buy a human hand-written article for as cheap as $10 or even use AI for just a couple of cents.

If you need users to validate a new product idea, copy, etc. you could spend weeks manually trying to drive users to it. Or, you could spend a few dollars a day on paid ads and get immediate feedback. This is a big one in my opinion. We often try and do our initial validation of new products in 5 days and that is infinitely easier when you throw a few dollars at the problem. After all, if paid ads work, and the stats point to a solid ROI, it basically becomes a money tap that you can just turn on and off.

Key Takeaways

1. Money is powerful, even in small amounts. $50 can go a long way.
2. Money can work in parallel to your manual efforts. Do everything you were doing AND spend money to support yourself
3. Forcing yourself to use free tooling is almost always slower than paying for a premium product
4. Stop bragging about spending nothing...