Business on a budget: 5 tech tips for digital startups to cut costs

The internet is full of advice on how startups should cut costs. Much of them start with ‘start from home’ and lead to ‘cut down on the fancy furniture’ and ‘go green’. Some go as far as suggesting ‘keep manpower thin’. In an era of global warming, ‘go green’ is a solution not only for startups but for all small enterprises and large conglomerates too, an activity that cuts across industries – very important to earn carbon credits. Start from home, may sound like an ideal situation, yet it requires a lot of disciplining and deprives employees and often clients of a formal work and discussion environment. A garage instead could be a better solution. Yes, cutting down on fancy furniture, and browsing through deals sites for furniture or travel tickets may not be such a bad idea.

However, we have five better solutions and we are restricting to technology solutions. Pay heed.

BYOD

Bring your own device (BYOD) is no more a fad and is a reality where organisations are encouraging employees to bring in their own devices – mobile phones, tablets, notebooks – to work. Something that started as an HR appeasement is a reality now. Startups can highly save on investments into these gadgets. However, this comes with its own set of challenges, which range from providing IT solutions to varied OS and brands to fund fresh rookie employees who don’t own these devices. Providing IT solutions to a small team shouldn’t be much of a problem. The problem will come once the team grows in proportion and there are as many OS brands to support. However, the IT solutions cost would be much lesser than the initial cost of investment into the devices.

Startups do tend to encourage first-time job-seekers and keep the experienced skill as thin as possible to cut down on salary costs. Some of these fresh recruits may not own any, one, or more than one of these required devices. Startups, at the time of hiring can offer to fund their new devices, which will be the eventual property of the fresh recruits. This funding can be recovered through an arranged agreement between the two parties, such as regular deductions from salaries. Startups also benefit in this arrangement from owning depreciated value gadgets and upgradation costs for obsolete software/hardware. BYOD also allows work accessibility from anywhere outside the office, including home. But if the device needs to go for repair, who pays? That is the question you should lay down in the employment contract. The cost could be shared as it’s being used for both personal and official purposes.

Go opensource

It’s given that if an employee is eventually owning the device, s/he will buy a brand of her/his liking, which may come with proprietary OS and proprietary apps. Much of these OSes and apps will come with a personal use license, which would make it illegal to be used in the office. Startups could encourage usage of opensource OS – largely in the Linux space to overcome OS and applications’ license costs. These can be managed through dual-boot solutions, with the opensource partition for office use and the personal preferred proprietary OS on another partition. Another partition could manage the common files – documents and music and video files – which would be accessible to both the OSes on the system.

If the employee personally prefers the opensource environment, you have saved half the trouble. Our recommendations are Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary OS and if someone wants an environment as close to Windows to cut down on the learning curve, you can go for Linux OSes in the KDE environment like Kubuntu or Chakra.

We will not say that opensource will save on anti-virus licences, even though the Linux environment is less prone to viruses and many of the software channels maintained by many of the opensource OS brands have an anti-virus solution and firewall embedded within the OS itself that are updated regularly. But if you are working in a networking environment, computing security is the last thing where one should look at cutting costs. If you trust your OS software channel, go by it or else invest in some good anti-virus solution. But there are many very good free anti-virus solutions available too – Avira, Avast and AVG, and most of them have Linux versions.

However, opensource comes with its own set of challenges. Much proprietary software may not find support on opensource OSes, for example, Adobe Creative Suite, which includes apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. Or for that matter, Microsoft Office. Even though there are applications like Wine. Wine works as a Windows emulators to run Windows compatible programs on Linux, but chances of failure to emulate are high. But emulation still incurs a license cost and it eventually defeats the opensource purpose. The opensource fraternity is huge and there are many equally good equivalents for many of these programs. LibreOffice and Openoffice.org are two very good alternatives for Microsoft Office. GIMP is a very good free alternative for Photoshop. While Adobe doesn’t maintain Linux binaries, Corel does have Linux versions but that too come at a cost. A very good free substitute for Illustrator and Corel Draw is Inkspace. If your startup is into web development, Quanta Plus and Kompozer are very good alternatives for Dreamweaver.

Evolution is free and equally competitive as MS Outlook. Thunderbird and Geary Mail are other good free native mail clients.

Also, for your website, you can use free and opensource publishing solutions like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. If you need a site, which will be largely used for content publishing, announcements, or to maintain an official blog, WordPress is the best and the easiest. If you need more functionalities or want to put up an e-commerce site, interactivity with customers and more, you can try your hands on Drupal and Joomla.

Ride the cloud

First and foremost, cloud computing comes at a cost and is not free. In fact there are many good cloud based office suites too – Google Drive and Zoho are quite competitive alternatives to MS Office. Personal use file sharing services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, Ubuntu One and Copy could be handy as they offer free space anything between 2 GB to 20 GB and many of them have referral programmes, which can get you more free space.

However, a startup with a centralised cloud server would need more space and a support that is serviced on priority and is regularly monitored. A cloud service could cost cheaper than the locally installed server costs, which includes investment into the physical server; real estate cost for server installation, which can be saved or put to other better use; continuous electric supply to keep the servers running and server cooling solutions; battery backup and subsequent maintenance cost for all of these. These all become the headache of the cloud solution provider. A cloud server cost would be much less than all of these above costs put together, even if you add the data transfer cost to access the cloud server. As such, you have to invest into a data package for your enterprise, so the added cost of server access may just go up marginally. Amazon, IBM, Google, Rackspace and Microsoft are some pioneers in the cloud computing space.

While cloud makes the data and enterprise apps easily accessible, even from outside the office and any time of the day, it also solves the problem emerging from the first solution – BYOD. What do you do when an employee leaves the company? S/he is taking the device along, and along with it could go the data. So once, cloud computing comes into play, much of the data is residing on the cloud, to which user accessibility could be easily and immediately denied. IT solution providers may just check the device for mandatory checkups for any local backups, but would be saved from troubles of wiping the data or taking office backups and transfers to new machines owned by employee replacements.

Go social

By going social, we do not mean have Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest accounts. They are given. They will help you save on communication cost and create buzz. But they won’t help much in getting you businesses. Instead of investing on banner ads and paid newspaper ads and listings. Much of these investments will be a spillover. Instead, use online forums like LinkedIn for networking and get businesses and in fact for that matter, upgrading knowledge. LinkedIn is a vast repository of forums that would be relevant to your work domain. Whether you are an app developer, hardware manufacturer, digital marketing agency, web developer or mobile solutions provider, there are many active forums catering to them. You can make a pitch for a business in these forums or find a freelancer to outsource smaller projects which may not need a full-time employee.

Virtual communication

Last, but not the least on our savings list is usage of web communication tools. Costs on SMSes could be saved hugely through usage of apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and Viber or any other equivalent like Nimbuzz and Fring. Preference for an app over another would largely depend in which region your office is located, which market you are targeting and which app is largely used by your industry peers and clients in these markets. The best thing about most of these apps are that they are tethered to the mobile number of the users, hence the problem of remembering any usernames is taken out of the equation.

Now, how about some cost savings on travel. Use Skype to save on long-distance travel. Registration is through a username and Microsoft has no plans as of now to tether it to a mobile number. While Skype offers good video and voice quality, its user interface still comes from the Flintstones ages. Another equally good app to save on international voice call costs and roaming costs is Viber, which is tethered to the mobile number. Video on Viber is available, as of now, only on its desktop app versions, which too may compare inferiorly with Skype. Google Hangouts too emerge as a good alternative. Since Hangouts replaced Google Talk, it’s going through a lot of tweaks and changes, which are yet incomplete and that could be a deterrent as of now. There are speculations that Hangouts too could be used as an SMS app, once tethering it to a mobile number is allowed.

Travel costs could also be cut down by using virtual meeting rooms like videxio.com. While Videxio has some good cheap plans to hold virtual meetings, vyew.com also has free version, which is ad supported. And if you are looking for a free online toolkit for group projects, wiggio.com is our best free bet.

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This article by Dhaleta Surender Kumar originally appeared on e27, a Burn Media publishing partner.