We decided early on that we were going to develop Eliot Turner on a shoe string budget. Setting up the experiment was going to be fun, setting it up in a “recession” was going to be fun, doing it on a budget would make it incredible.
We have therefore decided on a budget of £1000 which will be introduced into the business by the four directors. As the legal structure of the business hasn’t been finalised this could be in the form of a loan, working capital or shareholder funds.
I can see people screaming at this post saying it’s impossible to start a business with £1000! However, it is worth noting that the initial design and development is being done by carrotmedia’s carrots out of working hours. Therefore we don’t have an overhead for the development of the website itself.
This is how we see the budget break down:
· Legal costs / Business Startup – £500
· Initial Stock – £400
· Marketing budget – £100
Once we launch we will be reporting on how this was actually spent in finer detail and if it has been spent effectively.
I don’t have a great deal of experience of budgets when setting up, is this budget what you would expect your customers to pay to you as a start up looking for your services?
As a designer I am worried about the design/development being “swept under the carpet”. Are you noting down the hours spent developing this project to calculate the cost later?
Also I would be worried about £100 as a marketing budget? What does this cover? Marketing can make or break your company. What do you class as marketing? Writing these blog posts and your twittering about the project is classed as marketing and Im sure you have spent more than £100 of your time.
Personally to start a business on a shoe string, I would have used a platform that already exists and anyone could set up (I have done this, and (http://mlbadges.com/schools) is now quite successful, and would not like to add up the hours spent developing, designing and marketing it). BUT does this not contradict with why you started this experiment, as your client left to seek a bigger platform to handle a bigger turnover.
As you can tell I am following this project and interested to see where it goes. Good Luck
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