How do start-ups reduce financial costs?

Everything costs money to start a company, and how to cut costs is the trouble of many entrepreneurs. Today, "People's Eyes" comprehensively sorts out and offers suggestions for everyone to maximize the value of hard-earned entrepreneurial costs.

Use equity to attract people with the same values at the beginning of recruitment.

In the past seven or eight years, the domestic labor cost has increased at the rate of 16% per year, which undoubtedly brings great pressure to startup companies. In terms of recruitment, suggestions for start-ups are as follows:

First of all, values are more important than ability. Those who can accompany the company to the end basically agree with the value of the founder and the company. If you recruit a person with strong ability but inconsistent values for short-term performance, entrepreneurs need to be ready to break up with him at any time.

Secondly, looking for like-minded people can choose multiple recruitment channels. In addition to various vertical and comprehensive job-hunting websites, BBS and Zhihu can also try.

At the same time, in order to retain people, early entrepreneurs can be more generous in equity. In other words, while controlling its own shareholding structure, it is appropriate to give up a part of its equity, because at this time, the salary of the startup company cannot be very high, and it is necessary to draw cakes to attract outstanding people. In the later stage of the company's development, when entrepreneurs can afford high wages, they should pay more to attract talents and cherish equity.

Finally, in addition to salary and equity incentives, entrepreneurs also need to analyze the specific situation. In addition, young employees pay more attention to soft welfare and have great interest in snacks, fitness, group building and other lifestyles. Younger teams will bring more vitality and creativity to the company.

How to save software budget?

Office software is really expensive for startups, and it is really worthless. It is not wise for a small team of several people to buy the enterprise edition. We can save software costs in the following ways:

Buy Mac in the early stage: you can save a lot of office software costs, and they are all genuine.

Outsourcing unconventional technical activities: You will find that outsourcing not only saves labor costs, but also does not need to buy seldom-used software.

Small teams can use the personal version: the work can be completed normally, and the company is unlikely to go to court when it is small.

Pay attention to discounts: office software is occasionally discounted, and mobile apps are more common.

In fact, many 2B applications or services are free+value-added, and the free part is basically enough for start-ups. Cloud services can be used more on hardware, and IOE is too expensive for start-ups.

When the operation cuts expenses, it can spend money where users are concentrated.

Operation promotion can also save money. Tian Li, head of the early project of FREES Fund, believes that startups should ask themselves three questions in their operation: Who are the users? Where are they? How to get these users at the lowest cost?

"Who is the user" reflects the common problem of many product managers: they mistakenly think that their own needs are the needs of users. For example, many people think that WeChat should launch PC and Web that are easier to use. Tencent didn't do it because the activity on these two clients was not as good as outsiders thought. Another function is a more convenient friend grouping function. Most users only have one or two hundred friends, so grouping is not their most urgent need. Entrepreneurs sometimes feel that this function is necessary to iterate, perhaps just because there are more friends.

Knowing who the user is, we must know where the user is. Most people will ignore the fact that old users are often trapped in old products and it is difficult to dig them out. At this time, it is necessary to burn the war to big brother, get accurate users in batches, and start quickly. If it is a knowledge sharing community, the stock users may all be in Zhihu now. If it is a fan product, the stock users may be in Weibo or post it. If entrepreneurs go to these places to grab users in batches, the cost of obtaining customers can become very low or even zero.

After defining and locating users, how to acquire these users at a lower cost? If entrepreneurs invest on a large scale, brush traffic and burn money, it is likely that the speed will not keep up with the speed of making money. Therefore, early companies need to do detailed channel tests and experiments so as not to waste money.

Start-ups spend a lot of public relations cost promotion activities, and the cost performance is not necessarily high. In the absence of a large amount of funds to promote, you can think of some tricks that can cause virus effects. For example, if you send an email from iPhone, the default signature is "From My iPhone". This is a design detail with almost zero cost, but it has a virus effect in itself. How many advertisements have you made for Apple's iPhone?

Of course, the most important thing is that the founder must have a six-month to one-year plan in the early stage and know when and where the company should be. You can spend money more efficiently in Ming and Qing Dynasties.

There is an iterative process to spend money efficiently. Companies at different stages need to do different things. For start-ups, it is more important to recruit, finance and develop small-scale markets. Once it grows into an incremental company, the investment in product and service construction, operation and marketing needs to be increased. After developing into a large enterprise, burning money has become a necessary stage, but at that time, burning money will be more valuable.