How we built BeSnappy.com for $317,000 | Hacker News Reader

How we built BeSnappy.com for $317,000

ianlandsman.com

The decision to raise money from investors is becoming an increasingly complex one. There's angels, funds doing seed rounds, funds doing series A and B, crowdfunding, Kickstarter, bootstrapping and then raising money to scale, et al.

Or simply bootstrapping.

It's fascinating to see UserScape bootstrap itself to the point where it can seed fund its own products. That's an amazing place to be at and something to really aspire too.

But then, with seed money you can quit your job, focus on your product without freelancing as a distraction, and keep your business top of mind without financial pressures. But you better be damn sure that you're hitting high growth rates and get back on the roadshow to raise your series A. So there's that too.

Yeah, it's a tough call. Once you get on the funding train you kinda have to stay on it. They expect you to spend the money which means you're going to have high expenses which means you're probably going to need more money than your business will generate early on.

This is a very insightful article - BUT - you're paying way too much for health insurance.

Shoot me an email (contact info in profile) or check out http://www.simplyinsured.com - assuming you have 2-3 people on your team, we can save you thousands. I'm looking at quotes right now for fantastic insurance at around $150-$250/person.

Really cool to see how you guys are doing and what your costs are. The services/hardware are becoming exorbitantly cheap and manpower/expertise is becoming expensive.

When are you launching? Any chance to get bumped up in the list? I registered months ago...

And FWIW, Snappy >>>>> SnapReply

It's in a limited beta now, over the next few weeks we'll be rolling out a much wider beta so you should get a notice pretty soon.

I'd love to see more detail on number of people for payroll and especially healthcare, that seems SUPER expensive.

We have 5 staff total, most of that number is 3 of us. Healthcare is high because we pay for 100% of it and everyone is on a family plan. So cost is around $18K/year. We all work remote so we need to use a plan that's national which also costs more.

For how long this budget was?

6-7 months, but as I said we were working on other things along the way as well.

Nice landing page bro

Thanks!

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