Shoestring Venture

Book excerpt: A Complete Guide to Starting and Growing Your Own Business On A Shoestring Budget The Cheat Sheet for Business. For the millions who start a new business every year on the barest of resources, Shoestring Venture: The Startup Bible is like hiring a high-level consultant to deal with the bewildering maze of issues from finance to marketing to technology that all entrepreneurs face. Every business is nothing but a series of decisions which can make or break the business. You could say that, if there's a science of business, it's the science of making good decisions. And every bootstrap entrepreneur faces the daunting task of making ALL the business decisions, any one of which could either doom the enterprise or catapult it to stratospheric success. That meas that every entrepreneur has to quickly get up to speed on every issue their business faces. Shoestring Venture: The Startup Bible is the most exhaustive set of practical resources collected to empower entrepreneurs to make the right decisions on a limited budget, from business concept to product development to Web marketing. We call a "consultant in a book," there to give considered and experienced answers to the infinite questions that come up. Shoestring Venture-The Start-up Bible All entrepreneurs - even the smallest operating on the tightest of budgets - have the opportunity to build powerful start-up organizations without ever really having to walk out the front door. Using global communications and data networks, even bootstrap entrepreneurs can staff an entire organization with every human resource and skill they need at rock-bottom prices. In short, anyone can run a virtual organization using only a desktop or laptop computer. Shoestring Venture: The Startup Bible gives bootstrap entrepreneurs all the resources they need to build truly effective startups using the magic of outsourcing and offshoring. This is the century for small business . . . You have the tools to build a powerful start-up organization, from financing to product development to marketing, without ever really having to walk out your front door. Using global communications and data networks, you can staff an entire organization with every human resource and skill you need at rock-bottom prices. You are, in short, running a virtual organization using only a desktop or laptop computer. It's the magic of outsourcing. It means that you can be a pretty formidable player in the business world. Why? Because it permits you to focus your energies on what brings real value to your business-what you do best. That's what this book is all about. Shoestring Venture gives you the tools you need to start your new venture or take your current business several levels higher by exploiting the resources our interconnected world offers you. Chapters: Startup, Finance, Taxes, & Banking, Hardware and Software, Bringing Your Products to Market, Outsourcing Your Back Office, Information Technology, Web and Ecommerce, and Promoting Your Product: Marketing & Sales