by Matthew Crowe - Wednesday, 11th November 2009 - 2 comments

Weren't the last few years great? Everyone got accustomed to easy money, the streets were paved with investor gold. But those days are over now. And the reality is you don’t need all sorts of money to build a company today. You can do it on the cheap.

There is just no need for massive infrastructures and tons of employees and overhead anymore. Especially in the early days when you're not really making any money.

During your start-up phase there are so many great and innovative ways to build your company virtually until you are turning over real revenues and are ready to scale.

That’s where venture comes in. That's when angel investors can do their best job for you.

Learning how to run your company lean in the beginning will set you up for success when you become larger. It's a great skill to have under your belt. Start with free online tools that will help build your personal and business brand first such as Linkedin, Twitter, Wordpress, and Facebook. These are all great examples of ways to get people to see what you are doing and build your brand at the same time. Using modern networking tools and freeware also shows you are not anchored to the past but understand how business is trending online today.

Other great free and cheap online resources that are available to you are mint.com, Odesk, LegalZoom, Google Docs, Mailchimp and Skype. Not only are these tools innovative, but also will expedite your productivity and show professionalism.

The business landscape has changed. It has weeded out most of the people who should have never been entrepreneurs or just don’t make the cut. For today, that means that anyone who understands how important it is to be careful with their pennies in the beginning, is innovative, and can start to build users and make money while still in the bootstrapping phase will be on the radars of venture firms and investors because you actually have something tangible versus just a pie in the sky idea.

Wake up, entrepreneurs. You don’t have to spend a ton of money to build your company. You just need to have a solution to a need. You need to be willing to be creative. You need passion. And most of all, you have to be scrappy in how you go about getting it started.

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