Starting a business with $0

"It takes money to make money"

We've all heard this before and it's true to an extent, but . . .there are people that began construction businesses with just a shovel; there are people who began a salon with a comb; there are people who sell food to millions that started from a home oven with one burner working.

Heck even the largest business successes today: Craigslist, Kinko's, UPS and Yahoo had meager beginnings:
Craigslist began in 1995 as an e-mail newsletter to Craig Newman's friends -- telling them about cool events around San Francisco like the Anon Salon and Joe's Digital Diner. It spread through word of mouth, and became large enough to demand the use of a list server, majordomo, which required a name -- his friends suggested calling it "craigslist" to reinforce its personal and down-to-earth nature. Over time, people started posting items on the list.

from Craigslist History Page

Kinko's began as a low-price copy shop for college kids in Santa Barbara. It was founded in 1970 by Paul Orfalea, a self-described mechanically inept and dyslexic, "C" student at the University of California. He leased an 80-square-foot former hamburger stand in Isla Vista, near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and rented a small Xerox copier, charging customers four cents a page.

UPS was founded in 1907 in Seattle, Washington, by 19-year-old Jim Casey as a bicycle messenger service called American Messenger Company. Casey delivered telegraph messages and hot lunches and sometimes took odd jobs to keep his struggling business going.

Yahoo! Inc. got its start in 1994 as the hobby of two Stanford University students who were writing their doctoral dissertations. Jerry Yang and David Filo, spent much of their free time surfing the World Wide Web and cataloging their favorite Web sites. In doing so, they created a Web site of their own that linked Internet users to Yang's and Filo's favorite places in cyberspace. At that time, their site was called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web."

Histories are from: http://www.fundinguniverse.com

If they can do it, you can do it too. And damn-it, if I can do it (I began a business with virtually no money) then I know you can do it -- and do it better!

This technique of starting a business with zero or little money is called bootstrapping -- and I've done a lot of it. This article is the beginning of a series to help you begin your home business. Because there is no excuse for you not to begin your business today.

This series will be titled: "Begin with Zero."



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