We are a three people team of founders. Two of us live cheaply while traveling, so we keep it very lean, and one of us is living off his savings.
Here's the breakdown of expenses:
- $5.000/mo for paychecks
- $2.000/mo for marketing
- $800/mo for freelancers
- $500/mo for software and hosting
- $500/mo for operational expenses
- A 10-20% margin for things that come up
At a $10k/mo burn rate currently, and being on track to make $1k on our first month, we only plan to go as low as $100k in our bank's balance.
We are being extremely cautious and saving money for future projects, because we want to avoid raising funds in a need.
Glad you found it useful! I think it's working because the market is huge (everybody has a "fitness" problem) and it's such a simple product.
Our expenses are at $10k with a 3 people team, some freelancers and a $2k/mo marketing budget. We plan to break even in half a year, if things go right.
My goal so far has been to keep us profitable, as in +revenue and -expenses.
My story with fitness echoes this post closely. Gyms have long had the motivation to push the latest machines or fitness fads, because that's how they retain customers with the promise of a new program that'll change everything.
After a ton of research, the only thing that worked for me was bodyweight workouts and barbell training.
To drop my weight I followed bodyweight programs at home. 20 minute short sessions with squats, push ups, etc. Far more challenging than it sounds! You can see pics of how I dropped 20 lbs in this post:
Then I jumped onto barbell training, complemented with bodyweight sessions.
Starting Strength has been the best resource I've followed so far. For a small time investment a week, I've been progressing in technique and strength steadily over the last months.
The fitness field has been a huge motivation personally for me, which ultimately made me leave my previous startup and found http://8fit.com to help people like me follow that learning path.
I've done a lot of olympic lift training over the years and am competent at it. I am very much pro machine. The modern machines are excellent at preventing injury while providing an ideal strength training movement. The barbell stuff is these days fetishized for no good reason.
People get hurt using barbells all the time. It is easy to mess up and tweak something and then be a bit injured for a few weeks, even if you know what you're doing. It is much harder to mess up with the good machines. The barbell doesn't have any special advantages. In fact, loading up the plates is a nuisance.
Spain requires invoices after paying, for tax purposes, and they are slightly different than a receipt if you want to claim money back for them when doing your taxes.
And a related post: "Curse of the Gifted", talking about how the skilled ones have trouble following processes or standards, and how this can be detrimental in the long run to your ability to create larger things:
Many friends of mine have local companies, targeting only the Spanish market. It works well for them, but we have different goals. They want to be local leaders (easier acquisition, lower marketing costs), we want to build a leader in our category (higher investment in development and marketing)
OP here. Ditto to that, we like our culture in Barcelona and didn't want to replace it. We don't see it as a matter of cost, but a matter of possibility.
Since we didn't have a solid marketing or sales team, we decided to land it where our main market is. It just made sense.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18Se8QtvIKrGPWd8HEN4ILZz3Yyp...