FundRight: Optimising Start-Up Costs in the Early Stages

Hello! My name is Artem, and I am the founder of FundRight.

Today, I’d like to share our experience in optimizing costs during the early stages of our start-up, as well as highlight some useful services and tools that we use in our daily operations. And if you're curious about how much money these optimizations save us, make sure to read to the end of the article to find out!

For corporate email, we chose Zoho. This service is free and offers a lot of functionality compared to Gmail. Zoho allows you to add up to 5-6 users on your domain, features a handy calendar, and supports the creation of corporate groups for convenient mail distribution. It also offers demo mode services for mailshots. For example, we create groups like support and add work emails to ensure all group members receive the emails. There’s no IMAP integration for use with an email client in the free version, but it provides web version access. The paid version includes full IMAP integration and more features.

Most email services are quite expensive, costing about $10 per user. For pre-funding start-ups, this is unreasonable. Zoho is an excellent option for small teams.

For corporate messaging, we use Zulip. It’s also free for teams of any size and is a good alternative to popular solutions like Slack and Mattermost. Zulip stores up to 10,000 messages on the free tier. Once a company’s system reaches 10,000 messages, older ones start getting deleted.

Moreover, Zulip is an open-source messenger, similar to Rocket.Chat, but it has the advantage of its own server. This is very convenient for start-ups.

We use Taiga for task management. This free solution provides all the necessary functionality for managing tasks. Taiga can be deployed on your own server, but we use their managed instance.

Taiga includes essential modules like Kanban and Scrum, along with numerous possible integrations via webhooks and other means. For example, if we create a task in Taiga, a notification is sent to Zulip. This tool is genuinely useful, integrated with GitHub through bots, for example.

We have an interesting setup in Zulip: when a user creates a support ticket, it automatically appears in our dedicated Zulip support channel and gets sent via email to our support team. This makes Zulip an excellent auxiliary tool and a good alternative to Slack. They offer bots with Slack-compatible webhook API, making it easy to switch services without changing parameters or addresses. Taiga, being open-source, allows us to see all the code and be confident in security and data privacy, making it a good choice for project management thanks to its functionality, integrations, and code transparency.

For internal documentation, we chose Slab. Slab is a great free alternative to Notion. In our opinion, Notion is overloaded with a complex interface, while Slab is simple and user-friendly for documentation systems. Simplicity is its main advantage. It performs its core task without unnecessary frills; its minimalist interface loads quickly and contains nothing superfluous.

Slab can be compared to Google Docs in terms of functionality. We can categorise documents, vote, approve, and comment on them, as well as edit them. This makes Slab an excellent tool for our team.

We use Jitsi for video conferencing. This open-source system has proven to be a secure video provider. The main advantage of Jitsi is that there’s no need to purchase a paid version, unlike Google Meet.

The video quality on Jitsi is excellent, and the platform offers end-to-end encryption, ensuring no one can listen in on your conversations. We trust Jitsi’s security as we can view and verify their code. If we ever lack confidence, we can enable end-to-end encryption for additional protection.

Another advantage of Jitsi is the lack of time restrictions. Unlike many free versions of other platforms, you can talk for as long as you want. Furthermore, Jitsi can be self-hosted, providing you with complete control over your communications infrastructure.

Our developers use GitHub — a platform for code repositories where users can publish, review, and scrutinise each other’s code. It’s the most popular system for working with code, offering convenient tools for collaborative development, branching, pull request reviews, and more.

For our start-up, GitHub is an ideal solution, costing about $10 per year, which is quite affordable for us. GitHub offers reasonable prices and necessary functionality for small projects.

We also use GitHub Copilot — an AI-based tool from Microsoft which integrates into various IDEs and code editors, including VS Code development environment. It helps write tests quickly and efficiently, reducing development time by 80%.

Moreover, VS Code is also open-source and very convenient, with a vast array of plugins available for installation. The tool itself is free, though some plugins may require payment for enhanced functionality.

We use the latest version of the model's API to create chatbots, for the GPT chat API, the pricing is based on tokens instead of a monthly subscription. Tokens are small pieces of text, and you get charged for both the tokens you send to the API and the tokens it sends back to you.

We use the API to create summaries of start-up success for investors. Our process includes analysing information about the start-up and its founders using a custom-configured ChatGPT, and matching it with current trends. We then provide this information to potentially interested investors. This is not just a matching system; it’s a full-fledged analysis based on our data.

For design development, we use Figma. We didn’t need the developer mode, so we continue to use the free version. Figma’s functionality is sufficient for our workload.

We wanted to optimise our processes and save time so that our developers could focus on other important tasks. Now that resources are freed up, we plan to transition to our own solution. Tilda costs $15 per month and is a great tool for starting if you, for example, don’t have your own developers.

— Traffic Generation: Linkedin, Medium, Reddit

We use free platforms Linkedin and Medium to publish content about our project and share our expertise in working with start-ups and investors. Currently, most investors have come to us after reading our articles on LinkedIn. In the future, we plan to work with the media and share our start-up news with a wider audience.

We invested about $500 in Reddit promotion, resulting in good website traffic and the attraction of start-ups for alpha testing, as well as interest from investors.

Respondent.io is an indispensable tool for founders. It helps find respondents for market research in Europe and the US. Some options are free, providing valuable insights from potential clients and investors.

For those who sign up for the alpha test on our website, we will share a life hack on how to save $1,000 when using Respondent.io. Please just add the message "RESPONDENT" to the alpha test application, and I will share it with you.

By using these free and accessible tools, we can optimize expenses and effectively manage our start-up in its early stages. Here’s a breakdown of our costs:

Our total monthly costs are just $15, and annually, this amounts to $690

We hope our experience proves useful to you and helps you make informed decisions for your start-up's budget and resource management.

Artem Zhuravlev CEO & Founder of FundRight