Starting a small company with partners, what bootstrapping services can I use?

2 points by fnordpiglet ↗ HN
I’m looking to start a small highly technical multi asset quant/stat vol/arb/HFT with some friends from my long career in tech and quant trading. I founded some startups in the mid 90’s so it’s not my first rodeo, but I have seen so many awesome services and startups posted here focused on bootstrapping and providing leverage to small teams, and I’d really like to build something elegant and modern in the business sense without distracting from the building of the business. Ideally I could scale as we scale, we are self funding for now so every dollar spent on business services is dollar not at work growing the fund. I have a rough business plan that could see geometric growth over time so it would be nice if the services are like any good service - scale invariant. I guess, what would the serverless architecture for a new high tech business in 2023 look like?

Thank you for any suggestions, thoughts, recommendations, pitches etc. It’s an exciting step in my life after 20 years in FAANG and globomegacorps and other peoples funds.

4 comments

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Would probably be helpful if you talked a bit about the problem space and what paid services you would use. That would let folks chime in with freemium/free/self-hosted/OSS solutions that might work.

Right now, I don't have any ideas for you beyond:

* google work for office software

* squarespace/wordpress for a website

because I don't know what "multi asset quant/stat vol/arb/HFT" firms need in terms of software services.

Sorry, thanks. I’m not as interest in support software for the literal business itself, but support services for being any business - benefits, payroll, legal, all the minutia you ultimately hire a office manager, HR, finance head, etc. In my old startups we had dotcom era funding so I just hired these functions out.

The software we need for the actual revenue producing business is all custom kit we are building ourselves. So no hosting, no websites, no CDN, no payment system, etc.

Ah, thanks for clarifying. I can talk about what I've seen:

* zendesk or intercom for support

* nodebb, discourse for forums

* gusto for payroll and benefits management

* stripe or braintree for taking payments

* fractional CFO (lots of them out there) for finance

* google for calendaring, email groups, documents, email