Disclaimer: I had full-time employment to put a roof over my head and food on the table for the entire duration I've had a business.
$58.17 of my own money, spent in the one month before I had enough sales to fund all business expenses out of incoming revenue.
If I had to do it over again, I'd tell my younger self that the "bring it in for under the price of a video game" discipline was worthwhile, but $500 or so on icons, visual design, domains, and directory submissions in the first few months would have made my life much easier.
If you (somewhat arbitrarily) say having a day job is cheating and that my basic living expenses were de-facto invested into the business, then I'd estimate I probably spent something on the order of $15,000 of implied investment prior to ramen profitability. I think that is a pretty useless statistic but, hey, full disclosure.
This is an interesting question because I spent the better half a year ignoring consulting work and focusing solely on our mobile software company. So if you include opportunity costs, you could say about $60k was "spent" over the course of about a year (about $5-7k or so was hard cash, the rest was 6-months of not doing service-related work).
The company became ramen profitable pretty quickly but I went back to doing part-time consulting work to maintain a lifestyle. As the AppStore grew exponentially, our apps pretty much remained ramen profitable. We missed our opportunity to make a bigger return when we launched our first app in Nov/Dec 08. Part of that was my fault based on how I setup the company, and being way to tolerant of lack of effort from developer-partners. Fortunately I learned my lesson with my own money.
We received angel funding about a month ago to start a new company, we'll have 1 (maybe 2) apps on iTunes but we won't be solely dependent on it for our success. This will let us stay focused on making a really fantastic mobile app, not only for Apple but also for Android and other platforms.
Right now I'm trying to decide if I should sell my former small business on SitePoint or something. I'm not sure we'd get much for it but it would be nice to put a nail in the coffin since I don't have time to really maintain the company. Anyone have any experience with small sales like this?
To those who have said and are going to say that the time they have spent isn't worth anything, it is. The time you spend on your start-up is time you could be spending working a paying job, be it a "real" job, a freelance job, a consulting job, etc. You time is not free!
Now there is nothing wrong with this. You are investing your time into something you believe will be worth it in the end, but don't think you time has no value.
Evaluating how much your time is worth is another question though.
I stopped doing consulting and lived off my savings whilst building my first SaaS app. It took a few months to get ramen profitable and I had zero income the whole time during development. Looking back, that was actually kinda stupid of me...
But we're not talking about time or opportunity cost, we're talking about hard expenditure right?
In that case, probably about $3000. Got spent on a bunch of things - hosting, buying software licenses, SSL certs, icon sets etc etc.
My biggest expenditure was on hosting. I went with a dedicated Rackspace server and I signed up way too early. 2 months into my contract I still hadn't launched and was, of course, paying a flat fee per month (not cheap!). This is precisely the situation I could avoid by using cloud solutions, but at the time there wasn't a cloud service out there I was comfortable with using. Tried out Rackspace Cloud Servers recently and would like to use that for future projects.
Camarades.com was funded from a software licensing scheme that brought in about 700,000 annually. In one year all the licensing income was spent on salaries for employees we hired and bandwidth (which was very expensive back then), the second year the business became profitable when we added 24x7 media advertising.
The licensing deal was abolished and the licensed software became completely free as long as people would host their video streams with us.
After that the whole thing was spun out as a different company underneath the parent, and extra shareholders came on board.
All told I figure about a million went in to it before it was really profitable, because it was launched off an existing stream of income we had in that sense a relatively easy time of it. It definitely is a lot of money to spend on something you are not sure is going to take off though, fortunately it did.
Working on a new game project; spent $590 for art, $20 on domains, using a server I'm already renting on another budget. Spent about 200 manhours on it (worth €10k or something).
I'm still spending, altought it's more of time and energy, so far probaly >1000 $, I won't count my time I hope to break-even in January 2010.I will post it here.
i wonder if there is a correlation between initial spending vs later success.
In some cases, i would be willing to bet that high initial spending lead to a greater turnout because you're able to leverage the money and convert it into increased traffic and sales.
i'm more looking for the break-even point. How long people supported their startups on their own dime, before the business finally took off, and started bringing in enough money to pay for itself.
$58.17 of my own money, spent in the one month before I had enough sales to fund all business expenses out of incoming revenue.
If I had to do it over again, I'd tell my younger self that the "bring it in for under the price of a video game" discipline was worthwhile, but $500 or so on icons, visual design, domains, and directory submissions in the first few months would have made my life much easier.
If you (somewhat arbitrarily) say having a day job is cheating and that my basic living expenses were de-facto invested into the business, then I'd estimate I probably spent something on the order of $15,000 of implied investment prior to ramen profitability. I think that is a pretty useless statistic but, hey, full disclosure.