I was reading this article by Barney Austen on Bloggertone and got to thinking about all the things people waste money on when starting their own businesses. There are tons of things that you think are really important to have or do. Many of them really are not.

Here at RevaHealth.com we were no different to any other start up. We invested time and money into areas that should have been left to much later in our development cycle. Here is a list of areas that on reflection we either should have ignored or that we managed to get away without.

A Logo
We still don’t have a logo and don’t have any plans to get a logo. We just typed out RevaHealth.com in a font that we liked and left it at that.

Stationary
We still don’t have any. It was a bit of a pain getting some things set up without any, like a business account with Vodafone, but we managed without and we are still managing without.

Business Cards
We did without business cards for a year and even after getting them printed I keep forgetting them. If your business isn’t based around meeting people face to face then business cards aren’t one of the first things that you need.

A CRM System
We spent a huge amount of effort in the early days evaluating CRM systems. This was at a time when we could list all our customers on the back of a napkin. Eventually we deployed Salesforce at huge cost. After a year we abandoned it and went to Highrise. This still didn’t do the job (more about this in a later post) and most of the company reverted to spreadsheets and notebooks.

We now have our own home-grown CRM system which works like a dream, but we couldn’t have created it in the beginning as we didn’t know the way our business would be shaped in the future. Fundamentally we would have been significantly better off if we hadn’t looked at any form of CRM until we had hundreds of customers and a well defined business. I think many start-ups would be in the same boat and that CRM systems are not something that you should be looking at during the early stages of a business.

A Sales Process
Unless you have already done business in exactly the same business environment and your business model is established and well understood then you can’t have a sales process. Inventing one prior to this is pointless and akin to throwing darts drunk, blindfolded and standing on one leg.

An Intranet
Most of us have worked in companies where a corporate intranet was badly implemented and used.  When I started RevaHealth.com I was determined that ours would be implemented and used correctly. The truth of the matter is that it simply wasn’t required. For small companies the natural organic methods of sharing information are much more efficient. We do use our intranet effectively but it has a much smaller role than we envisioned.

A Server
I spent a good man week deploying and poorly configuring an internal server. It now sits in the corner gathering dust. We don’t have any active servers in our office anymore – everything is in the cloud: Mail server, development servers, intranet, source control … everything.

A Brand Name
This is probably important, however we gotten away with a fairly bland and meaningless one so far. I’m not entirely convinced that if we changed our one overnight that anyone would notice.

A Finished Product
Luckily this isn’t a mistake that we made. We deployed product as quickly as possible and iterated every week from that point on. However, this is a mistake that I see start-up companies making every day. They think that they have to get the technology correct before they start doing business. Whereas they need to start doing business before they can figure out what the correct technology is.

Legally Binding Terms & Conditions
Legally binding to what? A typically start-up changes its business so often that any agreements are outdated as soon as the paper dries. It’s probably best to start with standardised creative commons terms & conditions until your business firms up.

So, when you started up your own business what did you spend time or money on that you needn’t have?