Zero Investment - How to bootstrap an online start-up in India

For making a start-up, the most important thing after a unique idea is its online presence and in this blog, I'll talk about how you can do that without spending any money (almost). This would be useful for School and College students who have an idea and are willing to make a start-up but are not sure enough for making big investments or willing for studying abroad and want to strengthen their profile. You can check an example of all this in the end.

1. The initial step would be a platform where your customers or clients can contact you. For this you can easily use Google Forms which is available on the web free of cost, you can design your form by adding so many questions, columns for short answers or long answers, and options and can also collect phone numbers and emails. All this data will be automatically added to a google sheet in your Drive.

2. Another important initial step would be Social Media Presence like on Instagram or Facebook which can be made easily. After that you need good posts to make it look good and for that you can use Canva free of cost. At Canva you have access to thousands of designs and idea for designing and making beautiful and attractive posts, if you have some money to invest then you can buy Canva Premium which will give you access to many other premium designs. This can be used for making posts, videos for YouTube, and designing logos. You can also use it for designing letterheads and stamps for your company.

3. Another important step would be marketing, there are various steps like influencer marketing, word of mouth and more but for doing these free of cost, first, you'll need something to show as people prefer to follow that account which already got thousands of followers rather than new account, which simply means you'll need fake likes and followers. There are various applications available for this on the web but using these apps is not the legal way and this usually leads to getting your Instagram account temporarily disabled or deactivated. Instead of any local app, you can use GetInsta, this application is tried and tested, and it won't harm your account in any way as it is authorised and available on Google PlayStore. To use this, make a new account (a fake account with a random name) and add it to the GetInsta app. There you have to like and follow other random people's posts and accounts which makes you earn coins which you can use for adding likes to your posts and getting followers. Another great way of social media marketing is asking for start-up pages on Instagram (pages which share stories of startups); some of them will share your story free of cost because they need content, this way you'll get featured.

4. Another Important part will be getting a website, for this, you can use the Link Gallery feature of Rebrandly. Here you can create a page where you can add links for all your forms as columns on a website, and can add your logo. If you want a page with an "About Us" section or the "Terms and Conditions" section like conventional sites then you can make these documents using canvas, make a pdf document, upload them on the drive and use the share link to add it to the webpage. This will serve the need of the website but if you want your website to look good, then you can do it by spending very less money, buying a domain by Godaddy and easily adding your Rebrandly link to its transfer address so when someone will log on to your domain address they'll be transferred to your Rebrandly link and it'll work for the website.

5. Another important step is receiving payments or making bills, for this you can use RazorPay free of cost (cost 2% per payment). This can be used as a customised payment gateway where you can add product details, your logo, cost of the product or service on the payment page, it'll create a link for that which you can share with your customers on Email & Whatsapp or directly add on your Rebrandly website. It can also be used to create digital bills for payment (GST and Non-GST). It can take payments from all available modes like UPI Payment or Credit & Debit Cards.

6. If your work needs dealing with other companies then they'll ask for GST Bill and for that you'll need a GST Bill, forgetting that there are many companies which will charge thousands of rupees for getting this done but you can easily do this free of cost. For getting a proprietorship business GST number you'll only need an address proof, a Pan card and an Adhaar card, which can be easily done on the website of GST India, you can many Youtube videos for doing this.

For Example, you can log on to: www.varconsultants.in, I created this start-up cost efficiently through the above-mentioned ways. When you'll log on to this, the webpage you'll find is created by Rebrdandly, its payment gateway by RazorPay, Contact forms by Google Forms, About Us and Term & Conditions from Google Drive, all the posts and videos on the Instagram page are using Canva, likes and followers through GetInsta and a lot more through zero-investment. In my future blog, I'll tell about "how to get a workforce without paying any salary".