A new study has revealed some of the tricks and habits startup businesses employ to save money during the early stages of their business.
A third of startups surveyed don’t view email as their primary form of communication, favouring free collaborative platforms such as Slack, Trello and Basecamp for project comms. 37 per cent of businesses polled said email was not their main form of communication.
Social media also played a large part in internal comms for the startups surveyed. 47 per cent said they used instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to communicate in real time with colleagues.
Other ways startups function differently to traditional enterprises
The research, found that more than half of companies have remote workers, enabling businesses to save money on office space.
More than half of the startups surveyed had at least one remote staff member.
Over half of the startups surveyed had at least one team member who wasn’t based in the company’s main office or didn’t have a fixed company base at all.
Of those, 7 in 10 businesses said more than half of the workforce were based somewhere other than the main office, although this figure included local staff who preferred to work from home.
Startups certainly don’t see location or remoteness as a barrier to hiring a team member and in some cases, startups said that they expected to recruit people into entirely remote positions.
Matt Haycox of Access Commercial Finance says: “The idea of a well-funded startup recklessly burning through capital has become a cliche. But our experience suggests that new businesses can be as innovative about managing costs as they are about developing products and services. A business is at its most financially vulnerable in the first couple of years, so it’s encouraging to see so many startups focused on keeping costs lean, as well as growing revenue.”
