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few other tricks helpfull for bootstrapping : 1. outsourcing. if done right can be a great money saver. 2. crowdsourcing: you can get cheap and high quality work for most services a business needs using crowdsourcing. see :http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/enterprise/2009/09/crowdsourcing_... 3. design you processes for outsourcing: for example: customer support given using web chat can be cheaply outsourced, prevent accent and company image problem when outsourcing support , more efficent than phone based outsroucting because the support person could answer people in parallel , and you get an archive of questions and answers , that might appropriate for service automation.