In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 7 & 8:

7 – The best 10$ you’ll ever spend

Sounds like too good to be true… And actually it is a very sweet deal.

The basic infrastructure of most startups is the notebooks of the founders. Business plans, specifications, tasks lists are managed with the usual office suite. And soon the big version chaos hits. Nobody knows which version is the correct one, where to find the current specification, which tasks are completed.

There is a neat solution to this called Jira (Task tracking), Confluence (Wiki) and later for software development Greenhoper, Bamboo, Fisheye and Crowd. Each of these software packages goes for 10$ for 10 users per year.

Result: A systematic approach to work. And the best 10$ ever spent.

(Discloser: We do not have any shares in Atlassian or commission agreement. Why we’re fans? We run two successful startups – local.ch and memonic.com – on this setup.)

8 – Use cloud computing

Our most expensive investment so far was a development server with a price tag of CHF 7’000.- Our second most expensive investment was our office furniture from IKEA. A chair, a desk, a conference desk, and some small furniture pieces. That’s it.

We haven’t invested a dime into our entire life infrastructure. Instead we rent. The magic words are “Cloud Computing”. In our case we rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Instead of investing heavily upfront into our life infrastructure, we rent on an as-you-go basis the required computing infrastructure (storage, processing, etc.). And it’s cheap: our February bill totalled 157$.

Consequence: A much-reduced capital requirement.