As a startup, funded or non-funded, its always challenging to manage costs while developing and evolving. You will always need more and more funds to keep growing your business. There are several ways you can save costs on development, testing, and marketing your startup business. We evaluated over 100 startup companies to learn how many of them overspend having lack of experience in utilizing the investments.

1. Low Level Design Work

UI Design is critical factor in making your product stand out from the crowd so its best to have in-house UI experts to handcraft that dream product you always wanted. We are not asking you to outsource entire UI Design efforts to some company 3 timezones away from you, we are suggesting to outsource the parts which require minimal or no decision on design. For example, after your in-house design experts are finished with an approved design from all stakeholders, you can hire a company or a freelancer to convert those designs into working web pages. The company or freelancer you hire have to just create pixel perfect copy of UI screens as web pages. One added benefit is they will also take care of testing the UI on various devices, browsers and screens. This will save at least 30% of your cost on overall design efforts without affecting the quality of your product. You can hire our company for Design to HTML5 Conversion starting only $9.99 / hour or find a freelancer on platforms like Elance.

2. Product Testing / QA

Testing is very time consuming task but good thing is it does not require same level of technical competency for certain types of testing. As soon as you have test plans ready, you can outsource non-critical but time consuming testing tasks to some company or freelancers. Testing costs in developing countries is nearly one fifth of the costs in US / Canada / Europe. A responsive web page testing can easily take about 20-30 hours considering number of devices, screen sizes and browsers. Taking about app testing, you will spend much more than you ever imagined. Android phones have many variants with different screen sizes, different version of Android OS running. To make sure your app runs great on all devices you are looking at at least 100 hours or testing. You can find a company offering Testing / QA services starting as low as $10 per hour.

3. Custom Online Campaigns

You definitely have plans to kick out killer campaigns to get traction and develop a brand value. Campaigns are simple enough to be outsourced without any harm. Once you lay out campaign plan, hire a company to develop and execute it for you. Everything from landing page design, opt-in pages, email newsletters to custom integration with other marketing tools can be done easily. You don’t have to waste your in-house resources on campaigns. Viral Facebook apps, referral campaigns, hashtag campaigns and a lot more can be accomplished without involving you in-house programming staff.

4. Customer Support

Yeah, that’s right. Service is pretty expensive in States as compared to India. Where you will spend at least $20-$25 per hour in US, you can setup same quality of resources in 20% of the cost. India is second largest English speaking country in the world after United States. There are hundreds of small to medium sized companies in India to whom you can outsource your customer service. As a startup, customer service is a way to keep your friends hap