A few days ago, Jason Calcanis from Mahalo.com wrote a blog post entitled: How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips). After posting it, he received numerous critical comments from bloggers everywhere. Michael Arrington on Techcrunch was a bit milder and endorsed many of the points made in the original post.

Although we are still puzzled by the Mahalo business model, we at YouTellMe do relate to many of the points made in Jason’s post. When we founded the company we were facing a long development phase (=no incoming cashflow), so we knew we had to take the bootstrapped approach. Saving money was a necessity for us, like it is for almost every startup. Some of the tips he gave to save cash are straightforward like ‘don’t buy everyone Microsoft Office’. Other tips were more experience-based like ‘use dual screens’ which increase productivity and save valuable (development) time. Everyone here either uses a second-monitor or has a big 24inch screen (our lucky developers even have both! Job openings here ). The only tip that really puzzles us is ‘buy macs for everyone’… but that might be personal..

More importantly Jason talks about ‘firing people who are not workaholics’. After a storm a criticism he later changed it to ‘firing people who don’t love their work’. Although he puts it a bit harsh, he does have a valid point about the absolute necessity of a motivated startup team. From the start we knew that it was critical to hire the right people. If I should name the single most important event in our short company history, it’s completing our team with the talented people currently on board. For those of you who have read ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins, the phrase ‘get the right people on the bus’ may sound familiar.

If you have a strong team in place, then don’t worry if you are forced to change your entire strategy or business model. Good people are flexible and can adapt to all the challenges that are thrown their way. To quote Michael Arrington: “What I’m saying is that you should hire people who work 24 hours a day because there is nothing else they’d rather do. If you’ve got a product to launch and you’re ultimately trying to disrupt a bigger and better funded company, it’s likely that you are going to need a superhuman effort from the team.”

I couldn’t agree more, you need people who want to go the extra mile. That’s exactly what is happening here, everyone loves what they do and the product we are developing. Increasingly I find myself asking our dev team NOT to work late all night, instead of having to push them to be workaholics…