One of the best things an entrepreneur can do is figure out how to get stuff done on a limited budget and build scrappiness into the DNA of the company. Once the business catches fire and has unbelievable growth, some of the scrappiness will have to be unwound, but that’s a high class problem to have. Let’s talk about some common scrappy ideas.
- Subleases – Never do a direct lease unless there are flexible terms (more ideas on subleases)
- IKEA Furniture (or Goodwill) – Invest in great chairs but otherwise get the cheapest desks and furniture possible (costs to furnish a nice office)
- Interns – Young, ambitious talent is eager to help out and make a difference
- Crowdsourced Design – Look to talent from around the world for high quality logos and graphic design (see 99designs and crowdSPRING)
Scrappiness is an important part of successful startups and should be employed whenever possible.
What else? What are some other scrappy startup ideas?
David Cummings on Startups 
could not agree more with this list, unfortunately subleases were hard to come by in the market I was shopping when i first started out; part of the reason is that leases had no sublease clauses in the contract as standard language.
Don’t hire a PR firm. Never pay for lead lists. Use PSD2HTML instead of a developer. Sell by PPT, then build product.
To save initial startups costs – I would forget office space altogether! See ‘Remote’ by 37 Signals for inspiration on this!
Typo – should say ‘initial startup costs’ above
Use cloud-based communications (Office 365) and project management solutions (Basecamp and others) to keep startup overhead costs and provide great functionaity.