Zero

When I lived in Portland a little less than two years ago, I was almost broke. I had $3,000 in my bank account when I left New York, and that was it. I landed in Portland, and by the time I was set up in an apartment, I had less than $2,000 left.

So I made a decision, one that I've stuck with for the last two years: my business should have as close to zero overhead as possible.

That doesn't mean that my work isn't exhausting, it isn't hard, it isn't challenging.

But it certainly isn't expensive. Every once in awhile a cost does come up, but that's the key: they came up. In the work that I do, and I believe that most of us do with the web in the state of evolution that it is in currently, we don't need to be spending thousands of dollars in order to get to launch day.

In Minimalist Business, I wrote about how to aim for a zero-overhead online business (that runs itself). Zero-overhead was, and still is, the goal. Once the goal has been set, the strategies begin to naturally spring up around it.

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Over those two years, having zero-overhead has saved me a few times since I implemented it. I'm glad it's a rule that I can live by.

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I read a lot of business books two years ago when I quit my job, and none of them mentioned the zero-overhead thing. I wondered why? So I wrote about it, from my own experience.

My experience of zero is that it's a relatively new thing. For businesses it used to be advantageous to invest in the office, the secretary, the servers. Now? We can outsource much of that to the cloud.