The price of admission to entrepreneurship seems steep, but the reality is far scrappier. According to data from the US Chamber of Commerce, 58% of businesses launch with less than $25,000, and one-third start with less than $5,000.
This scrappiness isn’t just a choice; often, it’s a necessity. For many founders, traditional funding is out of reach, and only 24% of small business owners say they are very comfortable with their cash flow, according to another US Chamber of Commerce report. Most new business owners face a catch-22: You want funding to establish your business and start making sales, but lenders want to see a history of profitability before approving funds.
So, what happens when you treat a lack of capital not as a roadblock, but as a creative constraint?
Across the commerce landscape, a group of founders is proving that you can build success on a small budget. These entrepreneurs are trading capital for creativity and swapping ad agencies for iPhone cameras. To understand exactly how a shoestring budget can become a competitive advantage, three founders break down how to bootstrap a business on a small startup budget.
How to bootstrap a business
Below, the founders behind Larroudé, Dapper Boi, and Province of Canada share their best strategies for launching a business with limited budget.
Build velocity, not just volume
Ricardo Larroudé is not your typical bootstrapper. A former finance executive, he launched his eponymous footwear brand, Larroudé, with his wife, Marina, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than investing prodigious amounts of their own money, they chose to start with extreme discipline to prove the model worked before pouring in cash. “I’m very tight with money,” Ricardo says. “My love is allocating capital.”
Ricardo’s initial tech spend was precise: $4,750 went entirely to a consultant to help structure the business website. Ricardo and Marina handled everything else—design, population of the site, and operations. Instead of hiring a PR firm, they leveraged Marina’s background as a fashion director. “PR was 100% my wife,” Ricardo says. “She wrote the press release herself, she sent it to all the media publications.”
In the fashion world, product development is usually a massive line item involving freelance designers and expensive prototyping agencies, but the Larroudés relied on their own experience. By doing the creative work in-house, their only product development cost was the physical production of the initial samples.
Instead of a flashy launch event, they used those samples to turn their living room into a showroom, conducting Zoom calls with buyers from major retailers like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. “I would walk around with my computer and show the shoes on the screen,” he says. This zero-cost strategy secured them wholesale orders before they had even fully launched.
While Ricardo saved on the front end, his finance background led him to a counterintuitive decision on the back end. He realized that outsourcing manufacturing to third-party factories was a losing game due to the high premiums they charged new clients for small production runs. Instead, he spent roughly $200,000 buying used machinery, gradually reducing orders from other factories until he could make everything in-house. It sounds expensive, but the math worked.
“The cost of placing one large outsourced order was roughly the same as buying used machines,” Ricardo explains. By owning the means of production, he avoided the higher prices that factories charge new clients. “I repaid my $200,000 in like five or six weeks,” he says.
This investment wasn’t just about saving money. It was about increasing velocity—the speed at which cash moves through the business. By owning his production, he could produce on demand, reducing the need for massive inventory stockpiles. He also negotiated for deposits from customers and 60-day payment terms from suppliers, improving his cash flow and creating a business model that funded itself.
To further reduce risk, he employed a manufacturing strategy called commonality of parts—designing multiple styles around the same raw materials. “The same ivory [leather] that I use for a sandal is the same one that I’m using for my boots,” he says. This drastically reduces the waste and financial risk associated with dead stock.
Ricardo maximized efficiency by working with a small budget, ensuring that every dollar of revenue was maximized. However, he acknowledged that bootstrapping has limits. “If I had another $2 million in the bank, I would be growing 300% a year,” he says. “Today, the biggest constraint on my growth is capital.”
Validate first, manufacture second
For Vicky Pasche and her wife and cofounder, Charisse, the drive to launch Dapper Boi didn’t come from a business plan. It came from frustration. As a woman who preferred masculine-styled clothing but struggled with the fit of men’s jeans, Vicky saw a gap in the market that no major retailer was filling. But while having a vision is free, manufacturing denim is expensive.
“I remember reading a Tim Ferriss article on how to launch a successful Kickstarter campaign,” Vicky recalls. She ended up following the article’s advice to a T, ultimately crowdfunding $26,000, which was well beyond her original $18,000 goal. She estimates that startup costs—including the prototypes, legal setup, and video production—were less than $5,000.
With limited funds, product validation became crucial. Before spending a dime on inventory, Vicky had to prove that the market existed. To do that, she had to get a sample into the hands of her potential customers. She cold-called manufacturers, despite having no fashion background. She got hung up on—often. “People were just like, ‘Do you even know what you’re talking about?’” she says.
Eventually, perseverance paid off. She found a Los Angeles manufacturer willing to work with her on a single prototype. “We tried to find anybody who could fit in these jeans, all friends. And every single person we put in them was obsessed,” she says.
With zero budget for a PR agency, Charisse turned to Twitter, searching for journalists who were already writing about fashion and gender-neutral topics. “We had a set template message that we were just cold-reaching out to any writer,” Vicky says. This landed them a feature in Entrepreneur and a spot on Fox 5 News—publicity that would have cost thousands to buy.
Vicky then utilized a flash-mob social media strategy, pre-writing a launch post and sending it to friends and family with instructions to post it simultaneously. This grassroots effort drove a rush of preorders, and they were able to fund the first production run with the money raised from their initial Kickstarter campaign.
Later, they used the same community-first approach on StartEngine to raise $284,000 from more than 500 customers, turning their buyers into investors. By selling the product before manufacturing it, Dapper Boi navigated around the debt trap that kills many retail startups.
DIY your way to a premium brand
Jeremy Watt and his cofounder and wife, Julie Brown, weren’t fashion moguls. They were graphic designers. When they decided to launch Province of Canada, a lifestyle brand celebrating Canadian identity, they didn’t have the capital to compete with established players. What they did have was an eye for design and a refusal to look small.
Their startup capital was meager—roughly $1,500. Jeremy earmarked nearly every dollar of that for physical inventory, treating the website costs as a standard utility rather than a capital expense. Since they were designers who had previously helped other ecommerce businesses launch their own websites, they saved an estimated $10,000 to $20,000 by handling all branding, web design, and photography in-house.
The biggest financial hurdle was manufacturing. Canadian factories typically demand high minimum order quantities (MOQs) that were far out of reach for a $1,500 budget. “We first went to the manufacturer that we really wanted to use, and because of the minimums, we got turned away,” Jeremy recalls.
Instead of quitting, they compromised on the manufacturer, not the vision. They found a smaller, less ideal factory willing to do a tiny run. “It was almost like ‘You know what, let’s go prove the concept to the world and see if we can turn some heads,’” Jeremy says. The strategy worked. Once the brand launched and gained traction, the original, premium manufacturer came back to them.
Unable to afford traditional advertising, Jeremy used content marketing to build a following. He built an email list by sending out daily Canadian fun facts—value-first content that didn’t just push product. The brand’s approach to marketing not only engaged readers, but it literally helped inspire new inventory. One simple post on Instagram stating ,“Montréal bagels are better than New York’s” went viral. Seeing the reaction, Jeremy realized the content itself was the product. He took that exact phrase, printed it on a t-shirt, and it became a bestseller. By testing the market with content first, he knew exactly what products would sell before investing in them.
To keep design and production costs low, Jeremy also resists the urge to constantly reinvent the wheel. “We’ve had the same cut of t-shirt for almost 10 years now,” he says. “We just reinvest in colors.” This allows the brand to establish a reputation for reliability without the high R&D costs of launching new silhouettes every season.
The bootstrapper’s playbook
While their products range from denim to luxury footwear, Ricardo, Vicky, and Jeremy all operate under the same philosophy: You can get a lot of leverage out of a little money. Their experience proves that, in the age of ecommerce, a brand that looks like a million bucks doesn’t have to cost a million bucks—but it does require sweat equity.
In every case, these scrappy founders sold the promise before the product. They handled marketing and PR in-house and used crowdfunding, pre-orders, and wholesale deposits to fund an initial inventory run, limiting debt. If you can get paid by customers before you have to pay your suppliers, you have created a negative working capital cycle that allows you to grow without outside investment.
Ultimately, a lean budget is a forcing function. It demands that you engage with your business at a granular level that well-funded competitors often skip. It forces you to operate with intimacy and care. That requires showing up in ways that massive corporations neglect. Whether it’s sending handwritten notes with orders, dancing in your living room for a TikTok, or walking a buyer through a Zoom showroom, the unscalable things are often the most valuable when money is tight.
*Shopify Capital loans must be paid in full within a maximum of 18 months, and two minimum payments apply within the first two six-month periods. The actual duration may be less than 18 months based on sales.
