The following is a two part series by Saurabh Chandra, founder of Bangalore based startup Neev Technologies. He has a pretty interesting blog at Bootstrap in Bangalore. Check it out.

In the part I of this guide we discussed the externalities of starting the office – location, rents, surroundings. Now that you may have found the right place, lets see what goes in and what you need to get it running.

Go to Shivajinagar/Infantry Road for great deals on furniture. Instead of buying consider renting it. You could get a stuff for as low as Rs 50 a month for a table and chair. Do get a white board with a stand (so that you can move it around). PAN furnitures on Langford road has nice white boards in different sizes apart from other office furniture like chairs etc (no I don’t get a commission from them).

Moving to the electronic infrastructure. While trying to be frugal, be rational and invest in productivity – time is your enemy so don’t let it slip by you. Take the best internet connection for your needs. If you add up all the delays in downloads, it becomes really huge. The worst part is usually you cannot do anything productive in the wait time. Cheap availability of broadband is an important factor in making bootstrapping possible much more easily compared to earlier times.

Buy laptops and wifi. This is the best mode to be connected. No wires, more productivity. Let your budget guide you in case all your seed money is just going into just buying those cool laptops. We started our office with desktop computer parts bought separately from computer warehouse (the website has an updated excel sheet where you can check prices of peripherals. The shop is on M G Road) which I assembled at home with the help of a friend (just assembling on my own saved me 500 bucks! plus we could choose the cheapest alternative for every component). For an earlier startup we bargain hunted on S P Road, you can surely get the best deal in bangalore there if you negotiate well.

It helped that I had worked in a start up earlier where I had to play sysad for sometime and I set up the home office network with a cheap 800 rupee hub and ethernet wires that we borrowed from friends. During my college time I used to troubleshoot Linux setup issues for friends and that came really handy allowing us to save on windows license costs. We were very clear from day 1 that pirated software was a big no. Its just not worth risking your budding company’s reputation on these trivial things. Hidden lesson that we will reiterate later: do many things even before you start up. In your own company, you will find some use for the most obscure talent you have.

Buy a hosted server to keep your source code (learn version control ), web server. I recommend buying a virtual private server at rimu and if you find something better, do let me know. This allows you or your friends to access files from anywhere, almost 100% uptime and no worries about losing your data if your local machine goes down. You may sometimes want to host a demo or a tool when this server will come handy. For your email definitely buy a domain name and use hosted gmail. Communicating with people using you@example.com makes a much better impression than gmail.com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.