9. COST STRUCTURE:
How much money do we need to start, and why? Variable and fixed costs, Scale economy, taxes?
Be Seated is a low-cost structure as we are reliant on the crowd and are not expecting to use financial incentives. We therefore should not require a huge investment to get started.
Developing CANVAS and the Cost Structure of Be Seated, there are some common things to take in account in order to find out how much Be Seated could cost:
- Technology items: hardware, software, network, developing schema: PaaS, SaaS, IaaS.
- Human Resources: project leader, designers, programmers, network specialists.
- Company creation costs: lawyers, taxes, registration (brand, logo).
- Office costs.
At a rough guess, it seems that ÂŁ100,000 is enough for a startup SNS company of Be Seated’s ilk.
Courtney Boyd Myers (founder of audience.io: “a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups grow internationally”) gives a quick overview about the possible starting costs, and programming time in order to build and launch some known sites:
| SITE | TIME | COST (US$) |
| 1 day – 1 month | 50,000 | |
| 3 – 6 months | 100,000 – 300,000 | |
| 9 months | 500,000 | |
| 9 months | 250,000 | |
| Uber | 12 – 18 months | 1,000,000 |
| 4 months | 120,000 | |
| Shopify | 6 months | 250,000 |
| Angry Birds | 12 months | 2,200,000 |
| Tumblr | 12 months | 1,600,000 |
| Vine | 6 months | 150,000 |
Conclusion: Be Seated would cost £150,000 with approximately 6 months worth of programming. This is our guess for the first functional and operative version of our site.
References
Boyd Myers, C. (2013, 12 2). How much does it cost to build the world’s hottest startups? Retrieved from TNW: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/12/02/much-cost-build-worlds-hottest-startups/
Boyd Myers, C. (2014, 11 21). TNW. Retrieved from Courtney Boyd Myers: http://thenextweb.com/author/courtneybmyers/
