Our SaaS Start-up's Expenses Six Months Into Building Outseta

We’ve talked quite a bit on this blog about our desire to build a self managed organization. Self management depends heavily on transparency - everyone in the organization is enabled to make decisions, including spending company money, because everyone is operating with all of the information available. With that in mind we thought it would be both fun and appropriate to take a closer look at our expenses now that we’re six months into building Outseta. This exercise was a valuable checkpoint for our existing team, and let’s face it - we’d like to work with some of the people reading this post in the future - so we figured we’d start giving you access to all of the information available now.

The graph and breakdown of our spending shown above is from Mint.com. We’ve spent $4,702.85 to date. That includes $1,541.18 on “Food and Dining” - this is mostly Dave & Dimitris getting lunch together when they work from Dave’s house. The $178.88 spent on “Entertainment” was primarily a round of golf that the three of us played together when I was in Boston last.

Where this is most interesting (and hopefully valuable) to other SaaS start-ups is looking at what we’ve spent in the broad category of “Business Services.” It’s interesting to look at both the timing of these expenses, and the breakdown. Some highlights are below - they are listed in the order in which we first incurred an expense with each vendor.

My initial reaction to this table? It’s fairly remarkable how little overhead is needed to start a SaaS company. It’s worth noting that we’ve chosen to bootstrap the company, and have made a pretty concerted effort to keep expenses low to date. For example, we are all using computers we had purchased on our own and we are not yet paying ourselves at this stage (we are working for sweat equity).

Oh, and Dave and Dimitris really like Pure Cold Press in Brookline - they’ve eaten lunch there more than anywhere else (6 times!). They even brought me once the last time I was in Boston - good place.

We’ll circle back at the end of the year and publish a similar update focused on our total expenses in our first year of building Outseta.