Startups don't cost anything, unless you make them so. Chasing scale for the sake of scale is stupid. If you're actually selling something that's not fluff you get a couple of customers, improve your product then roll out when you need to.
I'm running a startup right now. The first year cost 0 for me and my partner (besides gas). All the engineering work was done on my gaming PC and the feedback from potential clients was gathered by my partner.
After we got something going, it cost us about 2k for servers (256GB RAM, 50TB storage, 32 CPU cores total) and around 4-5k for graphical product and website design in the next year.
If we're lucky, we're getting a contract this year netting us about 100k/yearly revenue, which will cover all costs + good wages (we were on no/minimal for two years) + another engineer (bus factor of 1 is not fun).
Disclaimer: What I wrote applies to software B2B startups, hardware startups almost necessarily cost a lot, B2C may be harder, but still not that hard if you're not selling fluff.
The biggest cost is your time. You've valued it at 0...
If the startup idea requires someone (or more than one person) to work on it full time in order to succeed then that's not a valuation that is practical.
I'm running a startup right now. The first year cost 0 for me and my partner (besides gas). All the engineering work was done on my gaming PC and the feedback from potential clients was gathered by my partner.
After we got something going, it cost us about 2k for servers (256GB RAM, 50TB storage, 32 CPU cores total) and around 4-5k for graphical product and website design in the next year.
If we're lucky, we're getting a contract this year netting us about 100k/yearly revenue, which will cover all costs + good wages (we were on no/minimal for two years) + another engineer (bus factor of 1 is not fun).
Disclaimer: What I wrote applies to software B2B startups, hardware startups almost necessarily cost a lot, B2C may be harder, but still not that hard if you're not selling fluff.