How I Started My Business With $200

I want to tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to believe. You do not need money to start. You need about two hundred dollars and a stubborn streak. I know that sounds like one of those lines people put on a graphic with a gold border. But I mean it literally, because I have the receipts. When I finally started The Velvet Girl, I did not have savings set aside for it. I did not have an investor, a rich uncle, or a business loan. I had a full-time job as a referral coordinator at a medical clinic, a laptop that had seen things, and roughly two hundred dollars I was willing to part with. That was it. That was the whole budget.

And I want to walk you through exactly where it went, because I spent months reading articles that said “starting a business is cheaper than ever!” and then never told me what to actually buy. So here is the unglamorous version.

What I actually spent money on

Three things. That’s genuinely it.

Hosting. This is the rent for your website. Nothing exists without it. I went with a shared hosting plan, which is the entry tier, and I paid for a multi-year term up front because the monthly price drops dramatically when you do. This was the single biggest chunk of my two hundred dollars.

A theme. This is what your site looks like. You can absolutely use a free one, and I did for a while, but I eventually paid for a premium theme and I do not regret it for one second. Not because it looks better, though it does. Because it stopped me from spending every single Saturday fiddling with fonts instead of writing. That was worth every dollar.

An email platform. I use Kit, on the free tier, which covers you up to a certain number of subscribers. So technically this was zero. But I’m listing it because it is the thing I would tell you to set up on day one, before you have a single reader. More on that in a second.

And the thing I didn’t pay for: my domain name. It came free with the hosting plan for the first year. A lot of hosts do this. Check before you go buy a domain separately.

So: hosting, a theme, and an email platform that was free. Under two hundred dollars, all in.

What I did not spend money on (and you shouldn’t either, yet)

This is the more useful list, honestly.

I did not pay for a logo. I made mine myself, and it is a serif monogram on a dark square, and it is fine. Truly fine. Nobody has ever not read a post because the logo was homemade.I did not pay for a photographer. I shoot my own flat lays on a marble board I already owned, near a window, on my phone. Bright edit, clean background, done. I did not pay for a business coach. I read books instead. Girl Code by Cara Alwill Leyba cost me under twenty dollars and did more for my head than any program I could have financed.

I did not pay for ads, a course, a fancy scheduling tool, a Canva subscription, or a project management system. I used free tiers for everything and I upgraded only when the free version was actually, genuinely limiting me. Not when it was mildly annoying. When it was actually stopping me.

I did not pay to form my LLC through a service. I filed it myself with my state, directly, for the state filing fee. The services charge you a premium to fill out a form you can fill out yourself in about twenty minutes.

The order I’d spend it in, if I were starting over tomorrow

Because the order matters more than the total.

First, hosting and a domain. You need a place that is yours. Not a social media account you’re renting from a platform that could change the rules on Tuesday. Yours. Second, an email platform. Even if you have four readers and three of them are your mom. I put this off for months and it is my single biggest regret. An email list is the only audience you actually own. Every follower you have on any platform is borrowed. Start collecting emails on day one, even when it feels ridiculous.

Third, a theme you don’t have to fight. Free is genuinely fine to start. But the moment you notice you’re spending your creative hours on design instead of writing, buy the thing. Your time is the resource you actually can’t get more of.
Everything else can wait. All of it. The logo, the branding session, the fancy tools, the course you saved to your cart. Wait.

The part nobody puts in these posts

Two hundred dollars will get your business online. It will not get it off the ground. I have started and stopped before. In my twenties I ran a small business with a social media presence that was genuinely thriving, and then I quit all of it. And the reason I quit was never money. It was that I ran out of steam somewhere between the excitement of starting and the boredom of maintaining.

So I will be honest with you. The two hundred dollars is the easy part. The hard part is the Saturday in month four when nothing is working, nobody is reading, and you have to sit down and write anyway.

That’s the actual cost. Not the hosting bill.

But here’s what I’d say to the version of me who was still waiting to have enough saved up before she started: you were never waiting for money. You were waiting to feel ready, and you were using the money as the reason. Two hundred dollars is not a barrier. It’s a weekend of takeout you didn’t order.Start smaller than you think you’re allowed to. Start with the ugly logo and the free email tier and the theme you’ll replace later.

Just start owning something.