Andrei Petrik is the CEO and Co-founder of NetHunt CRM. His sole mission is to bring more productivity to your working day.

I see you — broke entrepreneur, searching for business experts to bequeath their best business advice. Maybe you’re looking for a business sugar daddy or momma who can give you some “practical” help with your startup. 

Ahem, I’m talking about money.

Unfortunately, I’m not that person — far from it.

I’m the guy who’s been there and done that, who’s going to tell you that even after such a rough year, even though you’ve got no money in your pocket, you should still start up that startup.

Life at the end of the shoestring is difficult, but there are advantages to exploit.

Use your small business advantage to build a solid foundation.

All those big companies, expensively assembled in fancy offices across the world, lack something your business has in abundance. Something that immediately puts you at a massive advantage against them, no matter how powerful they are within an industry: communication.

Communication with those around you and your team, and communication with those who you’re trying to communicate with: your audience. Where big businesses often put up office walls and bureaucratic red tape and contend with time zones, a small business, by definition, doesn’t.

The main communicative advantage your small business has is with your customers. As a small-business owner, you’re quite right to cherish your customers and treat them as if they’re your last.

For new customers, get into the habit of speaking like a human. Avoid robotic transactional communication styles. Listen to feedback, act on it and make your product better. Prioritize individual customer success as a precursor to your own.

You’re laying the foundations of your business. If you develop a culture of conversational customer relationships, encourage reviews from the beginning and develop a legion of brand evangelists, it becomes second nature and beneficial for your business later on.

Start thinking about setting up a referral program for your business. Obviously, based on a product or service that is ready to share, a simple “refer a friend, get x-amount off” program sows the seed of maintaining a loyal customer base with your brand.

The world is full of good people — find them.

Still, the name of the game is growth. You’ll have to employ at least somebody, somewhere. Finding the right people isn’t easy, and it’s important to understand the process as a marathon, not a sprint. 

I believe every single person in the world has a purpose — one special skill that they’re really, really good at. Me? I’m a coder. I don’t market, sell or support very well. I’m okay with that — you can’t be everything to everyone. You should look outward to build your business.

Specifically, you should hire T-shaped people.

What is a T-shaped person?

T-shaped skills don’t specialize in one task; these would be I-shaped skills. They aren’t generalist jack-of-all-trades either, good at everything but specializing in nothing. T-shaped colleagues spend most of their day fulfilling their specialty, but they can also do other jobs to a good level where and as needed in a business. 

T-shaped teams easily adapt to fluctuating demand, crucial in the post-2020 world. They can learn from and teach each other their skills, so the dash and tail of their T's continue to grow as your business does. The problem is that it can be difficult to explicitly identify T-shaped skills during an interview process. Instead, develop your team as T-shaped people; make it part of your brand culture.

Align teams under a shared information umbrella. Through untethered communication and shared access to the same data and tools, different teams can develop homogenous, conversational customer relationships. 

Keep teams close. Hold product update meetings and daily standups. Eat lunch together; go to the pub. Build a business family, not just a squad of mercenaries. All your employees should share skills. More importantly, they should share the vision and desire for your business.

You’re skint. You can’t set out a business upon the strength of finance alone. Instead, do so based on the strength that relevantly skilled people generate when they’re devoted to an idea.

Find your niche and stick with it.

Shoestring or not, finding your niche is the most difficult aspect of developing a business idea. If someone’s making the same product as you for $1 less, you’re not going to sell many products. So you’ve got two choices, right? Lower the price (no thanks), or develop a brand new product. 

You’ve got so much competition. Google your product and you’ll likely find pages and pages of hits with what looks like your product. Cheaper, different colors, bigger names and bigger budgets. With so many people on the planet, it’s impossible to be original anymore.

But finding your niche isn’t really about creating a totally unique product that's going to change lives instantly. Finding your niche is part research, whereby we engage existing customers to hear their feedback and the ongoing challenges they face day to day. It’s also a dedicated marketing push, involving one or two outbound communication platforms to chip away at and dominate in the future.

My team and I focus on content marketing as a cost-effective method of lead generation and education. We pump out good content and every piece ranks us a little higher in a specific keyword, bringing us closer to our niche. These keywords define our niche. We’re still scaling our content marketing and SEO strategy six years later.

We’re also on our way to conquering video marketing. In every video, we try something different. We use a shorter intro here and a persuasive call to action somewhere else. Every video we put out teaches us something, ranks us a little bit higher and brings us closer to our niche.

Find your niche and home in on it as part of a long, constantly evolving process.

Welcome to life at the end of the shoestring. The money only comes when you’ve exploited your small business advantages and built something worth investing in.

So start building.

Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?