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This is a guest article from an iPitch member, Jason Kotchoff. He is Co-Founder of FinancialModelTraining.com, which offers online financial modelling courses for careers in Finance & Banking.

So every programmer with a touch of entrepreneur in them has heard how easy it is to bootstrap a startup from their garage, grow it out real quick and hand it over to google for a cool billion (nice job Chad & Steve). The truth is, for every guy who made it big (and I have met quite a few of them), there are loads and loads of us out there devoting countless hours to projects that will and do fail.

Luckily, trying and failing doesn’t cost much more than the sweat equity involved these days and if you have the right skillset and a great idea, there’s no reason you can’t shift quadrants and build it yourself on the cheap!

Thanks to maturing web frameworks like Ruby on Rails and cheap hosting like EC2, my most recent venture (shameless plug - FinancialModelTraining.com), has an actual financial cost of launching that could be broken down as: Read more