Kitting Out a Startup Without Burning the Runway

A ten-person team needs roughly ₹7 lakh of laptops before anyone writes a line of code or closes a single sale. For a funded company that is an annoyance. For a bootstrapped one it can be the difference between eighteen months of runway and twelve.

The three problems with buying early

You do not yet know what your team needs

The specification you choose in month one is a guess. Six months in, your designers need colour-accurate screens, your engineers need 32GB, and your sales team would have been perfectly happy with something half the price. Buying locks in the guess.

Headcount moves in both directions

Hiring five people means buying five laptops. Losing three means three machines sitting in a cupboard depreciating. Rental headcount tracks actual headcount, month by month.

Support becomes someone's job

When a laptop fails at a twenty-person company, someone has to deal with the service centre. That someone usually has a more valuable job to do. A rental agreement makes hardware failure a phone call rather than a project.

A sensible allocation by role

Practical points worth agreeing upfront

• —Swap terms — can you upgrade a machine mid-contract when a role's needs change?
• —Replacement time — what actually happens, and how quickly, when a unit fails?
• —Return conditions — what counts as fair wear and tear versus damage?
• —Data handling — how are drives wiped when a machine comes back?
• —Scaling — how much notice is needed to add five more units?

“We went from four people to fourteen in five months. Adding laptops was the one part of that scramble that never became a problem.”

We work with a number of teams across Vashi, Belapur, Kharghar and BKC on exactly this basis. If you are planning a hiring round and want to model the hardware cost properly, get in touch — we will put together a per-role breakdown you can drop straight into your budget.

• Startups
• Cash Flow
• Team Setup