Guy Kawasaki has a great post on the things to focus on in tight financial markets when launching your business in his post "The Art of Bootstrapping". It has a number of common sense suggestions for entrepreneurs:
I wouldn’t like to run a Super Bowl commercial someday. Until that day
comes, the key to success for most organizations is bootstrapping. The
term bootstrapping comes from the German legend of Baron von
Munchhausen pulling himself out of the sea by pulling on his own
bootstraps. That’s essentially what you’ll have to do, too….
Forecast from the bottom up. Most entrepreneurs do a
top-down forecast: There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems
reasonable that we can get a mere 1 percent of car owners to install
our satellite radio systems. That’s 1.5 million systems in the first
year. The bottom-up forecast goes like this: We can open up ten
installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, each can
install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10
systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. That’s a long way
from the conservative…"