Christine Mason McCaull is one of several entrepreneurs Portfolio.com is following as part of the series The Great Global Adventure. All of the entrepreneurs will be blogging about their experiences. This is the third in the series of blogs from entrepreneurs.

When we started our most recent business, ClickMarkets (in shared office space with a decent broadband connection and high-powered laptops), we did all the same things we did at our last big endeavor.

It was the usual drill: Develop a value proposition, craft a brand and market-entry strategy, put together a financial model, pull together a team, set up an infrastructure, and, eventually, actually sell services to our first customers.

But this time there was a big difference: It took a lot less of money and time to get to that first dollar in sales revenue, thanks to technologies that have vastly reduced selling, marketing, and administrative costs in setting up a new venture. This has freed us up to invest our money and time in the development of what is core to our business, run very lean, and bootstrap our company through sales revenue, not Other People’s Money.

I’ll even put numbers on it: What cost a minimum of $500,000 and took nine months and lots of engineering talent in 2004 can be done today, thanks to technology changes, by smart people with some Web awareness or the willingness to learn, for less than $20,000 in three months. It’s not that we’re doing this business on duct tape and baling wire, either. We’re working with very clean, professional services that can scale and which just a few years ago cost a hundred times as much to put in place.

As a former venture-backed CEO and 18-year industry vet, I’ve been an insider creating some of these technology shifts—but it’s only now, as we’re applying them in our own new startup, that we really understand their real impact from an operating perspective.

The following five major tech-enabled trends have saved us money and improved our business in the process.

• Trend 1: The Open-Source Movement
• Trend 2: Technology-Enabled Distributed Workforce
• Trend 3: Social Media
• Trend 4: Software as a Service
• Trend 5: Online Productivity and Communications Tools

We see that these trends don’t just impact new businesses, but are also applicable to established businesses of all sizes.

Trend 1: Open Source Everything

The open-source movement makes it easy to launch a functional, commercial, and robust Web presence at a fraction of the cost.

Usable open-source software and business applications cut down the cost of building really robust, functional websites.

Example: We used the free open-source Joomla (www.joomla.org) content management system to build our Web presence, including user registration, email, and social-media management and e-commerce—and to avoid using developers to interpret our content and place it on the Web.

• Cost savings: $25,000.
• Extra benefit: Day-to-day control of our own site content without developer intervention.