Startup Next Door

This is Part III of the Delaware LLC series. Start series here.

OK, this is where the real action happens. Once you’ve got your business and personal accounts separated, it’s time to take the plunge and get your LLC.  There are any number of companies that would jump to help you: The Company Corporation and LegalZoom are just two.  But since I’ve had good experience with LegalZoom in the past I used them.

I’ll guide you through the whole process, which takes about 30 minutes.  Let’s go!

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This is Part II of the Delaware LLC series.  Start series here.

In order to protect your personal assets, it’s vital to separate your personal money, expenses, and debt from those of your business, or you may forfeit the legal protections that LLCs and corporations offer.

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Part I: Why you need one, and your options

This is the first of a three-part series on how to set your startup with a Delaware LLC. I recently did this, and will guide you through the process. Let’s get started.

Sole Proprietorships are good if you are very small

When you’re first starting your business and you’re making a few bucks, you don’t have to worry too much about getting sued. For one, you may only have a few customers, you’re making them happy, and they are paying you. But as time goes on and your customer base grows, it’s realistic to expect that something will go wrong.

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Successful angel investor and hacker Gabriel Weinberg developed DuckDuckGo as one of his many side projects over the years. DuckDuckGo is a search engine, but beyond being a great search engine, it adds extra features, and is more of a command line tool. Mighty impressive for a solo effort, and no venture capital was needed.

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I was dumb.  There was once a thriving forum on zKorean.  In an attempt to make some money from the heavy forum traffic I announced I would charge members a monthly charge to use it.  This was met with protest, as many people had contributed a lot of time helping others on the forum.  I analyzed this to mean that people would not pay to use the site because I’m just a guy, not a business.  But I was wrong. It was just a dumb thing to ask users to pay for.

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As I mentioned a few months back in I’m a Startup Rancher, I tend to create startups, let them run for a while, and see if they have any traction.  Some flop due to difficulties in the business model, or in the marketing, or just because I didn’t solve a problem that many people had.  So the failed startups get taken offline and are heaped onto the compost pile.  But once you have paying customers, turning off a service that people depend on can have big consequences.

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When you set out to build your startup, coming up with a business model is one of the qualifiers, and hand-in-hand with that decision is what payment model to use. If making money solely using ads is your revenue model, you may skip this article. Today I’ll touch on how customers will pay you.

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He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.

  – Paul Atreides

And if that thing is valuable, you become the monopoly.

Providing a reference tool is a good business idea.  I’ve been in organizations where having a large-size data repository and searching capabilities keep people coming back.  This is a solid method for building a long-term SaaS (software as a service) where you can charge a monthly subscription for its use.

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Before the web, everyone had a Rand-McNally map in their car.  Once the web was prevalent, MapQuest was the destination for getting maps online.  Then around 2005, Google began to pull market share from MapQuest and is finally now surpassing MapQuest.

If you go to Rand-McNally nowadays, it looks like MapQuest did back in 2005.

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In the last article on advertising, I introduced you to the complexity of Adwords and the promise of Trada.  In this article I’ll go over a few more services to help get your startup marketed, this time covering display ads.

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