3. INCORPORATION

This was harder than I expected. Not because the process is difficult, but because my lawyer is an ass.

The actual act of incorporation is a very common, very minor paperwork procedure. A competent, committed lawyer could find an existing draft of an incorporation document, swap out some names, have you sign it and file it within the week. My lawyer took three weeks.

The mistake I made, I think, was to meet him in person. I very obviously look 24, and in particular I met him with my dad (already a client of his). I would imagine this made him take me that much less seriously - startups are already of tenuous credibility, and it confirmed that I'm super young, super inexperienced and halfway broke. Or at least it did in his head.

On the plus side, whenever he's blowing me off I can call my dad and have him bitch him out.

After a few frustrated phone calls, I was finally incorporated in the state of Illinois. There were about $650 in legal fees and some paperwork to sign, but that was it. I'll leave it to you to look up the difference between LLCs, sole proprietorships and S corporations, but for most small businesses, LLCs are clearly the way to go.

On December 16, 2008, I was officially a small business owner.

2. Bidness Plan

Next step: get this shit on paper!

Business plans are surprisingly intimidating. You always think it'll be easy, but you don't realize how crappy and misguided your idea is until you start writing it down and realize that none of it makes sense.

I looked up business plan templates online, which confused me even more. Every site you go to has a whole different set of titles and items that are all of absolute critical importance to include in your BP or else your enterprise will be an utter failure and embarrassment that you will never live down, ever. I ended up picking out the ones that seemed the most important.

These included:

• Mission Statement: Brief, 1-2 line summary of what you're trying to accomplish, and who you're serving
• Executive Summary: A high-level summary of your idea, fitting on one page. Important to show to investors later on, I'm told. (Mine is currently accurate but incoherent. I'm sure I'll fix it eventually.) The most important section, by far.
  
• Description of Services: Outline everything you want your company to do. EVERYTHING.
  
• Market Analysis: Includes a breakdown of customer audiences, the size of the market and main competitors.
  
• Financial Analysis: Expected initial expenses and revenue sources, using as much data as you possibly can. Probably the most important, after the executive summary. I, uh, didn't really do this. Which was not smart.
  
• Marketing Plan: Meh. Working on this as we speak. Critical, but not urgent.
  
• Calendar: A preliminary schedule of everything.
  

A lot of this stuff is obvious or even redundant, but what you're really doing is putting it all in one place in a master document that you can update and refer back to later. You're also making sure your idea makes sense, since sitting and writing about it forces you to think about it too. And you can pass it around to other people for feedback.

I've heard stories of people taking existing business plans and basically cutting-and-pasting their company's name into it, with minor changes. I really recommend taking the time - as much time as it takes - to write out the whole thing and do a thorough, thorough analysis. It helped me out a lot, and I caught a lot of potential holes before they became issues.

After it was done, I sat on it for a week, and then went back and reread it. And then sent it out to a bunch of other people to read. And then reread it and edited and updated it. And then did it again.

After I felt there were no more major holes, it was time to find a lawyer and INCORPORATE THIS MOTHERFUCKER.

yeah i'm a consultant. why do you ask?

advice

There is advice I want, and advice I don't want.

If we are working on jlisted together, if you have a particular area of expertise or even if you don't but I just generally value your insight, I will probably solicit your opinion on my own. I'm outgoing like that.

If I don't actively search it out but you feel like there's something I should consider, let's talk about it! You could very well be right. And I like talking about jlisted, because I am a tool, so ask me questions and we can have a discussion and GO HOG WILD.

But if you randomly ask me what my idea is all about, receive my quick elevator summary and then, based only on that, proceed to aggressively tell me exactly what's wrong with everything I have done and ever will do....um, eff off. I can guarantee you have not thought about this as much as I have, and your concerns were probably addressed before I even wrote my business plan. Ass.

Would you go up to a mom and tell her how to raise her baby? I don't think so.

Bleh. For most advice, I think this rule of thumb works pretty well:

Buchheit's Law: "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization"

1. The Idea!

I started this blog halfway through the process of setting up jlisted, but I think it'd be useful (for me, and for my thousands/millions/five readers) to take a step back and describe my exact starting point.

There are two reasons for starting your own firm:

1. You really, really, really want to be your own boss, make a lot of money in a short amount of time and/or get out of your current boring job to do something more exciting. You're actively searching for a startup idea.
   
2. You lose your job and have to contract, or stumble upon a lucrative idea and decide you might be better served branching out on your own. You're not actively looking, you just kind of...fall into it, and then keep going.
   

The first one applies to me - I knew right out of college that I wanted to start my own company, and soon. So while I worked at some bullshit job (not my current one), I spent hours mulling over business concepts and tossing ideas back and forth with friends. I tried to find inefficiencies anywhere I could.

One day, I was procrastinating at work and gchatting with a friend from journalism school. He was going through the job application process, and while we were talking about his apps I was struck by how archaic and ineffective the system was.

My immediate reaction was to think "job postings!" But that didn't make sense, there are all kinds of sites posting to job-hunting journalists. With so many journalists and so few jobs, that's a given.

I moved from that to people pitching their stories through us and charging a flat transaction fee, to freelancers posting stories online to be bought, and so on. Whatever I tried, I just couldn't find a logical way to profitably exploit the disconnect. So I tossed it away with the dozens of other half-baked epiphanies I'd had over the last few months.

I guess I subconsciously knew I was on to something, though. I let the idea percolate in the back of my head for a long while, and then, almost a year later, in the shower, I had a "eureka!" moment. I immediately sat down and started sketching out the rough outline of a business plan.

At that point it was definitely far from the coherent set of service offerings we're planning to provide, but the core was there.

my shitty elevator pitch

I don't have an elevator pitch.

Well, I kind of do. The project idea isn't particularly complex, but it's diffuse enough to take longer than 30 seconds to explain. Either that, or maybe I just get caught up and talk too much.

I also need to compress the basic product offering into one quick descriptive phrase, like "organic meat processing facility" or "fully armed and operational battle station."

For your benefit, and so this blog actually makes sense, jlisted will, very vaguely:

• Allow journalists to create online profiles with resumes and clips
  
• Search for clips automatically
  
• Provide social networking capabilities

The idea is obviously more complex than that, but those are the three key elements we're looking to develop.

The plan is to get these core features in place, and to offer them for free to build up an initial user base. Once we have an audience, we'll look for outside funding and build a bigger team to start to generate revenue through ads (vom), premium membership and one-shot services.

We can also expand into developing blogs and move into similar fields (photography and music, for example), but that might be overreaching. We'll see.

respeck

Startups have absolutely no credibility with anyone. I was not aware of this.

I'm funding this entirely from scratch, so I figured I would face some resistance - that my lack of resources would make it difficult to find people to work with. In fact, the opposite has been true.

Everyone wants a piece of a startup. The moment you mention it, they want to know what it does, who you're working with, why you 'hate your job,' and for some reason, everyone wants to help with the fucking marketing.

This is all very nice. But what's impossible is to get anyone to actually do what you want, when you want it.

There are two problems here:
1. Yes, OK, I have no money
Everyone wants a piece, but few people are accountable when working for free (or in general, really). You have to get on people's backs to do something they said they'd do, which is that much more difficult when you're not paying them anything.
2. I am not an authority figure
I'm 24, working with people who are friends (or friends of friends), since they're the only people who will go out on a limb and work for cheap. I don't have seniority or leverage or any kind of authority over anyone. While I can be a hardass when necessary, you can't bitch someone out one day and then go drinking with them the next.

Because of this, deadlines are often ignored, work is occasionally shoddy and people are generally unprofessional and hard to get a hold of. Especially programmers. Lazy shits. (HA HA JUST KIDDING GUYS)

My lawyer is a great example of this. He's my dad's old lawyer who works for a major firm in Pittsburgh. He went to Pitt-Johnstown and Duquesne Law, so while he's marginally competent (enough for my purposes, at least) he's definitely not a big deal. And yet, he has made it entirely clear that I am his lowest, least priority in life.

He takes over a day to return my phone calls, doesn't answer my emails half the time, and is, mostly, kind of worthless. Because of his laziness my legal LLC filing was delayed over two weeks.

Bah. Eff. The worst part is that the actual filing is a one-time thing, so it's not like I can just switch my services over to someone else. That would end up costing me even more money.

You know what?

I NEED JACKIE CHILES.