My startup bombed and I lost everything (here’s what I learned)

Looks tricky to do. If your cofounder is a strictly business partner - how can you make sure you have the same vision/values? And vice versa, if you're pulling the same company together - should you do whatever to avoid becoming friends?

I understand the idea, but literal alternatives don't seem much better?

Spend a week setting up your future startup efforts for success at the beginning and then focus completely on reaching your customers and iterating on your solution to their problems.

step 1: first protect yourself legally by setting up a LLC you can use http://www.legalzoom.com/

or might even try to get access to stripe atlas https://stripe.com/atlas/faq

also get your terms of service setup. here is a resource for that. http://snapterms.com/

2-spend a few hours getting a generic domain name that is easy to spell. here is the registrar I use https://dnsimple.com/ also get SSL certs. you can use dnsimple but a free lets encryt cert is even better. https://letsencrypt.org/

3-spend a day or two setting up continuos integration this involves a code repo such as github, gitlab or bitbucket. and continuous build and testing service such as cicleci, travisci or codeship (although all the repos are integrating build and testing features)

4-setup a hosting service such as AWS, digital ocean or heroku. Personaly I would start out with heroku as hosting service but to keep costs low with a bit more effort AWS proper or digital ocean can work as well. setup a staging server so that when you push code to your repo it is automatically deployed to your staging server and from there you should set it up to promote the code to production with a single command. I use heroku pipelines in conjunction with some simple automation scripts for this.

Also at minimum setup hourly backup and restores for any databases that you may use.

5-by the end of the week you should be able to push a hello world to your real production server out there on the open internet.

Now at this point you have a real platform out there in the real world to start iterating on. Start talking to your customers and build really small features and push them to your repo on a daily basis to get feedback from your users.

Since you have a generic domain name you can pivot in any direction keeping the focus on just the one project that you are iterating on.

One last thing. Start a blog related to your business and talk about what your mission is, your product features and your technology