Ask HN: What is your business setup/system? How much do you spend a month on it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your business setup/system? How much do you spend a month on it?

2 pointsrblion3 comments

Things I am most interested in:

- Legal - are you a LLC or a C-corporation?

- Finance - are you using QuickBooks or something different?

- Payments - are you using PayPal, Stripe, or something different?

- Marketing - how are you using the web to generate leads/conversions?

- Communication - are you using Gsuite, Slack, Facebook, or something else?

- Social - how do you continue to network within your field? build partnerships?

- Safety - how are you insured while traveling internationally?

Feel free to add any others in there if you feel they are needed.

Thanks for reading, reflecting, replying. You are helping me get one step closer! :-)

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Legal: Right now I'm a sole proprietor with an EIN, but I plan to move over to a single-member LLC for the legal protections. Did this through LegalZoom

Finance: QuickBooks

Payments: Stripe, but I plan to add Bitcoin support (most of the work is already done, its just using it is a major liability)

Marketing: Mailchimp works pretty well, I have a self hosted Jekyll website too. I also have a public Telegram group that anybody can join, but few have so far

Communication: Mostly Slack

Social: I don't really network within my field. There is no hardware or physical component to what I do, and I work from my house most of the time.

I do self host things like Git, CICD, etc, and it wasn't really worth the trouble. When this scales out to beyond say ten people I'll definitely migrate to a SaaS stack. The biggest pain point with self hosting was choosing Drone CI for the CICD. That has been the most fragile part of the setup by a land slide.

Rule #1 of startup tool selection: Always pick the safe, popular choice and stick with it.

QuickBooks isn’t perfect, but you can make it work and always find someone to operate it.

Stripe is fine and maybe less likely to lock up your funds than PayPal. Use it if it fits your needs.

Slack is quirky but it works and everyone knows how to use it.

Same for Google docs. Use it, keep it simple.

Don’t overthink your tooling choices, don’t try to get fancy, and definitely don’t even think about trying to self-host something when you can pay a few dollars per month per employee to use a SaaS. You need to keep everyone focused on solving the startup’s target problems.

Bike shedding is one of the most common failure points I see in early startups. If you find yourself constantly changing chat tools, project management tools, frameworks, or programming languages then you have a major drag on productivity. Pick the easy option and stick with it until year 2 or 3.

I agree, I'm going with the best designed, most adopted, highest savings (time, money, effort) tools.

Hardware - Apple

Creativity - Adobe

Development - AWS

Finance - QuickBooks

Payments - Stripe (Stripe Atlas for legal)

Communication - Slack

Collaboration - Google

Marketing - omnichannel

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