Preneur Guide | Blog

Unlocking Payments

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Before launching your Minimum Viable Product to the world, there are some things you will need to do before you can actually sell it.

Website for your business
Legal business entity
Sign up for Stripe

You need a Website

Your business needs a web site. It should contain the following:

Your business name
Description of the goods or services offered
Terms of Service
Privacy Policy (if you are authenticating or storing private information)
Contact information

You can build one yourself, or use services to create and host them.

Legal Business Entity

Creating a legal business entity, such as an LLC or corporation, offers several advantages over using your individual Social Security Number (SSN) for your business:

Personal Liability Protection
- A legal entity provides a shield for your personal assets.
- If your business faces lawsuits or debts, your personal assets (like your home, car, and savings) are generally protected.
Tax Benefits
- Business entities often have access to tax benefits and deductions that aren’t available to individuals.
- For example, an LLC can choose how it wants to be taxed (as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or corporation).
Professional Credibility
- Having a registered business entity can enhance your business’s credibility with clients, suppliers, and potential investors.
Easier Access to Funding
- Many investors and lenders prefer to work with businesses that have a formal structure, as it provides a clear framework for ownership and decision-making.
Separation of Finances
- Keeping your business and personal finances separate simplifies accounting and tax filing, and it can make it easier to manage cash flow.

Stripe is a leading payment processing service with robust integration options, global payment support, and competitive pricing.

Once you have signed up, you will need to integrate it. Stripe offers several payment integration options, but the Stripe Checkout integration is the most popular.

Write for an 8th Grader

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

When writing content and marketing copy, it’s generally recommended to target an 8th-grade reading level. This may seem counterintuitive, but there are a few reasons why this level works well:

Clarity and Simplicity
- An 8th-grade level keeps your language clear and straightforward, making it easier for readers to quickly grasp your message.
Broader Reach
- Many adults read at or below this level, so targeting it helps you connect with a larger audience.
Better Engagement
- Simple, concise language is more engaging and less likely to overwhelm or confuse readers.

It’s a common misconception that lower readability scores mean your writing is childish or less professional. Clear writing makes your messaging easier for all readers and demonstrates mastery of the information.

Straightforward writing appeals to everyone, regardless of their education level. Skilled authors prioritize accessibility without sacrificing depth or sophistication.

I continuously challenge myself to keep messaging simple. I strive for a less is more philosophy.

Ship Early

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A common regret from founders is that they spent too much time building the product before launching it to the public.

Product Evolution

Agile product development promotes a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) — emphasis on MINIMUM! Many recommend to timebox their MVP so that they Ship Early and Engage with Customers. This enables customers to provide feedback, direction, and help you prioritize.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

An MVP is the most basic version of a product that can still be released. It includes only the core features necessary to solve a specific problem for early adopters. The goal is to validate the product idea with minimal resources and gather user feedback to iterate and improve.

Minimum Marketable Product (MMP)

An MMP is a step beyond the MVP. It includes enough features to be marketable and provide value to a broader audience. The MMP is ready for a larger market launch and aims to generate revenue while still being relatively simple.

Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF)

An MMF is a small, incremental feature that can be developed and released independently. Each MMF adds value to the product and can be marketed on its own. This approach allows for continuous improvement and frequent updates, keeping users engaged.

Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

An MLP is designed to not only meet the minimum requirements but also to delight users. It focuses on creating an emotional connection with users by providing an exceptional user experience. The MLP aims to turn users into advocates who love the product.

Progression

These related concepts often follow a sequential evolution in product development:

MVP: Start with the MVP to validate the core idea with minimal investment.
MMP: Once the MVP is validated, develop it into an MMP to reach a broader market and start generating revenue.
MMF: Continuously add MMFs to the MMP to enhance its value and keep users engaged.
MLP: Aim to evolve the product into an MLP by focusing on user experience and delighting users.

By following this evolution, you can ensure that your product not only meets the basic requirements but also grows to become something that users love and advocate for.

Buying a Domain Name

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The time will come when you need to buy a domain name for that new business idea.

Why I use Namecheap

Friends don’t let friends overbuy for a domain name.

I personally use Namecheap.com to purchase my domains, and have done so for years.

When I first discovered Namecheap, they were significantly cheaper than other options. At that time, I recall buying a .com domain for about $12 USD when other prominent brands were selling the exact same thing for over $30. The cost differences were not limited to domain registration fees, but other add-ons as well.

Competition has since improved, but I still find Namecheap to be competitively priced, feature rich enough, and offers great suppport. At the time of this writing, I can buy a .com domain for less than $15 per year, often around $9 for the first year.

Notable Features

NameCheap offers a simple interface to do things like:

Redirect your domain to another site
Point your domain to a web hosting platform
Email forwarding to an existing email account (like Gmail)

Documentation is abundant, and high quality help is only a click away. You don’t need to be a networking expert to be successful.

Save Your Money

Registering a domain name is an early step to building your online business. There are inevitably other pieces to the puzzle, like:

Web Hosting
Business Email
SSL Certificates
Premium DNS

My advice is to just say no. Vendors want to cross-sell, but you can usually find cheaper or better alternatives elsewhere. You can always change your mind and add them later.

Web Hosting

You can always just point your domain to a hosting service of your choosing. Many web hosting service providers offer free tiers that are fine options to get started. For example:

Cloudflare offers a Free plan.
Firebase Hosting offers a No-Cost Spark Plan.
GitHub Pages offers free hosting for sites using Static Site Generation (SSG).
Netlify offers a free Starter plan.
Vercel offers a free Hobby plan.

As your business takes off, you may outgrow the free tier, and then you may need to spend a little money. By then, you will have revenue to cover the costs.

Business Email

When you are just getting started, you do not need to sign up for a paid Business Email plan.

Namecheap offers Free Email Forwarding. This feature can redirect email to your domain to another email address, which is often a good place to start. For example, I usually add a catch-all rule that routes any email to the new domain to a Gmail account. When you outgrow these virtual email accounts, you can reconfigure it to support a Google Workspace business plan, or another email provider.

For those not using Namecheap, ImprovMX is a similar service that creates free email aliases for your domain name.

SSL Certificates

Today, every website should be using HTTPS. However, you usually do not need to purchase your own SSL Certificate anymore. Most web hosting services offer free Let’s Encrypt certificates. As a result, you can save your money.

Premium DNS

PremiumDNS has a nominal fee, but I have always just used the included BasicDNS and it has been fine. As a result, I recommend you save your money.

Free Domain Privacy

Namecheap offers Free Domain Privacy. I highly recommend using this because it hides your contact details from the public Whois database, which is often mined by scammers. It’s free, so take advantage of that.

Business Plan

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

As a software engineer, I need to resist the urge to just start building.

A wise exercise is to write a lightweight business plan. It should outline business goals, target audience, marketing strategy, and financial projections. It is crucial for several reasons:

Clarity and Focus
- It helps you clarify business goals, target market, and strategies.
- This clarity can guide decisions and maintain focus on your objectives.
Roadmap for Success
- A business plan outlines the steps you need to take to achieve your goals.
- It acts as a roadmap, helping you stay on track and measure your progress.
Risk Management
- By identifying potential challenges and risks in advance, you can develop mitigation strategies.
- This proactive approach can save you from unexpected setbacks.
Resource Allocation
- It helps you allocate your resources efficiently, ensuring that you have the right amount of capital, personnel, and materials to achieve your goals.
Attracting Investors
- If you need funding, a well-thought-out business plan can attract investors or lenders.
- It shows them that you have a viable business idea and a plan to make it successful.

Lean Canvas

The concise Lean Canvas is a nice approach because it captures the highlights in a single page.

The Lean Canvas replaces long and boring business plans with a 1-page business model that takes 20 minutes to create and gets read.

Start Small

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

You don’t need a big idea to get started. Small ideas that are common can impact a lot of people. Making $20 from 50,000 people is a million dollar idea. There are over 5 billion internet users worldwide, and it continues to get easier to access global markets.

I am often surprised at how small some products are. You often only need to do one thing in the beginning, and then see how the market reacts.

Statuspage

One of my favorite examples is Statuspage. This was a common problem that they turned into a commodity so that you could just buy it instead of build it. Atlassian acquired it for $360 million in 2016. Wow!

Paul Graham

Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were on to something. Maybe it is a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger the ambitions, the longer they’re going to take to realize, and the longer you’re projecting into the future, the more likley you’re going to be wrong.

So I think the best way to do these big ideas is not to try and identify a precise point in the future and say, “How do I get from here to there?” like the popular image of a visionary. I think a better model is Columbus who thought, “There’s something to the west. I’ll sail westward.”

Start with something that works. That you know works. That’s small. And then, when the opportunity comes to move, move westward, right?

The popular image of the visionary is someone with a very precise view of the future. But empirically, it’s probably better to have a blurry one.

Jeff Bezos

I would definitely advise a small startup company to be as narrow and as focused as is possible to be. If you look at the original Amazon business plan, there was no hint of anything other than books in it, and it was not on my radar. I was thinking I wanted to build an online bookstore. That was it.

And, you know it worked way better than I thought it would. And we launched music and that worked better than I thought it would. And we launched videos. I think, it’s so long ago I can’t really remember, I think it was actually VHS tapes. Is that possible? And that worked better than we thought it would.

And then I sent an email to customers. I picked about 1,000 customers and I said, “Besides the things we sell today, books, music, and video, what would you like us to sell?” And the list came back incredibly long tailed. It was almost like whatever was on their mind at the moment. It was like, I wish you sold windshield wipers for my car. And I was like, really windshield wipers? That wasn’t in the business plan, but that’s an interesting idea. So it’s been kind of one foot in front of the other.

We expand into new areas in two ways. One is from a customer need. We will work from a customer need to the skills that we need. And the other one is skills forward from a skillset we have to a new set of customers.

So Kindle is an example of a customer need. If you go back 10 years, we had no hardware team. We had to hire somebody to lead our hardware group and then build a hardware team and build some institutional competence at it and so on. That’s a customer need backwards approach.

And skills forward, a great example of that is Amazon Web Services. We had the skills to do AWS. We had probably more distributed computing expertise than anybody else in the world, because of the transactions. Transaction systems are so complicated and hard to build, and we had a service oriented architecture of great complexity, probably before anybody else. Because we were doing that, we could kind of see the future a little bit and decided to build AWS, which has turned into, you know, a huge business in its own right.

Business is very situational. Rules of thumb are good, but they have to be applied to the right situation. So sometimes the old maxim that you should stick to the knitting is correct, but sometimes the adage that you should stick to the knitting is wrong. And a senior leader’s job is to figure out in which situation are you?

Stan Lee

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

If there is something that you feel is good, something that you want to do, something that means something to you, try to do it.

Because I think you can only do your best work if you’re doing what you want to do. And if you’re doing it the way you think it should be done.

Mike Strives

Simplify = WIN.

There’s a way to simplify everywhere.

Start with Why

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.

Simon Sinek identified a pattern for success called the Golden Circle. It highlights the importance of communicating your WHY — your purpose, cause, or belief.

WHY does your company exist?
WHY do you get out of bed every morning?
And WHY should anyone care about the work you do?

The Golden Circle can be used as a guide to vastly improve every aspect of your business or organization—from leadership and hiring, to product development, sales, and marketing.

I highly recommend watching his TED Talk because it has profoundly impacted my communications. It has been viewed over 60 million times making it one of the most popular.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Action | Simon Sinek

What is your WHY?

Help Wanted

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Our guide is dedicated to curating the best ideas and strategies that lead to successful online businesses. We can’t do it alone. We need your stories, your successes, and yes, even your failures. By contributing, you help create a rich resource that can guide and inspire fellow entrepreneurs.

Are you an indie hacker, solopreneur, micropreneur, or part of an early-stage startup? Your journey, whether filled with triumphs or challenges, holds invaluable lessons for others walking a similar path. You are invited to share your experiences and insights with our community.

Together, we can build a supportive and resourceful community that empowers entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams. We look forward to hearing from you!

Building Success

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Did you know that up to 90% of online businesses fail? Yikes!

The mission of this guide is to curate the best ideas to help entrepreneurs beat the odds and be successful.

I’ve long dreamed of building a profitable online business. I have tried and failed; I am part of that 90%. I will try again, but this time be part of the 10% that succeed.

I have skills and talent, and would like to profit from them. While I know a lot about software engineering, I have much to learn about things like sales, marketing, and how best to leverage social media.

First time founders think about product, second time founders think about distribution.

I am not alone. The internet is full of advice from others who have learned the hard way, but information is scattered. Since there didn’t seem to be a good, curated resource yet, I figured that I would make one. I expect to learn a lot along the way.