OK, so here is my advice.

First, some background on me so you know where I'm coming from with this. I started my own business almost 5 years ago. It's a tech company, but I think I've learned enough that there are applicable lessons, not only from my work but from the other entrepreneurs this has put me in contact with. Currently my company is self sustaining, has 5 full time employees, and Fortune 100 customers (we make B2B software).

First thing - you have to be really careful starting a business around your passion. This can be an easy way to come to hate your hobby. Remember that it is a business first. While I haven't reread it in years, you might want to read a book called The E Myth which talks about starting a small business.

Second, if you're serious about this, I hope this post wasn't some sort of customer validation experiment. Of course people here are going to be interested. However, most likely no one here is an actual potential customer. I've read some of your other answers here where you've mentioned that games sell "like hot cakes" and there is no real competition and it's a large market. If you do this without any real customer validation you're going to have a rough time at best and be out of business quickly with a ton of debt at worst. Who are your customers? How are they going to know about this place? How do you know what they are willing to pay to participate? How do you know THEY want a place like this? How do you know they are actually willing to pay you money to come to this place? A good book to help understand the various ways you can gain traction is Traction which discusses 19 different traction channels and how people have put them to use to grow their business.

Can you deal with competition? Even if there isn't another business like this in the area, how do you know someone isn't working to start one? If your business is a success will someone start a competitor? Are you ready for that? What if a month before you open a competitor beats you to it? If you have a solid business and plans to grow in place you'll be fine.

I don't know if you plant to raise money or not, but regardless of that fact, think of how you would pitch this to someone who could invest but doesn't give a crap about boardgames or pubs. Would someone who is looking at this from a purely objective money making standpoint be interested? Have you generated enough traction, attention, and interest to make this an appealing business prospect? If not, what can you do to change that? If you can't figure that out now, do you really want to wait until you're deep into this business to try and figure it out?

Set up some metrics. Probably the best way to do it for your business is to measure revenue per visit. How much profit do you expect to make per person per visit? If you are charging $4 per person and then you expect some % of them to buy additional things (food, games, drinks) - your avg per person should be over $4, obviously. How many visitors and at what average profit per visitor do you need to stay afloat? You can increase your overall profit 2 ways - increase the number of visitors or increase the average profit per visitor. You'll have some limits - you an only fit so many people in the building, for example. This will help you determine if this business can be profitable and give you an idea of where you need to be so you know early on if you're tracking well or not. Measure everything that you can.

Basically, just be careful. You're mixing your hobby with your work, but you have to remember it's a business first and foremost. Treat it like a business and be honest with yourself and you'll be fine.

Also, fried foods with games sounds like a good way to end up with a library of greasy games.

I've posted this before but I'll repost it here:

Now in terms of the question that you ask in the title - this is what I recommend:

Job Interview Prep

1. Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions
   
2. Programming Interviews Exposed: Coding Your Way Through the Interview
   
3. Introduction to Algorithms
   
4. The Algorithm Design Manual
   
5. Effective Java
   
6. Concurrent Programming in Java™: Design Principles and Pattern
   
7. Modern Operating Systems
   
8. Programming Pearls
   
9. Discrete Mathematics for Computer Scientists
   
   

   Junior Software Engineer Reading List
   

   
   

   Read This First
   

   
   

10. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
    
    

    Fundementals
    

    
    

11. Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
    
12. Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art
    
13. Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach
    
14. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
    
15. Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software
    
16. Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing
    
17. Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application
    
    

    Understanding Professional Software Environments
    

    
    

18. Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game
    
19. Software Project Survival Guide
    
20. The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky
    
21. Debugging the Development Process: Practical Strategies for Staying Focused, Hitting Ship Dates, and Building Solid Teams
    
22. Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules
    
23. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
    
    

    Mentality
    

    
    

24. Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
    
25. Against Method
    
26. The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development
    
    

    History
    

    
    

27. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
    
28. Computing Calamities: Lessons Learned from Products, Projects, and Companies That Failed
    
29. The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management
    
    

    Mid Level Software Engineer Reading List
    

    
    

    Read This First
    

    
    

30. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth
    
    

    Fundementals
    

    
    

31. The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
    
32. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
    
33. Solid Code
    
34. Code Craft: The Practice of Writing Excellent Code
    
35. Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative
    
36. Writing Solid Code
    
    

    Software Design
    

    
    

37. Head First Design Patterns: A Brain-Friendly Guide
    
38. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
    
39. Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
    
40. Domain-Driven Design Distilled
    
41. Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design
    
42. Design Patterns in C# - Even though this is specific to C# the pattern can be used in any OO language.
    
43. Refactoring to Patterns
    
    

    Software Engineering Skill Sets
    

    
    

44. Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
    
45. Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools
    
46. NoEstimates: How To Measure Project Progress Without Estimating
    
47. Object-Oriented Software Construction
    
48. The Art of Software Testing
    
49. Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
    
50. Working Effectively with Legacy Code
    
51. Test Driven Development: By Example
    
    

    Databases
    

    
    

52. Database System Concepts
    
53. Database Management Systems
    
54. Foundation for Object / Relational Databases: The Third Manifesto
    
55. Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design
    
56. Data Access Patterns: Database Interactions in Object-Oriented Applications
    
    

    User Experience
    

    
    

57. Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
    
58. The Design of Everyday Things
    
59. Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
    
60. User Interface Design for Programmers
    
61. GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and Dos
    
    

    Mentality
    

    
    

62. The Productive Programmer
    
63. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
    
64. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
    
65. Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
    
    

    History
    

    
    

66. Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
    
67. New Turning Omnibus: 66 Excursions in Computer Science
    
68. Hacker's Delight
    
69. The Alchemist
    
70. Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages
    
71. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
    
    

    Specialist Skills
    

    
    In spite of the fact that many of these won't apply to your specific job I still recommend reading them for the insight, they'll give you into programming language and technology design.
    
    

72. Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC
    
73. Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets
    
74. Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: Rules for C and C++ Programming
    
75. The C++ Programming Language
    
76. Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs
    
77. More Effective C++: 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs
    
78. More Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#
    
79. CLR via C#
    
80. Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java
    
81. Thinking in Java
    
82. JUnit in Action
    
83. Functional Programming in Scala
    
84. The Art of Prolog: Advanced Programming Techniques
    
85. The Craft of Prolog
    
86. Programming Perl: Unmatched Power for Text Processing and Scripting
    
87. Dive into Python 3
    
88. why's (poignant) guide to Ruby

Here are all the books with amazon links, Alphabetical order :)

---

• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1591396190
  
• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh et al. Link: http://amzn.com/160941280X
  
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown Link: http://amzn.com/0804137382
  
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston Link: http://amzn.com/1590597141
  
• How Google Works by Eric Schmidt et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1455582344
  
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World by Gary Vaynerchuk Link: http://amzn.com/006227306X
  
• Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard Branson Link: http://amzn.com/0307720748
  
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1400064287
  
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck Link: http://amzn.com/0345472322
  
• Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0385346654
  
• Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable by Tim S. Grover et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1476714207
  
• Rework by Jason Fried et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0307463745
  
• Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin Link: http://amzn.com/1591842948
  
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss Link: http://amzn.com/0307465357
  
• The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth by James Altucher Link: http://amzn.com/150100994X
  
• The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison by Mike Wilson Link: http://amzn.com/0060008768
  
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz Link: http://amzn.com/0062273205
  
• The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen Link: http://amzn.com/0062060244
  
• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries Link: http://amzn.com/0307887898
  
• The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by MJ DeMarco Link: http://amzn.com/B004BDOUAI
  
• The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday Link: http://amzn.com/1591846358
  
• The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1885167776
  
• The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0984999302
  
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell Link: http://amzn.com/0316346624
  
• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1591848369
  
• Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out by Marc Ecko Link: http://amzn.com/1451685319
  
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0804139296

Hey,

I'm kind of on the same boat as you (starting a software/media company with strong technical skills and some concern for the business side of things)

​

Few things I've learned and realized these past few years of coding and trying to make my side-projects into businesses:

- Create a high-level overview / design doc based on these principles to align your vision, technical requirements and business objectives.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/disciplined-entrepreneurship-24/9781118692288/images/p01-f001.jpg (taken for an MIT entrepreneurship course taught by Bill Aulet. I highly recommend you buy his book: https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Entrepreneurship-Steps-Successful-Startup/dp/1118692284)

​

- Learn how to create an effective marketing plan including an end-user profile, persona, market research, advertising on Youtube, Google Ads and Instagram/Facebook, Google Analytics, re-targeting with custom audiences, creating funnels in Google Analytics to see what parts of your app may be causing churn. Here's a good course for this: https://www.udemy.com/learn-digital-marketing-course/ (does not include churn detecting with funnels in GA, you can find more about this on youtube)

​

- For everything else there's Slidebean's CEO, FounderHub and Patrick from Valuetainment to help you out tremendously:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz9n-2W33WY&list=PLnhdsL4kFmVYMNq6F8k8UiFkc6fwIdk3o

- https://founderhub.io/

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB442EchOTY

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfLLcqC-D7Y

​

- On the technical side of things, I recommend you start with a stack that's easy to work with, can scale without significant effort on your part / without growing your team, and ultimately that gets you to an MVP as fast as possible with minimal trade-offs. For this I recommend Firebase and Cloud Functions to get you up and running quickly without worrying about making an entire API or running servers.

​

Most important of all, DO NOT build a monolithic app thinking that every feature you're building will be something your users will enjoy or that what you'll build may useful in the future. Your goal is to build the most minimal version of your key value proposition. From there, establish an effective means of communicating with beta testers / first customers to determine what features to build out. Think of your product as a psychology / design experiment. You need to establish a baseline problem / solution / theory. Then test that theory through small iterations of changes with QA processes / feedback loops to measure the impact of these changes. Eventually you'll have a product that's centered around your user / problem and not your idea of what's best for them (which is rarely ever going to be perfect). Check out Jobs Theory for a better grasp on how to predict and understand your customer's needs: https://medium.com/frameplay/pt-3-defining-the-job-in-jobs-to-be-done-838087696490

I also recommend looking at successful competitors as their platforms have undergone this extensive process of understanding their customer needs. Don't be afraid to emulate what's successful in the market in terms of design, business model and value propositions / mission. Look at their growth over time and old versions of their site with Wayback machine to get a feel for how they re-aligned their vision to target their customer's true needs.

> For those who prefer video lectures, Skiena generously provides his online. We also really like Tim Roughgarden’s course, available from Stanford’s MOOC platform Lagunita, or on Coursera. Whether you prefer Skiena’s or Roughgarden’s lecture style will be a matter of personal preference.
>
> For practice, our preferred approach is for students to solve problems on Leetcode. These tend to be interesting problems with decent accompanying solutions and discussions. They also help you test progress against questions that are commonly used in technical interviews at the more competitive software companies. We suggest solving around 100 random leetcode problems as part of your studies.
>
> Finally, we strongly recommend How to Solve It as an excellent and unique guide to general problem solving; it’s as applicable to computer science as it is to mathematics.
>
>
>
> [The Algorithm Design Manual](https://teachyourselfcs.com//skiena.jpg) [How to Solve It](https://teachyourselfcs.com//polya.jpg)> I have only one method that I recommend extensively—it’s called think before you write.
>
> — Richard Hamming
>
>
>
> ### Mathematics for Computer Science
>
> In some ways, computer science is an overgrown branch of applied mathematics. While many software engineers try—and to varying degrees succeed—at ignoring this, we encourage you to embrace it with direct study. Doing so successfully will give you an enormous competitive advantage over those who don’t.
>
> The most relevant area of math for CS is broadly called “discrete mathematics”, where “discrete” is the opposite of “continuous” and is loosely a collection of interesting applied math topics outside of calculus. Given the vague definition, it’s not meaningful to try to cover the entire breadth of “discrete mathematics”. A more realistic goal is to build a working understanding of logic, combinatorics and probability, set theory, graph theory, and a little of the number theory informing cryptography. Linear algebra is an additional worthwhile area of study, given its importance in computer graphics and machine learning.
>
> Our suggested starting point for discrete mathematics is the set of lecture notes by László Lovász. Professor Lovász did a good job of making the content approachable and intuitive, so this serves as a better starting point than more formal texts.
>
> For a more advanced treatment, we suggest Mathematics for Computer Science, the book-length lecture notes for the MIT course of the same name. That course’s video lectures are also freely available, and are our recommended video lectures for discrete math.
>
> For linear algebra, we suggest starting with the Essence of linear algebra video series, followed by Gilbert Strang’s book and video lectures.
>
>
>
> > If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
>
> — John von Neumann
>
>
>
> ### Operating Systems
>
> Operating System Concepts (the “Dinosaur book”) and Modern Operating Systems are the “classic” books on operating systems. Both have attracted criticism for their writing styles, and for being the 1000-page-long type of textbook that gets bits bolted onto it every few years to encourage purchasing of the “latest edition”.
>
> Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces is a good alternative that’s freely available online. We particularly like the structure of the book and feel that the exercises are well worth doing.
>
> After OSTEP, we encourage you to explore the design decisions of specific operating systems, through “{OS name} Internals” style books such as Lion's commentary on Unix, The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, and Mac OS X Internals.
>
> A great way to consolidate your understanding of operating systems is to read the code of a small kernel and add features. A great choice is xv6, a port of Unix V6 to ANSI C and x86 maintained for a course at MIT. OSTEP has an appendix of potential xv6 labs full of great ideas for potential projects.
>
>
>
> [Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces](https://teachyourselfcs.com//ostep.jpeg)
>
>
>
> ### Computer Networking
>
> Given that so much of software engineering is on web servers and clients, one of the most immediately valuable areas of computer science is computer networking. Our self-taught students who methodically study networking find that they finally understand terms, concepts and protocols they’d been surrounded by for years.
>
> Our favorite book on the topic is Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach. The small projects and exercises in the book are well worth doing, and we particularly like the “Wireshark labs”, which they have generously provided online.
>
> For those who prefer video lectures, we suggest Stanford’s Introduction to Computer Networking course available on their MOOC platform Lagunita.
>
> The study of networking benefits more from projects than it does from small exercises. Some possible projects are: an HTTP server, a UDP-based chat app, a mini TCP stack, a proxy or load balancer, and a distributed hash table.
>
>
>
> > You can’t gaze in the crystal ball and see the future. What the Internet is going to be in the future is what society makes it.
>
> — Bob Kahn
>
> [Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach](https://teachyourselfcs.com//top-down.jpg)
>
>
>
> ### Databases
>
> It takes more work to self-learn about database systems than it does with most other topics. It’s a relatively new (i.e. post 1970s) field of study with strong commercial incentives for ideas to stay behind closed doors. Additionally, many potentially excellent textbook authors have preferred to join or start companies instead.
>
> Given the circumstances, we encourage self-learners to generally avoid textbooks and start with the Spring 2015 recording of CS 186, Joe Hellerstein’s databases course at Berkeley, and to progress to reading papers after.
>
> One paper particularly worth mentioning for new students is “Architecture of a Database System”, which uniquely provides a high-level view of how relational database management systems (RDBMS) work. This will serve as a useful skeleton for further study.
>
> Readings in Database Systems, better known as the databases “Red Book”, is a collection of papers compiled and edited by Peter Bailis, Joe Hellerstein and Michael Stonebreaker. For those who have progressed beyond the level of the CS 186 content, the Red Book should be your next stop.
>
> If you insist on using an introductory textbook, we suggest Database Management Systems by Ramakrishnan and Gehrke. For more advanced students, Jim Gray’s classic Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques is worthwhile, but we don’t encourage using this as a first resource.
>

> (continues in next comment)

Hey, DE here with lots of experience, and I was self taught. I can be pretty specific about the subfield and what is necessary to know and not know. In an inversion of the normal path I did a mid career M.Sc in CS so it was kind of amusing to see what was and was not relevant in traditional CS. Prestigious C.S. programs prepare you for an academic career in C.S. theory but the down and dirty of moving and processing data use only a specific subset. You can also get a lot done without the theory for a while.

If I had to transition now, I'd look into a bootcamp program like Insight Data Engineering. At least look at their syllabus. In terms of CS fundamentals... https://teachyourselfcs.com/ offers a list of resources you can use over the years to fill in the blanks. They put you in front of employers, force you to finish a demo project.

Data Engineering is more fundamentally operational in nature that most software engineering You care a lot about things happening reliably across multiple systems, and when using many systems the fragility increases a lot. A typical pipeline can cross a hundred actual computers and 3 or 4 different frameworks.doesn't need a lot of it. (Also I'm doing the inverse transition as you... trying to understand multivariate time series right now)

I have trained jr coders to be come data engineers and I focus a lot on Operating System fundamentals: network, memory, processes. Debugging systems is a different skill set than debugging code, it's often much more I/O centric. It's very useful to be quick on the command line too as you are often shelling in to diagnose what's happening on this computer or that. Checking 'top', 'netstat', grepping through logs. Distributed systems are a pain. Data Eng in production is like 1/4 linux sysadmin.

It's good to be a language polyglot. (python, bash commands, SQL, Java)

Those massive java stack traces are less intimidating when you know that Java's design encourages lots of deep class hierarchies, and every library you import introduces a few layers to the stack trace. But usually the meat and potatoes method you need to look at is at the top of a given thread. Scala is only useful because of Spark, and the level of Scala you need to know for Spark is small compared to the full extent of the language. Mostly you are programatically configuring a computation graph.

Kleppman's book is a great way to skip to relevant things in large system design.

https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable/dp/1449373321

It's very worth understanding how relational databases work because all the big distributed systems are basically subsets of relational database functionality, compromised for the sake of the distributed-ness. The fundamental concepts of how the data is partitioned, written to disk, caching, indexing, query optimization and transaction handling all apply. Whether the input is SQL or Spark, you are usually generate the same few fundamental operations (google Relational Algebra) and asking the system to execute it the best way it knows how. We face the same data issues now we did in the 70s but at a larger scale.

Keeping up with the framework or storage product fashion show is a lot easier when you have these fundamentals. I used Ramakrishnan, Database Management Systems. But anything that puts you in the position of asking how database systems work from the inside is extremely relevant even for "big data" distributed systems.

https://www.amazon.com/Database-Management-Systems-Raghu-Ramakrishnan/dp/0072465638

I also saw this recently and by the ToC it covers lots of stuff.

https://www.amazon.com/Database-Internals-Deep-Distributed-Systems-ebook/dp/B07XW76VHZ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=database+internals&qid=1568739274&s=gateway&sr=8-1

But to keep in mind... the designers of these big data systems all had a thorough grounding in the issues of single node relational databases systems. It's very clarifying to see things through that lens.

I'm a socialist and this is right on. We have to distinguish between long term goals (a more equal society) and short term relief of suffering. I think we (the left) should be more willing to consider market solutions in the short term.

One example would be letting charities play by the same rules as companies. Yes, the people who make money in the charity business would make more money, but it would also give more help to those the charities exist to help. (http://www.amazon.com/Uncharitable-Restraints-Nonprofits-Contemporary-Perspectives/dp/1584659556/)

I think we need to drop our ideology with regard to the short term, in favor of what works. There are a couple of heterodox economists I really like, lefties to be sure, but with interesting nuanced appreciation of the good that markets can do:

• Dean Baker (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/)
  
• Ha-Joon Chang (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/hajoonchang)
  They have both written really good books, too.
  
  If market policies succeed (as I believe they often can), and this leads less power for the left, so be it. But I don't think that will be the case.

So, two things: is this something you actually want to do? It's not going to suddenly become your life's path to be a manager if you take this promotion, but if it's something you're pretty sure you don't want to do yet, it's OK to push back against it.

Secondly, if this is something you want to do, I'd like to aggressively recommend the book which helped me to make the transition myself, Managing to Change The World by Allison Green. To me, it's the bar-none best book for new managers to learn how to develop the skills they're going to need to be effective managers. If you can, visiting one of The Management Center's trainings on your company's dime is also almost certainly worth the money, if you have any kind of training budget. The training goes in-depth on the things that the book covers and allows you to spend some time with people in a similar position as you (new managers) to learn from each other over the course of a couple days.

Whichever way you go, best of luck!

First off check out this video.

So to me it sounds like you are looking for purpose from your work. You want your work life to be meaningful in some way and actually have an impact.

Are you looking for general impact or more charity/EA "doing good" type of stuff?

I don't really know much about EA stuff so I'll speak to the "general impact".

First off, you don't really need a credential if you want to be an entrepreneur. Do you have some specific business ideas that drove you down the tech start up route in the first place? If yes, this is the best road map I've found on starting your own business.

You should take a look at a bunch of start ups (or established firms) and make a list of 10-20 ones that if they offered you a job today then you'd wake up at 5:00 AM tomorrow to start working there. What problems are they trying to solve? Are they things that in 5,10,15 years you'd look back on and say "wow"?

Check out what type of roles these places are looking for then figure out if those roles are something you can already jump into. If you can't jump in directly then go to linkedin or google and reverse engineer the role to figure out what these people's resumes look like & what background do these people have who are already working in the field. Contact some of them off linkedin. Check out the schools, or online classes or certifications these people have etc. Take online classes on Edx, udemy etc, check out the relevant subreddits etc just to try and get a taste for the role(s). Try to jump into the new role as far as you can to see if you like it & if it's something that you really want to pursue further. Obviously start easy and progress naturally...for example if your math skills are OK but you've never taken a calc class then maybe stay away from differential equations.

I mention start ups because this is where you will most likely have maximum impact & responsibility considering you will be helping a firm grow or die. Though, some established firms also have impactful roles too. Start ups can sometimes be hard to find but I guess one way to do it is to check out VCs & look at their portfolios. Those start ups will at least have funding.

Another way to try and answer the "what should I do question" is if you were independently wealthy what would a year in your life look like? What types of stuff would you ideally like to be working on? What type of stuff would you be learning?

As far as the anxiety about the application process goes, & this might sound harsh, but to me it sounds like you're afraid of failure/rejection & so you are using your uncertainty about establishing a priority in what you should be doing career wise as an excuse for not actually filling out apps thus avoiding the possibility of rejection. So, the question I have is would you still be anxious about filling out the app if you bumped into a CEO who really liked you and the perfect job landed in your lap you basically just had to give them a resume/fill out some forms to show you're "real" and the job was yours?

I feel you the uncertainty sucks about whether or not you'll actually get hired. Taking a hard look at yourself in order to market yourself also sucks. But IMO the best way to think about it is to just play the lottery...apply to as many places as possible & eventually you'll land something good. It's only hard at the beginning once you get experience then recruiters will be breathing down your neck & the tables will be flipped. So shotgun that resume. Maybe write a little python script to help you apply?

Good luck & feel free to DM me if you wanna chat.

Thanks so much!

As for what to read, it really depends on what you're interested in but I always recommend the classics when it comes to anything to do with the left first.

However, if you'd like something more modern and lighter here are some of my recent favorites:

• Why Marx Was Right - Terry Eagleton is a fantastic author and this book has sold more than one friend of mine on the concept of Marxism. A great resource to learn more about the socialist left and hear the other side of the story if you've been sold the mainstream narrative on Marx.
  
  
• A Cure for Capitalism - An elegant roadmap for ethically dismantling capitalism by the most prominant Marxist economist alive today, Richard D. Wolff. Very utility-based and pretty ideologically pure to Marx while still taking into account modern economic circumstances.
  
  
• No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy - this one is a great take-down of how modern NGO organizations (especially the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) are the premium outlet for soft imperialism for the US.
  
  
• Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair - added this because it was a very impactful, recent read for me. A lot of left-of-republican people support some kind of prison reform but we usually view it through the lens of helping "non-violent offenders". This book digs into that distinction and how we, as a society, can't seriously try to broach meaningful prison reform before we confront the notion of helping those who have done violent things in their past.
  
  
• [Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women] (https://www.amazon.com/Backlash-Undeclared-Against-American-Women/dp/0307345424/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1550926471&sr=1-4&keywords=backlash) - probably my favorite book on modern feminism and why it is, in fact, not obsolete and how saying/believing as much is key to the ideology behind the attacks from the patriarchal ruling class. Can't recommend it enough if you're on the fence about feminism.
  
  
• How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic - Written in the 70's by a couple of Marxists during the communist purge in Chile, this book does a fantastic job of unwrapping how ideology baked into pop culture can very effectively influence the masses. Though I can only recommend this one if you're already hard sold on Socialism because you might not even agree with some of the core premises if you're on the fence and will likely get little out of it.
  
  
• Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Mark Fisher's seminal work deconstructing how capitalism infects everything in modern life. He killed himself a few years after publishing it. My most recommended book, probably.

I felt the same way, so I went and found a bunch. Here they are:

Start Your Business is the single greatest book on starting a business. It is a pretty comprehensive overview of all aspects. I would definitely recommend it.

Finance:

Financial Accounting is a decent text. The usefulness of financial accounting in general is quite limited for an entrepreneur though. The techniques are mainly used by outside parties to evaluate companies, whether for investing or lending. But it can be useful in that it gives a metric for how your company is doing.

Managerial Accounting is a good book. The subject matter is extremely important and should definitely be learned. Get a book on managerial accounting.

Marketing:

Marketing Management is a really good text for an overview of marketing. One of the best.

Most marketing texts are smaller and not textbooks like you're looking for. There are some detailed texts that go into complicated calculations related to marketing decisions. Go check them out. It's like marketing science or something like that.

Business Law:

Business law is not really worth going into extreme detail. So a good book is The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law .


Final Note: It's important to note that it makes way more sense to just get into business and learn as you go. You could spend years learning from every text possible and get nowhere.

I just had a full out response typed up here and accidentally clicked back with my mousepad's gestures, but brief summary of why this is a terrible way to pick charities to donate to (paraphrased from Dan Pallotta's great book Uncharitable).

Charity A and B each receive $10 M in donations in a given year to go to finding treatments for/a cure for prostate cancer.

Charity A has a team of analysts review the research of dozens of universities from around the world. It picks the 10 best and donates $750,000 to each, and spends the remaining $2.5 M on salaries for the team of analysts plus rent. Remember that typical non-profit salaries are far below fair market value (see this, for example)).

Charity B consists of a team of one guy - he gives $9 M to the first university doing research on prostate cancer that comes up in Google and keeps the remaining $1 M for himself.

By percentage standards, Charity A gives only 75% of its proceeds to the cause, while Charity B gives 90%. But clearly, Charity A is the one we feel compelled to support.

I don't know exactly how you put your ideas on paper, but I suggest putting it into a framework to better assess whether it can work. Business canvas model is a strong tool for that purpose. Not only you need to fill out all the blanks in the model, you need to make sure they create a feasible, coherent plan when standing together. It also eliminates too-visionary things that may sound pretty cool but not really needed when you first start build up your business.

I also suggest you spend time reading Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet. It will give you very clear instruction on how to proceed from an idea to a fully-grown company.

Good luck!

I think you should consider reading a copy of this book https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 because imo you're asking the wrong questions.

That said, my job is quite literally to decide what tools a development team should be building for a VFX house (though I am internal and not trying to sell software/solutions/etc to other parties) and I can say with total confidence that the things people ask us to make are not the things that would actually be most beneficial to the business.

In your original question you asked "what would be your dream pipeline helper in terms of versioning, file format exchange, etc.?" but I can guarantee you that artists and even studios in general don't give a flying fuck about any of that - artists care about making cool images and studios care about throughput and profitability. File versioning, backups, dailies, whatever are all just various ways that we facilitate that and remove friction from the process. Can you build a product/service/business that increases my studio's throughput without us having to dedicate development resources to integrate it?

Also if you can't see how Shotgun helps a VFX facility work in a streamlined manner, you probably have no business developing artist/production facing software solutions for this space. I don't mean that in a super offensive way, I'm just genuinely surprised you'd write that since other than RV, Shotgun is one of the very few non-DCC products in the last decade that has come out and been widely adopted by studios of all sizes. So... it clearly solved a problem.

He's giving from one hand, taking back from the other basically. And his giving on one hand is done for spectacle, for public image, it's what a PR firm told him to do after the 1999 microsoft monopoly trials.

A lot of his non-profit aid consist in paying for-profits that are often already responsible for the issues in Africa, or aid that benefit microsoft following this simple scheme : give money to for-profit to help education -> this for-profit then use the money to buy microsoft license to help said education. In 2014 they have 2.2 millions dollars of their foundation invested in for profit prison, probably more now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism

They are monsanto's dog :

https://americaoutloud.com/the-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-is-the-gangster-godfather/

https://www.amazon.com/Such-Thing-Free-Gift-Philanthropy/dp/1784786233

https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-45-the-not-so-benevolent-billionaire-bill-gates-and-western-media-b1f8e0fe092f

Microsoft is a scam, it's a malware and spyware, designed for control, thanks to him the USA have an awesome way to spy easily basically anybody who uses it. Microsoft is an active participant to the PRISM project.

Devil's best trick is make us believe he doesn't exist.

Asking people's feedback is a first step but it's not enough and somewhat misleading, because many people will either :

• Say they will "definitely buy" and don't actually when you present it to them.
  
• Will say nice things, biased answers not to hurt your feelings (even if they don't realize it).
  
  What I advise :
  
  

1. Read this, it will help you define your customer need and products. Best 10$ you'll ever spend if you plan to launch a product and you are collecting feedback.
   https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742
   (NB : There might be other alternatives, @UX guys out there if you have another book to suggest)
   
   
   
2. Launch a quick dummy store.
   Woocommerce, shopify,etc... are options to do so. Do a quick store setup with a them and few products and images and explanation, then add google analytics and track your funnel. Then do some fb and/or adwords campaigns to bring traffic in.
   Do everything like you were selling the actual product and once people reached the checkout and are ready to pay redirect them to a page saying "Sorry we are not open yet, enter your email adress here and we'll let you know as soon we are ready to ship"
   
   
   Once it's done, check the number of people that interacted, added your product to the cart, proceeded to checkout. You'll have an accurate view of the potential of your business.
   
   
   I can tell you, best shit you can ever do. I've done it myself to test an idea. It's better than any business plan and you'll learn a ton of stuff in the process.

Resources I've found helpful for marketing (some of these are more relevant for romance than erotica):

Write to Market - Chris Fox

Launch to Market - Chris Fox

Six Figure Author - Chris Fox

Reader Magnets - Nick Stephenson

Derek Murphy's YouTube channel--if you browse around his videos, he covers a lot of different aspects of self publishing. The principles of: covers, blurbs, titles, how to launch a book, et cetera. It's kind of like having a friend to talk to who has a few more years knowledge than you.

The Perfect Year - JA Huss (a series of videos by a romance author on how to launch your romance)

JA Huss' Top Five Tips blog posts--have some useful stuff on marketing.

Naughty Ink - Jamie Fuchs (some good erotica specific marketing tips).

Libbie Hawker on blurb writing.

For covers, get Photoshop CC and Google around for YouTube videos on the basics, then follow cover design principles from Derek Murphy videos or whatever other videos you find and like. (Or, if you're writing romance, do market research then hire a cover designer.)

To hell with the Career! Identify a problem you learned in the years you have put in so far, design a solution and build it up while helping your son grow too!

The ugly truth is - careers are an illusion used to convince people to use up their most precious years. So they can retire at 70, die a few years later with no time to use the money they saved.

Please do not look at this change as a negative thing! Join a group of entrepreneurs (real ones - not some MLM bs), learn how to a) find a problem to solve, b) create a solution c) listen to your customers d) maintain control.

Takes about three years to take a viable idea to reality - your son will still be young, and you will not have missed the chance to spend time with him. And if you succeed, you'll make more money than your husband :D

Surround yourself with people who do the things you need to succeed with your new focus

Evidence:

https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Entrepreneurship-Steps-Successful-Startup/dp/1118692284

https://www.amazon.com/UNSCRIPTED-Life-Liberty-Pursuit-Entrepreneurship/dp/0984358161

https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Fastlane-Crack-Wealth-Lifetime/dp/0984358102

https://www.startupschool.org

Stay-At-Home Parenting is not a prison sentence! It is an opportunity to break free!

Read stories of success, surround yourself with cheesy inspiration to keep moving forward. Whatever it takes - it's a process, start now and make this your "Eff this! I want a second house in the Cayman Islands" moment.

Write down your dreams, how much they cost, list the steps you need to obtain that money, and put dates on them. Then, go!

And good luck! You will fail at least once - regroup and do it again.

Unlike most things in life where one bad apple spoils the bunch - with entrepreneurship, one good crop feeds you for life.

So the things you're pointing out are completely normal for any business owner, particularly a startup. That doesn't make them feel less painful -- I empathize with you and I'm sure this feels discouraging.

Let's hit on a few key points:

• Right now you're in the process of validating your offer. Your figuring out if you're really offering something that people want.
  
• You've also recognized the disconnect between people who fawn over your product and actual users/buyers.
  
• Plenty of people will tell you your product is a good idea and that they will use it... very few actually will.
  
• What this means for your sake is being able to filter feedback and really understand who your users are and what they think of your product so that you can revise/adapt your offer to convert them.
  
  Some next steps for you:
  
  
• Go back to your niche. Who are you trying to acquire as users?
  
• What reason do they have to use your app?
  
• For those who moved on, why didn't they stay?
  
  To the latter point, you really need to get into the mind of your user and remove any excitement you're feeling around your app. What I mean by this is that the answer to the question isn't, "Because the app's amazing and it does so much for them!" That's what you think. It's clearly not what your users think. So how do you figure out what your users are thinking? A lot of times this means simply asking them for their honest feedback. This can be direct communication or as you scale, it can be something as simple as a survey that gets sent out to users who haven't used the app in X days. I always prefer the former, but that's also my communication style.
  
  A book was recommended here a while back -- I've since read it and appreciate it's perspective. It's called The Mom Test, take a look at it here: https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742
  
  I also have a podcast episode on this topic. I don't self promote but if you want it let me know and I'll DM you where you can find it.
  
  Best of luck. Hang in there!

Glad it was helpful! Managing is tough and I've definitely made similar mistakes. I actually didn't have a specific post in mind, though I'm sure it's come up. The whole website is great, and she has lots of great advice about how to communicate well with employees. Her book is really good too, though targeted at nonprofits definitely applies well outside them.

https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Change-World-Nonprofit-Managers/dp/1118137612

Read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Fastlane-Wealth-Lifetime-ebook/dp/B004BDOUAI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380613408&sr=8-1&keywords=millionaire+fastlane

Then this one: http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Work-Week-Anywhere-ebook/dp/B006X0M2TS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380613398&sr=8-1&keywords=four+hour+work+week

Don't be put off by the titles. These are both excellent books. By this point you're going to struggle to ever want to get a job xD. These books are great overviews that give you a solid mindset shift in what's possible and what's required.

Once you've done that, resources like Mixergy, Smart Passive Income, etc will give you a lot of ideas for different approaches (there are heaps more, find the best and listen to what's relevant to you).

Break what you want to do into sections. You'll need to get clients, sell them the idea, have them pay you and be able to deliver the product. So figure out what you need to do to achieve each of those objectives.

Tons of stuff here but I will tackle a few:

1. The vast majority of businesses get no outside funding and are self funded so start building up your credit limits.
   
2. I suggest you take a class in finance because if you can't do a Profit-Loss statement or a balance sheet you are flying blind. You can also take classes in drafting a business plan.
   
3. Think bigger. If you start out with a goal just to make enough money to live on what you are really doing is buying yourself a job. You need to build a business that grows and can eventually take on employees.
   
4. Wanna be entrepreneurs spend a lot of time worried someone is going to steal their "awesome idea". There are 7 Billion people in the world, many people have had your idea. There is probably someone doing your business somewhere right now. The question is can you provide that product or service better than anyone else, that is the key to success. As soon as you launch and have any market someone can and will copy you so just concentrate on being the best and building a customer base. Never try to compete on having a monopoly unless you have a patent for a unique item and never compete on price unless you have huge economies of scale.
   
   If you want to go into business for yourself I highly recommend you read these 2 books first:
   
   The Illusions of Entrepreneurship
   
   The Millionaire Fastlane

It's a funny thing, being able to see needs.

I've been developing for the past 6 or so years and finding needs is a task I only recently discovered. It seems like such a simple concept, but being able to see a need and fill it without being too complicated, loosing touch with the motivation of the need, and actually finishing the solution is tough.

I recently read a great book called, Start Small Stay Small, and it was comforting knowing that marketing of your product is way, way more important than it's feature set. That has been my credo the past few months.

Answers here will vary based on experience. I'm a content marketing guy, so I'd say content marketing. (In-depth blog posts, podcasts, etc.)

Lots of ways to skin a cat here, though. My paid traffic friends scoff at content marketing and say I'm crazy. :-)

Best to stick to what you know or are skilled at. Use that as your bread and butter, but try testing out other funnels as well.

Neil Patel has some great content on getting traffic, IMO. There's a great book called Traction that you'll likely find helpful - worth a read.

Technically you're supposed to pay yourself a market based wage....not just for tax reasons (like mentioned by another commenter), but also because you should be replaceable and your salary should be able to pay a replacement for yourself. Otherwise you're just earning "sweat equity" that you hope to cash out with later on.

I'd recommend getting the book "Simple Numbers". It's just $10 for a Kindle version. It talks about the financial parts of a business in a way that makes sense and it discusses the concepts and ideas behind profitability, paying yourself a a wage, ad how to track it correctly from an accounting standpoint

Many of us entrepreneurs purposely underpay ourselves. And most of us are interested in growing our business's top line numbers. This book explains the rest.

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Numbers-Straight-Talk-Profits/dp/1608320561

I've been in business for 10 years and just finished reading this book last week. It's the type of book I wish I would have read five years ago.

If you or anybody wants to read this book but cannot afford the 10 bucks, PM me.

The answer to your question is: Yes!

There are a lot of people who do freelance creative work. The key is to differentiate yourself from the $3/hr Fivvers.

Do you have a portfolio? What sort of things do you do?


The typical strategy would be:

1. Branding. You are a graphic artist, UI designer, etc., not just 'someone who has years of experience with Photoshop.'
   
2. Put together a portfolio that shows the different kinds of things you can do. Put this online somewhere so you can post links to it.
   
3. Google for remote work/freelance job sources. There are quite a few, and some have work for graphic artists.
   
4. Reach out to all the local graphic artist freelancers to see if they have overflow work. Do the same with some of the boutique creative shops.
   
5. Send emails to everyone - friends, previous employers, family - letting them know you're in business for yourself and would appreciate if they know of any work. (They might not employ you, but they might know of someone)
   
6. Start promoting yourself - blog post about things that demonstrate your expertise without being salesy. Your posts should be designed to help people.
   
   Grab a copy of Stop Thinking Like a Freelancer:
   https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Thinking-Like-Freelancer-Evolution-ebook/dp/B00PJIDO9C
   
   Check out some of the articles on: https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/ (it's not my site)
   
   Check out r/freelancing
   
   
   
   

\>with the accounting books, Accounting was still the only course I have ever failed. What ones you ready?

Not so much straight accounting - more like "I need a CFO, but am not going to hire one, so that's me now."

The best one I've found - that really is blowing my mind - is:

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Numbers-Straight-Talk-Profits/dp/1608320561

I am way into anything that gives you a manageable load of metrics and tells you when to watch out.

"The Ultimate Blueprint for an Insanely Successful Business" by Keith J. Cunningham is another good intro to reading financial reports and getting something out of them.

I've built a successful SaaS business. The number one lesson is around sales channels. You can have the best product in the world, but if you can't sell it, you're wasting your time. If you don't know what a sales channel is read https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Guide-Getting-Customers/dp/0976339609

If you have a sales channel, you do not need an idea, your channel will tell you what they want. The cheaper your sales channel, the greater your chance of success.

Feel free to PM me with your other questions.

oh friend, there are dozens of us. DOZENS!

But seriously, YES! You can be a farmer. Yes, you. The sustainable agriculture movement is happening all over the US. Check out Acres USA, and if you have time, an apprenticeship is a great way to get started. The most inspiring book I've read on the subject is You Can Farm by Joel Salatin. PM me if you want to chat!

Advice: if the database server is at all important, make frequent and automated backups. On a different machine from where the database server lives. Offline, too. Honestly, best practices as to how for your specific software can better be found on sites like StackOverflow (maybe ServerFault), or perhaps /r/sysadmin archives. The important thing is that you make them (and verify that you can restore from them).

Also, have multiple databases for testing: a development setup, "UAT" (user acceptance testing) which can be used for verification outside the development team, and then production (maybe more if it's a large enough setup). Roll changes out to each in order and know how you can go back to the previous version (of the database and code) if anything goes wrong. It shouldn't need to be said, but don't let people develop directly on production; roll out a planned and tested code revision/schema change script.

If you have backups and decent testing, that insulates you from most accidents and you can get better at query-writing and such as you go.

My databases textbook was Database Management Systems by Ramakrishnan and Gehrke, but it's a bit abstract for administration. Something in O'Reilly's lineup for the database you're using would probably be a better fit for picking up general management and use.

> A Filthy Book In a Fancy Dress, will help you format your ebooks and make them more appealing: https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC

I'm planning on buying Vellum before my next book, and I'm hoping that will take care of formatting for me. Maybe wistful thinking...

> https://www.amazon.com/Naughty-Ink-Erotica-Publish-Successful-ebook/dp/B00L8ERJVU

I'll read through this. I'm only in Amazon, so some of the information might not be relevant, but I always find a few gems of info. Great that it's in KU!

Thanks for the links.

MRR is short for "monthly recurring revenue", and ARR is for "annual recurring revenue." It's how much money your company makes each month / year before any expenses, and that's typically how people come up with a price when they want to sell their company (plus other factors like how fast you are growing, etc.)

"SaaS" also means "software as a service", where people pay you a monthly fee to use software hosted on a website. Before that was popular, you would usually pay a one-time license fee to install the software on your own computer. The SaaS model is much better because people keep paying you each month, and eventually a lot of that income becomes "passive" if you don't have to spend too much time on customer support.

I've learned a lot from these:

• https://www.indiehackers.com
  
• https://news.ycombinator.com
  
• https://stripe.com/en-US/atlas
  
  • They have a private forum for Stripe Atlas members, which has been really good.
    
• https://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/dp/0615373968
  
• https://thisweekinstartups.com
  
• https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com
  
  But the best way is to just start building something, try to find paying customers, and make lots of mistakes.

>I'm loyal and I can get work done.

I'm not trying to be a dick, but you've gotta look at it from an outside perspective. What "work" have you done in the past? From the sounds of it, this is your first venture of any kind.

From your other comment :

>Well now that I'm thinking about it I can arms deal ammo and guns

Holy shit hold up. Do you know anything about the regulations that revolve around dealing guns online?

Your target market can't just be "adults." I'm gonna stop there. What I'd suggest you do is take a step back from the "I want to be a millionaire" mindset, and spend some time learning.

I appreciate the hustle, but you're not going to become a millionaire overnight. It's gonna take years of luck, perseverance, and differentiation to get where you want to go- and even that's a stretch. You're competing with literally every other twenty-something out there, and only a handful of us are gonna make it.

I recommend The Millionaire Fastlane to any budding entrepreneur. It'll give you a no-bullshit look at building up a business, without any of that preachy stuff many authors are fond of now. It's the only business book I've ever read, and it's a great first step.

I've read a lot of the books recommended so far in the comments, and IMO a lot of them wouldn't really apply to OP and what he's looking for.

For the financial analysis stuff you're looking for, I would recommend ["Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits"] (http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Numbers-Straight-Talk-Profits/dp/1608320561/ref=pd_sim_b_52?ie=UTF8&refRID=1S8HGR7A61EGGQWPC28R).

I would also second "The Personal MBA" as someone already posted here. I also liked ["E-Myth Mastery"] (http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Mastery-Michael-E-Gerber-ebook/dp/B000RO9VIQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419395662&sr=1-1&keywords=e-myth+mastery) for the company structure and organization that you're looking for -- if you can get past the waffling and storytelling crap Gerber is so fond of, there's actually good information within those pages.

Lastly, "Street Smarts" is also a great book on business strategy for those with more experience like you.

/r/homesteading/ would be a good resource for you.

Check out the book You Can Farm by Joel Salatin

Check out ATTRA

I takes a lot of work and lots of skills to farm. It takes even more to break even at it. The odds of success are very low. But people can succeed.

Good Luck!

*edit
subtracted a picture of a delicious cookie. :(

I think it is key, especially if they are "great". It is actually in a company's best interest. The more vested a person is, the more likely they will work hard to create a great product. A salary isn't a great tool to get people to really commit. They get a salary whether the company succeeds or not.

I can't think of situation where you wouldn't want to give a great employee equity. It is just a bad business practice and shortsighted. That said, there is a great book called Slicing Pie: http://www.amazon.com/Slicing-Pie-Company-Without-Funds-ebook/dp/B0096EFHBI which details how allocate equity in super fair way without just "guessing" or using word of mouth estimates on industry standards. It is like vesting but without a predetermined allocation, which is hard to determine when a person just starts.

I'm sure some non-profit compensation packages are inappropriate, but you can't simply look at the salary and determine whether or not that's the case, as you did in your comment. And nothing is wrong with spending a large percentage of your budget fundraising as long as the end result is a bigger and better impact improving the world.

The simple truth is that there's a huge untapped pool of charitable donations that people would make if they were asked in the right way. Instead, people in the non-profit industry are cautious and shy about making an aggressive case for their own causes, for fear of looking selfish.

Of course, the real problem at the core of the non-profit industry is "how do you measure success?" In the for-profit world, cash is the bottom line, but non-profits too often gauge their success on misleading and unscientific surveys or on simple "dollars moved" stats. I heartily recommend givewell.org for the work they do encouraging donating based on good science, and the book Uncharitable if you want to read more about how the culture of non-profits is self-sabotaging.

Depends on if you're sticking to the business-centric category or not. For instance, I think Antifragile (although the author is a bear to listen to) has even more impact than Zero to One. I personally know several startup founders or funded companies who swear by it and immediately dove into their systems to purposefully break the heck out them.

Similarly in slightly different direction, I found How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told By Themselves to be incredibly unknown and worthwhile, and Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant to be a "quake" book leading you down the rabbit-hole of marketing.

One last book, because I can't help myself, would be Traction. Although not necessarily a "must read," I perhaps took more notes from this than any of the others, save Antifragile.

The amazing book Slicing Pie outlines ways to deal with almost your exact situation in the fairest way possible. It's short, sweet, and I highly recommend it. It has ways to value everything you mentioned, including time invested, money invested, his ownership of the LLC, etc. Using their formulas, you can figure out fair ways to represent all that time and money in your equity splits.

This book is fantastic and not even that long of a read:

http://www.amazon.com/Stop-Thinking-Like-Freelancer-Evolution-ebook/dp/B00PJIDO9C/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 (not an affiliate link)

Covers everything one needs to know about growing a freelance business into a million dollar company.

I promise if you read it you will make back the $10 you spent to buy it. I'm not an affiliate or anything – I just think it's a great book.

Instead of making money on royalties / equity, you might want to look into the idea of value based fees. Here is THE book on the subject.

You are correct in your assumption; Aligning your financial incentives with the client's financial incentives is a win for all parties involved.

It isn't always a bad thing to wait that long. You get to use the "Patent Pending" term on your product which by itself will help deter people from copying it.

You can file a provisional patent application (PPA) for less money and have a year to test commercial viability of the product. Then once you choose to move forward it will take a year or two generally.

Again the long wait can be a good thing, even if you end up getting denied by the patent office for some reason. You still get to use all that time to develop market share and use the "Patent Pending" term on all your products.

I'm not recommending it but I've heard of people actually filing patents they know will be denied just so they can legally use the term.

To address your other question about the specifics about filing a patent I suggest buying and reading Nolo's Patent it Yourself Guide. It's very very good information. You definitely don't have to try and write a patent yourself but taking 4-6 hours of reading this guide will tell you if your idea is patentable, describe the application process, and all the terminology. Most importantly it helped me have a knowledgeable conversation with my patent lawyer.

As far as my personal story, I reached out to an old professor asking him for patent lawyer recommendations. He put me in touch with an older lawyer who worked for himself, not a firm. That helped keep the price more reasonable, about $5-6k all said and done.

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Unfortunately, I don't think there is any one link that will help you with that. Let me recommend some books to you that might help:

The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult is one of the most helpful tomes you will ever read. There is an entire section of "Chemognosis," which is to say real knowledge gained through this sort of experience.

There are two books by Daniel Pinchbeck I would recommend reading:

Breaking Open the Head

and

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

There is a clinical study on DMT, called DMT: The Spirit Molecule that is worth reading. There is a movie version of it on Netflix, but don't watch the movie over the book. Do both, but if you only do one, read the book.

There is also a documentary I would recommend watching on Ayahuasca. Watch this documentary.

Good to know that having to stay on the company timezone gets to you. That's what I was worried about with my previous job and why I left before doing a year abroad with We Roam. Now I'm a freelancer and don't need to really be on anyone else's watch but my own.

I'm reading a good book right now that walks you through the steps of making a good bit of money as a freelancer: https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Thinking-Like-Freelancer-Evolution-ebook/dp/B00PJIDO9C

Peter Block's Flawless Consulting is the Bible of consulting and offers really intuitive step-by-step analysis of best practices in consulting. If you pick this book up, you can use it to guide you through your first gigs without too much trouble.

Good luck!

If you are looking to rate alternative solutions to a particular problem, you can use the Pugh Matrix method. Where I work, we've used this to compare multiple options and while it doesn't make the decision for you, it provides some good perspective. Here's an Excel spreadsheet setup for this approach.

By idea, I'm assuming you mean an idea for a new product (or service). Evaluating the viability of a product is more challenging. I would suggest the most important questions to ask are as follows:

• "Does a market exist for this product?"
  
• "How big is the market?"
  
• "How competitive is this market already?"
  
• "Do I have a means of reaching this market?"
  
• "Do know anything about this market?"
  
• "Am I passionate about this market?"
  
  I'm working my way through Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling and Mike Taber and they emphasize that market is the most important consideration. If you don't have a market, or if you can't reach into that market, it doesn't matter how great your product is.

Thanks for your response!

Unfortunately, I do not think the business has much opportunity to grow (aside from opening another location). It is a retail store, so there isn't a lot of equipment or machinery.

Just the fact that I needed to ask this question means that I need to read up on small business finances. Just went to the library and checked out this book. I think it will help me to break everything down and figure everything out! Thanks again!

Besides Lean startup, I would go for:

Business Model Generation - to layout your ideas first and have a feeling of your to be business model (on their site you can get a sneak peek for free https://strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation)

The startup owner's manual, from Steve Blank (https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Step-Step-Building-Company/dp/0984999302)

Disciplined Entrepreneurship: (https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Entrepreneurship-Steps-Successful-Startup/dp/1118692284)


good luck

I wonder if you've ever read this book? The author is very much focused on the concepts of synchronicity and shamanism. At one point he travels to Africa where he takes Ibogaine with a native tribe there. He describes the same tree spirit.

I've not journeyed quite as far as yourself, but your description was enthralling, and many parts of your experience directly match many of the conclusions I've come to during my own moments of introspection. I, like you, am skeptical and tend to question everything, but I think as long as you don't take yourself too seriously, which you don't seem to do, you've got alot of things figured out. Anyway, thanks for sharing.

Edit: Correct link

> Small inventors cannot afford the process of getting a patent.
>

That is incorrect. You can get a patent for a few thousand dollars is you do your homework. There are books about how to do this, and the cost is really not that high if you can avoid legal fees.

>
>
> Small inventors cannot afford the process of defending a patent in court.

That is correct. Big companies can still bully the small inventor because a typical patent lawsuit will cost millions of dollars.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just to be clear: I'm not trying to defend the US patent system, I'm just stating what I know about it based upon discussions with patent officers many years ago. At that time I was complaining about trivial patents -- that conversation I can probably dig up because if I search around because it was had on the Usenix group sci.crypt (EDIT: Found some of it here ). The US patent system has problems -- but fixing it in a fair way is not such a trivial task. I think it is naive to say no to all software patents.

Let me give an example. Whether software should be patentable has been questionable since the early days of software. One of the major examples of a patent that seemed to pave the way for allowing software patents is the RSA cryptosystem patent. In this patent, they described it as a (hardware) "device", to make it look not so different from other patents that people envision when they think of inventions. But then they put in the text to also allow it to work on a general purpose computer: "In alternative configurations, the transformation of the message M to the ciphertext C may be accomplished using a programmed digital computer rather than the hardware elements illustrated in FIG. 3."

From this way of thinking about it, it is pretty hard for me to understand how somebody can say "no" to software patents but allow other types of patents. What is the difference between building special purpose hardware to solve a problem versus having a general purpose computer solve the same problem? If we allow hardware devices to be patented but not allow software, then anyone can build software that solves the same problem as the special purpose hardware, which will essentially kill the benefit of patenting hardware. It just doesn't make sense -- the whole purpose of a patent is to protect your IP, but prohibiting software patents would make hardware IP no longer protected.

So, I fully think software patents should be allowed. They just need a better way to rule out the trivial and not-inventive stuff, because right now the real problem is too much junk getting through.

As far as numbers go, my first book had pretty similar results for the first week or so it was out, I think that's alright for a new author with no presence at all on the market. At least I wouldn't start really worrying about the numbers until I got a bunch of books out there

For the rest, as mentioned by the other people, your book probably needs reworking / rebranding. It doesn't scream "erotica" in the way it's commonly understood

Have you read all the guides in the sidebar?

Also, I'd recommend giving this a read https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L8ERJVU

I know there's plenty other guides out there but this one seemed really good for beginners. At least if you'd read it you wouldn't be getting the replies you've had so far in this thread :p

Hm. That's tough. Are you in law school, or is this some sort of survey class? If it's a survey, the stuff on wikipedia is actually pretty good. Also, there's a book called "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law" that is very very useful: http://www.amazon.com/The-Entrepreneurs-Guide-Business-Law/dp/0324204930

Have you guys validated your idea? Do you have hundreds or thousands of people who already gave you feedback that they would put down money for your idea?

If you don't have validation yet, that is the number one thing I would say you need to get. If I had to recommend three books for you to hold close by your side, they would be:

• The Startup's owners manual (http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step---Step/dp/0984999302) - that will teach you how to validate customers
  
  
• Designing for the digital age (http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Digital-Age-Human-Centered-Products/dp/0470229101) - a comprehensive guide on how to know your user and design for them
  
  
• Traction (http://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Guide-Getting-Customers/dp/0976339609) - gives stories and pragmatic tips on how to find your market
  
  Also, don't become the Winklevoss twins!

Skimming your other responses - you've got two products you're trying to monetize:

• eCommerce site for electronic components
  
• YouTube channel
  
  Both are commodities, with lots of competition, and very different marketing strategies.
  
  Meanwhile you're worried about PPC vs SEO, when you haven't even considered:
  
  
• who your audiences are,
  
• what they want, and
  
• how to reach them.
  
  Is FB the right channel for people who want 'electronic components'? Doubtful.
  
  As to PPC or SEO - it's just a cost benefit analysis.
  
  For example: I had a furniture client who was paying $1.50-$10 PPC for different types of furniture keywords. Average product price was $1,000+ with healthy 30% margin. PPC worked reasonably well. But so did direct mail of furniture catalogs.
  
  > There's is no potential for brand building with PPC
  
  That's right. PPC is best for 'acquisition' of new customers - "people actively looking for X." Once you've got them, email tends to be the popular 'retention' strategy - reminding people you exist. That's why all those annoying "subscribe" popups exist on websites.
  
  As to Secret Sauce, NO. Landing page is awful, and I can't believe someone selling growth hacking could have created it.
  
  Check out Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (founder of DuckDuckGo), or anything by Andrew Chen (growth @ Uber)
  
  Growth hacking can summed up as:
  
  
• There are LOTS of marketing channels (GW says something like 19, but I think it's closer to 110)
  
• Find the one that works for your audience (exploratory testing)
  
• Perfect your message and landing page for that channel and audience (e.g., test, test, test)
  
• Repeat until the channel is exhausted, and move on to another channel
  
• With the right budget, you'll probably do multiple channels at the same time

Flawless Consulting is pretty well known and respected.

I would recommend Small Time Operator. It is a great resource that touches on a variety of important items and issues.

Got a spare $30 - buy this book - it has everything you need to know to draft and file your own patent for any of these basic ideas. All you need to do is describe your idea in enough detail so someone could build it. Most ideas are patentable if they could be implemented on a computer (list the steps) and achieve a practical result. Filing a patent costs $400 if you earn less than $150k per year otherwise it costs $800 for a company of up to 500 people. You will need to pay $445 if the patent is granted, but a granted patent can be quite valuable.

https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Change-World-Nonprofit-Managers/dp/1118137612/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503537038&sr=8-1&keywords=managing+to+save+the+world

This book is amazing. While it is geared towards the non-profit sector, it is absolutely helpful for managers in all fields.

I wouldn't try to value the company at this point. No track record of revenue or customer base makes it so subjective.

Recommend using an equity calculator like this:

http://foundrs.com

only as a starting point for discussion, then talk about likelihood of things that would change your situation.

From here:

• Set periodic time to review equity (e.g. every 3 months) and see if still valid.
  
• Put in Cliffing
  
• Put in Vesting
  
• Get this in writing (e.g. shareholder agreement) & signed by both of you
  
• talk to a local startup lawyer to vet the wonderful legal advice I'm giving you over the Internet
  
  While having it in writing is important. Remember a piece of paper is useless, unless you have inherent trust to begin with - think of it like pre-nuptial and how many of them actually hold up in court.
  
  For more detail, read:
  
  
• 18 mistakes that kill startups by PG
  
• Slicing Pie if you want a more comprehensive equity split model
  
  Let me know if any questions

https://www.amazon.com/Such-Thing-Free-Gift-Philanthropy/dp/1784786233

Interesting that one of the fastest growing business in the world is philanthropy. Even though Gates is "giving" his wealth away, he's still making billions.

I'm reading (and following), Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo), it is awesome! Highly recommended.


http://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Guide-Getting-Customers/dp/0976339609

I recommend reading http://www.amazon.com/Slicing-Pie-Company-Without-Funds-ebook/dp/B0096EFHBI

It advocates against fixed equity splits, rather allowing you to calculate a dynamic ratio of equity that should feel fair at all times.

There are a lot of books out there and some of them are pretty heavy duty. The Startup Owners Manual is, as it describes, a manual. I've found this book lighter weight and easy to digest. Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Static splitting of shares when nothing has been done by anyone is absolutely insane. I absolutely recommend reading Slicing Pie by Mike Moyer. It gives you a dynamic way to split shares within a startup company based around your actual measurable contribution to the project.

http://www.amazon.com/Slicing-Pie-Company-Without-Funds-ebook/dp/B0096EFHBI

Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet

The approach outlined in this book is a large part of why MIT is known for creating successful startups.

There are a number of good books. One I found helpful is this one. available on amazon

Focus on point 1) only first. Read the Mom Test and preferably some more literature (/blogposts/listen to podcasts/etc.) on idea validation. Do the interviews.

For 2) after: do a competitor analysis on a wide range of competitor & substitute products, preferably look at a similar product line where similar need & trends showed up. Draft up your first idea of a business model (e.g. with Business Model Canvas).

Return here after with a better idea and understanding in your mind and better questions.

I don't think this is true. The original proprietor is still on the hook for all the debts incurred while he was the owner of the business as these are personal debts. The new owner would only be liable if he agrees to take on the liabilities. This process would involve sitting down with the original owner's creditors to work out some kind of deal to transfer those debts.

Furthermore, if the business is organized as a sole proprietor, I would set up the business as an LLC to avoid unlimited personal liability especially considering the nature of a gym (people getting injured).


To OP: This is a great beginner's guide to starting/running a business. The book is called "Small Time Operator".

https://www.amazon.com/Small-Time-Operator-Business-Yourbooks/dp/158979799X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1485891222&sr=8-2&keywords=small+time+operator

It doesn't. If there was an economic meltdown then gold & silver would be as worthless as paper money, people can't eat or shoot with gold. If you are buying gold for an investment then wonderful but if you are looking to survive an economic colapse your money is much better spent on property and guns. Learn how to farm, Learn Bushcraft and buy a few months of food reserves.

Value-Based Fees is the one I swear by. Really shows how the relationship should be set up (for example using "we" instead of "you"). Definitely a good read.

I am also a developer, and wrote this post about how I generate tech business ideas.

Another recommendation is to read Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup. It has a lot of good advice on how to validate ideas once you have a few ones that sound plausible, and it is written for developers.

> Rich people do not monetarily benefit from charitable donations unless they’re committing fraud.

Here is a whole book about it. And yes, they have very creative ways to get returns on their investments. Tax avoidance being a big one.

Rework

Traction

Web Startup Success Guide

Well, fundamentally, a database is just a bunch of data. Different database management systems sort and store this data in different ways, and have different ways of interacting with the data. Probably the most important type of database management system right now is the RDBMS. SQL is the language used to interact with most RDBMS. NoSQL DBMS are the big competitor to RDBMS currently.

Try learning about the difference between the two and you'll probably find a million other things you want to read about. As a programmer, you'll probably be interacting with RDBMS rather than manipulating databases yourself.

If you want a more straightforward way to learn about databases, the first chapter or two on a textbook about DBMS is probably a good read.

This is a great process for dividing equity and a quick read: Slicing Pie

Read value based fees before you start charging by the hour

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/0470275847

You can download a sample on iBooks. Anything by Alan Weiss will help you on your new consultation business

Mill

Disciplined Entrepreneurship: https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Entrepreneurship-Steps-Successful-Startup/dp/1118692284/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538665255&sr=8-1&keywords=disciplined+entrepreneurship

​

Its a fantastic overview that covers all the major steps for "successfully" launching a business. I've bought it for employees every Christmas.

I don't know where you're doing your research, but these things should be easy to find. Pick up a copy of Small Time Operator - that will give you the basics of bookkeeping and the sort of issues you'll need to cover.

Then check with your county office, and the secretary of state - they'll tell you about applicable tax requirements. Check with your city or village to see if there are specific licenses they require, or ordinances you have to comply with.

Not sure if you've seen this but it might be of interest.

Not affiliated with OP - here's a link to the book.

Stop Thinking Like a Freelancer: The Evolution of a $1M Web Designer

Yes, it's certainly possible, but as mentioned, it's difficult. I'd highly recommend looking into the following resources:

Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup

Patrick McKenzie's blog -- Kalzumeus Software. Read everything!

The Lean Startup

Also do searches for "micro ISV" and read anything you get your hands on.

Hi Jawilson2, here's a few books I've read in the past that helped prime me. I guess at the minimum these books helped me understand who was a bullshitter and who wasn't when they claimed they "knew the business side."

Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur - Fund raising basics. Key if you ever plan to raise money. You'd be stupid to try without reading this first.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071496025/

Business Model Generation - This book helps you think through the business model issues most "hacker" type entrepreneurs skip. Makes you think more holistically.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470876417/

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law - Basics about legal issues you should be aware exist. I haven't read through it all at once, but it's a good guide when I run up against areas I'm murky on.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Entrepreneurs-Guide-Business-Law/dp/0324204930/

Here, friend. Read this:

https://www.amazon.com/Such-Thing-Free-Gift-Philanthropy/dp/1784786233

In the 1890's the Hopi Indians prophesied that in 130 years the U.S. government will slaughter millions of its own citizens. Every prophecy that the Hopis predicted has come true. That includes WW1, WW2, the Great Depression, and others. This was discussed by Daniel Pinchbeck, who lived for almost a year with the Hopis.

https://www.amazon.com/2012-Return-Quetzalcoatl-Daniel-Pinchbeck/dp/1585425923

i am an american planning on backpacking in AUS. a lot of these jobs are targeted directly at backpackers on gumtree since they know most urban dwellers wouldn't want to do work this hard, fickle, or seasonal. they're sort of taking advantage of our lack of choice and therefore able to offer very low pay, or none at all in exchange for room and board, with the ability to stay in the country.

You could also try looking for farms around you by woofing.

If you want to get into business for yourself (basically all farming is) I'd pick up some books by Joel Salatin which give realistic expectations of farming life and some semi-realistic ideas for starting out for yourself.

Most farmers have bits of excess land that they can find no use for and will rent to you for super cheap. This is a good way to do some tunnel house chicken coops and such and to learn for yourself.

I'd think the first thing to do at this point is to talk with your client about their expectations. Be honest in telling them what you can do in the time you have, and give them the options of changing schedule, scope, and budget. Usually you can have any two of those. If all three are locked in, then describe the outcome you expect. You'll get the go-ahead or you won't, but your conscience should be clear either way.

My theory is that people hate after-the-fact surprises more than hearing bad news at the beginning. If you don't, you risk your reputation with the client's network - you'll never have the opportunity to explain the situation to those people.

Finally, check out Peter Block's book Flawless Consulting. The first third is indispensable, the second third is good, and the last part is just OK (IMHO).

If you want cheap, read Patent It Yourself so you can control price AND quality!

That book is extremely well written.

Here's a good book to read:)

https://www.amazon.com/Such-Thing-Free-Gift-Philanthropy/dp/1784786233

You'll find an infinite amount of fragmented resources for your question. I found one book that centralizes and summarizes that information into a process. Disciplined Entrepreneurship. https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Entrepreneurship-Steps-Successful-Startup/dp/1118692284. If you're serious about succeeding, pick up this book and follow the steps.

Slicing Pie

Have a read, it's about a hundred pages and it will give you some good insight on this. I'll let others chime in from here.

Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling.



Great book!!



Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0615373968

Read this: Patent It Yourself: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Filing at the U.S. Patent Office.

If your patent is going to be worth anything significant, the cost of a patent lawyer is peanuts.

His “charitable giving” to media companies helps build that kind of public sentiment. Look under the surface and it’s not so rosy.

Hi. We're a company developing management systems for fraternities and sororities. We're looking for a developer proficient in PHP and JavaScript to join our team in exchange for equity (fairly).

The equity would be split in accordance with what I've learned from: Slicing Pie.

We are a team of two CEO's (one learning to code) and one developer right now.

Major, major plus if you were part of Greek Life.

If you are charging hourly then you are missing out on a boatload of revenue. I highly recommend that you read Alan Weiss's book, Value Based Fees.

https://www.amazon.com/Database-Management-Systems-Raghu-Ramakrishnan/dp/0072465638/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318489725&sr=1-2

Thee are millions of books around.
http://www.amazon.com/Small-Time-Operator-Business-Yourbooks/dp/158979799X/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0S7XN6A43GPJE4X8JWBS

You aren't going to make a living doing computer repair unless you are servicing many business accounts

http://www.amazon.com/2012-Return-Quetzalcoatl-Daniel-Pinchbeck/dp/1585425923

Llevo 15 años como Consultor Independiente, con bastante éxito.

TODO mundo quiere hacerse independiente, pero pocos tienen la disciplina y valor para hacerlo. A mí me sirvió mucho leer estos libros:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Business-Consulting-CD-ROM-Included/dp/0787994642

http://www.amazon.com/Flawless-Consulting-Guide-Getting-Expertise/dp/0470620749/

Suerte

Start with this book and you’ll be ahead of the game. Small Time Operator.

Also familiarize yourself with the IRS publications for starting a business.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/starting-a-business


https://www.amazon.com/Small-Time-Operator-Business-Yourbooks/dp/158979799X

check out this book: https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Entrepreneurship-Steps-Successful-Startup/dp/1118692284

Nađi ljude koje smatraš svojom ciljnom grupom, 5-10 njih. Za početak pročitaj Mom Test i probaj iz tih ljudi da izvučeš da li je to nekome uopšte potrebno.

​

>jer uglavnom ljudi to procenjuju iskustveno što je sasvim dovoljno

Ovo je nešto jako važno, da li su ti ljudi spremni instalirati tvoju app kako bi ona obavljala posao umesto njih?

​

Postavljaj pitanja poput

• Koliko koristite računar dok radite?
  
• Kada ste poslednji put koristili neku aplikaciju za proračune itd...
  
• Kako Vi trenutno računate te proračune?
  
• Koliko vremena/novca Vam to oduzima?
  
• Da li ste zadovoljni tim rešenjem?
  
• Koji je Vaš najgori deo dana?
  
  Ovim ćeš videti da li to pije vodu uopšte. Poslednje pitanje može da ti da neku drugu ideju/problem koji treba rešiti.
  
  ​
  
  Držim ti fige
  
  ​
  
  EDIT: Mislim da imam pdf na srpskom, ako ti bude trebalo dm-aj.
  
  ​
  
  EDIT 2: Samo sam ovo našao: Summary of 'The Mom Test'

Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco

Disciplined Entrepreneurship is a step-by-step guide to starting a business and here's a [PDF summary] (http://www.disciplinedentrepreneurship.com/downloads/Disciplined_Entrepreneurship_Poster_Aulet.pdf)

here ya go

OP read this first

http://www.amazon.com/Slicing-Pie-Company-Without-Funds-ebook/dp/B0096EFHBI

Slicing pie

D'oh! Was not 100% sober when writing that. Correction, the book is "Slicing Pie". Site, Equity Split Calculator, Amazon (not-affiliate).

• netflix. period. (finally catching up on Scandal/HIMYM/Mad Men)
  
• new glarus spotted cow
  
• re-organizing weird parts of the apartment
  
• brainstorming marketing ideas from Traction
  
• stretchy pants
  
  (boyfriend is gone for the week. bachelorette life is sweet.)

>Being your typical poor college student, what kind of time frame am I looking at for a deadline?

Starting March 16, 2013, the USA patent system switched to first to file. Your deadline is immediately.

File a provisional Patent. It costs $130 and you don't need a lawyer. Patent fee schedule. IIRC, you are a micro entity so you don't need the additional fee (which is for larger organizations of people that file multiple times). Hand sketches are totally acceptable for this sort of thing.

No one reviews it and nothing really happens - its up to you to seek out prior art. When you reach the utility stage, then you'll have an inspector scrutinize your claims.

Once you've filed your provisional, you have 1 year to file for your utility. If you fail to do so, the technology becomes public domain. When filing for your utility, you can only claim what was in your provisional - to add more, you need to seek out professional advice/services.

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Does your university take claim to anything you invent? This is the case in a lot of places (perhaps less so for undergraduate).

Finally, I recommend "Patent it Yourself" and then recommend that you do not patent it yourself (everything after the provisional).

This book, Patent it Yourself, is a bible for these kinds of questions.

And, if you're a cheap ass like me, you can just use the "Look Inside" feature to flip to a certain page that answers your specific question. Seriously though, the book gets incredible reviews and is the default source for self-patenters with no background.

Two books come immediately to mind for me:

1. "Start Small, Stay Small" by Rob Walling (https://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/dp/0615373968/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1480963865&sr=8-2&keywords=star+small+stay+small)
   
   
2. "Single Founder Handbook" by Mike Taber (http://www.singlefounder.com/)
   
   Both host a podcast at http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/