This post is targeted at people starting a one-man shop, not entrepreneurs in the sense of the word as used on hn.
If you've got partners and plan to grow and/or are planning on hiring several employees in the next few months, you should do the couple of hours of homework and lawyering it takes to file the right papers at the beginning.
Because you shouldn't be an individual if you're starting a company. Didn't Paul tell you you need a co-founder?
Seriously, if you're a one man shop and happy about it, just file an LLC with your state. It's cheap ($200-$400 depending on state) and will protect you from any legal stickiness if one of your customers decides to get nasty because your app lost their data or you find yourself on the wrong end of a copyright lawsuit. It may be unlikely, depending on your business, but it doesn't take long, and the requirements are quite low.
If you're not really serious about starting a business at all, then, don't worry about it at all. Go get a job working for someone else and work on your projects as a hobby.
I would think OP is talking about tasks at work that they're not familiar with and less talking starting a business which is how I think you interpreted it.
I find the article a bit strange. It seems to assume that an entrepreneur starts with the goal of having a 1-person business but has no other ideas whatsoever. That's not ideal.
I have a 1-person business myself, and it seems to me that it starts with an idea and/or personal skills, the two of which are inherently related. There are things that I know, and things that I'm good at. The author advises you to target businesses, not consumers, and perhaps that's good advice in the abstract, for a generic person, but for me personally it feels like bad advice. B2B is not my area, not in my past experience, not what I know. The author says "The opportunities are endless", but that's a curse as well as a blessing. How are you, as a single person, going to make an impact, distinguish yourself from other businesses? You have to rely on your personal strengths, whatever those happen to be, even if they go against the author's generic advice.
My own advice would be this: don't try to start a 1-person business unless you need to. ;-) It's extremely difficult.
For anyone else contemplating starting a company: don’t do it until you absolutely need it. You can look for customers and/or work on a software product without being incorporated. Nobody will care whether you’re actually a CEO in a company registry. When you’re ready to charge people and send invoices — that’s the time to start a company.
At age 24 I made the mistake of thinking that having a company will magically make my work more meaningful and make people take me more seriously. I didn’t lose any substantial money, but it would have made sense to postpone actually registering the business for maybe a year or so.
The scary part is not some paperwork — it’s finding those customers. Tackle that first.
(Edit: this applies to solo founders only. If you’re co-founders, get your IP and equity agreements formalized ASAP.)
The grocery store near my house was started by one person. So did my dads mechanic. And my dentist is doing fine in his one man practice. People build successful businesse all them time by themselves. The fact that you are doing software doesn't change anything. A business is a business in a ny way you look at it.
If you've got partners and plan to grow and/or are planning on hiring several employees in the next few months, you should do the couple of hours of homework and lawyering it takes to file the right papers at the beginning.
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