Entrepreneurship

i enjoyed your story

>if somebody had not shown me the basics of setup and marketing I would not have been successful.
not to be a dick but I doubt you're that successful as is.

most business owners either work in management before moving to ownership or labor in self-employment before hiring others. It's an organic process. Yes, people will teach you along the way, but you're not going to learn what you need to know from a book.

sure as fuck not going to learn it from a thread on Veeky Forums. It's just too broad a subject with a lot of very specific expertise required.

What should i start first? A business or stock portfolio?

I walked away because I wanted to pursue work out of state, but also because OCSD and FBI were going hard on crackdowns on massage parlors, and I wanted a gentle out that wouldn't hurt my non-business relationship with Mamasan.

Quality post

stop calling her mamasan, you cringe weaboo. we get it, you like hand jobs and have yellow fever and are lonely

Disagree entirely, don't listen to a word of this

Agree entirely, listen to this this guy.

I started my first business at 18. I did it for experience to get a foothold in a good career. It was only by chance during an interview that a man who was a lot older, wiser and more successful than me, offered to become my business partner instead of my boss.

This guy cleared 14 million a year just from his businesses, and made 110 million the year I met him from an initial 140,000 investment. He was extremely well connected, extremely kind, and his 'Why' was to help others. Together we turned a little side-dig business into a company, two businesses, and work across four continents in multiple industries with staff across the globe. I literally could not have done any of that without his help, experience and guidance. He taught me lessons that I quite simply could not have had access to otherwise.

Everyone needs a helping hand sometimes, and particularly in business. If you're one of the people who can wing it and make it without the guidance of others, you're a rarity. And I'm making a solid guess that is most certainly not one of those people.

OP, good on you for having the initiative to reach out and ask for advice. You're already one step ahead of most people (like the one above).

>I'm making a solid guess that is most certainly not one of those people.
I never said you can make it without help.

I said the kind of help you need won't be found in a book or in a Veeky Forums thread.

sadly success in business also requires a modicum of intelligence, which seems to be sorely lacking in yourself and others here. If you think you can talk OP through starting a successful business in this thread you're probably a bit stupid.

you need a mentor in your field of interest. Not a book or a thread full of anons LARP'ing.

I'm currently transitioning from employment to freelancing as a programmer.

Wrote my first invoice and got paid.

My problem is, I'm an incredible cheapskate. So now I need an ERP software solution for invoicing and bookkeeping.

There are decent cloud-based providers for $10/month but it annoys me greatly to pay $120/year just for an invoicing solution.

There are open source alternatives and I know that setting them up and maintaining them is more expensive if I factor in my hourly rate of $80. Still I'd rather waste time than money.

It's not logical and I can't get over it.

TLDR: expensive DIY vs renting

Okay, let me deconstruct this for you.
>I never said you can make it without help.
Well, actually here's what you said:
>if you're the sort of person that needs things spelled out for you, you're not going to make it.

On that note; OP simply asked the following:
>What resources would you recommend for those starting to learn how to run a small business?

Did he ask for a step-by-step guide? Did he ask people how to start a small business? No, he simply asked for some helpful resources. I gave him some tips.

>If you think you can talk OP through starting a successful business in this thread you're probably a bit stupid.
See my above point

>sadly success in business also requires a modicum of intelligence, which seems to be sorely lacking in yourself and others here.
Then I'm fucking anomalous, seeing as I had multi-million dollar businesses by the time I was 22 (inb4 a retort about dick-swinging or bragging, which is not what I intended to do).

I think that you are actually the problem you're describing: That you can't get business advice or help from Veeky Forums. Well, when you go and proliferate a board with useless, rhetorical and non-constructive posts, you're really helping to destroy what value that board has in the first place.

And so as to not contradict myself; OP here's some more pointers:
>A good landing page will be your best friend. Here's a handy resource to help you make the best headlines possible: coschedule.com/headline-analyzer
>Here's a great resource for creating cool landing pages, that look and feel professional: www.leadpages.net (free plans exist)
>In design/marketing; "red and green should never be seen"
>Here's a great resource for learning how to optimise your PPC adword campaigns - it helped me a lot: unbounce.com/ppc/5-adwords-hacks-to-help-you-step-up-your-ppc-game/

None of your advice or mine can be specific to OP's:
- field of business
- location
- business model
- personal management style

knowing that nothing you say is specific, the best OP can hope to get from you is generic advice.

and to be very frank if OP can't google generic business advice they've got bigger problems than lack of experience.
and if you don't understand this, you are again more than a little stupid.

Ultimately a business owner gets to succeed or fail on their own. Nothing you say changes that. The time inevitably comes. OP isn't showing what it takes to succeed.

>>understand that it's easier and cheaper to win more work from existing clients than to acquire new ones

This is Gospel.

>>don't underestimate the power of email signups and email marketing campaigns. Million dollar businesses have been built upon email addresses

How can I do this without being a complete fucking annoyance to everyone?

I have founded an Archviz startup about 6 months ago. It doesn't really count imo, as I'm 100% backed and financed by a succesful architecture firm and get all my work from them, so I didn't have to do any marketing or acquisition for now. Basically I'm their R&D and visualisation department.

I've still learned a lot of things about running a business, even in this easy mode I'm in.
For example, you will spend a whole lot of time doing paperwork and just generally organizing all kinds of things, from setting up bank accounts and dealing with taxes, acquiring a location, looking for deals on hard and software and even picking out trashcans for your office. There will be days where you yourself won't do at all what your business is supposed to do, in my case visualising architecture. You will have to be a manager and you will have to be able to pass work on to employees who eventually might be able to do a better job than you could do.
It's also hard to find employees that are decent. You really have to present your business well so people want to work for you. I only have a Facebook page and it's been okay for hiring a couple of students, but now business is taking off and I really need a website and business cards and stuff like that.

Basically the moment you have your own business, a lot of your time will be spent managing rather than actually doing business, and that can really suck if you founded the business because you enjoy doing that kind of work. Obviously depends on the business a lot tho.

Also you will get fucked in the ass by tax man.

Why even go on Veeky Forums when you can just Google everything?

You have not said one constructive thing and are being a totally useless dickbag.
Do you sit at the bar and tell your friends to just Google shit when they want to make conversation?

>You have not said one constructive thing
telling someone they aren't cut out to be a professional basketball player or a rock star or an entrepreneur is very constructive.

If I'm wrong nothing I say will stop OP anyways. Because if he's born to do it he will. I doubt he is, but whatever. OP posted 1 time, he's a regular troll and he's samefagging this thread as we speak.

Except the OP never said he wanted to start a business in the first place.

And I think you're wrong. You can learn to run a business like anything else. Some have more talent than others, and some will fail, but it's not something magical that you can not learn.

>You can learn to run a business like anything else
of course.
just not here. and not by reading. Managing is a verb, an action. You learn it on the job if you're capable of doing so.

as you said. It wasn't what you expected. It never is.

I agree that you can't learn it here, but you sure can pick up some pointers and it's nice to read others experiences imo.

I would agree that you have to learn managing people through experience. But a large part of running a business is dealing with red tape and taxes and other bureaucracy and one can and should definitely learn that from reading about it - and also talking to an accountant.

>started a webshop importing stuff
>have done no SEO, no link building and barely any content
>get plenty of traffic and people buy shit
>makes about 1500 a month

>made a content driven affiliate website
>do a lot of SEO, upload around 4000 new words a week
>barely get any traffic at all
>hasn't made any money yet

The first site started as a joke. The second site was meant to be the real money maker, but whatever I do I can't seem to make it work.

>a large part of running a business is dealing with red tape and taxes and other bureaucracy and one can and should definitely learn that from reading about it
absolutely but to advise on that we'd need to know OP's location and field.

even then nothing anyone here says is a substitute for a good lawyer and - as you say- an accountant.

I enjoyed reading your experiences because I relate to them, (it wasn't what I expected, I spend most of my time doing things other than what my business does, and taxes are amazingly high).

but even that is situational. That may be our experience. It might even be most owners' experience. But it probably isn't some universal law that applies to everyone in every business everywhere.

the scope of the question is too broad and the knowledge required too specific.

>the scope of the question is too broad and the knowledge required too specific.

I agree. I would also like to read more stories.

>mfw taxman gets more money than the employees actually doing work

I studied tax law in Europe. And have a neat little flawless administration. I honestly believe 90% of startups fuck up their administration.

My brother has his own business as well. I don't think he has any administration. When he entered his tax form he selected he had no substantial interest in any business because he didn't know what it was. In my mind I was thinking: HOLY SHIT. But I told him it might be a good idea starting with those things.

Yeah, I'm in the US. I think I pay about 55% tax rate on personal income after self-employment and state taxes.

I prefer to roll money back into my business and have it taxed at the much lower capital gains rate if I sell. It just makes more sense to buy vehicles and office space/equipment than to give half my profits to the tax man.

>It just makes more sense to buy vehicles and office space/equipment
should probably add that these are also taxed at a higher rate for business though.

running a business costs way more than most people realize. Everything costs more.

Same shit here in germany.
Have half a mind to relocate to Estonia or something.

I save myself a headache and just say the clients are paying my taxes. I do pass the costs on to them. Everyone does.

That's odd. I'm from the Netherlands, so I can't really judge your situation. But owning (or renting) a car and an office space here as a private person means you won't get anything back. While if you do it as a business you can subtract the VAT, the fuel and the maintenance costs. Or you can at least write it off to some extend.

I can write it off of my federal taxes 100%

but local property taxes on business property are about 3 times higher than on personal property. The county and city take a big cut.

That's pretty fucked up. Here they don't make that distinction.

I think the reasoning is that you're getting rich off the community so you're expected to give more back.

I don't mind it, it's just a business expense. If I want more money after taxes I'll go make more.

On one of my sites; I have a popup on exit which says:
"10% discount! To instantly redeem your 10% off code, simply enter your email below. Limited time offer." I get heaps of signups on it

Also, I ran a survey to gain information within my target demographic, I incentivized it by saying every respondent would get a 15% discount code. 90% of those who filled out the survey answered "yes" to "Would you like to receive your complimentary 15% discount code?" and so I got their email

Incentivization is the best way

I've found that a lot of taxes are pretty hard to justify. Especially when they are based on a fiction.

It's all a fiction, you get ahead by ignoring the morality of it and optimizing within the constraints.

Normies worry about their tax rate. A true businessman doesn't care because it simply doesn't matter.

Of course the goal is to make so much money it doesn't matter if 50% is stolen. But getting there is much harder with such tax rates, especially for start ups.

I pay around 4.5k a month in taxes. That's not much for a large business, but for my start up, it could be a new workstation or a full time professional 3D artist or a larger office or advertising budget. .. instead It's just gone. It's sort of coming back in because of write offs but what's the point of such a circular system? It's like a snake eating it's own tail.

If you raise my taxes I raise my prices, so the end user is paying more taxes, not me.

if you lower my taxes I don't make more money because my competitors lower their prices and the end user saves.

so ultimately taxes don't affect business owners. They motivate us to reinvest in the US, but they aren't going to make us earn less. It's just the cost of doing business and all businesses have to add it in.

where it really helps is in credit and capital gains. because to some extent banks and buyers look at gross. Gross is inflated by the cost of taxes.

How is the pay to do freelancer? Any difference?

I'd like to do freelance but I'm afraid I couldn't get any jobs and bills won't pay by itself.

sorry for my english

>where it really helps is in credit and capital gains. because to some extent banks and buyers look at gross. Gross is inflated by the cost of taxes

or to put it very simply-
if you lower my taxes my net worth goes down. If you raise them it goes up. That's a real way to make money.

Thanks for all this user. I'm starting a small business with an online store as well as looking into selling at events in my city and maybe even getting my product in actual stores once I have some numbers to show them.

I thought of dropshipping and affiliate marketing and stuff like that but I've decided I'd rather spend time focusing on building a brand/product from scratch that I can actually be proud of and enjoy working with.

Good to hear user.
I've done dropshipping, had my own brand and ran my own business; and the one I was most committed to was my own business - providing my own service with my name on it. Best of luck to you!

Im in the process if starting up a formwork distribution business in Australia.

There was a steel material distributer that gave 10/10 advice but i was able to reply to him and thread died.

Bumping so he might see it and help you out OP