Resources

How I Built This. by NPR . It is the best podcast on the entrepreneurial story. Some of our favorites are Dyson, Dell, and Instagram. You can get a lot from listening to the stories of others.

Additionally, we subscribe to the newsletter from the Polsky Entrepreneurship Center at U Chicago. It is a weekly roundup from one of the premier university entrepreneurship programs.

If we only had one book to read, it would be Disciplined Entrepreneurship. Bill Aulet lays out the steps to a successful venture in clear and compelling language.

BIZEE.com is priced at a premium but is well organized and convenient allowing you to focus on building the business. You can go direct to any state and file paperwork, but there always seems to be a wrong form or missing signature. In our experience, BIZEE is simply better at it.

Our advice is to use a placeholder name out of the gate. Do your research on your actual name so you can get an intuitive URL and one that isn't competing with a massive company. In terms of URL management, GODADDY.com is solid. There are numerous AI logo services such as www.logojoy.com and online service marketplaces such as FIVERR . BTW more expensive doesn't necessarily mean better.

We have a love hate relationship with QuickBooks. It is NOT easy to use. But it is the only game in town. An ideal scenario is to have an accountant set it up for you and you do the daily activity. It doesn't always work that way. We have learned the hard way that getting the accounting right from the beginning is way easier. So it is worth some watching some YOUTUBE videos. Claude.ai is also good at accounting. You can ask Claude the best general ledger codes for your business or how to post a certain journal entry. It is a great way to understand how the accounting should work for the business.

We used to build custom websites for a living. And there is certainly a place for that when you are talking complex, high intensity sites. But to just hang a shingle, WIX and Squarespace are perfect.

Shopify is running away with this space. Unless you have a complicated sales process or a product / service that doesn't fit, it really hard to argue against Shopify. Focus your money on great product shots and on the product itself.

ChatAgency will get you pointed in the right direction on SEO. If you want to go deeper, we like www.answerthepublic.com to assess a space. It does a nice job of showing you the actual questions being asked in Amazon and Google. It can give you empirical data on how people see the space. You might convince yourself that people search for Vegan brownies, but they really search for Vegan deserts at 10x the volume. We also like www.semrush.com to get a good idea of what search terms cost. In a perfect world, do this analysis before you choose your name. Fnally, the tools from Google, Meta, etc are very good. You just have to undersatnd that they are there to help you spend moeny, not save it.