Many of us have our heart set on launching a company with a couple of friends, drinking a few beers and then retiring by 35. And why not!?!?

We’re living in the era of web 2.0. Designers have become content managers. Data has become art. Photos of your neighbor’s two-year-old riding your golden retriever could end up on the front page of Digg.

With so many options for making money, it’s inevitable any 19-year-old with a half-knowledge of HTML and CSS will be collecting Hamiltons in no time, right?

Well, it’s possible. That is, if you can handle the heat.

Where to start?

Launching your own business can be very intimidating. Our team battled doubts well into our secondary development stages. Sometimes, we didn’t know which way was up and where to go next.

What should you do first to try to minimize the headache?

How about deciding what you want to do and why to begin with. Business can be fun, but opening your own isn’t all jokes and candy dishes at meetings. It’s tough stuff.

Consider these benchmarks when getting started:

• Get a grip on why you want to go into business for yourself
  • Is it the fame? The promised fortune? Understand there’s a lot of work involved too
• Decide what services/products you want to sell/provide and how you will provide them
• Think about who you want to include: Is this a sole operation? Will mom be helping?
• Evaluate your costs: Your in the business to make money, but you have to invest some as well
• Decide on a name
  • This comes after the foundation stuff because you don’t want to get stumped for a week on finding a cutesy name that holds up your whole operation (like we did)

Sound daunting? Don’t get discouraged! Half the battle is throwing caution to the wind (but still keeping it on a leash) and fully committing yourself to your project.

If you don’t believe in your business, likely investors and clients/customers won’t either.

Got any cash?

Guess what folks, that old adage “It takes money to make money” is pretty close to the absolute truth. Lucky for most of us, the Internet has taken a lot of traditional overheard expenses out of the starting-your-own-business equation.

Although starting your own business isn’t yet free, the costs are next to nill if you’ve saved that creaking PC and behemoth monitor moms bought you for college.

Dust the moths off your wallet and start counting your initial start-up costs:

Start-up costs

Expenses	Explanations	Costs
Brainstorm	What are you going to sell? What's your services?	Free
Name your company	Figure out a name that you'll be proud to tell your parents	Free (possibly)
Register your company with the state	You have to be legit if you expect companies to take you seriously	$50 / one-time
Register your domain	This is your home on the Internet, make it count	$6.99 / year
Hosting	Buy a server or sign up with a hosting service	$10 / month
Cell phone	Clients need to talk to you, not just trade emails	$50/ month
Time	This stuff doesn't get done on its own. Be prepared for long hours	girlfriend, dog's love, sleep, latest episode of heroes
Total	Add it up	Sanity and some change

Although the mentioned monetary costs are minimal, you may be interested in loans and investment to get a new computer or pay some people to help you. If that’s the case, you’ll have to have a business plan and financial proposal ready to impress bankers and backers with.

Luckily, the founding members of Optimal Webworks (OWW) already had their own computers at the time they cooked up the idea to go into business. What they didn’t all have was time.

Where will you find the time?

The first two months of development of OWW very labor- and time-intensive. On top of our regular jobs, two of us were coming home directly after work and plugging into our home machines.

Luckily, one of our team members was already self-employed. This allowed her to work from home and move things along for us a lot quicker than we likely could have done if we all were slaving away at corporate jobs.

Take into consideration, when starting a new business, you have to invest time to develop a name, deciding which services/ products you’ll provide, writing a business plan, designing a site, ect., ect., ect.

So how can you carve out time to get started?

• Get a job that allows you enough leeway to slack off and work on your company during the day
• Quit your job altogether and eat, sleep and drink your company until your savings runs out
• Bring in partners who can help you do the work

Can you hack it?

We believe in you, for the sole reason that we believed in ourselves. We pooled our talents with no one showing us the way other than a few great bloggers and a bookshelf of library books.

You can do it!

You will find your own issues to hash out by the time you reach this point of your planning stages.

Some of ours issues included how we would manage our friendships and working relationships. Because the OWW team began as friends, we wanted and still want to make sure our relationships last. We also spent time thinking about how to create an incentives program to encourage outside people to help us so we wouldn’t have to bring in investors and give up ownership of our company.

Have we missed anything? Or do you have a success story you can tell? Comment and tell us, or send us an email.

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