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Week four.
I should probably start writing in this journal semi-regularly, so in another few months when people come back to take a look, they can see the process we took in order to get here. :)
I somehow seem to have managed to get myself elected as this enterprise's Suit. This is amusing to anyone who actually knows me. It also means that the majority of my time so far has been involved with business stuff -- research, paperwork, business plans, accountancy, etc.
So yesterday, the paperwork officially establishing Dreamwidth Studios, LLC as a Maryland company went in the mail. The state of Maryland, bless them, has an amusing racket: the registration fee is $100, but if you want the registration processed in less than 6-8 weeks, it's another $50. Fun times! We should have the certificate of incorporation back in 5-7 business days (according to the state, at least), at which point we get to file for a Federal tax ID number (as well as start filing for all the other fun stuff -- trademark registration, copyright designated agency, account with the NCMEC, Safe Harbor registration for compliance with EU data privacy regulations, etc, etc -- that doing business online and globally requires). We've also written up our operating agreement, which will get posted so everyone can satisfy themselves that we're a). in this for the long haul and b). not evil.
Big task this weekend: finishing up the formal business plan (complete with numbers! have I mentioned I hate numbers?) so that we can have a solid, rational package to show around if we want to take out loans. (Still undecided as to whether we want to do bank loan to set up the necessary infrastructure to colocate immediately, or use cheaper but less reliable hosted solutions up front until we can build up the war chest from payments. Advantages and disadvantages to both.)
We have preliminary project specs written for half the things we want to do pre-launch (our motto: we're not a clone, we're a fork, and we want to do the things we always wanted to do on LJ and couldn't), and we've been amusing ourselves (okay, mostly me) by adding more and more tasks to the do-list. It's vaguely depressing to be adding tasks and not removing them all the time, but at least it means that we're less likely to forget shit as we go, right?
Current tasks on the task list: 96. I predict this number will continue to go up, not down, for a while yet.
I should probably start writing in this journal semi-regularly, so in another few months when people come back to take a look, they can see the process we took in order to get here. :)
I somehow seem to have managed to get myself elected as this enterprise's Suit. This is amusing to anyone who actually knows me. It also means that the majority of my time so far has been involved with business stuff -- research, paperwork, business plans, accountancy, etc.
So yesterday, the paperwork officially establishing Dreamwidth Studios, LLC as a Maryland company went in the mail. The state of Maryland, bless them, has an amusing racket: the registration fee is $100, but if you want the registration processed in less than 6-8 weeks, it's another $50. Fun times! We should have the certificate of incorporation back in 5-7 business days (according to the state, at least), at which point we get to file for a Federal tax ID number (as well as start filing for all the other fun stuff -- trademark registration, copyright designated agency, account with the NCMEC, Safe Harbor registration for compliance with EU data privacy regulations, etc, etc -- that doing business online and globally requires). We've also written up our operating agreement, which will get posted so everyone can satisfy themselves that we're a). in this for the long haul and b). not evil.
Big task this weekend: finishing up the formal business plan (complete with numbers! have I mentioned I hate numbers?) so that we can have a solid, rational package to show around if we want to take out loans. (Still undecided as to whether we want to do bank loan to set up the necessary infrastructure to colocate immediately, or use cheaper but less reliable hosted solutions up front until we can build up the war chest from payments. Advantages and disadvantages to both.)
We have preliminary project specs written for half the things we want to do pre-launch (our motto: we're not a clone, we're a fork, and we want to do the things we always wanted to do on LJ and couldn't), and we've been amusing ourselves (okay, mostly me) by adding more and more tasks to the do-list. It's vaguely depressing to be adding tasks and not removing them all the time, but at least it means that we're less likely to forget shit as we go, right?
Current tasks on the task list: 96. I predict this number will continue to go up, not down, for a while yet.
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