bigtoga

Check out 37signals.com and BaseCamp. There are tons of books - a little google searching is in order.

Wow - talk about an optimistic approach to business. I have to say that IMO this is horrible advice. You need a lawyer for equity deals - you'll never convince me otherwise. Your "simple agreement" is fine - as long as it was written/reviewed by an atty w/ experience in this particular subject. Having a partner, dissolving a partnership, firing a partner - those are rarely simple "plug and play from a handbook" type of situations. You need a document that handles everything known to man. The more you spend up front on this one not-simple matter means you spend less down the road.

"If you can't afford to do it right, don't do it at all." You'll potentially save yourself a ton of money and stress if you follow that sentence. Don't start your business if you can't do the legal/tax stuff correctly. Don't go into a partnership if you can't do the legal/tax stuff correctly. Any other advice IMO is just overly optimistic. "But it'll never happen to me and my best mate, Jimmy - we'll be buddies for life!" Of course you will...

In my experience, elance is not the place for large jobs (and I've tried). I would strongly suggest people not start out w/ a large job on elance and instead start w/ smaller piecemeal-type work.

Since you mention discountasp.net I wanted to say that, for most people, discountasp.net is the most expensive shared hosting you can find. I've been very disappointed w/ the quality of service from every shared host I've used in the past two years - and by "service" I mean both the speed and the technical support. I'm exclusively an ASP.NET person so I don't have experiences w/ php hosts to compare against.

You could try a post at webmasterworld.com. I have no experience selling but I see those on there from time to time. good luck!

I've done some posting on elance before and I will suggest to start with the smallest job (i.e. cheapest) first to get used to working with bids and vendors. Start with a logo + business identity for $300-$500, go with only 5-star people with 6+ months of feedback. Once you have that, do a 3-5 page website for $300-$500. By now you should have a good feel for (1) the process, and (2) the people so now's the time to bump it up to a $1000 or $2000 project.

Those places really aren't the place for $2000+ projects IMO.

Tinyurl: http://tinyurl.com/

You're probably better off posting this at webmasterworld.com than here.

If you are into Windows, you might want to check out our server admin tutorials: http://www.learnwindows2003.com/

Well said - good ideas. I like mobsocial best :)

Dual 22s

I just came across this and wanted to add my thoughts and reach out to the other Dallas startups.

1) Is Dallas a good city for startups? That depends on your involvement/wants/definition. There's a lot of money here and a lot of good MBA schools/programs around. If you had asked, Is Dallas a good city for hackers?, I would've probably said, "Not really since we don't have a quality tech school."

2) My startup, LearnItfirst.com (video training), is hiring both permanent and interns: http://www.learnitfirst.com/jobs/

Someone posted a StartUpDrinks.com group: http://dallas.startupdrinks.com/

For ideas I use OneNote (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/default.aspx). I'm a Windows user and it is part of the Office suite. OneNote is great for bringing order and search to disorganized ideas.

I'm ENTJ - just like Madonna and Whoopi Goldberg!

sorry but that format is not interesting to me. bullet points, headlines, something needs to be in there for me. just my opinion.

I'm not at all interested in nasa spam here. As per the YC guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

How about these:

Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works: http://tinyurl.com/3ftxva

Founders at Work:http://tinyurl.com/4cytwa

(links are to amazon.com)

egads - he didn't say he wanted to be bored and made to feel like *&$% ;)

You have a decision to make: can you self-insure for the minor costs or not? By "self-insure", I mean can you handle up to $2500 or $5000 per year of health costs if you had to? You can get $500 deductible insurance plan for $400-$600 or $5000 deductible plan for $180-$250.

Look for an HSA or ask someone for help on those.

wow - useful content? It's a new day!

I'd budget 3-6 months if you aren't networking w. smart people already. I've tried dice, monster, craigslist and I expect it takes me 150-200 resumes before I get to one interview.

cheezburgers

Meh. I ran it and it has lots of reported things that are not real problems.

Oh, and BTW - I need someone to do more web stuff such as SEO , SEM, PPC if that matters.

Here's the book: http://tinyurl.com/3kr99k

It deals a lot w/ hiring interns-to-become-full-timers.

Zoho for me. I like having one company to go to for project mgmt, CRM, docs, etc.

I don't have a degree either and I have to admit: when I was in my 20s, it bothered me too as I thought, "I might be missing out on something." Today though, running my own business, I see that it worked out perfectly. In my latest job posting (for a .NET/SQL dev), I wrote "A Computer Science degree is not required but helpful" because I don't equate degree to good code.

Joel Spolsky talks about this in his book and he prefers a degree or, if not a degree, evidence that the person had to go through some sort of highly selective process.

I've been using GC for about 18 mths and we've had more than 20x the chargebacks that we've had on PayPal - just FYI.

Wait - so instead of spending $11.99 on a book that tells you what to do, you advocate spending tons of money and losing tons of sales while you reinvent the wheel? Come on, man...