Hello,
So I am starting a company with a group of friends at school. (I technically started it 4 months ago) and I have some questions:
So my company is about replacing regular school with full-time online education, and creating an archival system that keeps data of every website on the web.
I want some advice on how I can grow my company from $0 dollars to a reasonable income. I am pretty serious about this btw.
How can I make sure that when I fire someone I fire them for a legit reason?
I fired someone the other day for copying our licensed work and being inactive, and now he is rebelling against us.
How does your company make money? What is it revenue stream?
and what’s a reasonable income for you?
How do your employees/workers know what’s allowed, not allowed?
Did they sign/read a company policy so they know what’s allowed/not allowed to do in your company?
I mean in some of the big companies, employees are allowed to bring pets, play ping pong, take a nap during the day. So for these companies, these behavior are not grounds for firing. But for other companies, sleeping on the job, or playing instead of doing work are grounds for firing.
So you need to be clear on your ground rules on your official company policy handout.
And may be a good idea to have someone knowledgeable look at your company policy manual to make sure they’re not running against your state rules.
A reasonable income for me is that in which I can afford an education for Stanford University’s four year CS program.
250,000 dollars over a period of 5 years. Basically 50 grand a year.
In fact my employees dont know what is allowed and what isnt. Good idea. I will make a doc on the rules.
we have a gofundme page and we are currently collecting donations. if there is any other way I can accumulate some money please tell me. I am new to business, I need some advice. If I am doing something wrong please tell me
First, you need to solve a problem, meet a need, provide a service, or provide a product that people want so bad that they’re willing to pay for it… i.e. they want to scream “shut up and take my money”
What is it you’re offering that people want to bad and will be willing to pay for it?
Gofundme is asking for donations… that’s not a revenue stream, well maybe it is, but it’s not sustainable in the long run.
This is stuff that will happen 2~3 years down the line. RN we are just focusing on learning and building. And I still have to study the internet fully. Man my stack is huge
Amazon affiliate links can provide you some passive income… depending on your traffic, and number of people that bought links through you, and total amount they spent on Amazon, and on which product categories they bought from (electronics, homegoods, books, services, etc), you can earn varying amount of percentages based on category and sales volume.
If you have the traffic and a participating audience, this can become lucrative. But Amazon over the years have lowered commissions and implemented caps on certain categories so income from these is not as big as it used to.
In addition to what @camperextraordinaire said, think about what you can do for others before thinking about what others can do for you.
We are now at the turning point where we are starting to see serious discussions about what is and isn’t acceptable business practices particularly in the tech industry. If you just want to get enough money to fund a degree at Stanford (which, by the way, in many cases contradicts your statement of “having school online, it is 2018 and we are still going to school in a building. We should be at home”), you’d probably be better off cloning something and just doing slightly better than your competition in a saturated market (that way you that there are customers).
Stop trying to be a smart arse to someone who offered you help unconditionally would be a great first step to starting a successful business. (I guess you could get away with that in some cultures if you have a degree from Stanford, but this isn’t one of them).
Learn what a business is. This includes business ethics, how to treat/pay employees, tax requirements, 1000 other things.
Learn how to actually start a business that can accept money or donations. You do not want to make income and find out 5 years down the line that your business owes 42K in taxes.
Find a problem, then a solution. The problem that you state is students should learn at home. There are so many online programs for K-grad. How will yours STAND OUT?