For about a year now I’ve been sitting on a business idea. It’s not, like, the kind of business idea that makes anyone rich. On the sliding scale from lemonade stand to Amazon, this is much closer to the former. I think it will probably turn a profit, but I have no illusions about striking it rich and launching myself onto the pages of Forbes. Looking at the numbers realistically, I will be pleasantly surprised if I can make enough money to keep myself above the poverty line. It’s cliche, but I’m really not in it for the money, I’m in it for the thing.
My idea is for a board game, and it’s a game that I think is interesting to a wide range of people, and also deserves to be made, or at least attempted. I’m not going to share too many details, because if spending high school economics class watching clips of Shark Tank posted to YouTube has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t show your idea off until you have the legal grounds to sue any copycats into oblivion.
The obvious question of why I don’t sign it to a board game publisher has a complicated answer that relies on context that I don’t want to share at this time. But the long and short of it is that, if I’m doing this, it’s a project that I’m pursuing for personal reasons, and based on what I’ve heard from people who have gone through game publishing, they’re reasons I have cause to fear a publisher won’t respect, or might try to renege on. And besides that, there’s a part of me that’s tickled by the idea of being an entrepreneur and not having to answer to anyone (except, you know, manufacturers, contractors, accountants, taxes, regulators, and of course, consumers).
So I have the idea. I have a vague idea of what my end goals and expectations are, and some notion of the path towards them. Whether or not I’m “committed” in the sense that the guides say you need to be to be an entrepreneur, it’s an idea that I’d like to see exist, and I’m willing to throw what money and time I can spare at it. If there was any job that could ever motivate me to wake up early, this project would be one of them. The people I’ve talked to about this privately have told me it’s a good idea, including a business professor who, upon hearing my pitch, immediately endorsed it and tried to convert me to take her class. I think there’s something here.
And that’s about where I got stuck. I managed to make a prototype last summer, shortly after the idea popped into my head, and I’ve been play-testing and reviewing the rules a bit, but this is just circling the problem, and I know it. My next step is that I need to move forward on iterating the prototype towards a sellable product, and on looking into getting some cursory idea of costs. In practice this means getting quotes from manufacturers, which means I need some kind of email account and web presence.
Theoretically, I could throw up a Gmail account and launch that process off today (well, not today; I have homework, but basically any time). But conducting such business under my own name, or even under an arbitrary trade name is both murky for tax purposes, and depending on whom you consult, somewhat legally risky, since it puts all the liability squarely on your head. It’s also less clean than setting up a proper web platform with a fancy custom URL and a logo to handle everything centrally. It’s the same reason I have a patreon already set up for this blog- even if I’m not raking in the big bucks today, I’d rather be prepared for that day with the proper infrastructure than have to scramble if I suddenly go viral.
But setting up a website and branding materials effectively demands that I have, at the very least, an established brand name that can be trademarked. And doing that requires that I have the relevant paperwork filed to incorporate a business. It’s something of a point of no return, or at least a point past which returning becomes increasingly difficult and expensive. To this end I have spent quite a few free hours perusing the available information on starting up a startup and building a business. And let me just say, for as much talk that’s made about making life easy for small businesspeople, and lip service paid encouraging entrepreneurship, I expected it to be a heck of a lot more straightforward. Even the Small Business Administration, whose entire mandate is to make starting new businesses as painless as possible, is a convoluted and self-contradictory mess.
The problem isn’t so much a lack of available information as a lack of concrete information I can act upon. The website can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be written for laypeople or lawyers, and in failing to pick a side is decipherable to both. Most government websites are difficult to navigate, but I would’ve expected an agency whose sole job is to make life easier would be less egregious.
But it’s not that I can’t find a form to fill out. Again, I could always pick a name and a business structure out of a hat and plow forward. The differences between a partnership and an LLC at the size I’m looking at, while not irrelevant, are perhaps less of the deciding factor that they’re made out to be. The problem is figuring out a way to start this project that lets me keep my dependent status and hence my health insurance. Because while I’m willing to throw time and money and endure paperwork for this idea, I’m not willing to go without life support. Or rather, I’m not able to go without life support.
I think there’s a loophole that lets me have my cake, and also not die an agonizing death. But I’m not an expert on this field, and this isn’t a risk I want to take. If it’s a question between starting a business that I earnestly believe will change the world for the better, if only incrementally, and getting my life support, I’m going to pick the latter. This is really frustrating. I mean, I’m still head and shoulders above the people that have to pick between medicine and food, but choosing between medicine and chasing an opportunity is grating.
But what really gets me is the fact that this isn’t a problem in other countries, because other countries have guaranteed healthcare, so that potential entrepreneurs can try their hand without risking their lives. Many of these countries also have free education, transport infrastructure, and in some cases free government advisors for new businesses, all of which lower entry barriers for startups. But in the land of the free markets, we apparently hate entrepreneurs.
I digress. The point is, I’ve hit an entirely political roadblock, and it’s extremely discouraging. I haven’t set this project aside yet, because despite everything I still believe in it. Part of the reason I’m writing this is to remind myself of the excitement I feel to see this through. My hope is that I’ll be able to make some progress on this before summer. But we’ll see what’s possible for an entrepreneur in this allegedly business friendly country.