We receive a comment from one of our users, Ben, who asked us the following:

“hey love your startup vlog.. i cant wait for the next installment! Can you please get into the logistics of running a startup? being in the same situation as you (starting out with a group of friends) how do you tackle the legal aspects of the startup, the hours put in by each member, the duties, the funding for daily activities… I dunno can you walk us through a typical day in the life of your startup? walk us around the office or something… that would be fun :)”

Ryan is working on the video portion, which will be the walk around the office. Which are all going to be separate videos because we all work from our homes. We are attempting this with no funding at first, which means we don’t have an office as offices cost money and we don’t have any to spare. However, the rest of the questions I can address right here and once Ryan gets back from Sundance he’ll be adding his piece to it.

Legal Aspects

We are an LLC and so how we setup our company was already covered in this article I did about the different business classes available in America.

The basic run down, though, is that we are member managers and so we are all equal. We have our duties and we know what we need to get done to make this company a success. All profits are shared and the “losses” are given to whoever put the money up to fund a certain aspect of the company.

The hours put in

Right now Kent and Adam are without a question putting in more effort to the creation of the actual product and they are doing an absolutely amazing job of it. They have logged countless hours crafting our vision in front of a glowing computer screen.

Which doesn’t mean that Ryan and I aren’t working hard at whatever we can do, as well. Once launched, we will be in charge of working on promotions, marketing, publicity, community management, customer service, and running the business side of things. So while Adam and Kent are working tirelessly now, Ryan and I are working on learning all the stuff we will need to know once we launch.

Last year, I took off more than two weeks from work to do an in-depth study of various social platforms out there. I wrote up wiki articles on our internal wiki about what they are, how to use them, and how we could market to them, or use them to our advantage to spread our name and gain users. I worked for a minimum of 16 hours a day just poring over sites, taking screen shots, writing documentation, and I did it with no extra pay and without being asked.

I did it because it’s information we needed. We all know what we need to do and how we need to do it to get this project going, and we have all made sacrifices for it. We have dealt with slow progress and low morale on the project, but in the end we came out feeling like champs when we overcame it and made some good progress.

Daily Activities

We each have our own activities. Adam works on the UI, the layout, etc. Kent works on all the backend coding, server maintenance, etc. Ryan works on learning new technologies, learning more of the business side of things, etc. I dedicate at least two hours a day to research related to us (our product, related sites, social web, entrepreneurism etc.) and I blog about it either here or at my own blog, Shuaism. Either way, it’s all information I put back into RoyalAnts. I also work with Ryan on marketing strategies, monetization strategies, customer service strategies, and all of the business strategies that need to be addressed.

We all have our parts to play, and we all know what is expected of us and we know what kind of work we need to get done. I’m very lucky to work with such a talented and smart group of people, and ever more lucky that they are my friends. This is extremely important for the project to survive.

I hope I’ve answered your questions and given some insight into the inner workings of our business.

Thank you, Ben, for the questions and sorry it took so long to reply, we’re improving all the time. If you have any other questions or any topics you want us to cover, please leave them in the comments below. Also, if you have any comments or something you want to leave with us, please leave them below as well.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

Image by AtomicJeep

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Home, Starting Up a Startup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.