Starting a coaster company
About a month ago Tom announced the start of Coastermatic. Coastermatic is a service that allows Instagram users to print their photos on to stone coasters. We’ve been working on it rather intensely for the last 5 weeks and are getting pretty close to launch.
After talking about the concept and logistics with a few people who are part of the growing ecosystem of Instagram products, Tom and I decided to make Coastermatic an LLC. LLC stands for ‘Limited Liability Company’, which basically means the finances for the company are separate from our personal accounts. We’re hoping it’ll be smooth sailing for Coastermatic, but its better to be safe than sorry.
What did it take to get our coasterican ship in the water? A crash course in governmental + banking bureaucracy. I’ve spent far too much time online and on hold trying to figure this all out, so I’ve decided to detail the process here. Hopefully this post will save a people in a similar situation some time and frustration.
1. Register in Delaware
We’re based in NYC, and the process for setting up an LLC in New York is a little arduous. Namely, you need to publish a notice of the formation of your company for 6 weeks in 2 newspapers. This takes a lot of time, and money, two things that we don’t have.
2. Use Legalzoom.com and order:
- Their basic LLC package with a Tax ID ~$325
- A rush upgrade, so it takes 10 days instead of 35, ~$150
- Certificate of Good Standing for Delaware. ~$180
Legalzoom was recommended to us in our Entrepreneurial Design class. They were fine to work with, and have helpful staff. Note that the Certificate of Good Standing is really important. We missed this part, and are now stuck waiting for it.
3. Authority to do business in NY
Before you can open a bank account in NY, you need a Certificate Under Seal in NY state. This is confusingly also referred to as a Certificate of Good Standing or Certificate of Existence. This certificate means you’ve told NY and the IRS that you intend to do business here, so they can tax you for it.
This costs around $250, and to get it you’ll need:
- Certificate of Good Standing from the home state of your LLC, Delaware for us
- Application for Authority - Form 1361
- Credit/Debit Card Payment - Form 1515
Fax it all through to the Department of State, Division of Corporations. Their uninformative page on the topic is here and includes the fax number.
4. Opening a bank account
Once your business shows up in the Corporation and Business Entity Database you’re good to go. Find a bank where you can speak to someone in person. I tried to set up an account online, then via phone + email. Both attempts were completely useless. Do this one IRL and it’s much easier.
5. Hook up your accounts and launch!
We’re set back a bit since we didn’t do everything in this order, but we should be ready to roll in a week or so. We’re using Stripe for our online orders, integrating with them has been a dream. It’s so nice to be able to style out our own payment form.
Be on the look out this week for Episode 1 of Coastervision, a video series about the possibilities of coasters. Also, join our signup list, where we’ll be sending a special treat along with our launch announcement.
Elusive confidence
Down at SXSW, earlier this month, I had a few fantastic conversations with women who work in the digital + creative industry. I spoke with them about their work and how they got to where they are today. These talks ended up going deeper into conversations about what it feels like to be bold with your ideas. One of them said, “For a while, I never really knew what everyone else was doing, but I assumed they did it better than me.” This shot through me like a bolt and made me instantly realize a couple of things:
1. I often make the same assumption.
2. I’m not alone.
This got me thinking about why I, and other women, often undervalue their work. I know that this isn’t a problem restricted to the female gender, but there is something pervasive in our culture and that causes more women than men to undervalue their work and their opinions.
Sheryl Sandberg hits on this point in her talk, Why we have too few women leaders. She references a few studies that show how women systematically underestimate their own abilities, and attribute their success to external factors.
This is a problem, and not just for women, but for everyone. As the old guard falls around us, being able to see problems from as many angles as possible is steadily becoming a necessity. You can’t disrupt industry from the inside, and in order to face the future we need a more gender and ethnically diverse range of problem solvers. More importantly, to get there, we need as many people as possible to be confident with their ideas, who understand and embrace the fact that their experience in the world gives them a unique perspective.
So, where do we go from here? After chatting with a few people about this issue, I’ve got a few starting points:
- Know your worth, this means actually talking to people about money
- Be vocal, blogging is really hard, but do it anyway
- Say no, to projects that don’t fit in the ‘feature list’ of your life
- Take the time, daily, to reflect positively on your work
This is where I’m at, if you have anything to add, I’d love to hear from you.
Good ideas are not everywhere.
Strange as it sounds, this was a somewhat surprising insight. At grad school we’re constantly surrounded by concepting sessions, thesis ideas, and astounding guest lectures; so much so that I tend to forget that theres a lot of half-baked work out there.
The startup mania that happens at SXSW was a rather amazing reminder of how many undercooked or just downright creepy ideas become a reality. On the first night, Prachi and I went to a few sites for the Startup Crawl. We were excited to see new ideas and speak to people about their startup experience, but instead we found offices with beer pong, meeting rooms named after sushi, and services that hold on to your social network activity…for your employer. Each to their own, but we didn’t find there was much to construct conversation around. The abundance of bad office furniture didn’t help either.
A couple of nights later, I had the opportunity to meet a few new people over dinner. One person I spoke to had launched a startup just the day before, upon arrival to SXSW. He told me, proudly, about how they’d conceived and built their service in a very compressed time frame, I suspect without much user testing and iteration or even testing if there was any demand for the product in the first place.
Believe it or not, but I found this all really inspiring. It gave me renewed faith in my work and my ideas. Thanks to my time at SVAIXD, it seems obvious to me that you must consider and design for the people at the center of a product or service, and not for the sake of building the product itself, but I realized that’s an insight not everyone has.
