From “Side-Project” to Company

Piyushi Bishnoi
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

When I pull up my LinkedIn, I see in big letters, “Founder, CEO”. I look at many of the people I’m connected with, and the many profiles that have similar titles. What does it mean to be a founder? What does it mean to be a CEO? Why can we not be satisfied by calling a spade a spade — our project is merely a project until it comes to fruition with a few key components like a minimum viable product, MVP, a growth model, and a profitability model.

This is something that has racked my brain ever since I myself typed those words on my profile, uttered those words at networking sessions, and filled out applications for various conferences. When I was faced with questions associated with my above metrics to be a company, I didn’t have many answers, I was just in an “early stage”. What can we do to move ourselves to that next level?

As I am currently in the process of earning the title I gave myself on LinkedIn, I did a lot of research on what makes an idea into a company, and I thought I could share a few of those thoughts:

  1. Define your goal

Let’s use an example of cookies. Say you really love cookies, and you want to come up with a great cookie recipe. You spend time making many batches, and suddenly you find the perfect ingredient proportions and they taste insanely good. What’s next? What is your goal with these cookies? If your goal is to share these cookies with friends and family, maybe you don’t need to make it a company, it was just a cool baking project. However, maybe you realize that this is a recipe that you want people you don’t know to experience. Do you want them to experience it from your baking? Do you want them to bake it themselves? Do you want them to buy it from a store? Defining this goal is the first step to see if your idea will develop into a company.

2. Determine Your Time Allowance

It’s important to know how much time you are willing to dedicate to this idea. If you work somewhere that you know will be taking most of your time for the next 6 months, maybe your idea won’t be a company just yet, and that’s perfectly fine! It’s important to project how much time would it take for you and your possible partner(s) to get your idea to the next level, and see if you have that much time on hand. To continue with the cookie example, if you wanted to start selling the cookies online, you would need to figure out how long it would take to make a website, attract buyers, set up a payment system, spend time baking large batches, packing, and shipping them out, and that’s not even all of it! If that’s not possible, then it may be better to pursue it at a later time, and keep it as a side-project.

3. Create Your MVP, or at Least a Website

This one could be a little controversial, but every time I go anywhere and talk about my side-project as a company I am asked for one of three things: the product/app, the website, or a business card. It is really important to have something that proves that you are serious about your project becoming something more than a few scribbles on pen and paper. If you aren’t sure about too many specifics, or don’t think you have enough to populate many tabs in a website, start with a landing page. The best way to attract and retain interest at the very early stage of your company is by putting a landing page with a field for people to sign up to be beta testers or receive updates. For your cookie company, you could have the page display a picture of your delicious cookies, what they would one be buying, and a sign-up list. If you are creating an app, and have a bit of development experience, it also could be good to at least have a basic app created. Ionic is a great way to whip up a simple app to start.

4. Make it Official

The great thing about thoughts are that they can be shared; the same goes for ideas. If you’re trying to make that idea or project into a company, however, you probably don’t want someone to share it and then create it themselves. There are many ways to give your project some legitimacy. If your idea is one that is unique and “is a new or useful process” or product, then it might be beneficial to file a patent. If it doesn’t really fall within those categories, filing your product so it becomes an LLC, DBA, or corporation is a great idea. For your cookie company, an LLC might be best, because unless you plan to have a very structured and scaled-up cookie empire, and LLC will be good enough. A DBA in this case may not be advised, as the food/product industry has a high liability, and a DBA will tie the liability to you. Each of these filings has different liabilities and are useful for different needs, which is why having your goal set for the company is helpful before filing. Filing a company does cost a fee, but that varies by state, so that would be good to check it out.

5. Determine Your Profitability

Whether your company will be a non-profit or for-profit company, it will need money coming from somewhere. In your cookie company, there could be funds coming from various streams, whether it be from sponsorships by the ingredient companies, the revenues from cookie sales, or a company buying the recipe off of you! It is really important to have an initial idea of how you want your idea to attract some funds. This may be via fundraising, creating with your own funds (bootstrap), or creating partnerships with government entities for grants. Understanding where you want your money to come from, how much you need to get your side-project to company level, and what part of your project will actually bring in money is key. It would be helpful to do some research on the advantages and disadvantages of the different types of money streams.

I hope these tips help all of you from getting your idea or project to company-level, and hope you follow along on my journey! If you would like to read more, you can follow my feed :) .

Piyushi Bishnoi

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Exploring all interests from entrepreneurship to growth to health/wellness to productivity. Avid reader, avid runner, and future company founder :)