macrobug

My wife’s company away day had
bouncy castles and things :-)

When Macrobug has thousands of employees we will hire the largest bouncy castles in the land for our away days!

I still can’t decide how much I should publish right now about my product plans, but I’ve achieved a couple of technical milestones in the past few days, and I am therefore happy. So there. I’ll have to leave you in suspense about what those milestones might actually be.

I have finally applied for my business bank account. They tend to need a lot of paperwork. It varies, but the particular bank I’m going with required:

• Two forms of ID for director, company secretary (this is standard due to the money laundering regulations).
• Copies of the company incorporation certificate and register of directors
• A business plan
• Details of the share allocation

The tricky bit is that any copies must be certified copies: for example signed by a doctor or other professional with a note to say that they have seen the original. Hence this paperwork took several weeks to get together.

So I’m quite relieved to have sent it off. Of course, they’ll probably take weeks to look at it then come back with lots of questions or bothers. Business banking seems to be some way behind the consumer sector in its customer-friendliness… the banks charge for transactions, pay little or no interest, and many of them expect you to have an interview with their small business advisor to persuade them that you really deserve a bank account.

How did I choose the bank account? (The useful bit for anyone who really is reading this blog thinking about starting their own company!) First I trundled round the high street and popped into NatWest and Barclays. NatWest were worse than useless; I had to queue for ages and eventually some bloke took my details and said he’d get back to me (he didn’t). Barclays were much better – I walked in off the street and (to my surprise) was able to see their small business advisor there and then. She was very helpful and it was appealing to have a real person to talk to; for example if I ever needed an overdraft.

However I also did some Googling – the bank with the most AdWords hits was Alliance & Leicester so I considered them. I also considered the Co-operative bank, because they run Smile, with whom I’ve got my current account.

In the end I looked up the cost of a few example transactions, and the credit interest rates, and what introductory charge-free period they gave.

This whole decision making process might look arbitrary – and it is – but I probably spent about 12 hours looking into banks, and the opportunity costs through lost earnings are likely to make up for cost savings of having spent much longer thinking about it. I suppose that depends on whether I make any money!!

In the end I decided to go for the Co-op as a compromise between the traditional high-street banks and the online Alliance & Leicester-type camp.

Meanwhile, all the company purchases (staples, paper, mobile phone bills, insurance, train fares) have come out of my own account, so at some point I’m going to have to put in an expense claim against myself. It’s nice being schizophrenic.

I got branded on the weekend by my friends at Pepsmedia.com. It was quite a revelation – watching Andrew extract a few ideas from me (really, just what colours I like, and a list of websites that I liked) and throw together a website. Quite a talent!

The best part of it was that the bug survived! Andrew rotated it 45° and, as if by magic, it looked cool! Well, at least, a lot less daft than it did before. He’s also grown thicker legs and a thicker shell, err, line around the edge. So here is Bug Mark IV.

I’m going to have to pick a name for him one day. Things like Boris or Bertie are a bit too obvious. Maybe “Bitty”, except that to anyone who hasn’t seen Little Britain it just sounds nerdy (and to anybody who has, it’s just plain scary). Hmmm (thinks…) Suggestions welcome…

Thanks to the wonderful people at Pepsmedia.com, we now have a brand new website!

OK, onto my first post about how you actually start a company, instead of all the philosophical ramblings so far. (They may well continue too though!)

First of all, you may not need to form a company – you can just be a “sole trader”. It’s simple, but there are two problems – one of them is that there is no separation between the assets of the company and you, so if the company is sued or goes bust, you get sued or go bust.

Secondly, if you want contracts in the IT industry at least, you normally have to be a limited company, as people won’t do business with individuals.

A “limited company” (specifically, a company limited by shares) is therefore probably what you want. It’s an independent legal entity, able to enter deals, have bank accounts, etc. etc. You, as the person starting the company, will be a Director. (Possibly the only director). Directors have legal responsibility if it all goes belly-up.

To create a limited company, you apply to Companies House in Cardiff. You need such things as Articles of Association (effectively the constitution of the company) and to decide how the shares should be held. You can do this all yourself, and I understand it’s not impossibly complicated, but it’s more usual to get somebody else to do it for you.

The two possibilities there are your accountant, or to buy a ready-made company off the web. The former is more expensive (£300ish as opposed to £90ish) but you, of course, get a real human being to talk to.

All you really need is proof of ID, an address (to be your main place of business) and you can do it. But, the company has all sorts of obligations – not the least of which is filing its tax returns each year. Added to which, the Inland Revenue will decide that they want to send you (personally) a self-assessment tax return. So, typically, you’ll have to go from doing zero tax returns per year to two – three if you register for VAT.

The only other thing you’ll need is a Company Secretary. If you’ve got two or more directors, one of them can be secretary – but otherwise you’ll have to find somebody else. Somebody responsible. Somebody with experience of running a business. Somebody organised. Naturally, therefore, I chose my Mum. In practice the Secretary doesn’t have to do anything much, perhaps signing a form once every few months, but they do have some liability if the tax return isn’t filed on time.

The company formation takes a couple of days (any big accountant will be able to do it electronically) and you end up with a company number. Later you can use this to get bank accounts and so forth.

I was reading about the built-in dictionary in Mac OS X. I didn’t know that it appeared whenever you held down Command-Control-D. Cool feature!

I happened to move my mouse over Adrian and Taylor, and the dictionary reported that they were both cities in south-Eastern Michigan. It’s true…

Where are your names?

Most people have to do some filing in their personal life. Whether it’s of computer documents, e-mails, or real physical pieces of paper, they have to decide a system. My system is rubbish – for example, I’ve got a “Travel and Health” folder, just because years ago I couldn’t decide which folder to put my E111 form into, so I combined them. I’ve got folders for DIY, for “Gadget Instructions” and two dozen other things. All of them are in tatty folders in a bookshelf which annoys my wife somewhat. My electronic life is only marginally better organised (my inbox always has thousands of unfiled mails in).

I was expecting to have to face the same problem with the business, and was not looking forward to it. But then, magically, a filing system that “just works” arrived in my brain. I suddenly realised there’s a reason big companies are split up the way they are. So, I have folders corresponding to all the departments of the large company I used to work for:

• Software Engineering
• Marketing
• Administration
• Finance
• Partnering
• Sales

I’ve done the same with e-mail, my hard disk, and real physical folders. So far it seems to work. Geenyus!

(And no, a post about filing systems is never going to be very interesting, so no moaning.)

I’ve realised that the name “Macrobug” is quite similar to Macsbug. But I suspect all the ‘new Mac users’ (post iMac or OS X) won’t have used it. It was the evil low-level debugging tool which sprang up in the event of a crash on a Mac. (If and only if you had it installed, of course).

It was quite clever really, although I can’t remember much about it.

The Macrobug user interfaces will be much less frightening than Macsbug, of course!

Most people appear to decide they want to start a company, then figure out what to do. Some people even seem to start a company without having any idea, then hope an idea will fall out of the sky.

I’m not quite that bad. Instead, for about five years now, I’ve maintained an “ideas list” of things I could do. Some of them are entirely hare-brained, for example, designing certain kinds of swimming pool whirlpools that I thought would be fun, then trying to sell the ideas to swimming pool designers. (No, I haven’t tried to do that).

At any given time I’ve vaguely been aware of the top-most idea: “this is what I’ll do if I have to become self-employed”.

So, for me, there wasn’t really a decision-making process about what idea to pursue – it was already sitting at the top of my list.

And that idea is debugging tools for Symbian OS. It’s much more specific than that, but I won’t go into the details. (Symbian OS, for those who aren’t techies, is the most popular open Operating System for mobile phones – the equivalent of Microsoft Windows. Debugging tools, meanwhile, are bits of software to help identify the cause of software problems – bugs).

This idea has some merits:

• I know roughly what I’m doing in this area
• There’s possibilities for consulting in this field, possibly retaining some of the software I develop, for future sales
• It gives me a theoretical way to move away from Symbian and into other areas, as the tools I have in mind can be applicable elsewhere
• There are exit strategies of selling the whole thing lock, stock and barrel, if I produce anything worth selling but can’t myself sell it

But some big downsides:

• Symbian themselves, and Nokia, already produce a selection of software tools and could trample me at a moment’s notice. The good news is that they aren’t doing what I’ve got in mind (hopefully that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing!)
• There aren’t a lot of customers. Really, the only customers with enough money to spend on extra tools are the phone manufacturers who use Symbian OS. That means – it’ll be a few big sales of my product or none at all.
• At least to begin with, I’ll be lurking in the shadow of Symbian. I’ll rely on their co-operation and help, or it will be literally impossible to do what I want.
• The tools I’ve got in mind may not be technically possible. Ha! How crazy am I?

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes!