Next was coming up with a name for my shop. A  few minutes of brainstorming later, I decided on Pixel Perfect Cases. I picked a dozen products from AliExpress that were a mix of unique and practical, bought a domain name on Namecheap, setup an Instagram account, and started testing drop shipping times. This was in March of 2020 and it was at this point when COVID hit the U.S hard and caused me to reevaluate everything. Not only had COVID caused big disruptions on the supply chains from China (a screen protector I ordered took a few months to arrive!) I thought I should take a step back and refocus my energies around those businesses most impacted by the pandemic. This lead to a couple of blog posts, doing customer discovery interviews, and supporting lots of small businesses in New York City which I chronicled on an Instagram account I created getthisbreadnyc.

I learned a lot from that journey and also spent time exploring 3D printing, working on a bunch of side projects, researching launching a popup coffee shop, and volunteering with Tech for Campaigns and The Knowledge House. But recently I decided that it was a good time to go back to the ecommerce shop and just launch it. I realized that I wanted to gain deeper empathy than I could gain from only talking to people. I wanted to experience problems first hand and build products to solve my own problems. In October, I went ahead and "launched" the site by putting some money into Google and Facebook ads. In the months since launching the site, I have had lots of learnings already.

Although I had some success with Google ads I quickly stopped running Facebook ads since I was having no success with them at all . Phone cases are not a discovery purchase which makes them poor products to sell through Facebook ads. If people need a phone case, they will search for it which is why Google ads were way more successful.

Running ads for a few weeks gave me the data I needed to figure out my cost of getting orders. Phone cases from China are cheap. Like very cheap. Just a few dollars. Since my goal was to just generate some revenue, I  originally had a 2x markup on what the cases cost me to buy from AliExpress. Most of my products ended up being listed at less than $5 on my site. I realized that was too low. It was costing me too much to acquire each customer so I was actively losing money. I increased the markup from AliExpress to 3x which allowed me to eek out a small amount of profit on each sale. I also experimented with rounding up the pricing to more aesthetic numbers (from $4.62 to $5 or $4.99) but that didn't make a difference.

The site also gave me experience with dealing with customer support. Just to enable Google ads, Google requires that your shop have a contact page with at least two ways of contacting your business. This can be a phone number, email address, or a physical address. Since I didn't want to give my physical address and hadn't setup a business phone or email yet, I used my personal email address and phone number to start. A personal Gmail address seemed unprofessional so soon after I setup a business email through Namecheap. All contact has been through email so far so I am still am using my personal phone number but I plan to change that as well and use a service like Reach that allows you to get a business phone number that forwards to your personal number. I might also try outsourcing the support work.

With my site setup, the orders quickly and steadily started coming in. And I could easily ramp up the sales by throwing more money into advertising.

This is when I started to experience the pains of Oberlo first hand. In 2017, Shopify acquired Lithuanian company Oberlo which was one of the most successful apps in their app store. Oberlo makes it easy to drop ship on Shopify. They accomplish this by "integrating" with AliExpress. Oberlo lets you search for products on AliExpress and import them into your Shopify store. When an order comes in, Oberlo connects to AliExpress to fulfill the order. This sounds great in theory but is an experience riddled with issues in practice. Once an order comes in, fulfillment through Oberlo is mostly done through a browser extension. This browser extension opens up a new window and goes to the AliExpress page for the item or items that are being ordered and adds them to the cart with a note letting the vendor know it is for drop shipping, the customer's address is added, and you manually press the checkout button. I ran into a few issues with this extension where the wrong product was selected and the customer didn't receive what they wanted. The AliExpress login system is also very buggy. You are frequently logged out of the site and logging back in often fails. I didn't have many orders so this was manageable but far from a scalable experience.

Once an order is placed, the drop shipping times are about a month long. For certain items this might be acceptable, but for phone cases this has proved to be problematic. Since people buy phone cases when they have an immediate need for one, they want it quickly. Shipping times have been the source of lots of customer emails. More than half of the customers (about 50) have emailed about the delivery time. This complaint is second to only the wrong order coming. The amount of customer support emails increased even more towards the end of December as people noticed the cases were taking a long time and they were hoping cases would be delivered by Christmas. I felt really bad about this so my solution for any who has reached out about the delivery time has been just to issue a full refund. Everyone has been fine with this so far. To solve this, I have tried adding more products from Spocket which is similar to Oberlo but focused on U.S. and U.K. based products. I was hoping this would lower the shipping times. Even though the Spocket selection is very limited compared to what is available on AliExpress, it allowed me to add more expensive products. I still have not gotten any sales on my Spocket products.

In the beginning of December, I stopped running ads effectively putting the shop on pause. I have learned all I wanted to from drop shipping and I no longer want to deal with it anymore. While I was frustrated with the experience, drop shipping was a good way to get data on what phones people are looking for cases for and which cases people like. Now I plan to continue my experiment by using this data to buy wholesale. I plan to buy some of the popular cases in bulk from AliExpress and ordering new products on Faire (a marketplace for buying wholesale from independent vendors). I also have a customer base of close to a 100 people that I know want these products. This next round of learning will allow me to gain direct experience with handling inventory and shipping. If this is mildly successful, it might be worth buying in larger quantities from AliExpress and then have them handled in Amazon FBA.

Here is a summary of my experience

Problems:

1. Drop shipping experience from China is still very clunky

2. Shipping times from China are prohibitive

3. Selection of products from U.S. based drop shipping suppliers is still small

5. Shopify analytics are not as advanced as you would like

Next steps:

1. Get resale license in New York
2. Handle inventory by wholesaling from AliExpress and Faire
3. Outsource customer support
4. Setup an accounting system
5. Figure out how to handle taxes for 2020

Start each day by drinking a glass of water - A-

I haven't been able to follow this to the letter but I have certainly achieved the spirit of this. Being home a lot more than planned this year, I have usually been drinking more than 1.5 liters of water a day. I don't start each day with a glass because I have been running a lot in the morning and haven't wanted to have to pee in the middle of the run so I usually wait to start drinking water during the run.

Limit social media to 30 minutes a day - C

While being home more has enabled me to drink more water, it has not helped me limit my social media consumption. I started the year strong with this track but with social distancing, a lot of IRL socializing has been replaced with social media even more than usual. I have also fallen victim to the doomscrolling trap that many have suffered from. I hope to be able to still use social media for socializing in a socially distant world while limiting my doomscrolling.

Read a book in Spanish - B

Spending a month in Colombia and taking private Spanish lessons there really helped improve my Spanish. Since then, I have pretty consistently been doing Duolingo every day and had my phone in Spanish which has helped me maintain. I still haven't made much progress on reading the book though so I need to start getting to that.

Reduce personal reliance on large tech companies - A-

I have made good progress on this: replacing Chrome with Brave and Firefox Mobile as my main browsers, using Duckduckgo instead of Chrome, and moving conversations from Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp to Signal. Because shopping has been happening so much more online, I haven't been able to reduce my reliance on Amazon as much as I would like but I do try to shop at company sites directly when I can.

Meatless Mondays - A+

Of the six goals that I initially highlighted, this is the one I've been most successful at. During lent, I started not having meat on Fridays as well and I have continued not eating meat on Mondays and Fridays. I have found good alternatives to meat including impossible burgers, tofu, quinoa, and egg whites. I have also been expanding my dairy alternatives. My fridge often contains pea milk, cashew milk, and oat milk now as well as eating vegan protein powder.

At least one blog post a month - B

This is another goal that I can be more consistent with since I missed a couple of months. I did write on other mediums in shorter formats though which I will continue. I felt that the gravity of a blog post was holding me back from writing more so I've been trying to write a few sentences every day on random thoughts.

That is the where I am at with the six goals I initially highlighted. As you can see, it is a mix bag but overall I am ok with where I am at and some of my energy shifted to other goals that I will mention.

Be healthier

• Eat less sugar, no desserts for dinner, eat less bread - A

With quarantine, I have been cooking a lot of home (5-6 days a week) which has made it easy to cook healthy and not buy sugary snacks are a lot of bread

• Track calories 3 times a week - A

Cooking a lot at home has also made it easier to track calories. The times that have been difficult to continue counting calories have usually been when I eat out a lot and have no idea how many calories were in what I ate.

Be fitter

• Deadlift 225 pounds - N/A

With gyms closed, this is a goal that I will probably not be able to make any progress on but I have been able to complete a goal I had for a few years that I wasn't able to accomplish which was to run a 5K with an average pace of less than 7 minutes a mile. My workouts have mostly consisted of a lot of running (40 miles a week lately since joining the Wolaco run team), peloton workouts every other day with my virtual workout group, and some dumbbell workouts with powerblocks I purchased at the start of quarantine)

• Complete a 5K, half marathon, and Spartan race

I have done all of these kind of! Although I wasn't able to do an in-person Spartan race, I was able to a virtual Spartan trifecta which consisted of a 5K, a 10K, and a half marathon with corresponding workouts all in one weekend. A Spartan trifecta is something I had been thinking of doing over the course of a year and would still like to do an in-person real one at some time.

Learn more

• Finish 2 master classes - B

I finished one so far which was by Malcom Gladwell on non-fiction writing. I love Gladwell's writing and storytelling ability even though I don't always agree on his takeaways. I'm currently reading his recent book David and Goliath. I also started the Master Class by Margaret Atwood but haven't made progress on it recently. I'm a big fan of the Handmaid's Tale Hulu series although I've been slow to finish it because I often need to take breaks when it gets too stressful which is often.

• Start a small business - C+

As I've talked about in other blog posts, I've made steps to starting a small business. I had been hoping to generate my first dollar in revenue by now. While in Colombia, I even created a dropshipping site on Shopify for Android cases. Dropshipping was an attractive small business to start because of its low capital committments and time investment but it is also very competitive and can be low margin. I had started to test out delivery times of the cases from different suppliers and build up a social media presence when the pandemic hit New York hard. Given the long deliver times I was seeing and a desire to focus more on the needs of small businesses dealing with the impact of shutdowns in the short term, I decided to pause on the dropshipping efforts. I've recently been ramping up my efforts to start a small business again though. I've been building up a new Instagram account called getthisbreadnyc to highlight small businesses reopening in New York.  I've also bought a 3D printer that I hope to use to donate 3D printed face shields and sell some of them on Etsy with a portion of the proceeds going to charity.

Live more

• Get an apartment in New York - A+

I spent February looking at over 30 apartments around the city and signed a lease at the end of February to move in on April 1st. This turned out not to be ideal timing with the pandemic reaching its peak in New York City around this time but I'm glad I was able to look at all the places I wanted in safety.

• Live in a foreign country for a month - A+

This was an easy one with my trip to Colombia.

Simplify finances

• Get an accountant - A+

Since I worked at Intuit for more than four years and worked on some features that touched TurboTax, I felt a certain amount of responsibility to use TurboTax to do my taxes. This year, my taxes got more complicated with moving to a new state and having an investment property in a third state that I decided finally getting an accountant was worth it

• Review expenses monthly - B

I have done a pretty good job at reviewing this and created a recurring expenses sheet in notion so I had an idea of where my money was going and looking at anything that I didn't really need.

• Sell Atlanta home - A+

I've had an investment property for a few years now that I bought through the marketplace Roofstock. Late last year, my tenant stopped paying rent and was unresponsive to any attempts at communication so I was forced to evict them. It turns out they had not been in the home for a while and had trashed a lot of it. After spending money to fix everything, I decided I didn't want to deal with being a landlord at the moment and decided I wanted to sell. I started this process before coronavirus was big in the United States but we weren't able to put it on the market until March. I was luckily able to quickly sell it at the price that I was looking for.

Diversify Income Streams

Influencers typically build up large loyal followings that they then monetize through various channels like YouTube ad revenue, Instagram sponsored posts, merchandise sales, and patreon subscriptions. These diversified income sources allow them to better ride out down periods in any one source.  There are a few good examples of fitness companies adopting this influencer strategy and finding new ways to monetize the loyal followings that they have also built. Barrys Bootcamp, a popular boutique studio gym with studios around the world, first started offering free Instagram live classes when they were forced to close their gyms, then they started selling bands and other workouts equipment for those classes and they have recently transitioned their website to enable you to purchase online classes which are delivered through password-protected Zoom links. Spartan Race, which puts on a series of obstacle course races, has also ramped up their merchandising efforts and hosted the world's largest virtual race last month. The race itself was free to participate in but included an option to pay to "upgrade" that included coveted finisher medals and t-shirts. A diversified small business income strategy can include merchandising, gift cards, food delivery, etc.  

Own your brand

Influencers know the importance of owning their brand and being free from the control of middle-men like publishers. This enables them to have a direct relationship with their followers/customers. The tools are already out there for this mass disintermediation. After creating a popular series of videos for Buzzfeed, The Try Guys, a group of four guys who live up to their name by trying various things, left Buzzfeed and ventured off to create their own production company. When liberal news site ThinkProgress shut down, writer Lindsay Gibbs created her own paid newsletter Power Plays on Substack which now has more than 1,000 subscribers paying up to $72 a year. Small businesses can learn from this and also try to maintain their independence from middle-men as they transition online. Becoming a third-party seller on Amazon seems great at first given the huge platform benefits but you are also opening up your business to easy commoditization. In the long term, it will be difficult to compete with Amazon itself when they control the platform, the logistics, and all your data. Creating an independent site through the numerous site building tools that provide e-commerce functionality gives businesses increased control and enables them to build up digital assets for the long term.

Content is king

In this new covid-world, people are eager for content and influencers stuck at home have been whipping up lots of it to meet this demand. Some influencers have turned to Cameo, a platform that allows celebrities of all levels to be paid for producing personal videos for their fans. It has allowed people like Instagram comedian Evan Breen to make more than $2,500 at once by filming over 100 short videos for fans. Being domain experts in their area, small businesses can also capitalize on this hunger for content. Recently, I started auditing a virtual class from the School of Poetic Computation in New York. The school was completely artist run and used to having small intimate in-person classes in their Manhattan space where they could teach students how to use coding and design in artistic ways. When COVID-19 cases started rising in the city, they proactively made the decision to cancel their spring session and public events. They quickly setup a GoFundMe with the hopes of raising $15,000 to cover two months of rent and operations to hold them over while they figured things out. Shortly after, they developed online courses and expand their reach by allowing people to audit their classes for just $125 compared to $1,200 for the full course. Other small businesses can learn from this story and start producing their own content and monetizing them with online classes on Teachable, scheduled zoom webinars through zmurl, or any of the other platforms available.

These are undeniably tough times for small businesses but there are some signs of hope in how small businesses are adapting and are continuing to adapt by borrowing strategies from influencers and others. Some of these adaptations will be short lived but I think many are here to stay or at least will stay around in different forms.

1. Get delivery from your favorite local restaurants
This site helps you find restaurants that you can order directly from: http://eat.bikky.com/ If you can't order directly from a restaurant, many of the popular food delivery services have suspended, lowered or delayed fees collection and offered a contactless delivery option. Doordash has created a website to support this movement: https://www.openfordelivery.com/

2. Take out food from your favorite local restaurants
While delivery is probably better for social distancing, ordering food for takeout is another option and even many restaurants that don't traditionally offer takeout have started offering it. Yelp just launched a new feature that allows restaurants to indicate if they are open for takeout or delivery: https://blog.yelp.com/…/yelp-covid-19-response-and-support-…

3. Buy gift cards from your favorite local businesses
This is especially helpful for providing cash to businesses like spas, nail salons, gym studios, and barbershops that have had to shut down because they have been labeled as non-essential and can not operate remotely. Here are a few sites that have launched as directories of businesses offering gift cards:
https://helpmainstreet.com/ (New York)
https://saveourfaves.org/ (San Francisco Bay Area)
https://supportlocal.usatoday.com/ (U.S. wide)
https://rallyforrestaurants.com/ (U.S. wide)

4. Buy dining bonds from your favorite local businesses
These are basically discounted gift cards with a maturity date 30 to 60 days in the future: https://supportrestaurants.org/

5. Support undocumented workers in the service industry
Undocumented workers are estimated to be 20% of the restaurant workforce but won't have access to any relief programs that are rolled out and can't apply for unemployment benefits. Instead of asking people to buy gift cards or merch, Win Son restaurant in Brooklyn is collecting funds to support their undocumented workers instead. You can send money to @win-son on venmo if you are interested. I haven't found any other restaurant doing anything similar yet.

6. Buy NYC restaurants wine and food
Restaurants have a ton of wine and food in inventory and some of it may go bad because of such sharp decreases in demand. Some restaurants have started putting some of their inventory on sale online. This site provides a map of restaurants you can buy from in New York: https://cellars.nyc/

7. Sign this petition created by chefs nationwide for governments to take action to support small businesses
https://www.change.org/p/mayors-governors-legislators-save-…

8. Buy merch from your favorite local small businesses
Check to see if your local boutique store, gyms, etc. has an online store you can buy from. I haven't found any online directories for this yet but if you are in the Chicago area, this clothing brand created a new line with proceeds going to hourly Chicago workers: https://stockmfgco.com/…/chicago-hospitality-united-100-of-…

9. Loan money interest fee to small businesses
Kiva has been providing small loans to businesses in the United States for a while now and they have increased their max loan size to $15k, made more businesses eligible, and offered a 6 month grace period in response to the coronavirus: https://www.kiva.org/invitedby/cnaut

10. Donate to a relief fund set up to help small businesses through this
There are a lot of funds being created to support small businesses and their workers. Some might appeal more to you than others depending on where you are or who you are most interested in supporting

ONE FAIR WAGE Tipped and Service Worker Support Fund (CA, CO, DC, FL, IL, MD, MA, MI, NJ, NY, PA): https://ofwemergencyfund.org/

Restaurant Workers Community Foundation Emergency Relief Fund: https://secure.restaurantworkerscf.org/…/resta…/donation.jsp

The Giving Kitchen in Georgia: https://connect.clickandpledge.com/…/d11bff52-0cd0-44d8-940…

Bartender Emergency Assistance Program: https://usbgfoundation.networkforgood.com/…/95524-covid-19-…

Southern Smoke in Houston: https://southernsmoke.org/

D.C. virtual tip jar is a list of service workers and restaurants and their venmo, cash app, paypal usernames that are asking for cash in the D.C. area: https://docs.google.com/…/1tz2uyhgy3MsBS68MHPzO8H…/htmlview…

Emergency Fund for U.S. Sommeliers: https://gofundme.com/f/sommelier-emergency-fund/

Another Round Another Rally Emergency Fund: https://www.classy.org/campaign/arar-tip-jar/c277086

Children of Restaurant Employees (CORE) Relief Program: https://core.kindful.com/

Seattle Hospitality Emergency Fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/seattle-hospitality-emergency-fu…

Family Meal in Oregon: https://www.familymealpdx.org/one-time-donation

Charlottesville Restaurant Community Fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/charlottesville-restaurant-commu…

Coronavirus Worker Relief Fund in D.C.: https://ramw.org/educated-eats

11. If you have the time and relevant skills, you can volunteer on some projects being spun up on helpwithcovid.com to help small businesses and their workers
Give local: https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/40
Find covid jobs: https://helpwithcovidF.com/projects/99
Digital vouchers: https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/129
Restaurant signup for delivery services: https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/46
Marketplace for freelancers: https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/111
Small business loan software: https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/93

If you know of any other opportunities to help let me know! Also, let me know if you personally know of any small businesses that are in need of help.

My resolutions tend to cover all aspects of my life and push me to be better. Some of my past resolutions include reading over 50 books, getting a driver's license, saving $25,000 to bootstrap my startup, squatting 225 pounds. and meditating once a week.

I used to do monthly check-ins on all my resolutions to make sure that I didn't get off track but I haven't done so in the last few years and I've noticed that there have been a few resolutions that I just completely forgot about so I will be bringing back the monthly check-ins for 2020. I might share some of them in this blog.

Here are some of the resolutions I have planned for 2020:

Start each day by drinking a glass of water

One of my resolutions last year was to drink a bottle of water a day after reading about all the great benefits drinking more water has for your body. That ended up being too ambitious especially with all the travel I did last year and I ended up quickly forgetting about it. Starting each day with a glass of water should be a more achievable resolution that will establish a good habit I can build on.

Limit social media to 30 minutes a day

Social media really is a blessing and a curse. Apps like Instagram and Facebook let me stay in touch with friends and family that are spread out across the globe. But it is also a source of distraction and anxiety. 30 minutes will be enough time for me to catch up on people's lives but not rely on it so much throughout the day to fill in any gaps that I'm ideal or looking to procrastinate. Most of my social media time goes to Instagram so I've set the native timer there to alert me when I've been on the app for more than 25 minutes during a day.

Read a book in Spanish

Spanish was the language I first spoke and was the primary way I communicated with my grandmother growing up. Despite that I never became super comfortable speaking it and my ability to speak it deteriorated once my grandmother passed away and I went off to college. I have been working on improving it again the last couple of years. I have been able to communicate better with my family on my recent trips to Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic. My long term goal is to get to a level where I am comfortable speaking Spanish in a business context over the next few years. I will be spending the next month in Medellin, Colombia where I hope to continue to improve and will be getting a private tutor. I will also go back to practicing Spanish on duolingo daily. During the Stanford Latino Alumni Summit last year, I bought a book in Spanish called Camino a Las Estrellas (A Path to the Stars) by Stanford alum Sylvia Acevedo who was a rocket scientist at NASA and is now the CEO of the Girl Scouts. My goal is to read this book by the end of the year. It will be the first book I've read in Spanish since my AP Spanish Literature class in high school.

Reduce personal reliance on large tech companies

Tech companies have become massive corporations that have huge influence on many aspects of our daily lives. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and Facebook are the five largest U.S companies by market capitalization. Living your tech life within these tech ecosystems can be really convenient with data moving seamlessly among all the apps in their ecosystems. But lately it's become clearer that the incentives have gotten too strong for these companies to do anything to keep you within their walls which has led to privacy concerns and anti-competitive practices. These companies are making it extremely difficult for startups to compete in any area that is even remotely close to any of their lines of business with them often either copying, blocking, or in the best case buying competing companies. This is why I want to take steps to reduce my reliance of these companies and especially on Amazon, Google, and Facebook which I believed are the largest culprits. I plan to shop less on Amazon and try to shop on other sites or in person. Since last year, I have been using Brave as my main browser instead of Google Chrome and this year I will be switching to Firefox mobile on my phone and DuckDuckGo for searching instead of Google search. Facebook is harder to free yourself from because their products have incredibly strong network effects and most of my friends and family use at least one of them: Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp. My plan to limit social media will help reduce my reliance on Facebook a little bit. I've also started to encourage my friends to message me on Signal which is open-sourced, end-to-end encrypted, and backed by a non-profit started by the founder of Whatsapp. I would also like to support more small businesses in general. Instead of Starbucks, I will go to local coffee shops. Instead of getting a membership at a large gym chain, I will go to local gyms.

Meatless Mondays

After thinking about all the negative effects of eating meat, I decided to set this resolution for environmental, ethical, and health reasons. I have already been trying to limit my red meat intake over the last few years but have never set any concrete goals around it. It would be difficult for me to go fully vegan right away but this resolution is an achievable step to maybe getting there one day. With the rapid progress in meat alternatives like impossible burgers I could see myself eventually becoming vegan.  I already don't eat diary because of my lactose intolerance and usually just eat chicken so forgoing it meat altogether one day a week is very doable. Growing up Catholic, Fridays during lent were days I would traditionally not eat meat. But I often found myself making too many exceptions for Fridays which I don't think will be the case for Mondays.

At least one blog post a month

I read a ton but don't give myself the time to reflect on all I've read. These blog posts have become a good way for me to stop, reflect, and articulate all that I'm thinking and learning about. I want to continue doing this in 2020 and become a better writer and thinker through it.

Digital-only banks can be a good fit for certain businesses. Azlo, for example, is a bank created just for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and founders. They offer some of the standard features that traditional banks offer like a debit card and FDIC-insured accounts. What sets them apart is their completely online experience, community features, Stripe/Square/PayPal integration, and built-in invoicing. For an online e-commerce business, this combination of features can be exactly what they are looking for. Without the cost of physical branches, digital-only banks can usually offer low fees and no minimum balance requirements. But these banks aren't right for all businesses. If you have to deal with cash for your business, not having a physical location where you can deposit cash is a non-starter. Banks like Azlo don't even offer checkbooks which are absolutely needed by some businesses. In the last 10 years, there has been a proliferation of these digital-only banks but they still haven't gained wide adoption. In the United States, just 3% of millennials have their primary checking account at a digital-only bank like Simple or Chime. This percentage is even lower for other generations. For the banking needs I expect to have, a digital-only bank seems too restrictive without any physical locations and missing features like a breadth of financing options.

Credit Unions are another appealing option for small businesses. In the last decade, credit unions have seen their assets grow at twice the rate of regular banks. In the U.S., credit unions can offer lower fees than regular banks because they are member-owned nonprofits that are exempt from paying federal income taxes. While credit unions have a mostly local footprint, over 1,800 credit unions are a part of the CO-OP shared branching network that gives their members access to thousands of branches and ATMs across the country. By law credit unions must lay out requirements for membership. This typically means you have to be employed by a certain company, go to a specific school, or be a part of a particular community to join the credit union. First Tech Federal Credit Union requires that you either work for a sponsor company, work for the state of Oregon, work or live in Lane County, or be a member of the Computer History Museum or Financial Fitness Association. Navy Federal Credit Union requires that you either be an active service member, veteran, family of an armed service member, or work for the Department of Defense. Consumers Credit Union (CCU) has the straightforward requirement of being a member of the Consumers Cooperative Association which is just a one-time fee of $5. CCU offers online banking, a no-fee business credit card, and a savings account with no monthly fee and no minimum balance. While there are thousand of credit unions out there and despite their growing size, most have fewer than 10,000 members and all the credit unions combined still hold lower deposits than Chase. They also typically have inferior online banking experiences and limited credit card and financing options.

While digital-only banks and credit unions definitely have their appeal for certain businesses, big traditional banks are still the best option for the majority of small businesses that have a wide range of needs. The largest ones have thousands of physical branches for when you need to deal with cash or need to talk to someone in person. They have a wide range of financing options from short term lines of credit for a couple thousand dollars to long term loans for hundred of thousands of dollars. They tend to have many credit card options with great perks. They've also heavily invested on technology. Most large banks now have website and mobile app experiences that rival those of startups and are far ahead those of credit unions. It is difficult for a credit union or upstart digital-only bank to compete with the range of offerings that large banks have right now.

I ended up opening a savings and checking account with Chase, the largest bank in the United States by assets ($2.53 trillion). Chase has over 5,300 branches and 15,500 ATMs across the country. I don't expect to go to the bank physically very often but having that option is reassuring and having access to a large ATM network is definitely convenient. I do most of my personal banking with Chase so it is a plus to be able to do both my business and personal banking with the same bank. When setting up my checking account, Chase made it easy to transfer money from my personal account to my business account and even had certain fields pre-filled for me. I transferred $1,500 from my personal account into my new checking account to have the $15 monthly fee waived. The whole process was pretty smooth and done completely online. There were more steps than I expected and a few hiccups along the way but overall it was not bad. Chase also offers some of the best small business credit card options out there. This was important since I wanted a credit card with good rewards that will help me build credit for the business. I applied for the Chase Ink Business Unlimited credit card two weeks ago and as of this writing I still haven't heard back if I'm approved. My business doesn't have any credit or income yet so I'm not sure if I will even be approved for it.

With my business incorporated and my bank account set up, I'm now ready to start making money and getting that bread!

Key takeaways:

• IRS requirements around business banking are confusing and unclear
• Desire to have separation between personal finances and business finances but doing both with the same trusted bank with a familiar experience is convenient
• Digital-only banks might be able to compete with large banks and their wide range of services by providing amazing experiences to niches like freelancers
• Lower fees of digital-only banks and credit unions don't seem to be enough for the majority of businesses
• As a small business you are unsure what your needs might be in the future so large banks are a good option because they can serve you as your needs change
• There is a bit of a catch 22 with getting credit since you don't have any income yet or credit history

Next up was to decide what service to use to register my business as an LLC. I'm sure many businesses will opt for finding a lawyer at this point but business registration has mostly become comoditized by online sites that can do it quicker, cheaper, and just as well as a lawyer. Searching on google will give you tons of options but you quickly realize their pricing isn't transparent and you can't easily distinguish their quality differences. I had heard the most about LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer so I focused my effort on trying to decide between the two of them. These two companies spend a lot on marketing so that when I am in this position of wanting to start a business, they are on the top of my mind and all that marketing worked! After answering a few questions on each site, LegalZoom gave me the most confidence with it's better user experience. That's all it really took. I didn't want to waste too much time on this phase since it felt like the outcome would be mostly the same regardless of which site I chose.  

With LegalZoom decided on, I was expecting the rest of the process to be pretty straight forward but I was surprised by how many options are thrown at you right away. One of the first big decisions I was confronted with was deciding on a registered agent. I had to do some research on what a registered agent even was. It is basically a person that most states require you to have that will accept legal documents like tax forms and notices of lawsuits on your behalf. You can choose to be your own registered agent but that is an additional level of responsibility you might not want. LegalZoom gives you the option of having them be your registered agent for $159 for the first year with an automatic renewal rate that is subject to change according to the hidden terms. For simplicity, I just opted for this option.

Right after selecting a registered agent, you are presented with another choice. This time you must select between three options on documents ranging from $99 to $199. I splurged on the complete coverage that includes an EIN and required licenses along with an operating agreement. I'm not even sure if you can legally operate a business for very long with the other packages.

What follows after that is a series of monthly subscription upsells that seem designed to scare you into signing up for different LegalZoom subscriptions so they can make money from you monthly. Having access to legal help and staying compliant do seem like they would be useful in the long run but I decided to opt out and take my chances for now to avoid committing to pay even more upfront  just to register my business. Now that I am aware of these options though I might go back in the future and sign up for these depending on how things progress.

The next step, and supposedly the last one, is selecting an LLC package. The filing fee for an LLC in New York is $210. LegalZoom offers 3 packages for filing that cost an additional $7o, $329, and $349 on top of the state fee. The biggest difference that I could tell between the three options is how quickly the filing will be done. I initially balked at the big jump from $79 to the next option costing $329 so I picked the cheapest option even though it would take 3 times as long.

After finishing that step that claimed to be the final one, I got one final offer to open up a small business checking account with Bank of America. This option may be timely but I am also experiencing fatigue at this point from going through so many choices that I was unsure about, some of which seem tangential to my main objective of registering my business. Despite this I opt to let them contact me since setting up a bank account would be my next logical step (blog post to follow). I will have to wait until the filing is done and I get my EIN before I can open the account though.

After that I am finally done! Everything ended up costing just under $500 even after declining many add-on options. This is higher than I was expecting but didn't seem unreasonable given it includes the state filing fee which is $210.

Actually, just kidding! I wasn't really done yet. Shortly after I thought I was finally done for real, I got a call from someone at LegalZoom asking me for some missing information and also letting me know that what I had paid for did not include the price of using LegalZoom as a registered agent. Apparently this is only charged after your documents are submitted to the state. This adds an additional $115 to the cost and brings the total upfront cost to $603. This is more than the $500 a typical venture funded start up would pay with Stripe Atlas and can be a lot higher depending on certain options you choose. Stripe Atlas also claims to provide more than $100,000 in credits from partners but the economics of getting a small business costumer on your platform is understandably very different than getting a startup that could eventually be worth more than $1 billion dollars.

On the call, I also wondered if I really wanted to wait 30 days for the filing to ne completed. I decided to ask if it could be expedited and surely it could be for an additional charge of $129 which I thought was worth it to be able to move on to the next steps faster. I can now expect the whole filing to be completed on December 5th. The LegalZoom mobile app actually has a useful status tracker for keeping track of the filing status.

This whole process was not too long but didn't instill in me a lot of confidence that I had made all the right choices and required me to have a lot of trust in the service I chose. My main takeaways from the experience:

• Registering a business is a highly competitive and comoditized space
• Brand recognition is one of the only distinguishing features
• Little pricing transparency
• High pricing variability
• A lot of new business jargon for new businesses to learn
• Fees can rack up quickly
• Potential for many complimentary referrals like bank accounts and legal help
• Element of lock in since you are likely to choose other services from the company that does your business registration since it will work together well

It took me a lot longer to write this post than it did to actually register but I got a lot out of thinking critically through each step. I will continue documenting the process of starting up a small business and my learnings along the way. Would love to hear from you if you have any feedback!

Every time I land in a country that I've never been to before, I'm always amazed how many things we have gotten to work seamlessly across the globe even with all of our cultural, political, and language differences. We have so many foundational infrastructure differences that we have be able to overcome. Some countries are on the metric system while others are in the imperial one. Some drive on the right while others on the left. We use different electrical outlets. We speak different languages. We have different laws, different currencies. Despite all of this, in most countries I visit, I feel confident that once I get off the plane I can get around easily.

People debate when globalization started but in the last couple of decades we have made tremendous progress as a society in making the world feel smaller. My cellphone plan works in over 100 countries. I can pull out my debit card and take out money in most local currencies. I can open up the Uber app and call a cab in many countries without having any cash. Google maps will tell me where many places are located and how to get there. This is all things we take for granted but were unimaginable not that long ago.

There is still a lot of room for improvement for sure and there are many more ways we can improve interoperability between our human defined borders. Each new city I visit has it's own transportation card that I have to figure out how to acquire and load with money. Uber is banned in many countries or they have been forced to withdraw because of intense competition from local competitors. I'm currently in South Korea where Google maps won't give me driving or walking directions because the Korean government won't supply them with local geo data if Google will be storing it in foreign servers. I just came from Japan where most local places don't take cash and there are many different train companies that require different passes unless you get their transportation card. And those are two of the most advanced countries in the world.

It is exciting to think about how people will continue to bridge cultures and people from around the world and it is something that gets me excited about working on technology.

This will become a place where I can ramble about a bunch of topics but mostly technology, travel, and startups. I'm not sure if I will even make any of these posts public but it will still be a good place for me to articulate random thoughts I have.

I'll also be using this blog as a testing ground for new technologies I'm interested in exploring. Right now it is hosted on a single AWS EC2 instance on the free tier but I will be upgrading it over time to be more resilient, scalable, and data driven. I'll be trying out different analytics and marketing technologies as well. This will all be a huge overkill for a simple blog but will be a good learning experience nonetheless.

I was inspired to start this blog from loving to read Fred Wilson's daily AVC posts as well as my friends Ricky Yean and Richard Lo's personal weekly newsletters.