If I was you I’d be hunting for a non-technical co-founder with either a marketing or finance background. A crap ton of people in software dev have this ‘build it and they will come’ mindset, I sorta did too back when I was a FSD, but since working in marketing at multiple SaaS startups, I’ve realised it really, really isn’t true. There are so, so many good pieces of software out there with almost no users because they’ve got no idea how to communicate with their target audience. If you’re a great developer, find someone who can get users for your platform and help with design and such along the way, you’ll have a much better chance.

Remember how many businesses who built their concepts around AI are struggling. All the chatbot tools that basically got killed by new updates, the web browser extensions that got killed by GPT updates, etc.

AI as a part of your business makes perfect sense. AI as your business is a dangerous game to play. Most AI apps are built on OpenAI API’s right now, which isn’t inherently bad, but please remember Apollo with Reddit. Took one price hike to kill a multi-million user app in a matter of months.

Tons of businesses are adding AI to their offerings, and doing great because of it. Hubspot, Hootsuite, Figma, Framer and plenty more, but they are real fully sustained businesses using it for extra functionality, not building their businesses around it.

My business makes use of AI, but if AI died tomorrow because of corporate intervention, the whole thing would still work wonderfully.

Think of all the businesses built on Blockchain and NFT tech that aren’t around anymore because the hype died and the market decided they were worthless. Do I think that’s going to happen to AI? No, but I don’t think AI should be seen as this mystical thing we should run towards.

AI is the gold rush in the old west. Plenty of money to be made, but the most successful people are selling shovels.

I like the initiative.

I started my first business at 16 and actually sold it at 20 for a decent amount of money. You 100% can start a business at your age, there’s just a few limitations you need to work around, both forced by your age and natural. It does make things harder, but not impossible.

1. Funding. Obviously the younger you are, the less likely you have access to cash, which for physical products creates a limitation. Manufacturing can be cheap, it can also be very expensive, and economies of scale becomes the issue. I.e. If I want to sell a product for 10 dollars, after shipping and such, it might cost 15 dollars per product if I order one (a loss) or 5 dollars per product if I order a thousand of them, which could be a good margin, but that means you need to have 5000 bucks to order that 1000. This isn’t an impossibility, but it means most have to get creative to make that happen.
2. Online payment providers like Stripe and Paypal almost universally require you to be 18+ to open an account. Again, that isn’t a complete blocker, but it meant when I was younger I had to have somebody else do this, which depending on your country could be legally dodgy or in general just a risk depending on how much you trust this person.
3. Business structures. Much the same as number 2, you might not be allowed to register a business in your country till you’re 18, and though I advise starting before putting the legal stuff in place anyway, you’ve gotta be careful because this also prevents you from putting things in place like insurance. If you’re manufacturing a physical product, your risks on things like getting sued are bigger, and you wanna be protected against that.

My business at 16 was a live events company. I booked locations, bands, organised events and then focused on marketing to sell tickets. This worked for me because on the small scale, my overheads were very low and I knew it pretty well (I’d been playing gigs with my bands since 14). I ran it without a legal structure for a year, then put one in place, and re-invested my profits until I grew it to something big, holding more events and larger ones with higher profile acts that I could charge more for. Even then, I was skirting the law a little by being in these locations (alcohol serving places meant I needed to be 18+).

It’s not impossible, but you need to think about what you can do with your limitations and what’s most possible for you. Doesn’t need to be dropshipping, but you realistically need something you can start with a little money and then re-invest the profits to grow in a big way.

So…

1. Always confirm price before doing the work. Family, friends, strangers, doesn’t matter, always agree before you lift a finger.
2. Your family have no idea what art is worth, let alone what yours is worth. You shouldn’t expect them to. I also paint and although I don’t do it as a business, I occasionally sell some of my pieces just to clear space. I literally just list them on fb marketplace and say ‘make me an offer’. I’ve sold A3 paintings for £1 and I sold an a4 once for £200. Art is extremely subjective. It’s foolish to assume your family will have a clue.
3. Twenty bucks difference isn’t a big deal. If I was in the same situation I would have made that concession for my dad, but I also wouldn’t have got in that situation, I’d have confirmed price before (see point 1.)
4. Family are the worst customers. Always. My business is a marketing agency, as a part of that I get asked if I can build a website now and then. I’ve built websites for free for family and friends who asked for more than my clients who pay thousands. Now when someone asks about a website, I recommend Wix. No one values your skillset less than the people who were around when you wear shitting your pants and getting it wiped for you. Family will never perceive you as the professional you want to be. It’s not even them being mean, it’s just natural.
5. Rule of diminishing returns. If you’d spent two days less on that piece, your dad still would have said 40-45 dollars, because the tiny details that make it just right to an artist are the things most common people don’t care about. His price wasn’t reflective of your skillset, probably just a guess from a man who doesn’t much value art and thought he was being nice.

Get new personal number, give to no-one, redirect any old numbers to your receptionist.

I run a marketing agency, I had the exact same problem you’re having, it’s genuinely it’s the only way. Good clients won’t care, mediocre clients will complain but get over it, bad clients will leave. It took me ages to get to the point I was willing to, but I built my agency up from being a freelancer, which means many of my oldest clients still felt like they could treat me like an employee, which I’m not.

Project management apps help, SOP’s help, but the only foolproof solution is a line in the sand. Alot of clients won’t respect your time if you give them an option, so don’t.

Lawyer. Go to one now. Even if you’re not taking any action yet, hopefully you never have to take action and you can both sort this out in a happy healthy way, but just speak to one for a few hours, ask them, see if they’d be able to build a case based on old conversations, screenshots, files, revenue split, when accounts were opened, etc.

I hope your relationship and business all works out and none of this is ever necessary, but if it all goes to shit and you both need to call on lawyers, your best chance is to be calling the lawyer who started on this 3 months early.

Early on, sold to my previous employers, then a few that I did freelance work for, then I started working consistently on social media talking about the topic and interacted with people who interacted with my posts, and then with a bit of budget to play with started with Paid Search, then with a bit more budget setup retargeting ads on various platforms.

When I’ve got the budget, I’ll choose to do it through marketing, when I don’t it goes back to the old school method of pulling up your black book and seeing who’s buying. If you ain’t got a black book, go make one.

Wouldn’t have mattered, 18 year old me wouldn’t have listened.

Don’t bother with the Amazon FBA, dropshipping, etc type thing, truth is yes you can make money with all of them, but no more so than any other business.

The simple fact of things is that the best business you can do is the one someone will pay YOU for.

I run a marketing agency that works exclusively with SaaS Startups, (not a highlevel based SMMA, a proper one), but I don’t do that because Youtube told me to, it’s because I worked in marketing exclusively at multiple different startups before that, all of which either exited or received funding while I was there. I got good at knowing what SaaS will do well, what won’t and what type of marketing works in the most cost effective way. Doesn’t mean I know everything about SaaS marketing, but because of my experience I have a disproportionate unfair advantage compared to the majority of marketers or agency owners. As a result, I now a little over a year later have 4 members of staff, regular clients and pay myself a decent income. I’m not crazy rich, but we’re growing exponentially.

People focus way too hard on the type of business, when actually it usually works the other way round. The type of business shouldn’t decide what you learn, what you know should decide the type of business.

Think about your experience, and try and picture this. What Business would make people who know you go ‘well of course they’re doing well, compendiousbeing is running it no one can compete with that’. Might be something related to automation, or hairdressing, or computer science, or maybe if you can’t think of anything you need to spend more time learning, but basically dig deep, what is your ‘Unfair advantage’, the thing that most other people would need to study for months or years just to get to the knowledge level you possess today?

Fastest way to get a leg up, so the fastest way to get towards profits.

Having a website is good practice but you shouldn’t fear the costs. I work in marketing, my agency does web design (Not a promotion, OP isn’t my target customer I work with SaaS startups) and yes you can pay a crap ton for a site, but you really don’t need to.

If you’re happy to do it yourself, Wix and Squarespace are extremely cheap and easy to use and provide most of the functionality a small business could need.

If you want something a little more custom you can pay someone between 2-500 to get a good Wordpress setup, and hosting will be fairly cheap (Hundo a year maybe)

This doesn’t need to be expensive, scary or complicated. Chances are the site you want needs to be nothing more than a digital brochure. Some people’s site’s are basically just digital business cards.

No panic my friend, this is a very easy problem to fix.

When your target market has made it very clear to you there’s no situation in which they’d pay for your services, or when the requirements to make it something they’d pay for go beyond what you’re willing to do.

Too many founders never do the research on whether people actually want the product on offer, and only figure out once they’ve plowed thousands and half a year of their life into something.

Nope. Would close it all down. Not because I don’t love my business, but because put in the right places that 3 million dollars is a shit ton of money. Even just sitting in a 5% high interest savings account, that’d send you back 150,000 dollars a year in interest if you never touched the principle, in a diversified asset across stocks, real estate, etc it could potentially do better.

If you never touched the money and left it at 5% returns and reinvested the interest, you’d be at 4.8 mil within 10 years.

If I got that amount of money, I’d sell my business (or if it was worth nothing just close it down), use the minimum deposit possible to purchase my house with a mortgage or purchase property in a cheaper country abroad that I’d like to live in, allow the interest rates from the savings to outperform my mortgage costs, get a full time job for a few years to allow me to not touch the original cash as much as possible and when at a point that the interest outperforms any PAYE employment I qualify for? Retire, paint, write and let the days go by.

Hello there, quick bit about me, I run a marketing agency that exclusively works with B2B saas startups. I don’t say that to promote, I say that to give context that I meet and work with alot of founders and developers. I also was formerly a full stack developer.

There are still plenty of people paying for software engineers, the difference I’ve seen is the barrier on the work.

There are really a few points to consider here.

1. AI. I’ll be honest, AI has made an impact everywhere, but probably not on the scale you might think. AI is nowhere near advanced enough to replace the developer, I’m mainly just seeing it be used by the developers. You can’t give a non-technical founder GPT and expect him to piece together his own SaaS with it.
2. No Code builders. A weird one. Technically a non-developer can build an app with one of these, but definitely not a traditional business person, I know millionaires who have paid me to help them setup zapier connections between their Lead gen ads and their CRM. I think smart developers are learning how to use Bubble and Retool for projects to deliver projects quicker, and I think technical founders are using them to build their own apps, but there’s not a huge market of people who were going to spend 50k on an app, and then decided ‘nah I’ll build it myself’.
3. The self-cannibalisation of the industry. A huge number of apps are made to provide a service that previously would have needed to be custom. Imagine that 1000 wealth management businesses a year go to developers to get their own internal tool made for customer interaction. Then a saas startup decides to build a tool for this job that can cover 99% of these companies. The next year, 990 of them sign up for this SaaS and 10 get a custom tool made. The developer who made the app has taken 990 development jobs off the market by doing this.
4. Web developer doesn’t mean what it used to. Developers are an inherent part of the industry I work in, but what they’re required for has changed over the years. Web developers used to build the front end websites, nowadays me and my people do that with Wordpress, Webflow and Framer. Some people do it themselves with Wix and Squarespace.
5. Like you said about wordpress setups, I do know a guy who runs a fairly successful niche social media site. 20 years ago, that was an extremely custom job. Now, he runs it on a 200 dollar customised wordpress theme, but I would say this is the rarity.

Technology, outsourcing and the quantity of people in the software dev space has lowered the bar, and honestly it’s part of why I switched to marketing, because generating interest, leads and customers has become the far harder part of the equation nowadays, but that doesn’t mean the role of a SWE is dead, just gotta change your focus.

I know a guy who runs a Bubble development agency, his company is making alot of money, because yeah they charge a lower upfront fee than most developers would, but they need half the man-hours to achieve the same result, and they charge the exact same ongoing monthly maintenance and support fee that other agencies charge.

I also know a guy who runs a dev agency that doesn’t use any no-low code builders, but he’s niched down on advanced difficult topics. Their most recent project is built around using Lidar functionality in the new Iphone models to capture accurate measurements of property for asset management. As you’d guess, their charging a bomb.

SWE’s are gonna be needed for a long time, but the focus will change. Hell, half of what I do in marketing is based on software that didn’t exist 10-15 years ago. A client recently joined my agency because we ‘seemed the most confident on integrating Threads into our social media strategy’, a social network which didn’t exist 4 months ago.

Just gotta keep pivoting.

Totally depends on your business.

Truth is you probably don’t want a generalist. I run an agency that calls itself a plug in marketing department for B2B saas and digital services startups. If someone approaches who runs a 25+ man business, sells e-commerce products, runs a shop, offers local services, etc etc etc then I send them onto my contacts who specialise in that.

You don’t want a guy who says he can do it all, because maybe he can, but how well? Like I’m pretty good at what I do, but if someone’s got SEO questions I pull in our SEO guy because I only know the general stuff in that topic.

It’s fine to hire one person if you want it in-house, but you need to be confident that you’re hiring someone who knows what they’re talking about and isn’t gonna make it up as they go, and you need to be confident you’re hiring them for the job you need done.

I’ve been the one man marketing department at companies before, and scope growth did leave me googling the answers to tasks that aren’t my specialty. I did my best, but it was never going to be the same quality as someone who specialised in that thing.

To be honest, you want to find someone who specialises in what you do. If you’re a corporate lawyer in the USA who mainly handles countersuits, you want an agency that specialises in corporate lawyers in the USA and understands what that entails. Same thing for any other niche.

Completely disagree mate.

As an ADHD entrepreneur, it completely changes your brain chemistry, the way success happens, the way productivity works, the way things get done.

I run a fairly successful business nowadays, I previously ran a fairly successful business. There’s a 4 year gap in the middle there with a string of failures - just about paying myself a wage. The difference? During the first business, I was self medicating with cocaine and amphetamines and had more success at 17 than any member of my family had during their entire life, I didn’t do drugs because I liked the high, I did it because it was the only time in my life I’d ever been productive. I got clean after it almost killed me, watched my business die, watched the next few fail and then 9 months ago got an ADHD diagnosis, started my current company and have 2 employees and a fully functioning growing business now.

‘ADHD entrepreneur’ isn’t like saying ‘entrepreneur who likes cats’, it’s a disability on the level of ‘marathon runner missing a lung’, it’s a key part of how human beings function that ADHD people lack and being on medication for it is a huge qualifier to the successes and failures achieved.

OP (or anyone else this could benefit), if you’re ever looking for someone to speak to about this, feel free to DM me or have a look at a group called Joyfully Different. It’s a business network my friend Mark runs specifically for Neurodivergent founders and entrepreneurs.

The thing I hear from most people here in the UK is 5k a month in revenue. That’s not a definitive answer because this isn’t an exact science, but basically it’s just about how tax rates fall over here.

In the past, I’ve setup registered company structures on day 1, I’ve also had companies where I worked out pretty soon it was a bad idea and closed it less than 2 months later.

I think the baseline just comes down to ‘is this real or not?’ like I think most of us have dipped our toes in with businesses that, lets be honest, weren’t real businesses. The only difference is the amount of paperwork you give yourself when you walk way from it.