So what I need to start the business:

1. A computer. My 5 years old desktop computer should be sufficient, the software is not very demanding.

2. Software. Expensive one, unfortunately. Over 1000 USD. But I managed to get a better deal with monthly payments instead of one-off cash out.

3. An office. My room in my parents’ flat should be ok. It’s in the same house and my parents more or less moved to the weekend house.

4. Advanced phone line. I need to be monitoring the calls statistics to validate the assumptions and make adjustments in real time, if necessary. After some research, the optimal solution seems to be something called “a virtual swithchboard”. Which basically means paying a fee for using someone else’s fancy machine over internet. When I called Telefonica O2 sales line requesting it, the lady told me “I didn’t even know we offer such a service”. After switching through 5 different people I finally landed on someone whom I successfully persuaded they do offer this service, because I discovered it hiden VERY deep in their website But “It will take one month to activate”. I’m gonna push them hard on this yet…

5. Employee(s). This should be a nice job for an IT university student. Fortunately there is an IT department in my city and there are no good job opportunities around (even IT professionals’ salaries start at under 1000 USD per month). Great combination! I made an orange one-page ad, drove to the university building and put it right on the entry door, where no one will avoid seeing it I also posted an ad to jobs.cz – it is probably the best job portal for university students in the country (I got my Ernst & Young job there) and posting the first ad in temporary jobs section is for free! Within 5 hours I got ten emails from very good candidates….

6. Bank account and online payments mechanism. It is still necessary to visit the bank personally to set up an account. I chose Raiffeisen, where I have my personal account as well and setup “personal account for business purposes”. Then I was researching how to accept credit cards and online payments on my website. I found out that Raiffeisen offers this possibility, but you need a corporate bank account. And you cannot change your personal bank account to corporate one, so it would mean cancelling the freshly set up account, including credit card and setting up a corporate one. That’s too much, so I chose PayPal. They offer payments for both PayPal account holders as well as just credit card holders. In addition, you can have recurring payments through PayPal, which is crucial especially for me – I want to charge monthly fees.

7. Entrepreneur and tax registration. This is another amazing story. There has been much improvement in this process lately – you have to fill-in just one “joint registration form”. So I did, and also checked the box “voluntary VAT registration”. Everything went smooth with the entrepreneurial registration and I got it in 1 week. But another week later a lady from Financial Authorities calls me that “of course you need to fill-in a separate VAT registration form!” and “of course you have to file it in person at the FA”. So I fired up my Aprilia and rode to FA. They gave me one form, where I filled-in my personal data, but the form did not contain a single item which was not already filled-in in the joint form.  Amazing…

8. A domain and website. I was doing some remote administration on my mother’s computers and was using a solution you can find at www.teamviewer.com (free for non-commercial purposes). It requires the remote party to go to this website and click one button. However, I found that for people who don’t know a single word in English (my mother’s generation), it is extremely difficult to interpret a word “teamviewer”. The only way to do it is to spell the letters with their phonetic guides, i.e. “T as Thomas, E as Eva, etc.”. This is obviously pretty lengthy process, so I knew I needed some simple Czech word that everyone knows and is misspelling-proof, even if reproduced in poor quality over telephone. I came up with the word “fofrem”, which means quickly in colloquial Czech. So the domain is www.fofrem.info (in Czech only so far, but will be adding English version pretty soon) Please stop by and spread the word about it. Thanks!

9. Money. This is the critical issue. I will need money to pay the technicians, until I have about 40 clients. My target is to have them within 3 months. I will be offering some introduction discounts as well, because I need to “seed seeds” that means having some initial customers, who would hopefully call in their friends in exchange for getting further discounts. I will also seek some more temporary workers, preferably university students, to do the sales job – I intend to offer no fixed income, but one monthly fee (690 or 990 CZK = 35 or 50 USD) for every signed contract. So I will need money for this initial phase. I decided to go for FFF financing (family, friends, fools) My father lent me CZK 50 thousand (USD 2,500) and I have a string of income from web design and graphic design which I will be investing. It’s gonna be tough times – It’s a financial crisis and summer holiday is coming, so the timing is not perfect. But I do beleive that with a bit of luck, I can steer through this period.

To be honest, I am pretty scared, but I have to give it a try.

To be continued, thanks for reading!