Re: the fine line between personal and business?

It's an important question. You need an answer in two arenas: 
Personal commitment; and practical business issues.

For the first: You need to decide. Waffling between hobby and 
business means you will likely run into trouble. Running a hobby as a 
business or running a business like a hobby are surefire recipes for 
trouble. You need to commit one way or the other. Not today, but 
sometime before you get too deep.

Regarding business issues: You need knowledge. You are making 
decisions that could affect taxes or create legal issues. Some of 
these could be quite serious. I suggest three avenues:

- Find friends who know about this and discuss it with them.

- If you are in the US, contact the US Small Business Association; 
and contact SCORE, a volunteer organization of business execs who 
help out people like you.

- Go to the non-profit Nolo press. They have many books designed for 
new small business owners and their website has lots of excellent 
free info. http://www.nolo.com/

Overall, if I could tell you only ONE thing it would be: Educate 
yourself like crazy. You are standing at the edge of a briar patch 
and if you know the way through, it is not very tricky; if you don't, 
you will be in for a painful, difficult journey.
__________________________________________________________________________
Subject: the fine line between personal and business?
Author: Steve Segarra
Date: 12/5/00 10:12 AM -0500

>hi,
>	I was wondering when does a website become a business?  Let me explain:
>
>	I'm working on a site as a hobby, it may grow to get a large amount of
>traffic, and has an interface much like a corporate website would.  Its
>basically an online magazine (sort-of) but I'm not really intending to
>make any considerable amount of money from it, but I would like to sell
>advertising on it so that I can offset the hosting costs.  Now, is this
>a business?  I'm accepting money from other businesses so I am somewhat
>providing a service.  What do you think?  Sorry if this is a dumb
>question, but I'm not too business savvy.
>
>Thanks,
>steve

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