How to start a dot com business (Humor)

Monday, November 29 2004 @ 04:21 PM EST

Looking to start your own business? As we all know, the Internet provides vast amounts of opportunity and you should take advantage by starting your own dot com. Based on the recent activities of other dot coms, here are some guidelines to help you get started.

• Get a domain name. While it generally costs no more than $35/year for one, you will want one that people will remember, so be sure to raise at least $3 million to buy a good one from a cybersquatter.
• Incorporate. Actually, you should probably do this before you even buy the domain name. You will need to decrease your personal liability using the most expensive method available and start paying corporate taxes as soon as possible.
• Get an office. Even though your dot com business will have no physical storefront and no customers will probably ever need to visit you, you still need a fancy office. But of course you can't buy a building, otherwise that would increase your company's equity. Paying rent for an office in downtown Manhattan or in Silicon Valley is a sure fire way to blow away $350,000+ a year without gaining anything in assets. Since your business will be expanding rapidly, you will probably need many offices around the country with designer furniture in each. Don't forget the vending machines that dispense free snacks!
• Get funding. Since we are in the new economy now, "dot com" means guaranteed instant success. Just because you have no real business plan doesn't mean that a venture capital firm wouldn't be willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to fund your ideas.
• Get some employees. Hire everyone that submits a resume and you can even kidnap people. You will need to compete for talent with other companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Accenture (formerly known as Andersen Consulting), so you need to offer competitive salaries and benefits. Your salary offerings should be at least three times more than the industry average. If you don't have the cash to do that, just plan your IPO from the outset and offer stock options so that employees will get rich when you go public, hopefully by tomorrow.
• Get equipment. You need servers to handle the huge amounts of traffic your easy-to-remember web site will get. The vendors that advertise the most always sell the best hardware.
• Get software. You will need robust database and transaction management software to handle all that traffic you will get. The same rule applies here: The vendors that advertise the most always sell the best software.
• Use the latest technologies. Using the newest languages and development tools will ensure that your company is as high tech as it can get. It doesn't matter if the products you use are in pre-alpha stage and are not supposed to be used in a production environment. All that matters is that it is new.
• Get an accountant. You need make your financial statements look pretty for investors.
• If you don't know anything about computers, that's OK. Your new programmers fresh out of college will know exactly how to manage your entire IT infrastructure. That is what they went to college for in the first place.
• If you don't know anything about business, that's OK. Use venture capital to pay for some business management courses at night at a local community college. Afterwards, buy yourself a couple of Lamborghinis with the money left over and double your own salary. Executives have rights to incentives!
• Launch your website as soon as possible. You can skip the design and planning phases. You can't afford to let superfluous activities like integration with any back-end business processes keep you from getting your site to the public. Don't even bother spell-checking the content on your site since that would be a waste of time also.

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