An open source freelancer’s starter guide

This article was originally posted on Syllable.Productions earlier this year.

Want to start your own Freelance business but don’t know where to start? There are lots of quick-start guides out there — like this and this. But when I started my freelance LLC business, the thing I really wanted was a simple actionable checklist. I wanted a new business owner’s todo list.

Sure, it’s important to do things the ‘right’ way; it’s important to vet your options for every choice. But I at least wanted a default list of what to do — a list of one way to do it. I wanted someone to just say: Here’s the list of everything I did. YMMV. Have fun.

So, here’s my work-in-progress google doc outlining how I started my LLC in Brooklyn, NY.*

As a later project, I’d love to make this checklist an open source platform where anyone could add their checklists for how they started their business.

I imagine that these new business ‘recipes’ could be mixed and matched, similar to how tools like yeoman provide common templates for starting a new web application.

You would be able to see alternatives to every checklist item with a simple comparison to see which is right for you.

You could have a business consultant review your checklist and reassure you that, yes, you are now the proud owner of a legitimate LLC business. Best of luck to you.

*YMMV. I’m not a lawyer. All the disclaimers.

• Business
• Freelancing
• Startup
• Llc