Running multiple indie businesses
Hey folks,
I know that this was discussed before, but not enough was covered, at least to my opinion.
Obviously, some of us here have multiple businesses, and sure enough - there are some difficulties running more than one business, mainly in terms of administration.
For example, you cannot have more than one Twitter account connected to the same phone number. You can not have more than one PayPal business account per credit card, and it sounds terribly stupid to request for a new credit card every time I want to launch a new project.
Same goes for email - All the free-tier email providers won't let you use multiple emails on different domains without paying double for everything. Using an email alias can help, but it is not always ideal...
Some companies opt to use a "Master" domain, and then list their "Child" businesses in there. It can help in some cases (i.e. PayPal), but not sure it can do much more than that.
Do you guys have any ideas on how to better manage multiple businesses ?
My goal is to have them completely separate, but don't pay double for every service being used.
Cheers!
Hey, Satch. I've got a lot of different projects running, though from a legal standpoint, most are part of the same business entity.
Here's what I usually do:
At the beginning it's rational to economize on expenses. Once you're scaling, then it probably makes sense to stop worrying about paying separately for each service. I'd definitely do it a year or more before planning on selling any given business.
Hey @alchemist,
Thanks for the detailed suggestions.
Sounds like quite a lot of manual work for each project you start (technically it's not even a full day of work, that's true, but still opening all these accounts and managing everything separately can be a pain..)
And in regards to PayPal, I think it won't work, they require a different credit card for every separate account, which is really crazy.
Stripe, unfortunately, has yet to arrive to my current location, so I'll have to wait. Atlas is an option but probably mostly established businesses with higher revenues. (I personally don't think a < 10k MRR revenue would be worth it)
Setting up usually takes me about 4 hours, and 3 hours of that is choosing the domain name.
Ongoing management is more of a pain. I stay logged into the Google accounts, so there it's just a dropdown and a click to switch, but logging in and out of Reddit, Twitter, etc... is the worst.
That's strange what you said about PayPal. I have multiple accounts open and no credit cards connected to any of them, though they keep advertising to me to get one. It might be a country-related requirement.
Yeah, ongoing management is already bugging me for a while. Even though there are social media management tools, they don't cover everything so it's a bit annoying to switch accounts every time.
And in regards to PayPal, you can create accounts with no credit card attached to them, but they can often suspend it or not allow more advanced use. Last time I had this issue I've issued a new (free) credit card but it's crazy to me that it needs to be this way - I literally have a credit card lying in a drawer somewhere that is only being used for PayPal payments..
I run multiple (profitable) businesses. An important aspect is to have the finances separated from the get-go. Stripe is good on this front. Everything else is fairly easily solvable.
For email I use Fastmail. I can add multiple domains. Using DNSimple it's easily set up.
I do have multiple Twitter accounts too, but don't remember the limitation of one phone number? Is this recent?
For Paypal limitation with credit cards, you can look into Revolut or similar services. They allow for a number of so-called virtual cards.
Yeah no doubt obviously financials should be separated from day 1.
[EDIT: well turns out I was wrong, it can be done.] I use Zoho for emails, but for a single user with multiple aliases they do not allow to have separate names (I think!), for example, you cannot have an email such as support@company.com and sales@project.com at the same time under one account, you can only have name@ any-domain-you-want but the name is always constant. (you can add additional users, but it would cost more)
I thought there's a limitation for Twitter based on phone numbers, that's what I've heard, but I will need to look into that.
Lastly, regarding PayPal, yeah I guess this is one option, but just the fact of having to issue virtual cards each time is kind of odd.
Anyways, I'm just feeling a bit overflowed by administration stuff when dealing with multiple active projects..
I'll share some insights once I have some good ones :-)
What? I use Zoho Mail ... there is no such restriction on the Aliases.
You can only have a limited number of Aliases per user (around 15 or 20 or so?) ... but they can be for different domains with different names (i have tweeter@ and social@ for many of my domains under one Zoho user).
Multiple projects is an interesting topic. True ... hoping for more participation and tricks. Might search for past discussions.
You're right! I simply didn't find the right place to change the setting.
As far as I know, it's possible to have 30 aliases for free with them so all good on that front!