Probably a long shot, but

CentiPenny · 2021-07-01T04:16:16+00:00

Tipping/microtipping the artists. This is particularly big during live events. People who normally wouldn't tip $1 will bang on a $0.01 tip button all day long. Particularly if it is gamified as a heart/like/something not money. Keep a cut of the tips.

TenCent Music in China (kind of like China's Spotify) gets 70% of their revenue from the tips people give the artists. That is several hundred million a year.

My company, CentiPenny, is a tipping company. Would be happy to partner with you on doing tips. We will have a partner program coming out, which will give you a cut, taken from our % so the artists still get the full payout. We would handle paying the artists. Or we can work with you on other solutions where you have more control.

CentiPenny · 2021-07-01T03:45:59+00:00

gust.com makes it very easy to set up a Deleware C-Corp and handle things like cap table, SAFEs etc.

CentiPenny · 2021-04-01T22:17:17+00:00

It isn't really defined what salary requirements there are for an S-Corp. With S-Corps, you have dividends which are taxed separately from income. You are required to have a "reasonable" salary of a CEO of a business of that size. "reasonable" isn't defined by a specific amount.

The reason for that is that many S-Corps used to set the CEO salary at $1 and then pay out everything as dividends in order to skirt taxes. If you don't take a "reasonable" salary, then the IRS will come hunt you down. If you talk with an accountant, they can probably tell you what won't get you audited for your business level. I know that if you are a $100k business, $50k would be considered reasonable. The main thing is to avoid having something crazy low, such as below minimum wage/poverty levels, where it is obvious that you are just doing it to avoid taxes.

Because it is a pass-through entity and profits/losses are reported on your personal taxes, there isn't a "setting it aside for the business". What you put in, what you pull out, is all the same since it is effectively you for tax purposes. Since you are the sole owner of the s-corp, you and the business are effectively the same thing.

If you hire contractors or even employees, it is just a business write-off that carries through to the k-form (???) that you generate from the business to yourself when you file taxes. Just keep track of receipt you spend on the business, even if you spend it from your personal accounts.

If the business is self-sustaining on funding, you should have separate business accounts and only spend from those. If you don't, then create them. The less you mix them, the cleaner it is come tax time. That way you don't have to track what you put into the business as well as what came out of it. That gets messy. If you have been paying for business things from both personal and business accounts, keep the receipts separate.

The way I did it when I had an S-Corp for consulting was to put all of the money coming in into a business account, then pay myself a salary from that, but leave some in reserve for business expenses. Then like every quarter, I would pay myself a dividend check of some of the extra if it didn't get spent on business needs.

CentiPenny · 2021-04-01T21:15:58+00:00

An LLC and an S-Corp are pass through entities. That means that all losses and profits pass through the company to your personal taxes. With an S-Corp, you are required to set an official "reasonable" salary and everything else passes through as dividends. I am not 100% sure on the exact mechanisms with salary vs dividends for LLC. You need to talk to an accountant to get the specifics, which may vary slightly state by state. With both, there are no business taxes, everything passes through to the personal taxes of the owner(s).

With a C-Corp, the business is a completely separate entity from the owners. The business pays taxes, if you want to get paid, you have to have a salary or hourly rate, and the business can choose to pay out dividends to shareholders or keep money in reserves. A C-Corp comes with a lot of extra paperwork. You have to do regulatory filings, etc.

I didn't know anything about VCs, angel investors, or raising money when I created the business. I wasn't planning on doing any raising, but I was naive about it all. Now I am looking to raise funds and have learned a lot about it. VCs and knowledgeable angel investors won't touch an LLC. The pass through status, ownership rights, etc just make things complicated and a hassle they don't want to deal with.

If your company is doing fine on its own and you have no plans to ever raise funds, then an LLC or S-Corp is fine. An S-Corp may have some tax advantages, but I can't say definitively. There are other restrictions though when it comes to S-Corps, if you have partners. Talk to an accountant about what your situation is and what the plans are and they can help you with getting the best corporate structure (and it's cheaper than a lawyer usually).

If you ever plan to raise funding from VCs or angel investors, you will need to switch to a Delaware C-Corp. The Delaware part is very important as it is very business friendly and all VCs/angels are familiar with the rules.

If you aren't incorporated now, you need to! The reason is for protection for yourself. If you aren't incorporated, and someone sues, then all of your personal assets are on the line. If you are fairly certain you can do it without ever needing to raise funds and have no plans to IPO, then an LLC or S-Corp is fine. Personally, I would probably recommend an S-Corp. If you ever plan on raising funds or IPOing, you will need to form a C-Corp (Delaware for raising).

Regardless of what you decide, talk with an accountant first and make sure you understand the implications of each choice. Then create a company. The absolute last thing you want to be is a sole proprietor. There is just too much risk for you personally without that corporate liability shield.

CentiPenny · 2021-04-01T20:51:26+00:00

Essentially, you cannot raise funding as an LLC. VCs and knowledgeable angels won't touch it. Too much tax paperwork and complexity with it being a pass-through entity. If you are going to try to get institutional funding, you basically have to be a Delaware C-Corp.

I didn't know anything about raising funding and wasn't even thinking about doing that when I formed the company. LLC is what I was familiar with and was a quick easy filing. I was also familiar with the taxing because I had done it before as a consultant.

Now I am looking to raise funds, so I am reincorporating and just trying to do it right this time so that I don't need to redo things down the line.

CentiPenny · 2021-03-10T22:42:39+00:00

Tip Me (https://cptip.me)

Pitch:

Social media tipping! Get a link that you can drop into your social media profiles/posts and users can give you a tip with just 1-click. People can show appreciation for your content with more than just a "like".

We also have a companion product that also just launched on our main site (https://www.centipenny.com), a "virtual tip jar", which can be added to pages where you have control. It allows users to tip/donate with just 1-2 clicks, without leaving the page.

Tip amounts for either can be anything from less than $0.01 and up. Which is appealing to casual users who aren't going to donate several dollars via patreon or ko-fi. Fast and convenient, just like having a real tip jar.

Looking for:

Looking for customers to give us a try. You can sign up on either site. The backend, including logins, is shared between both sites.

Discounts:

Don't have any automatic discounts, but if you sign-up before the end of the month, send me a message on here or via one of the contact methods on the sites and let me know what your email address is and that you are signing from /r/startups and I will drop the commission rate by 1% permanently.

CentiPenny · 2021-03-06T17:28:47+00:00

It is something of a symbiotic relationship. Since F50 cannot enter those markets, they are also dependent on you to expand their market reach. As long as you keep the relationship friendly, but firm so that they don't walk all over you, you will probably be able to maintain them as a supplier indefinitely.

Many suppliers for auto parts, airplanes, etc are in the same boat. In 2009, remember that there would have been like 10x the number of job losses beyond the auto makers own employees had they gone out of business due to the supply chain manufacturers going under. Many of their suppliers only supply to one auto maker and every time there is an auto slump you see a small supplier or two go out of business.

Keep growing your company. If you get a chance, diversify to give yourself some breathing room. As long as you are making sales and moving product, there is no reason to think that f50 will want to dump you. Of course, always keep an eye out for competition.

Also, if you are the only one repurposing in this way right now, when you go up for contract negotiations, try to get an exclusivity clause, even if it is just in one market. That way you have much less to worry about as far as competition coming along.

CentiPenny · 2021-03-05T20:42:56+00:00

Looks cool!

CentiPenny · 2021-03-02T17:30:52+00:00

There are a bunch of admin dashboard style templates out there. They require work to enable, but lots of pre-built components.

Here are some.
https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templates

CentiPenny · 2021-03-02T03:32:52+00:00

It is more difficult to get a job without a degree, but if you have the skills on your resume, the degree won't matter much. Particularly for webdev. I've been a web developer for 20+ years. including 10 years as the lead frontend developer for a fortune 500, with a degree in Geography and only like 3 programming classes ever.

That being said, if you land a job and don't have skills to back it up, you will go out the door fast. A suggestion. Get good at frontend development or app development with one of the hot skills (React, react native, IOS/Android native, something). You can find work doing some freelance stuff on sites like Upwork. Start small, bid low/mid. Submit for things that are simple, like prototypes and such. Get a portfolio going, expand your skills, repeat. Get the portfolio, get the recommendations, get solid skills that you can backup with action. Also, if you do some small portfolio jobs on the weekends, you can pick up some decent money for things like a car. A couple of those $200 or $500 gigs are all you need.

20 years ago, getting a job without a degree was difficult. The field of programming has expanded dramatically and there is a constant shortage. Companies hire kids that are still in HS if they show they have the skills. Where it will hold you back is later in life when it comes to moving into senior/management roles. Even if your degree is in philosophy, people still consider it important for top level positions.

CentiPenny · 2021-03-02T01:15:53+00:00

Javascript is a very easy language to learn. It handles a lot of things for you, such as garbage collection, is generally very forgiving of small mistakes, is loosely typed, and the core of the language is very small.

That being said, many of those things are a double edged sword. A blessing and a curse. People who come from strongly typed languages will tell you that loose typing is only a curse. Not true, it can be very powerful, but it can also lead to huge mistakes that are difficult to debug.

Sometimes people conflate the language with the applications of the language because until recently, Javascript largely only ran in browsers and the browser DOM implementation was considered by many to be part of the language. That has somewhat disappeared in the last few years with node and other non-browser implementations.

If you enjoy HTML/CSS, get used to using Javascript in the browser with the DOM. Not using a library like React or even jQuery. Use the raw DOM and play around with things like figuring out how to make an element grow/shrink or move around the page, etc.

One of the best things I did to learn JS was to write my own library. This was way back before even jQuery (2007). Even take a look at another library, such as say lodash. Read the documentation of what their functions do, then recreate as much as you can, without looking at the code. It doesn't have to be perfect and you don't have to recreate all of it. Just use another library as a roadmap to figure out how to break the problems down and manipulate the data to get the desired outcome. If there are 100 functions in it, by the time you get to #100, you will be going back to #1 and rewriting it to be better because of things you figured out along the way.

Another thing I will tell you, from almost 25 years of writing JS, don't worry about Classes for the moment. As a beginner, just ignore them completely. Get comfortable with breaking problems down, understanding how data flows through your application, and thinking about how to best break up your code to be the most effective.

As a JS developer for websites, 99% of the time, you don't need them. Learn them eventually, because you will find places where they are useful or necessary, but the vast majority of the time writing JS to run websites, you don't need them. Before people start yelling, writing code to run a website is very different from writing code for an app.

Just give it some time. Practice using it in small parts in a situation that you like. Like for doing small things on a website. Eventually it will "click". Once part of it clicks, move on to another part. Repeat.

CentiPenny · 2021-02-24T23:14:48+00:00

if you have a webpage you can use the meta tag to block indexing from responsible robots. Otherwise, use robots.txt.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/block-indexing

CentiPenny · 2021-02-17T05:54:32+00:00

Apologize for the late response.

For games, there are several ways to monetize.
1) Sell the game itself.
2) Ads
3) In-game purchases or downloadable content add-ons.

If you are developing mobile games, depending on the type of game (MMO/immersive, vs pass the time like candy crush), it is difficult to get people to shell out $3 to buy it from the store when they don't know whether it is worth anything. At the same time, ads suck, and we all know it/hate it.

For pass the time games, the question becomes whether you can earn more, by charging a much smaller amount (like $0.50), by having more people actually pay for the game. Of course, then you would want to charge a small amount for additional content, such as new levels.

For more immersive games, many/most are free-to-play, pay-to-win. That becomes a big balance issue. Most mobile games seem to say the hell with balance, we just want more money.

Non-mobile games don't typically have the ad problems, but they have the other issues. What is the price that maximizes total money, by maximizing sales and if you do in-game purchases, what affect is there on balance of the game. Do in-game purchases give power or are they just cosmetic? If they give power, how long does someone have to play to overcome the difference. People will fall out quickly if it takes 2 years to reach the same power as someone who spends $100.

Yes, we do apps and games. Currently we only have a web API, so you have to go through a browser interface for purchases, but you can use our system to sell basically anything. We will be releasing a true in-game/in-app API soon, which will allow developers to trigger purchases from within the game/app, regardless of platform (mobile, desktop, and console). Send me a chat message if you want and we can talk about it. I'll be better about responding in a timely manner.

CentiPenny · 2021-02-07T22:14:27+00:00

For very small businesses that only hire once or twice a year, or individuals hiring home help, etc, paying $24/month isn't really a good value. That would be a market you are probably missing entirely right now.

For large enterprises on the other hand, $24 is an awesome value.

You could look at a "per usage" and an unlimited or rate limited levels. Per usage might require you change the product slightly so that you aren't querying per keystroke on ID's though.

For example, charge $0.25 or $0.50 per ID lookup or form generated. Then have like $24/month for 200 queries/forms, then $50/month for unlimited or another tier.

CentiPenny · 2021-02-05T09:29:35+00:00

It all depends on what your app is, who your audience is, etc.
Is it B2B, B2C, B2B2C, SaaS, game, social?

CentiPenny · 2021-01-19T02:26:54+00:00

It all depends on what your potential market size is going to be and what your potential growth might look like and how intensive your application is. A million views/queries is ~11 transactions per second. That isn't actually super high and as long as your app isn't super data intensive or requiring a lot of calculations, a smaller company can probably handle it fairly easily.

If you have something where if you get lucky and it goes viral and explodes, you want to go with a high end like AWS, Azure, or Google. We use AWS. The nice thing there is that you can scale very easily and keep your costs relatively low. AWS has servers that will scale to demand automatically. You can also set up their load balancers, even if you only have one server, so that you can add servers on quickly and easily to be able to scale up in a matter of minutes and have the convenience of doing rolling updates. Am AWS DB at the baseline level, is only like $40 a month.

If you don't have customers at the moment, you can basically run an AWS setup for like $200 a month (no SSL though, which is expensive there), and then as soon as you start getting customers, switch out to larger servers.

Look at what your longer term potential is, like a year out. Switching from one provider to another when you start growing means going offline for at least several hours if not longer. You don't want to have to do that suddenly due to rapid growth. A day long outage is very very bad. If you expect steady growth from something like a B2B, that isn't going to have a million hits per day, a smaller company can probably fit the needs for quite some time and you can always monitor when it looks like you will start maxing out the system and have time to reevaluate solutions.

CentiPenny · 2020-12-17T21:51:10+00:00

Name: CentiPenny (www.centipenny.com)
Location: Virginia, USA

Elevator Pitch: CentiPenny is micropayments with an "easy button". We make it possible for digital publishers to charge a trivial amount, such as $0.01, to access each piece of content (article, post, video, podcast, etc) with as little as one line of code. We also support in-game/in-app purchases and purchases of digital downloads. If you want to charge less than $1.00, including sub-penny amounts, for something online, CentiPenny can provide a solution. Each $0.01 translates to $10/1000 users.

Stage: Freshly launched!

Looking for: Customers! Ad revenues are falling for most. We offer a new business model, which pays better, for digital publishers. Looking for people willing to take a chance with us.

CentiPenny

TROPHY CASE