Will and I are now on Twitter (a year late): @trrbocharged and @aaronschram.  I was always the last child to adopt trends.  Apparently I haven’t escaped that as I’ve gotten older.

Example from my youth:  I wore sweat pants and baggy t-shirts till I was in 7th grade when I got my first pair jeans about 6 years later than every other kid I knew.  Regardless of how much the other kids made fun of me… it’s hard to beat wearing PJs 24 hours a day.  I like to think of myself as a mini Hugh Heffner not the fat kid in poor man’s parachute pants.

Anyways… yay Twitter.

… On Monday morning I was tired and disappointed. After the dust settled, there was a small core team left. I decided to bring in reinforcements, so Aaron joined us in the effort to really, really release this thing. We ended up rewriting a few things and tweaking some others. After gyrating around about different stuff we finally released a founders beta…

Ok, so this post has been sitting as a draft forever… mostly because it just felt like a chore. If anyone would like to hear the gory details about the history of VoSnap, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us.

I’d like to think since I spend a good portion of my day reading RSS feeds and the rest of it typing out code and emails that I could probably manage to output a blog post every once in awhile. I would be wrong. I’ve tried before, maybe not very hard, but I did attempt. You can tell by the previous posts that at one time I logged into WordPress and figured out how to link to another site (Oh yes… it was awesome). My main hiccup on the whole thing is who the really cares what I have to say?

Then I came across this blog. That’s right… Elisha Cuthbert had a blog. Not only that but if you look at the posts she #1 likes hockey (word) and #2 enjoys booing things. If I start blogging regularly it will serve two purposes for our relationship. The first being that we will have one more thing in common, if you’re keeping count that completes the ‘trifecta’ of commonalities needed for us to date happily . The second will be that she can learn more about me and how awesome I am. That should eliminate any lingering doubt in her mind that leaving the movie star hunk she’s with for a hot software stud like me might not be a sure thing.

So I resolve to try it. If not only for the good of Elisha’s and mine budding relationship… but for the good of the company which I suppose plays some tiny role in the whole blogging thing as well. Doing it to get our company’s name out there seemed so hollow and as is apparent by our lack of postings thus far, wasn’t motivating me the way it should have.

Sitepoint is giving away a free book on Rails (available here).  I haven’t done a lot with Rails as I’m completely fascinated with the Spring 2.0, Hibernate, Acegi, and Maven at the moment.  But a free book could help kick start me.

We’re going to Business of Software 2007! Whether or not you’re going, you can get a free copy of Erik Sink’s book if you sign up for their newsletter. Interestingly enough, there is no link to this from the conference web site, but there was one on the blog.

Startup Weekend is where it all began. The concept sounded pretty interesting - get a bunch of talented folks from the Boulder tech scene together to create a startup in a weekend. Aaron couldn’t make it due to a charity bike ride, but I went ahead and signed up for a developer position. On the first night, after discussing the potential projects to do for the weekend, VoSnap was born.

So, later that night, the developers started talking. We went around the group, each person stating which languages and frameworks that they were most familiar with. Turns out that most folks claimed to be Java developers - which I thought was cool, of course. Unfortunately, only two people (myself included) mentioned HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The fact that we only had two resources out of over 30 for front end development was a bit of a concern, but we figured that we would be ok if him and I could focus strictly on it.

I soon found that things weren’t going to go quite as planned. First, we needed version control, but no one knew how to set up Subversion but me. Second, we needed a build system, but no one knew how to set up Maven but me. Third, we needed a basic framework for the domain, persistence, and service layer, but… well, you get the picture. While I worked on all of this non-front end stuff, the back end guys spent quite a long time talking about the domain model.

Sigh. As the end of the weekend approached, I made the sad realization that we were not going to be able to deliver a solid product by our deadline. The problem wasn’t that the rest of the folks didn’t do anything, it was the fact that I had to do a lot of constant refactoring and rejiggering of the domain and service tier to get everything to even kind of work together. I was building all of the front end controller code and stitching it with the view at the last second.

So, at the end of the weekend, what did we have to show for ourselves? We had an ugly product that kind of worked to send email VoSnaps. SMS was not working at all, partly because we didn’t have a good way to test it. We didn’t want to tarnish the good name that we had built up over the weekend (heh), so we didn’t push the build to www.vosnap.com. A little known fact is that it was released under www.vosnap.com/vosnap - and it wasn’t pretty.

Then, aside from a little noise from people asking what happened to it, all was quiet. However, VoSnap was not dead, merely dormant…

So, we decided to create a business. We now experience the joys of feeling badass when telling our friends that we own our own business and whipping out the corporate credit card on dates. However, we realized that there are a lot of subtleties about creating a new business that weren’t mentioned on those seasoned entrepreneurs blogs. We spent hours reading up on the differences between C-Corps, S-Corps, and LLCs. As a small two-person company, we decided that a LLC was the best choice for us. We couldn’t find many good references that laid out the process to form an LLC in Colorado… so we decided to compile one based on what we did. We’re not experts and you should do your own research before filing for a business, but this is what worked for us.

1. Go to http://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/FileDoc.do and under the “Form a new…” section choose “Limited liability company (LLC)”. Use the name search to search for the business name you want to register. In our case it was 287 Development, LLC. If the search turns up empty, a blank Articles of Organization form will appear.
2. The fields are pretty straight forward.
   • You shouldn’t be using any restricted words. If you are you might think about changing your name.
   • Your principal office street/mailing address is most likely your home or a P.O. box. This address will be kept on record with the State.
   • The registered agent is the primary point of contact for the business. This person will show up in the State’s online search for businesses.
   • The founders should all be entered along with their addresses as the people organizing the business.
   • Don’t delay the effective date unless you know you have a reason to do so.
   • The person causing this document to be filed is probably one of the founders. We used the same founder as we listed for the registered agent.
3. Submit the form online. It’s $25 in Colorado if you file electronically. A pdf version of the Articles of Organization will be presented to you and available for download.
4. The next thing you will need to do is get an EIN (Employer Identification Number). This number identifies you to the federal government for tax purposes. You’ll also need this number to get a bank account. You can download the form online from http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fss4.pdf. It’s an editable pdf, so you can type right into it. LLCs cannot file for an EIN online, so filling out the form basically prepares you for calling the IRS and obtaining your EIN. The important sections to fill out for an LLC are:
   • 1, the name you filed with the state
   • 4a - 4b, the primary mailing address for your business
   • 6, the county your business is located in
   • 7a - 7b, the name of your primary organizer and their social security number
   • 8a, check the other box and write in “Multimember LLC” if you have more than one founder
   • 9, check started new business and fill in LLC as specific type
   • 10, the date you filed with the state
   • 11, the closing month is probably December
   • 13, if you aren’t going to hire anyone put in zeros for Agricultural, Household, and other and check yes to having less than $1000 in employment tax liability for the calendar year.
   • 14, select the activity that most closely matches your business (we checked other and wrote in “Software Development”)
   • 15, enter the product or service that you provide (ours was “Software”)
   • 16a, if you’ve never applied for an EIN before check “No”
   • The only other thing they will ask for is the applicant’s phone number
5. Call 1-800-829-4933 with completed form in hand. The people they have working the phones are extremely quick. The whole process only took us 5 minutes from start to finish. They’ll ask you field by field for your information and then give you your EIN which you can write in the upper right hand corner of the document. You’ll get an official letter from the IRS in the mail about a week later.
6. The last thing you should do but are not required to is sign an Operating Agreement between you and your founders. There are many different websites that have example Operating Agreements on them that you can cannibalize for your needs. They usually lay ground rules about allowing other members into the LLC, initial division of the company, and a bunch of other important things. If you and your other founders choose not to sign one the State’s default Operating Agreement will be used.

At this point you have created a member managed LLC. You should be able to take your EIN to the bank and open a business account.