A couple of other things. If you get investors to invest in your company, let's say hypothetically they invest $100,000. It is crucial to use a good portion of it for marketing - do not neglect marketing costs in favor of product or operations costs. If you get $100,000, then put aside $25,000 at least for marketing. If you actually need $100,000 to build the product, then you need to ask for $150,000. It's a nice sentiment to think that a product or service will sell itself, and very very rarely they actually do, but most do not. Like, if you want to go to a trade show (if they ever come back) that's 4 nights in a hotel in a upscale city, food, booth costs, marketing materials, pay union wages to get your booth moved into the conference center...you can spend $10,000. of the hundreds of thousands of businesses I have called, I look at most of their websites or lack of them. The people with very nice websites and digital marketing and other forms of marketing are almost always busy. But I call some businesses and they always complain about a lack of business. I've seen it so many times, I can't even begin to tell you. Standard marketing investment is about 10% of gross annual revenue, but in some areas, like fashion and perfume and all that kind of crap it is as high as 25% to 50% of gross revenue.

Also, I don't know if you plan to grow, but your balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, keeping up with your books is the most important thing in a company. More important than the product or service you provide. Nobody works for free. Not you, not employees, not vendors. Not taking care of your financials is the #1 reason for businesses going out of business. The first order of every single day should be to go over your accounting. It should only take 5 or 10 minutes a day, when you are small or medium sized, and if it takes you 2 hours, that's great because it means that you caught something and have to fix it, that 3 or 6 months down the line could kill your company. Don't underestimate the importance of the cash flow report. If you don't want to deal with the financial side, then don't even start a business. You cannot outsource it or have another partner or one of your team members do it. At the heart of accounting, is so easy, it is addition and subtraction, which we learn in 2nd grade. And the other part is categorization. You know, which does not belong: cat, dog, car, or cow. Which doesn't fit? Again, something we learn in 2nd grade.

Also, learn about financial controls. These are controls that you put on your accounting to make sure no one is embezzling. For example, you never ever let only one person do the books. Don't let your bookkeeper work on it 52 weeks a year, because then they can hide their wrongdoing. Do a google search on embezzlement examples to get an idea of what happens to people. There's all kinds of financial controls to limit the damage someone can do. Another good one is never delegate the signing of checks or making payments to another person. Do it yourself until you are as big as Amazon. Not that big, but you have to be doing thousands of payments per week, for example. This is only if you start getting big. If you are a sole proprietor and you do your own books an you only have 1 customer a month, then don't worry about it. But be aware that financial controls are super important. Embezzlement. Here's a story of Rita Crundwell, who perpetrated the largest embezzlement of a municipality in history - $53 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Crundwell I once read this long, long article on it, it was a fantastic article about how it all went down, a complete analysis.

Ubiquiti Networks was scammed because of poor financial controls - $47 million. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2016/02/08/how-a-te... As you will read in the article, the relevant issue is lack of financial controls. "The company's description of events suggest a compliance breakdown. Typically, publicly-traded U.S. companies require at least two people sign off on large money transfers. “All companies will have some minimum level like $5,000 that a person can just write a check for, but over some limit you would expect additional signatures from an independent person,” says Edward Ketz, an accounting professor at Penn State University."

By the way, financial controls just means procedures that the accounting department must follow in receiving and disbursing money, and accounting for it. These are well known and do not have to be re-invented. There are many of them, but here is a list of 17 from one source: https://www.score.org/resource/17-internal-financial-control...

You should really understand financial controls as an owner. You can't leave it up to just the CFO or anyone else. Because it is ultimately your responsibility. I know other people say you can delegate the job, and to some degree the implementation of it and day-to-day you can, but you still need to know and occasionally get in deep to review what's happening. Again, this is if you grow a large company.