If it’s just you, set up an LLC. If you have significant assets to protect, set up an S or C Corp. If you raise friends & family money get an attorney to draft the organizing agreement (LLC) or corporate documents. Highly suggest finding a good, local, business attorney to help at this stage and with any contracts.

Learn the very basics of accounting for a small business. Pick a platform and make the effort to learn how to use it. I do my own bookkeeping but have an accountant who handles all of my personal and business tax filings.

Put enough money into the business to get it going and handle the overhead (filings, mandatory taxes, regulatory fees, the lawyer, the accountant or bookkeeper, etc) for at least six months to a year.

Make some effort to learn the rules, regulations, laws, both the spirit and intent, in your local jurisdiction. My personal experience has been occasional screwups (on my part) with filings that can be resolved with a mix of contrition and penalty fees as well as whatever is needed to cure the problem. With the exception of food handling, I’ve found most bureaucrats are just dealing with the same BS regulations we are, but from the enforcement end, and are just following the letter of the law (because it’s their jobs if they don’t). Don’t piss off the low level bureaucrats you’ll end up dealing with. If you want to effect change make political donations and find a politician to sponsor a law or regulatory change.

As far as business ideas…I’ve built products after consulting gigs, inspired by problems I saw customers/clients encountering that were not the primary focus of my consulting work. I also go to the occasional local business networking events, not to prospect for clients but to talk to people and find out what sorts of problems they’re encountering. Look for patterns and commonalities and figure out if there’s something to build there, and will it be profitable?

There’s thousands of businesses who are happy to pay hard cash if you solve their problems for them. The core of capitalism is providing an effective solution to someone’s problem that is priced to be cheaper than their solving it themselves.

Don’t skip on support. If you can’t do it yourself hire someone at a low but decent wage to “answer the phone” (whatever that means today) and act as your Level 1 support.

My rule is something I build has to break even fairly quickly. No hard and fast time limit, if something is gaining customers slowly and should hit break even in a year I’ll keep it going. Don’t use app store pricing. Figure out your fixed costs and charge some multiple. This is the inverse of the standard internet give it away for free and slap advertising on it. Online advertising simply doesn’t cover costs let alone provide profits at small scale. And I aim for small scale. 1000 customers paying $99/month to me with a decent profit margin is far better than 10,000 customers paying $9.99/month especially when you deduct the vig from Apple or Paypal or whoever you’re using for credit card processing.

We’ve been conned into believing only giant huge problems are worth solving by the technology media and VC driven news cycles. There’s a lot of “small” problems that can be solved by relatively simple solutions (compared to FAANG level problems) but get ignored because they’ll “only” drive US$1MM-$10MM in revenue.